Daniel Hahn

'We should be talking passionately about culture-expanding books and how damn good they are.'

Award-winning translator Daniel Hahn ponders the importance - or otherwise - of 3%

There's a statistic that all of us who work in or around translated literature quote at every possible opportunity. It's the one statistic that is apparently Very Important Indeed - it's compelling; it's also the one that makes us unforgivable translation bores among our friends.

Yes, yes, we know, 3% of books in this country are in translation, and it's closer to 30% in Europe, shocking, yes, you've told us before, many times.

And it's true - even as I write I'm lowering my eyes dejectedly and shaking my head in despair. But I have two problems with this statistic. The first is that I'm not sure whether it really means anything useful; the second, that per se I don't actually care about it all that much - it's not, I think, the statistic that we should be looking at.

Let's remember first that it's 3% of a hugely over-swollen market, recently estimated at not far short of 200,000 new books a year published in the UK alone. So there's the issue of sheer numbers - 3% of a vast number is not inconsiderable (and I'll get into whether this is 'enough' later).

There is also the question of the disproportionate strength of the English writing trade. The vast English-language market (add to those 200,000 all the books published in the non-UK Anglophone world) not only keeps our figure looking paltry at 3%, it also helps to swell others' figures to an inflated 30% or thereabouts.

Non-English markets are flooded with English books far more comprehensively than with other translated literature. Rather than comparing the number of English-language books in French with the number of French books in English, compare it instead with the number of Spanish books in French, or Catalan books in French, or German books in French, or Russian books in French. The global dominance of writing in English means that a discrepancy in translation markets in is inevitable and that there must be a stronger culture of exporting writing on one side than importing it. So goes our balance of trade. And I'm not altogether sure why as an English writer that's something to be ashamed of?

The second more point is more tendentious, perhaps.

Would I like our publishing industry to be more outward-looking? Of course I would. Would I like the work that translators do to be recognised and rewarded? Naturally. And I'd like this work to be abundant too, obviously. But given a choice between on the one hand transforming those 3% into a market share of, say, 6%, and on the other remaining at 3% and doubling the readership for each of those fine books we're already translating, I'd choose the latter without hesitation. Why?

For a start, I should say I don't think we're doing as badly as all that. I'm a translator, and - I hope - a reasonably outward-looking reader, with a pretty broad world-view. I read an awful lot, but I haven't read even a small fraction of this year's 3%, or last year's, or those from the year before that. I'm very many thousands of wonderful translated books behind.

The fact is, I do want to read them; the market is so tight that when we do manage to get something translated into English it's truly the best literary fiction in the world. But even as things stand, I can't keep up - not even close. In spite of this, we all want more translated work than this. I can't disagree with that - I want there to be more too. It's worth observing here, though, that even as someone with more of an interest than most, while I'm not (unlike many readers, we're repeatedly told) put off books by the fact that they're translated, still I very rarely read things because they're translations, nor do I know many people who do. I read books in translation because I can't read Arabic, I can't read Mandarin, Turkish, Bengali or Norwegian either, and I want access to the finest of those languages' literatures, somehow.

Come to that, I don't believe books written in translation have anything in common with one another, any more than I believe that books written in English have anything in common with one another. Four serious novels translated from French could have as little in common with each other as William Faulkner, Ursula Le Guin, Irvine Welsh and Joanna Trollope - or, come to that, James Joyce, Daniel Defoe, John Grisham and Anthony Trollope. And these are not all authors I'd be in an equal rush to read. Then throw an extra cultural variant into the mix - alongside those fine French novels line up the best fiction from Mozambique, from Nepal, from Kazakhstan, from Hungary and Finland - and the differences from book to book massively outweigh anything they may have in common. (And thank God for that, after all.) Just because I've read and enjoyed The Master and Margarita am I likely to enjoy Ismail Kadaré? Or Javier Marias? Gao Xingjian? Paulo Coelho? (Really? Imagine being told in Italy that you should read more translated fiction, 'you know, stuff like Germinal, Finnegan's Wake or Pippi Longstocking'.)

The only common factor is that there's at least more quality control to those 3% than we find in the other 97%. I've read books in translation that weren't to my taste, but I can't think when I last read one that made me wonder why anyone had bothered publishing it.

There's another statistic I'd like to know about each of the books in that 3%. How many are read? Do they sell fewer copies than your average work of literary fiction written in English? And, much more to the point, are they selling fewer copies than many domestic books that are not very good? Presumably so, and that for me is what needs fixing.

But that's not really a question of translation vs. English-language; it's about the level of ambition in readers' choices. I'd like people to read more widely, of course - but I'd like them to read more of the great English-language African writers just as much as I'd like them to read more of the Francophones or Lusophones. Translated fiction gives us access to cultures quite apart from our own, but - at least for this reader - that's always the desired end, and translation no more than the means, allowing us access to otherwise inaccessible writing.

Reading should open readers' minds, broaden their horizons. But we'd be more open-minded, our horizons broader, if we all started reading English-language writers from cultures in Africa and Asia, more than we would, I think, if we read more close-to-home fiction translated from Dutch or Welsh. I'd be stretching further if the next book I picked up were to be a novel about society and politics and family written in Nigeria (albeit written in English, untranslated) rather than one about society and politics and family written in France, translated from the French.

Reading translations, then, seems to me to be hardly the point. We should be persuading readers to read more bravely whatever the language; instead of bemoaning the paltriness of the 3% quota, we should be talking passionately about those culture-expanding books that are being published and how damn good they are. (And many of them - as it happens - are translations.) We should celebrate them, these many, many varied triumphs. You absolutely must read the most wonderful novel I've just discovered …

And for those who worry about the percentage, they can rest assured that if readers in number start discovering the very best writing already on offer (a disproportionate amount of this translated), publishers will notice. While bestsellers are impossible to predict, the bandwagon-leaping way many publishers behave just after a bestseller emerges is absolutely predictable (another wizarding-school series, anyone?).

If we can find a way to sell good books to readers - new novels, old novels, long or short novels, novels in verse, social novels from Albania or Australia, Scandinavian or Indian crime fiction, west African political satire, French realism or Canadian or Turkish fantasy fiction - whatever it may be, publishers won't be shy about feeding these readers' appetite. And that's when (just incidentally) that 3% starts magically creeping up …

Daniel Hahn (September 2007)

Daniel Hahn has translated Pele's autobiography and three of José Eduardo Agualusa's novels, Creole, The Book of Chameleons, for which he and Agualusa were awarded the 2007 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, and My Father's Wives (all published by Arcadia).

He is also the author of The Tower Menagerie; a contributor to the Concise Oxford Companion to English Literature; and a co-editor of The Ultimate Book Guide: Over 600 Good Books for 8-12s.