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There’s quite a bit of irony to Robert McCrum correctly noting that Google Translate is people, but then giving computers the credit for the fact that translation finally may be catching on, instead of the incredibly dedicated people who have made translation their crusade for years:
Lately in the US the appetite for “foreign fiction” – Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy or Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84 – has sponsored a trend that has inspired new audiences for international literary superstars such as Umberto Eco, Roberto Bolaño and Péter Nádas. Perhaps not since the 1980s, when the novels of Milan Kundera, Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa became international bestsellers, has there been such a drive to bring fiction in translation into the literary marketplace.
In prose, if not in poetry, there are few worries about the “vanity of translation” identified by Shelley, who wrote that “it were as wise to cast a violet into a crucible that you might discover the formal principle of its colour and odour, as to seek to transfuse from one language to another the creations of a poet”.
New editions of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and Proust’s A la Recherche du Temps Perdu have pushed overworked translators – a shy breed – into the spotlight. David Bellos, whose new book, Is That A Fish In Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything was published this autumn, observes that, in Japan for instance, “translators are rock stars” with their own book of celebrity gossip, The Lives of the Translators 101.
The surge in this global audience for new fiction has been driven by the complex interaction of the IT revolution and the antics of literary promotions such as the Orange Prize and Man Booker hyping their brands through social media.
Seriously? You mean all this time we just needed a couple social media sites plus a few clever marketing gimmicks to finally switch the international literary conversation from insularity to translation? I’ll have to tell all the people I know who have dedicated their lives to promoting international literature that they should really be thanking Google and Mark Zuckerberg.
Obviously websites and such have been valuable tools in getting more notice for translation, but it’s a little ridiculous to write an entire opinion piece on how 2011 is “the year of the translator” and then not actually give any credit for that to translators. And as Chad notes, this authors that McCrum references as being behind this boom are major brands, so that 2011 (in McCrum’s telling) looks more like a confluence of a few superstar authors than an authentic fount of interest in translation.
I’m actually feeling somewhat good about translation this year, so I would argue that McCrum, like that math student who happens to get lucky, comes to the right conclusions for the wrong reasons. The fact is that even authors like Roberto Bolaño or Péter Nádas wouldn’t have reached nearly the audience they have without publishers who had spent years building a market for these translations and a public that wasn’t adverse to reading them. But still, in my mind that’s burying the lede. What makes me feel optimistic is all the non-celebrity translated authors that I see popping up in all kinds of locations that I wouldn’t have imagined seeing translated authors just a few years ago. Not to mention, I even see more than a few translators these days who are almost making a career out of literary translation (a pretty much impossible thing to do), plus presses that aren’t ostensibly “translation presses” getting more and more in on the action.
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I believe it is now a requirement that social media be credited for everything within the universe. The increased interest in literary translation falls into the category.
I entirely agree that it’s absurdly neglectful to write an article about the boom in translation without giving any credit to specific translators and their efforts. As well as assuming that social media have any role in increasing the visibility of book prizes, or that the mostly laughable forms of “web 2.0″ promotion have affected book sales in any way (consider, for example, that the much linked-to “book trailers” generally have something like 8,000 views).
BUT, I would not be so hasty to discredit the notion that the internet itself has had a significant effect on reading habits, with perhaps the side effect of boosting sales of translated literature. At a personal level, the existence of blogs like this, and the way their presence alters how information is distributed, has made a huge impact on how I discover new writers. But even more significantly I think that, at a structural level, consumption of media is fundamentally different now that the internet, an essentially text-based medium, has replaced television. Think of all the agony in DFW’s or Delillo’s writing about entertainment, about the threat posed by TV; I don’t think you would ever see a contemporary writer afflicted by this. The internet poses its own kind of threats to the reading life–in my case, the hours and hours of distraction available–but in nearly all cases of such distraction one is still reading.
Bert: Totally—as I said in my post, the Internet has given us valuable tools. But what McCrum absurdly ignores is that these tools require people to use them, and in most cases it’s translators and translation-lovers that have been the ones marshaling these new tools for the benefit of int’l literature.
I’ll also say that the Internet only goes so far. Speaking from experience, the awesomest social media presence in the world won’t be all that much help landing your obscure author in The New York Times, something that presses like Dalkey, Open Letter, and Archipelago have managed to do with an impressive frequency. For that, don’t thank the Internet; thank incredibly persistent and charismatic publishers and publicists.