Thoughts on the disadvantage translated works face in international competition from Rick Gekosko of The Guardian in his “Finger on the Page” column:

Well, it’s over, and Philip Roth has won the Man Booker International prize for 2011. I was delighted about that. The judges have read with great zest and pleasure – surveying, in Dr. Johnson’s phrase, “from China to Peru” – a vast amount of fiction by contemporary writers. It would have been great to find, and to reward, a writer in translation, preferably one little known to Anglophone readers. But we have an “International” Prize here, which surely means that it is open to anyone – who either writes in English or is available in English translation.

There is an intractable problem here, isn’t there, in comparing like with unlike? John Carey, in his judge’s speech in 2005, noted that “some writers had to be read in translation, which is a disadvantage”, which puts the matter almost too fairly. Like John, I grew up in a literary culture that insisted on the primacy of close textual analysis: after all, a writer chooses a word, a phrase, a sentence, because none of the millions of alternatives will do the job. To find an apt transposition into another language, as a translator must, is a frustrating process, like “kissing a bride through her veil,” as Israeli poet Chaim Nachman Bialik put it.

Gekoski has his finger on the problem of international prize culture, which was well covered by Pascale Casanova in The World Republic of Letters. Basically, it remains a center/periphery problem, where world literatures aren’t deemed literary unless they are acknowledged by the major literary centers (Paris, New York, London).

One reader’s comment which was supposed to refute the argument actually lends it credence:

We never have such discussions in Lithuania, where 99% of fiction is translated. It is because we are a small nation with a tiny language. I suppose the same is in other small countries. I wonder if people in medium sized countries also worry so much about translations, or is it the issue so important just for the English speaking world? It’s simple – you read your literature in your language and if you want to see what other people write, you read translations. Otherwise, learn all other languages.

I wonder where that 99% of translated fiction in Lithuania comes from (definitely not Korea (yet), according to the KLTI). The fact that a large percentage of fiction published in “smaller” countries are translations highlights the dominance of the “centers” on world literature. The famous counter-example is that only 3% of all books published in the U.S. are translated works.  The reason that the question of translation is so important, and why there are so many organizations promoting literary translation is precisely that imbalance.

It would be nice, though to be able to “learn all other languages.” And we can keep translating, because we try to be faithful to works we believe can and should be shared, and hopefully, to transmit along with them that thing that elevates those books into literature.