Eric Dickens

Trees

Translator Eric Dickens asks what more can be done to get UK readers interested in translated fiction.

For some time now, I have been worried at the state of literary translation in Britain.

The now-famous statistic that only around 3% of British books are translations is often compared with figures between 20% and 60% for various neighbouring European countries. Britain is rightly pleased when quite large numbers of British authors are translated into European and other languages. But Britain does not reciprocate to the same extent.

There is no logical reason to think that British books are any better or worse on average than those written in, for instance, French, German, Spanish, Italian, or the Scandinavian and Slav languages. Yet the only translations to reach Britain, bar a few exceptions, are re-translations of classics written two centuries ago. Contemporary European literature, ie that being written now, is all but invisible in British bookshops.

The problem stems from a vicious circle of ignorance and apathy: if you know nothing about the literature of a country as a whole, and nothing about the country itself, you will not become interested in specific authors - unless these are hyped to the heavens. And if you never read foreign fiction, you will never develop an interest in the culture in which a novel is embedded.

A further problem is, from what I can detect via websites, that none of the major British book festivals or large-scale literary events (eg in Hay-on-Wye, Cheltenham, Oxford and Edinburgh) invite more than a token presence of authors from Europe.

If you skim the contents of the book pages of the British quality dailies, plus such publications as the TLS and LRB (which can easily be done in our age of websites), you find an alarming lack of translations. Occasionally there is a peak, usually for one particular country, but this soon subsides.

Publications sometimes even miss out the name of the translator, and very rarely gives any insightful clues about the quality of the translation. This is, of course, because lamentably few reviewers can read a novel in any foreign language at all. And this situation cannot be changed overnight.

When translations do appear in Britain, there is a tendency to fetishise translation. Yet translation is not an esoteric activity. Many great works of literature over the centuries have had to be translated, not least the Bible. In most of the rest of Europe, publishers and bookshops do not feel they have to "shout about" the fact that a book is a translation. The translator must, of course, be courteously acknowledged and decently paid, but the activity itself is regarded as part of a healthy literary culture. Not so in Britain. Here, translation still has an aura of something that academics and librarians do in their spare moments. Literary translation is not regarded as a profession, but almost as a pastime.

Many British publishers (with some honourable exceptions!) do not regard the literary translators as educated, even erudite, professionals. You sometimes get the feeling that translators are thought of as no more than glorified typists, summoned when needed, and then told to "run along now" when the job is finished. A job that is often underpaid and has to be tackled in indecent haste. The very last thing a publisher thinks about seems to be who is going to actually translate the latest Nobel Prize-winner (an author they have often never heard of...), how much the translator is going to get paid, how much realistically this sum represents given the total budget for the book, how much time is needed to translate a book of a given length, and so on.

Specialist university departments dealing with language, literature and translation, plus specialist workshops and other events for literary translators, are very encouraging. But they are not enough to allow the British reading public to get a taste for translated literature - and to understand our profession. Especially, given the university language & literature department cutbacks of recent years. What is needed is a concerted national campaign of awareness-raising, with the simple message: books written in foreign languages, and ending up in ours, are just as good as the ones we produce.

Nor are prizes the whole solution. Literary prizes tend to focus the attention of potential readers on a very small number of books. The prize money is a magnanimous gesture, but does little to promote a broad swathe of literature in translation.

In the present climate, while translations are still regarded in Britain as birds of rare plumage, subsidies will be needed to ensure that a healthy number of translations enter Britain. This money can come from principally three sources: 1) the country where the book was originally written; 2) British cultural funds; 3) EU cultural funds. We translators like receiving our fee directly from the national literary promotion fund - many European countries have them.

But it is equally important that more than a gesture is made towards publishers, who have to sell a considerable number of copies of a title to break even. While thrillers and crime novels in translation (often from Scandinavia, at present) can stand on their own two feet financially, serious non-crime literature runs the risk of never appearing in Britain unless subsidies, from one or two sources, are involved. It would be a shame if the fiction that gets translated in Britain is almost exclusively crime fiction and thrillers. Britain, after all, produces many such books itself.

My own translation bibliography is both encouraging and absurd. I have managed, over the space of just over a decade, to publish (and get paid for!) the translations of four works of serious literature, translated from one of the smallest national languages of Europe: Estonian. Two with Harvill, London, one with the Central European University Press in Budapest (in a series that Timothy Garton Ash used to edit), and one with the Dalkey Archive Press in Illinois, USA.

The absurdity is that without any real help from promotional bodies, I have managed to translate and get published four book-length works, plus one forthcoming novel, from such a tiny language. But what is encouraging is, surely, that if one translator can do it from a small language, there must be room for translations from many more languages, which will represent work for many more translators, also ones from, say, German where there are more than 80 times the number of native-speakers than those of Estonian!

Would it not be possible for British publishers, reviewers, university language & literature departments, translators, literary agents, literary associations, and so on, to work together in a much more structured way, in order to ensure the breakthrough of the translations of contemporary literature in Britain? I believe that such input from abroad would contribute greatly to educating the British reading public that there is literary life out there in Europe, and beyond.

There is no shortage of research done at academic institutions covering literature written in foreign languages. But now, surely, we need more translations of books from abroad in British bookshops.

Eric Dickens (British literary translator)
Blaricum, Netherlands, 12 July 2007

Eric Dickens' book-length translations from Estonian

Jaan Kross, The Conspiracy and Other Stories (Harvill, 1995)
Jaan Kross, Treading Air (Harvill, 2003)
Mati Unt, Things in the Night (Dalkey Archive Press, US, 2006)
Friedebert Tuglas, The Poet and the Idiot (CEU Press, Budapest, 2007)
Mati Unt Brecht Appears By Night (Dalkey Archive Press, US, forthcoming)