A foreign student struggling with English spelling might disagree, but there are downsides to having the global lingua franca as your mother tongue, especially when it comes to our cultural lives. As Marina Warner, chair of the judges for this year’s Man Booker International prize, put it recently: “Possessing a world language can make us oddly provincial in outlook.” She cited a report by Literature Across Frontiers, which put to the test the oft-quoted statistic that only 3% of books published in this country have been translated from a foreign language.
Analysing data from the past two decades, LAF found that the figure was correct. “Embarrassingly low” was the verdict of its director, Alexandra Büchler. But the report also highlighted a positive development: there has been a steady growth in literary translations over the past two decades. Since 1990, they’ve increased by 66%, thanks to the globalisation of bookselling, the flourishing of independent publishers, the awareness-raising of prizes and the openness of readers.
One publisher contributing to worldwide growth in literary translation is Amazon. Its AmazonCrossing imprint, launched in 2010, is now the biggest publisher of foreign fiction in the US. Last year, it published 44 new translations into English; this year it’s projected to publish 70. Its biggest hit so far has been the million-copy bestseller The Hangman’s Daughter by Germany’s Oliver Pötzsch, but its encouragingly literary list also includes plenty of women and non-Europeans. Check out Korean writer Bae Suah’s Nowhere to Be Found.
The venomous way Amazon is spoken about in some bookish circles makes me doubt whether an AmazonCrossing title will make the longlist for the Man Booker International or Independent foreign fiction prize soon. But then Amazon, unlike other publishers, doesn’t need prizes to sell its books.
