The Great London Book Group on Translated Fiction

Eight of the 17 members of the Great London Book Group at IFFP

The Reading Agency ran a competition offering one reading group the chance to attend the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize awards ceremony at the Royal Institute of British Architects in London on Thursday 26 May. The reading group had to tell us, in 250 words, why they liked reading translated fiction.

Here is the winning entry from the Great London Book Group, Westminster:

Our group is now seven years old, and we have fought over and devoured several books of translated fiction in that time: from Canetti’s Auto da Fé to Murakami’s Dance, Dance, Dance; from Achebe’s Things Fall Apart to Saramago’s Blindness. In all honesty, these book debates have been among our favourites. Translated fiction forces you to think about the boundary that lies between author and reader. It forces you to think about the ambiguity of language. Did the author mean that precise word, inserted clumsily into that sentence there? What has been ‘lost in translation’? Since absolute authorship is severed, can we simply address the words for what they are, the characters by how they appear to us, the plot for how it unravels and turns? And if countless translations exist out there, as we recently found with Chekhov, does a ‘right’ one exist? Or do all those books exist equally and validly, reinterpretations of what was already an interpretation of the world? Mostly we just hang our heads and sigh, cast adrift in the countless Babel. Oh to know every language, to be able to speak to every person without these barriers and pitfalls! Our limitations sit deep in our guts. But it is enough: we get a glimpse of a different culture, a different land, a different way of naming and therefore seeing the world. It’s enough. And someone holds a book up like a passport. So where shall we travel to next?

And here is what they thought of the ceremony itself:

Attending the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize Award ceremony was a fantastic boost to our book group, which has been running for seven years and 84 books. We all really enjoyed the change of scene: the RIBA building was a step up from our pub off Piccadilly, and the Taittinger champagne easily trounced a pint of lager! Nevertheless, there was no change of subject: we still wanted to talk about books. That’s not surprising, considering the six books on the shortlist. They all sounded so good that we now want to read every one of them. The night helped us appreciate the role of the translator, and the skill involved in bringing foreign fiction to readers like us. It’s great that prizes like this still exist.