How books get lost in translation

[Dave Monroe]

anuary 16, 2015 3:41 pm

How books get lost in translation

Ann Morgan

Anglophone readers may be growing more open to global literature but
large parts of the world remain out of bounds


Translated fiction seems to be going through something of a purple
patch in the English-speaking world. Last year saw a string of
high-profile launches and impressive sales figures for works
originally written in other languages. While Norway’s Karl Ove
Knausgaard and the elusive Italian novelist Elena Ferrante won ever
more glowing praise, Scandi crime continued to storm the bestseller
lists. Jostling in the queues at the numerous UK bookshops that offer
late-night and breakfast openings to accommodate the buzz around new
novels by writers such as Jo Nesbo, you might be forgiven for thinking
that all barriers to British people reading foreign-language
literature had been swept away.

Even the traditionally pitiful statistics for the number of texts
making it into English look less bleak than they once did. In 2013, a
report by Literature Across Frontiers, a network of organisations
promoting European cultural exchange, revealed that 4.5 per cent of
fiction, poetry and drama (and 2.5 per cent of all books) published
across three sample years since 2000 was translated, thereby showing
the much-quoted figure of 3 per cent to be an underestimate as far as
creative works are concerned, albeit a slight one. And a few months
ago, LAF director Alexandra Büchler told the Guardian that the volume
of literary translations had increased by 18 per cent over the past 20
years. The evidence suggests that English speakers are embracing more
narratives from elsewhere than ever before.

Yet in recent years there has also been much debate on the insularity
and narrowness of anglophone literature and its readers and writers —
a criticism that Nobel judge Horace Engdahl cited in 2008 as one of
the main reasons there has been no laureate from the US since 1993.
Indeed, some commentators have even warned of a slide towards
homogenised, faceless literature, as western readers opt for the
exoticised familiarity of the “global novel” in preference to the
challenges of understanding works that are distinctly local in their
concerns. Xiaolu Guo, the Chinese-British novelist and film-maker,
notes the erosion of Asian literary traditions as authors seek to
emulate more potentially lucrative Anglo-American forms.

So what’s going on? Is it possible that anglophone readers are growing
simultaneously more open to global literature and more parochial in
their outlook? Part of the answer comes from putting the statistics in
context. While 4.5 per cent may be better than 3 per cent, it is still
a long way behind the proportion of foreign-language works published
in most other European nations — the 45 per cent of books released in
the Netherlands, for example, 70 per cent in Slovenia and one-third of
the literary output in France.

What’s more, the pool of countries represented in that 4.5 per cent is
relatively small. Only 22 of the books published in the UK and Ireland
in 2008 were translations of works originally written in Arabic, for
example. In the same year, there were just 17 trans­lations of
Portuguese-language literary works published. That’s 17 books picked
from the literary output of Portugal, Mozambique, Angola,
Guinea-Bissau, East Timor, Cape Verde, São Tomé and Principe and
Equatorial Guinea, not to mention the behemoth Brazil — and that was a
marked improvement on 2005, when there were just 10. And though well
over 100 trans­lations from French flood on to the British market each
year, the majority of these come from nations with strong publishing
and distribution networks, such as Canada and France. Franco­phone
African nations rarely get a look in.

The upshot is that there are many countries with work by only one or
two writers available to buy in English and plenty that have no
literature at all represented in the anglophone market. Indeed, if you
wander into the majority of bookshops in London, you’re unlikely to
find works from more than 70 countries (slightly more than a third of
UN-recognised states) on the shelves. Even the most wide-ranging
online retailers will feature plenty of gaps in their global spread,
with books from the most powerful western nations far outstripping the
offering from further afield.

On close inspection, much of the world literature available to
anglophone readers is rather less diverse than it might first appear.
As South-Korean-born Austrian writer Anna Kim once described it to me,
authors who succeed internationally tend to be those whose work
demonstrates “the right amount of foreignness”.

There are plenty of countries that have no literature at all available
to buy in English

Away from the Anglo-American market, it’s a rather different story —
as I found in 2012, when I set myself the task of reading and blogging
about a book from every country. In the absence of commercially
available alternatives, I was obliged to confront an array of works
that challenged the literary and cultural conventions I was used to —
often with only a minimal layer of mediation between me and the
original text, as a considerable number of the works I read were in
the form of unpublished translations. The novel I obtained from the
tiny Comoro Islands off the southeast coast of Africa, for example,
was dug out from the hard drive of an academic in Vermont who had
translated it years before for fun; a translation of the Panamanian El
caballo de oro was emailed to me by the novel’s author, Juan David
Morgan (no relation); and when it came to São Tomé and Príncipe in the
Gulf of Guinea, nine volunteers in Europe and the US — among them
celebrated translator Margaret Jull Costa, whose work includes the
novels of Nobel Prize laureate José Saramago — banded together to
produce an English version of the Portuguese-language short-story
collection especially for me.

Such literary off-roading was eye-opening in more ways than one.
Exploring beyond the limits of the pool of carefully sifted texts
containing that elusive “right amount of foreignness” for the western
market, I was obliged to confront the question of what could cross
between cultures; of whether stories written outside the global
conversation could have anything to say to me.

Some of these encounters were sources of great delight. When, for
example, I had the chance to read an unpublished translation of the
award-winning Mozambican novel Ualalapi by Ungulani Ba Ka Khosa, I was
thrilled not only by the towering figure of Ngungunhane — a tragic
hero as memorable as Lear or Okonkwo — but by some startling imagery.
Being one of the few English-language readers to explore it felt like
peering through a keyhole into a locked garden of astonishing blooms.
Its difference to books I’d read before simply heightened my
enjoyment.

There were times, however, when not being the reader the writer
imagined me to be made for an uncomfortable experience. Faced with
characters hurling insults at a corpse at a funeral, for example — as
happens in two of the short stories and novel extracts in Voices from
Madagascar, the anthology I resorted to in the absence of a single
translated novel from this nation of 23m people — I was unsure how to
react. The footnotes told me the practice was a tradition with its
roots in the historic rivalry between clans and the text implied that
it could even be considered a way of honouring the dead, but it was
nigh-on impossible to banish the outrage and shock evoked by actions
so at odds with the customs around death I had been raised with.

Similarly, when reading about a wedding night where the bride is
forced to submit at knifepoint in the fantastical narrative of Camara
Laye’s The Guardian of the Word, my Guinean choice, I struggled to
make sense of the scene: my conditioning predisposed me to regard it
as abuse, while the textual cues — at least as far as I could discern
— suggested it was a symbolic ritual, and as such not intended to
provoke my anger and indignation.

Yet more problematic challenges came in the shape of books founded on
value systems at odds with my own. Several of the works from the 77
countries that still have laws against homosexuality, for example,
left me in the margins of the story, fuming over homophobic slurs that
may well have struck many of their target readers as unremarkable.

Sometimes the book form itself proved limiting. In Griots and
Griottes: Masters of Words and Music, Penn State University academic
Thomas Hale recounts an anecdote about a recording session he
conducted in the palace of the Zarmakoy, the ruler of the Dosso region
in Niger, in 1981. Instructed to switch off his machine, he waited
while the Zarmakoy told the griot — a skilled storyteller trained to
remember and recount the community’s history and epic tales from
childhood — to alter the direction of his narrative so that he would
perform the version the leader deemed appropriate for the foreign
researcher.

Such alterations are bread and butter for griots, who tailor their
narrations according to who is paying them, forever weaving in new
jokes and references. Preparing a written version of such a
performance for unseen readers in other times and places — as Hale
did, spending 10 years working with scholars in Niger and the US to
translate a two-night performance of The Epic of Askia Mohammed by
griot Nouhou Malio — is in many ways counter-intuitive because it
fixes something that is intrinsically fluid and contingent on who is
listening. Reading Hale’s published translation, I couldn’t help being
conscious that what I was getting was a snapshot of a moving, changing
creation — a story that may well have played out quite differently (or
not at all) had I been there in person.

Of course, such examples are extreme. In reality, the idea of a sharp
divide between global literature and local works is problematic,
suggesting as it does an inner cluster of books that everyone in the
international club has read and an outer circle of texts beyond the
members’ reach. The reality is much more partial and approximate.
Stories travel as people do: haphazardly and often unpredictably,
sometimes cropping up where you least expect them.

By the same token, references do not divide neatly into global and
“other”. The novelist, critic and translator Tim Parks has written in
these pages about the careful weaving of English culture into the
works of Indian writers Salman Rushdie and Arundhati Roy, which, he
says, ensures that western “readers need never fear they are too far
from home”. But the truth is you’ll find such references in much
literature published in the subcontinent’s 22 other official languages
— from allusions to Hardy in Malayalam classics such as MT Vaseduvan
Nair’s Kaalam to allusions to Christie’s auctions in Shanta Gokhale’s
Marathi-language Crowfall. Such inclusions, like the mentions of Ikea
and Sex and the City that appear now and then in Arabic-language
fiction, are not, by and large, cynical ploys to woo the global
audience, but records of reality in the societies portrayed. Though
they originated elsewhere, these things are no more out of place than
references to pyjamas or curry in a British novel.

Seen from this perspective, the profusion of works that need
relatively little cross-cultural interpretation is less evidence of
writers’ efforts to crack the global market than a reflection of life
as it is lived in many parts of the world. Yet they should not be
mistaken for the full story. Beyond the offer tables and online
bestseller charts are many other narratives: books that take readers
away from what they know, challenge the assumptions that underpin life
elsewhere and present a strikingly different world.

Ann Morgan’s ‘Reading the World: Confessions of a Literary Explorer’
is published by Harvill Secker on February 5

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