If the freeze mentality spreads to other publishers, where will the material come from for new titles?

Easy: Translations of books already published abroad. Republishing them in English for American readers addresses three issues:

• Saving money. There’s plenty of established international writers out there who don’t need expensive editorial development, high-priced agents or glitzy New York publishing parties.

• European literary snobbery. Before this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature was announced, an official for the competition pooh-poohed Americans’ lack of taste for international literature. A pile of translated novels by U.S. publishers would shut him up.

• Competition for American hacks. Translated novels would give readers a break from their steady diet of James Patterson, Robert B. Parker, Danielle Steel, Mary Higgins Clark and Joyce Carol Oates.

Seriously, folks (to stick with the comedian theme), the globalization trend is already bringing great writers from other countries into American bookstores.

The only international authors he then references are Bolano and Le Clezio, so, well, he might not be the most well-versed in translated literature, but still, it’s nice to see someone advising publishers to do more translations. (A shitload of editors/publishers probably spit out their coffee when they saw the words “saving money” and “literature in translation” in the same article.)

Here’s my bit of counter-advice: why don’t all newspapers take a couple pages a month away from their local “arts” coverage (where books are rarely, if ever, recognized as an “art”) to cover international literature. You’ll have to turn to smaller presses to find good stories, but editors interested in broadening their horizons, and those of their readers, can contact me for a list of people, presses, books, authors, stories that would be worth writing about.

(It may be because I’m feeling a bit bleak today, but I’ll predict that a) no one contacts me, b) newspapers continue to cut books coverage in 2009, and c) that the overall number of original translations published in the States next year doesn’t exceed 400. But it’s OK to hope, right?)

Interesting what Toni Morrison has to say about the Horace Engdahl/American insularity situation:

Toni Morrison. – Je pense que ces propos reflètent effectivement, au moins en partie, la conception que se fait l’Académie suédoise de son prix de littérature. Car elle décerne tout le temps le Nobel à des Américains dans les autres domaines, mais en littérature, elle considère qu’ils ont quelque chose d’insulaire. Il se pourrait qu’il y ait un peu de narcissisme de la part des Américains, mais les talents ne manquent pas. L’autre problème est celui de la traduction. Je pense avant tout que nos éditeurs américains, quelle que soit l’importance des auteurs étrangers, n’achètent pas les droits de leurs œuvres. Ainsi, je ne savais même pas qui était cet homme [J.M.G. le Clézio, lauréat 2008].

Paraphrasing (loosely), she says that there’s a bit of narcissism on the part of Americans when it comes to the Nobel for literature, but that there are a lot of talented American writers. More interestingly, she points to the fact that editors don’t buy enough rights to foreign authors, so she didn’t even know who Le Clezio was . . .

In evaluating the new translation, Wood lays out the two basic translation camps:

Literary translators tend to divide into what one could call originalists and activists. The former honor the original text’s quiddities, and strive to reproduce them as accurately as possible in the translated language; the latter are less concerned with literal accuracy than with the transposed musical appeal of the new work. Any decent translator must be a bit of both.

This division can be put a number of ways—those concerned with accuracy vs. readability in English, keeping the text strange vs. smoothing it out, etc. All these dichotomies are a bit lacking and incomplete, but tend to fuel many a discussion about the role of the translator and editor.

Toward the end of the review, Wood draws attention to a particular choice Pevear and Volokhonsky made that I think expands this discussion a bit.

In the novel’s epilogue, Marya enters the nursery: “The children were riding to Moscow on chairs and invited her to come with them.” That is exactly what Tolstoy writes, because he wants us to experience a little shock of readjustment as the adult meets the otherworldliness of childish fantasy. But Garnett, the Maudes, and Briggs all insert an explanatory “playing at,” to make things easier for the adults.

Wood goes on to talk about this “little shock of readjustment” as a key to Tolstoy’s art:

The adjustment of vision forced on us by the condemned man, or even the children riding to Moscow, is related to a technique for which Tolstoy was praised by the Russian formalist critics of the nineteen-twenties and later—estrangement, or the art of making the familiar unfamiliar.

What struck me about this is the fact that in all the accuracy vs. readability discussions, the art of the novel is the thing that always seems to get lost. A great translation is great because the end result is a great work of art—not only because it’s more accurate than previous editions.

Based on this single example, it seems that the P&V translation isn’t just more accurate, but possibly a better representation of the art and craft of Tolstoy’s writing. And phrased this way, I’m much more inclined to want to read their translation than the “smoother” ones . . .

This sounds a bit like a truism—and I’m sure someone will accuse me of being an elitist for praising art for art’s sake—but I think this should be the driving goal of translators and editors: produce the best work of art possible. That goal opens up a few interesting possibilities, such as working with the author and translator to create a work in translation that’s artistically superior to the original. Or making certain choices to smooth in some parts, not in others, in order to improve the entire work as a whole.

Producing great works of art is the point of publishing, right?