Andrea Pisac

What about foreign culture in literary translation?

Literary translation is one of the most common ways of cross-cultural communication and exchange. Books are translated not only because readers are interested in reading a good work of literature, but because there is strong appeal in reading a text that originates from a different culture than our own. We are intrigued with how literature is written somewhere else and how life is experienced in a place where we have never been.

Translators cross the first obstacle for a reader by rendering a foreign book linguistically comprehensible. However, in literary translation, it is not only language that is being translated - a translated text represents another culture embedded in space and time, whilst at the same time it reflects an unequal relationship between texts, authors and literary systems.

Cultural concepts and literary expectations of the UK audience govern both the choice of titles to be translated and later the process of translation. Those books which come to be translated and viewed as representative of a certain national literature reflect how social and historical context shapes the literary poetics and canon and reveals institutional constraints that either promote or censor certain types of writing.

The publishing industry often turns its eye toward the wider socio-cultural situation and with its choice of titles follows what makes headlines in the news. In the 1990s, during the Balkan conflict, several writers from the former Yugoslavia were translated into English and became widely acclaimed, because there was a demand, bigger than purely literary, to know more about that part of Europe.

In a similar vein, publishers are nowadays competing to discover and translate Arabic authors to be able to bridge those gaps in cross-cultural dialogue between the two regions. Alongside the external constraints that govern the choice of published titles, the industry imposes the internal control, which means that only the accounts which conform to dominant stereotypes and poetic trends are commercially safe to publish.

In the UK there is very little or next to no public subsidy for the publishing industry, which is why the media and the anticipated commercial success of books are crucial in promoting certain themes, titles and regions of the world. Such a complex situation puts a foreign author in a very demanding position. On the one hand, the author needs to reflect the authority on certain subjects, mainly on history and the current situation in the country of their origin.

They are positioned as an authentic and authoritative voice of their community. Yet, on the other hand, the same author needs to be conscious of the literary expectation of their Anglophone readership and translate themselves in terms of cultural categories and acceptable concepts before the linguistic translation takes place.

There is one cultural position that offers a writer both the insider's and outsider's view into the literary creation - this is the position of exile. Exile is usually understood as an experience of living outside of one's country through an adverse set of events. It is portrayed as an expression of human tragedy. However, by looking into the lived meanings that exile can have for a writer, it can also be identified as a privileged vantage point from which one is able to talk about one's own culture to a wider audience. Exiled writers in this way positions themselves as writing for 'their people' in the international community, but also writing against them by criticizing the totalitarian regimes that have forced them out of their homeland.

Many books translated into English are written by writers exiled and displaced from their original countries. This observation poses the question of whether there is a recipe for getting work translated that some writers know better than others. Lawrence Venuti, a well-known American translator from Italian, wrote that 'if one is intelligible within the outlook of American ideology, then one has a chance of being translated'. Having realized how strong the social and institutional constraints are that govern the publishing industry, it becomes useful to think of exile as a position which enables the writer to get translated and published because it offers them insight into dominant narratives of their host countries.

Salman Rushdie said that, even more so than linguistic translation, for a writer who is aware of their potential audience, the most important thing is to be able to translate their cultural concepts and ideas so that they are comprehensible to a foreign reader. This might look like the sought-after recipe which will help the writer to get published into English, but it ultimately raises the question about what happens to the foreign culture in literary translation.

If getting to know a foreign culture is one of the reasons that we are drawn to reading foreign fiction, why then are we so keen to reduce it to something that is acceptable and understandable to the reader without challenging them to make a special effort? Most books of foreign fiction read as if they have been written in English to start with. They thus obliterate any trace of unfamiliarity that might put the reader off and so, finally, we end up losing the very thing that prompted us to read foreign fiction - difference an desire for dialogue.

Andrea Pisac (October 2007)

Andrea is Director, Writers in Translation at English PEN. Her first collection of short stories has been published in Croatian.