translation

‘The New Year’s Eve of Time’

December 21, 2018 By Porter Anderson (@Porter_Anderson) 14 Comments

At the Temple of Poseidon at Sounion, south of Athens. Image – iStockphoto: ISO3000

‘Actionable Epiphanies’

One of the first extended efforts in features writing I did on the way to journalism, many years ago, included an effort to describe the peculiar sensation of the holidays.

Across a lot of articles, I worked on issues around color and light; the seasonal commonality of a greeting (“happy holidays” as a unifying exchange phrase); and–inescapably–the magical realism of much of the scriptural literature, and of the “Christmas industry” that it has spawned, of course.

What was striking during all this–and I couldn’t let it filter into these pieces at the time–was the negative layer of disappointment that underlay so many aspects of all this.

The readings and interviews I was doing inevitably had something along the lines of, “Of course, that’s where the sadness always comes in.” Even among the happiest of yuletide Christian celebrants (and clergy) I encountered, there was a baked-in anticipation and expectation of a letdown. Many spoke without prompting of the “post-holiday blues.”

I found this frustrating. To me, the idea of life after the holidays being in various ways less cheerful was a given, and not where any emphasis was needed. There’s the return to work, the cold and darkness in many parts of the world, the quiet disappearance of the colorful light and trees.

But many years later, I’d find a short line that I think gets at what’s behind the cycle of emotional experience around the holidays. I’m adding the feminine to it because I hope its author would have wanted to do that if he were alive today.

Every man and woman regards his or her life as the New Year’s Eve of time.

Isn’t that a remarkable observation? Johann Paul Friedrich Richter, a writer in 18th-century Germany, was known as “Jean Paul.” He’d taken the name in honor of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. It’s said that he was too given to humor, satire, irony, and realism at times to be a full-blown Romantic. It’s also said that he was appreciated by women readers more than most authors of the era because he gave female characters a rare level of personality complexity.

His idea of how we think of our lives is exhilarating in the oddest way, and it relates, I’ve realized, to some of the literary work I respect the most. That’s where my provocation for you lies today. It has to do with what Writer Unboxed founder Therese Walsh has called “actionable epiphanies” in a comment below, a brilliant phrase I’ve updated this article here to include.

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Reading the World: Translation Is Rising

November 19, 2017 By Porter Anderson (@Porter_Anderson)

Where Politics Can’t Stop Us

A funny thing happened on the way to isolationism. Some in the business believe there’s new interest in work from other languages.

I’m hopeful that some of what’s lost in the dynamics of vulgar nationalism can be found in translation.

Threatened with the un-American idea that we shouldn’t have people from “foreign” venues among us, Americans, it seems, may be waking up to the fact that we’re all foreigners here, united in world history’s grandest handshake.

And not just in the Newer World, either. In the UK–perhaps an early warning of the Brexitian crisis–The Bookseller’s Tom Tivnan and Felicity Wood were reporting a rise in revenue of 6.2 percent in translated books in the first part of 2014. At that point (about 19 weeks into that year), 112 translated books had been part of the Top 5,000 titles tracked, over 63 translated titles in the same period of the previous year.

At world trade shows this year, the “rights centers,” those big, noisy kasbahs in which books are bought and sold into new languages, have been growing fast, to the point that at the largest, Frankfurt Book Fair, we had sold out all 600 tables in its Literary Agents and Scouts Center, called the LitAg, some six months before the fair this year.

Tomorrow (Monday, November 20), we’ll have news at Publishing Perspectives of Wattpad phenom Anna Todd selling the first book of a new series rapidly into international territories, and it’s not even releasing until June 1.

The National Endowment for the Arts‘ translation fellowships in 2018 will award 22 new grants of $12,500 or $25,000 each for a total $300,000 to help defray the costs of translation from works in 15 languages and five continents. In fact, here’s a bright spot amid the crushing distress of “your tax dollars at work” in so many wrong places these days: since 1981, the NEA has awarded 455 fellowships to 404 translators working into English from 69 languages and 82 countries. NEA literature director Amy Stolls calls this “expanding the range of ideas and viewpoints.” And that’s how you build open doors, not walls.

Meanwhile, Vermont College of Fine Arts has announced what’s thought to be the world’s first low-residency international MFA program in creative writing and literary translation. Hong Kong author Xu Xi, a visiting faculty member, is helping to head up the new program. In a prepared statement about the new MFA, Xu is quoted, saying, “The literary world is global and writers need to broaden their perspective beyond their own borders through immersion in other cultures and languages, and through interactions with writers from other parts of the world.”

Do you know Three Percent? It’s Chat Post’s site and project, based at the University of Rochester, that’s the closest thing we have in the States to an authority on translated books. Post, always struggling for adequate resources of time and money, diligently tries to track and evaluate the work going on in this country in translation. He also publishes translation from Open Letter Books.

And he named the site for a guess. Over many years, it’s been estimated (no one can prove this) that US citizens’ reading lists tend to include, at best, three percent literature in translation. Although still in the anecdotal stage, there are signs of rising interest, even in the American readership, in work from other cultures.

Part of the credit goes to AmazonCrossing, the translation imprint of Amazon Publishing (that’s trade publishing, not self-publishing). AmazonCrossing has become the new powerhouse of translation, putting out far more titles per year than its closest competitor in that regard, the Dalkey Archive. And one of the things that AmazonCrossing’s editorial director, Gabriella Page-Fort, is talking about these days is that glowing connection between the political conditions of this ridiculous year and the chance to communicate with another culture.

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“Bracing For It” in 19 Languages: AmazonCrossing Opens to Submissions

October 16, 2015 By Porter Anderson (@Porter_Anderson)

Image - iStockphoto: V Janez — Image – iStockphoto: V Janez

Looking for the Lingo

The audience at Frankfurt Book Fair's Business Club listens to AmazonCrossing's Sarah Jane Gunter talk about her program's new open-submissions program. Image: Bernd Hartung for #FBM15 — The audience at Frankfurt Book Fair’s Business Club listens to AmazonCrossing’s Sarah Jane Gunter talk about her program’s new open-submissions program. Image: Bernd Hartung for #FBM15

The first thing Bloomberg News’ Allesandro Speciale wanted to know when he sat down to interview me here at Frankfurt Book Fair’s Business Club is: “Is translation as big an issue this year as it seems?”

Answer: yes. As the glut of content in the book marketplace deepens, what could be more natural than to look to distant readerships for new sales?

Canelo publisher Michael Bhaskar said it in starkly frank terms during his onstage interview with me yesterday, Thursday:

There are too many books.

He’s right. The digital dynamic, in both the traditional and self-publishing sectors, has created an historically unprecedented level of competition among titles, among authors, among publishers. While the number of titles out there has exploded (with nothing going out of print nowadays, “digital is forever”), the audience size has not. For the most part, we’re producing exponentially more material for a readership that largely has stayed the same size and is being wooed by other electronic entertainment media.

Nowhere is the pressure of oversupply felt more keenly than in the strongest centers of self-publishing, the US and UK and, to a lesser degree, here in Germany.

The subject of how independent authors might go about finding affordable and reliable translation was big in our First Word day on international outreach at the Novelists Inc. conference earlier this month in St. Pete Beach. There, Jane Friedman focused on input from LiteraryTranslations’ Athina Papa, something Friedman and I returned to in The Hot Sheet on the topic.

Even for publishers, translation is no walk through the park. And for many independent authors, the $10,000 price tag that Papa quotes as the ballpark rate for a good translation is impossibly steep.

No wonder, then, that the news from AmazonCrossing has been so well received, and particularly by authors.

AmazonCrossing is the translation imprint of the Amazon Publishing wing—not self-publishing but contracted authors and translators (all of whom are paid royalties and on a monthly schedule, by the way, reflecting one way in which “APub” is not entirely traditional in its approach).

As I wrote at The Bookseller’s The FutureBook earlier in the week ahead of my onstage interview with AmazonCrossing chief Sarah Jane Gunter, the company has announced a $10 million commitment to translation.

A part of that allocation goes to the production in early 2016 of English translations of Indonesian writers, including (from the AmazonCrossing statement):

Nirzona, a love story by Abidah El Khalieqy, set against the backdrop of the Aceh tsunami, a rare moment in recent history when the world’s eyes turned to Indonesia

English-language originals The Oddfits and The More Known World, the first two titles in the Oddfits series from Indonesia-born Tiffany Tsao, a translator and past Indonesia editor at large for Asymptote Journal

Paper Boats, a new adult love story from popular novelist, actress, and singer Dee Lestari

A new edition of Laksmi Pamuntjak’s acclaimed A Question of Red and her latest, Aruna and Her Palate, which follows a food writer’s travels through Indonesia

Hummingbird, a work of magical realism from Nukila Amal

Indonesia is the Guest of Honour at this year’s Buchmesse, of course, and the more widely talked about point coming from Gunter’s team this week has been the opening of the AmazonCrossing process to submissions.

Is this, then, suddenly the preferred avenue for authors to offshore markets?

My provocation for you: It’s all very well to say that authors are not in competition with each other, as many indies like to assure us in that community-forever way. Unfortunately, it’s not true. Everyone is locked in a rising siege of competition. And when trying to break open new territory to get a leg up on that battle, translation may be the one area in which independent authors really aren’t as effective, on the whole.

Lots of horror stories are out there about bad translations bought by indies at ridiculous prices, only to have to be done over at more cost and with dubious results.

And once you’ve had a book translated, even beautifully, can you market it in another nation?

Giving AmazonCrossing a good, hard look may be the smartest move you could make, if you’re contemplating crossing the linguistic frontiers of bookselling today.

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