On the Uses of American Literature

Tim Parks, NYRB:

Apart from the immediate repercussions on the book market, where there is now fierce competition between English and Dutch editions of English language novels, the phenomenon suggests a few things about reading and the modern psyche. There appears to be a tension, or perhaps necessary balance, between evasion and realism in fiction, between a desire to read seriously about real things—to feel I am not wasting my time, but engaging intelligently with the world—and simultaneously a desire to escape the confines of one’s immediate community, move into the territory of the imagination, and perhaps fantasize about far away places.

For Europeans, one way to satisfy both desires is to read novels translated from English, talking about a culture far away, but one that can be thought of as relevant to readers because of the dominance of Anglo Saxon and specifically American culture worldwide, and because they themselves have acquired English as a second language; in most translations there will usually be some memory or trace of the original language, which, for those who are familiar with it, will reinforce their sense of knowing that other world. This may be simply the names of people or places, references to customs or a cultural setting, or, inevitably, some syntactical or lexical habit, that appears more often in, say, translations from English than in normal local language use (the frequency of the present progressive is a typical marker).

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