Books Without
Borders?
FROM PUBLISHING
TRENDS (MAY 2002)
Thirteen
years after the Berlin Wall bit the dust, global publishing
giants have staked out beachheads across the Balkans,
Croatia, Slovenia, Slovakia, Poland, and Hungary, with
a gimlet eye turned to each country’s potential print-runs,
GDP data, and reading habits. On the up side, these
strategic investments in Eastern Europe have pumped
up flagging local book markets and helped overhaul a
defunct distribution system. But, critics say, there’s
a big down side: as book behemoths pick off the low-hanging
fruit of globalization, less lucrative language areas
have been left to shrivel on the vine.
Read any good Catalan, Welsh, or Polish authors lately?
If a group of publishers from across these supposed
hinterlands has their way, you will. Based at the Mercator
Center of the University of Aberystwyth in
Wales, a four-year-old effort called Literature Across
Frontiers (LAF) has strung together a network of
off-the-beaten-path publishers from more then a dozen
countries who are determined to see their languages
and literatures gain a broader audience. With official
backing in hand from the European Union’s Culture 2000
initiative, LAF is mobilizing its network of publishers,
translators, agents, and fund directors to rescue neglected
“minority” languages — including Latvian, Portuguese,
Welsh, and Hungarian (see related
article) — by putting translation funding
and policy issues on center stage at book fair forums
from Prague to Paris, and Leipzig to Gothenburg. As
LAF project manager Alexandra Büchler has noted,
40 million people in the EU speak territorial languages
other than the official language of their state. That’s
virtually a whole new continent of literature, wide
open for discovery.
Of course, lit-in-translation has always been a quixotic
affair. Whether mainstream European publishers — or
their counterparts overseas — will take as much as a
peek in LAF’s direction remains to be seen. But funding
has come in from sources such as the Central European
Book Publishing Fund in Amsterdam, the Soros
Open Society Institute, and Austrian Kulture
Kontact, which aids publishers from Balkan states,
in addition to translation funds in most other European
countries. (Translation grants are also available to
American literary publishers, typically university presses,
with their troves of foreign authors.) This cash has
gotten a first round of translations under way from
authors including Poland’s Olga Tokarczuk (published
by Granta in the US); Christopher Meredith
from Wales; Nora Ikstena, Vladis Rumnieks,
and Andrejs Migla from Latvia; Patraig Standun,
Michael O’Conghaile, and Padraic Breathnach
from Ireland; and Slovenia’s Andrej Blatnik.
In addition, Literature Across Frontiers has helped
launch the Mosaic
Publishers’ Network, which grew out of an inaugural
conference in Aberystwyth in 1998. With members
including the Czech Republic’s One Woman Press,
France’s Actes Sud, and Kedros in Greece,
Mosaic has become a sort of grassroots federation fighting
to put little-studied translation issues on the map.
A second conference, held at last year’s Prague Book
Fair, helped turn up the wattage with participants including
Andre Schiffrin; the well-known Slavic translator
Michael Henry Heim from UCLA; and Jeffrey
Young of the literary magazine Trafika. At
that event, participants pondered the role played by
translators in today’s book business, worrying over
the scant protection of translators’ copyright, negligible
authors’ fees, and publishers’ reluctance to offer the
translator a share of the commercial success of a translated
work.
As for the future, Mosaic and LAF will be back at Bookworld
Prague
this month with a three-day slate of readings, debates,
and film screenings, and other projects on tap include
a study of support for minority literatures, an online
database of the translation infrastructure in Europe,
and an online “European Review of Books and Writing,”
described as a multilingual source of publishing news.
Hellenophiles among us will want to pencil in a week-long
residency with Greek poets, translators, and musicians
in Corfu and Athens. And finally, stay tuned for LAF’s
third international conference, to be held in Helsinki
in 2003.
Correspondent
Hrvoje Bozicevic, publisher of Editions Bozicevic in
Zagreb, contributed to this article.
©2002
Publishing Trends
