Deep Vellum in Deep Ellum
In 2011, Will Evans, heading as a newcomer at the age of twenty-seven to Dallas, Texas, with a degree in Russian literature, had no fixed plans. While studying in St. Petersburg he had become at once shocked at the number of writers he encountered who had never been translated into English, enamored of the process of translating when he dipped into it himself (he told the Dallas Morning News that he had found translation “exhilarating,” like “living inside the head and soul of another person”), and convinced that we need more of it. His professors discouraged him from pursuing such a non-renumerative and insecure pastime, and when he tried to publish the work he had labored over he discovered why, via publisher Chad Post’s influential blog Three Percent: in dramatic contrast to the rest of the world, where anywhere from 15 (France) to 45 (Holland) percent of published books come from other languages, in the US that number is only 3 percent, much lower when you remove cookbooks, textbooks, and other useful items and retranslated classics (read Will on this subject here, for instance). Accordingly, Will decided to create an international publishing house in Dallas, though he was new both to publishing and to Dallas.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Book Post to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.