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A Global Translation Initiative Reportby English PEN and Free Word


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Taking FlightA Global Translation Initiative Report

by English PEN and Free Word

The Global Translation Initiative (GTI) is a collaborativeresearch project that aims to identify perceivedbarriers to literary translation, to explore successfulmodels of best practice, to celebrate achievementand to establish ways of building infrastructure forliterary translation across the anglophone world.

International Translation Day and the LiteraryTranslation Centre at the London Book Fair areimportant staging posts for the discussion ofGTI-related topics, which range from practicalissues such as education, funding and training forliterary translation, to wider cultural concerns suchas literary translation in review media, the role ofliterary festivals, the translation of minority languages

and intercultural understanding.

Other GTI publications

The GTI survey, Research into Barriers to Translationand Best Practices, was published by DalkeyArchive Press in 2011. Available onlinewww.dalkeyarchive.com

The GTI interim report, Flying off the Shelves, waspublished by English PEN and Free Word in 2011.Available online www.englishpen.org


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Foreword

If we value literature at all, we know the worth of literary

translation. If we want language to be as subtle and

supple and layered and resonant as language can be, we

know the worth and the work and the subtlety of literary

translation. If we care at all about looking beyond ourback yard and our own dominant narratives, we know

the worth, the work, the open border, open mind, open

eyes and ears of literary translation. If we belong to a

culture which rates the word literary, we know the value,

the scope, the touchstone, the creativity, the generosity

that exist in this fusion of literary and translation.

If we consider the tiny percentage of translated literary

works published, compared to everything else in the UKs

literary publishing output every year, well be entitled

to feel sober, ashamed, cheated, excluded from whole

worlds. If we work against this, well be a lot richer, in

the end, when it comes to world and worlds.

If we recognise that a country, in all its history and all

its contemporaneity, can be seen, revealed, understood

by recourse to its literature; and if we can see that all

human languages belong to and with each other, exist

in the one huge borderless country of language; then

its obvious even just at a glance: the importance of, the

excitingness of, the fertility of and the imperative in, the

act of literary translation.

Ali Smith

Foreword 1


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Anything to declare?

Yes, we have!

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This is the final report of the Global Translation

Initiative. Taking Flight: New Thinking on World

Writing brings together a series of 18 short essays

from professionals that are keen to declare the

value of literary translation. Concerned with the

relatively small amount of literature available in

translation across the anglophone world, our

contributors consider obstacles facing literary

translation and tell us why they believe we

deserve better.

The essays in this report have been arranged in

three sections to reflect three types of value that

we associate with literary translation cultural,

professional and commercial. There are many

instances where these classifications overlap,

but they provide a useful framework as we begin

to measure this value.

We declare that literary translation brings greatvalue in the following ways...

Helps us tounderstand thechanging world

Promotes sharedvalues

Regenerates

literary sourcesRevitaliseslanguage

Revitalisesliterature

Allows us to readthe best of the best

Provides a valuableteaching tool

Develops newreaders and

writersDevelops newmarkets

Contributes toeconomic growth

Introduction 3


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Understanding thechanging world

Engaging our senses with the cultural exports ofanother country enables us to understand not only

the world as it is now, but also the shared history thatbrought us here. The world is constantly changing.Advances in digital technology, for example, meanthat we can access writing from around the world atthe touch of a button, but what is it actually like to bea blogger in a country like China or Iran? Nasrin AlavisWe Are Iran captures the writing and experiences ofa young generation of Farsi bloggers, which opensour eyes to their thoughts on revolution, censorship,women and even fashion.

Translated books haveprofoundly shaped ourcultural perspective overthe past half centuryJon Parrish Peede

Awaiting News at the Dock

A healthy landscape ofliterary translation can

produce a healthy levelof awareness withoutbordersJulian Evans

A Brief History of Intercultural Awareness

We like to nd books thattell us of worlds we do notknow, or have forgottenPeter StothardTranslation, Reviewed

Promoting sharedvalues

By conveying human rights issues, the experiencesof the marginalised, and elements of common

humanity, translation encourages a greaterunderstanding between different communities andcultures. Whether its Anna Politkovskayas PutinsRussia or Antoine de Saint-Exuprys Petit Princethat awakens your empathy, its incredibly importantthat we have access to these stories and experienceliterature beyond the borders of representation of ourown countries, or worlds.

Translation increasesreaders awareness of

shared human emotionand experienceGeoffrey Taylor

Found in Translation

Literature in translationis essential to an informedtransnational dialogueDavid Shook

Translator Prole

Translation createsrelations between writersand readers that dissolvenot only literary barriers,but barriers of economics,politics, nationalism and

cultural materialismJulian EvansA Brief History of Intercultural Awareness

You may be interested in thefollowing pieces:

Many Languages, One Literature,Namita Gokhale

A Small Country in the South Pacic,Jean Anderson

Important and useful,Polly McLean

Translation and Reciprocity,Ivor Indyk



Go Dutch!,Mireille BermanFound in Translation,Geoffrey Taylor

Awaiting News at the Dock,Jon Parrish Peede

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Regeneratingliterary sources

The power to renew the literary impact of a work isnot restricted to new translations of classic authors

like Tolstoy or Zola. The fortunes of The ReaderbyBernhard Schlink were transformed by its translationfrom German to English and its exposure to a newaudience. In Germany, Schlink was considered to bea crime writer, and The Readerlabelled soft on theNazis. It was on the back of the translation of thenovel that its adaptation for lm was commissioned,sparking great commercial success. Translationallows literature to travel, meaning writers can speakout across generations and cultures.

Translation fromGreek into Latin morethan 2,000 years ago wasthe starting point for thecritical canon, for whatwe have traditionallyrecognised as literatureat allPeter Stothard

Translation, Reviewed

Revitalisinglanguage

Translated work can enrich and benet the languageinto which it is translated, bringing new terms and

ideas with it. Each interpretation of a text is a revivalof language and imagery; a new setting thoughwhich we frame our understanding. By exploring andexperiencing different cultures through literature, webuild our capacity to articulate the world around usin fresh and exciting ways.

Words and phrases thatwe are most frequentlytouched by trickle into our

daily use: words like djvu, orang-utan, assassinand doppelgngerGeoffrey Taylor


Translations of GarcaMrquezs One HundredYears of Solitude

revitalised readers andwriters of English novelsin the 1970s and 1980sPeter Stothard



A Brief History of Intercultural Awareness,Julian Evans

Translator Prole, Maureen FreelyFor Wales: See England,Wiliam Owen Roberts



Translator Prole,Maureen Freely

Introduction 5


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Revitalisingliterature

Having more books in translation encourages usto experiment with our own literature. It can inspire

anglophone writers to reach beyond their niche;to learn from the literary techniques, languageand concepts of other cultures. Salman Rushdieplayfully explores the borders between Hindi andEnglish in Midnights Children, drawing attentionto the absorption of one language and culture intoanother. It is vital that we continue to play with theselinguistic and cultural boundaries to ensure diversityin our national literature.

To revitalise is one of

the essentials of thetranslators artPeter Stothard


Translators wishing to dojustice to a great poem ora great novel will need topay attention not just to its

surface meanings, but itsvoice, its tone, its style,its music and allusionsMaureen Freely

Translator Prole

Reading the bestof the best

In every other art form we can enjoy the best inthe world. We can visit world music festivals like

WOMAD to appreciate diversity in the UK musicscene and watch the latest Luc Besson lm at ourlocal Picture House cinema courtesy of ArticialEye, but with literature its a little more challengingto locate the best. Great work is already beingdone but we need sustainable infrastructure in placeto ensure quality books are consistently identied,marketed and, above all else, read. Whether itsliterary ction or fantasy novels were after, surely wecan, and should, enjoy the very best.

Publishers must nd greatforeign novels and avoidpublishing mediocre onesPolly McLean

Important and useful

Translation is a greatdemocratiser, allowinganyone to study the best

writers in the worldDavid Shook

Translator Prole


Translator Prole,David Shook

A Brief History of Intercultural Awareness,

Julian Evans


A Revolution in Words, Mark Thwaite

Awaiting News at the Dock,

Jon Parrish Peede

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Providinga valuableteaching tool

Literary translation can foster a deeper understandingof the intricacies of language and its various functions,

and can improve written and spoken communicationskills in English. The pedagogical benets oflearning languages are increasingly evident; boththrough scientic research and the direct impactof translation projects for young people. Certaininitiatives like Translation Nation and Poetry InsideOut show that when language learning is enhancedwith translation, young people gain condence andcritical thinking skills as a matter of course.

After many lessons of

translating others work,students are bursting toexpress themselves to writeOlivia Sears

Beyond the Text

There are too many peopleeither complacent about,

or frightened by, languagesother than their own. Theultimate challenge forlinguists is to address thisdebilitating combination ofcomplacency and fearMichael Kelly

Britains Crisis of Language Learning

Developingnew readersand writers

Refugee and migrant communities within the UKare often hugely underrepresented in our national

literature, and it is important that we create aspace for new and emerging voices and readers;particularly where they might not otherwise have aplatform. International literary festivals can attractnew readers, and in turn generate more translations,by catering for different linguistic groups andbeing aware of the kind of issues, languages andstories that are important to the audiences theirexperimentation draws in.

By providing access

to translations throughfestival programming,the readership oftranslated works willincrease and thusthe opportunities fortranslators will tooGeoffrey Taylor


Translation is an importanttool for promoting Welshlanguage literaturegloballyWiliam Owen Roberts

For Wales: See England


Important and useful, Polly McLean

Translation and Reciprocity, Ivor Indyk

Translator Prole,Amanda Hopkinson

Translator Prole, Nicky Harman


A Revolution in Words, Mark Thwaite

Unlikely Encounters, David Del Vecchio

Introduction 7


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Developing newmarkets

A number of writers in this collection throw thefamiliar assumption that anglophone readers have a

meagre appetite for books in translation into question.Research carried out by Dalkey Archive Press alsoindicates that readers really are ready to consumebooks in translation. With generous portions of StiegLarsson and Carlos Ruiz Zafn in translation beingserved around the world, can we still justiably assertthat readers nd literature in translation difcult tostomach? There are huge untapped markets thatwere only just beginning to cater for; and werescarcely beginning to grasp the potential of onlineresearch and promotion for translated titles.

Literature is literature andthere is always a market forgreat booksDavid Del Vecchio

Unlikely Encounters

Migration from print todigital platforms carriesgreat promise for translation

Jon Parrish PeedeAwaiting News at the Dock

The internet allows us todo peer-to-peer marketingdirectly. There are hundredsof blogs out there withhundreds of thousands ofreaders. They are telling

publishers what they (andtheir followers) want to readMark Thwaite

A Revolution in Words

Contributing toeconomic growth

Literacy, cultural understanding and linguisticcapability can help fuel economic competitiveness,

improve employability and develop insight intoforeign markets. Reading works in translation whether its the latest Scandinavian crime novel ora recent autobiography of a political activist helpsfoster a generation that is able to work in the worldwithout being trapped in a single language.

Having a second languageenables graduates tothrive and communicate

condently in complexglobal societies ... theyare the future leaders inbusiness, the professions,voluntary organisations,education and researchMichael Kelly

Britains Crisis of Language Learning


A Small Country in the South Pacic,Jean Anderson

Awaiting News at the Dock,Jon Parrish Peede


Important and useful, Polly McLean

Translation and Reciprocity, Ivor Indyk

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Cultural9


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No one should be surprised that translated literature

receives less critical attention than PEN (or the TLS)would like. Literary criticism of all kinds has less appealto editors than it once had. While opinion everywhereextends its reach, argued opinion is conned. Argumentbased on knowledge including the knowledge ofother cultures and other languages is conned allthe more. So it is valuable to recognise, in every waywe can, how essential is the import-export business ofwords to literatures life and worth.

For as long as there has been a literature writers havetranslated to survive. Translation from Greek into Latinmore than 2,000 years ago was the starting point for thecritical canon, for what we have traditionally recognisedas literature at all. Writings are still being translatedto keep writing alive; and future canons of classicalliterature are already being born from translation

even if the key languages are not yet identied.But when we worry that we are not translating enough, ornot reading enough translation, we are rightly worried.

We should, however, beware despair. Translationhappens more than we think, more than we sometimesnotice and for many different reasons, good, bad andindifferent as well as wonderful.

Ive been asked to consider whether there isa perceived bias against translated literature in thereview media. The evidence of the newspaper pages

and broadcast schedules certainly suggests a lack ofconsideration for new Indian poetry or Qatari novels.But we should not assume that, because of the absenceof coverage alone, there is a bias here. If literary editorssniff at an expensively funded campaign to promote

small countries through small stories, we are rightto be suspicious just as we will feel little obligationto review English novels promoted on posters onthe Underground. Winners of national literary prizes designed to exercise soft power on unsuspectingreaders should be equally examined with caution inthe literary editors ofce.

Each year the Times Literary Supplement publishesreviews of a wide variety of translated ction andpoetry. Among notices of novels in the past 12 months,I have counted almost 70 (out of more than 300)translations into English from some 18 languages,from Slovenian, Korean, Hebrew, Hungarian,Russian, Czech, Japanese and all these andmore in addition to the large number of books wereview in their original language. We take note oftranslation for many reasons, some that might be seen

as classical, others that are not. Translation bringsno more guaranteed virtue than any other act.But we consider translated books because we lookas widely as we can for what is worth nding.

The classical dictates of comparative literature remainvital. The line of Plato, Boethius, Chaucer, Petrarch,Wyatt, Marlowe, Dryden, Hlderlin, Pound and Hughesis not to be lost; and the skills learnt in following thatline, and other long lines, helps the understanding andidentication of successor lines. Informed argumentsabout the value of books demand deep knowledge of the

layers of meaning and association that have gatheredover time. Even the greatest originality depends on theunderstanding of origins: and often those origins arein other languages as well as from other times. For aclassicist the essence of translation is the rendering

Translation, ReviewedPeter Stothard, editor of the Times Literary Supplement,

believes that the import-export of words is a vital part

of keeping literature alive

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of Sappho by Catullus, the way in which Phainetaimoi keinos isos theoisin becomes ille mi par essedeo videtur and thence is driven on into centuries ofpersonal poetry and prose about the feelings of a loverin the presence of a beloved. But the argument forkeeping open the literary trade routes must go beyondthe purely critical, well beyond the chain that linksPropertius to Ezra Pound and Sappho to Swinburne.

One reason for our reviewing a translation is simply toopen eyes to things not visible in any other way. We liketo nd books that tell us of worlds we do not know, orhave forgotten or been encouraged to forget. As well askeeping our minds at home, we can be encouraged tosend them abroad. As well as the domestic present thereis the foreign past. In recent months, for example, theTLS has noted the Hungarian Gyula Krdys Life is aDream, translated by John Btki and reviewed for us byGeorge Szirtes, reminding us of the dreams of a nation,forgotten when the First World War took three-quarters

of its land away. We also reviewed Hans KeilsonsComedy in a Minor Key, a reminder that in the 1930sthe Nazis were sometimes only at the edge of humanstories; and also his The Death of the Adversary, thestory of a Jew in love with Hitler.

We noted German Sadulaevs I Am a Chechen!, anovella of personal testimony and exotic mythology,with a hero who is half Russian and half Chechen in aconict that translation helps us both to understand andto keep in our minds. We praised a translated reissueof Khirbet Khizeh, a novel based on a Jewish soldiersown account of the eviction of a Palestinian village in1948. For 60 years this story of the day the ownerlessproperty of orange growers was destroyed, its ownersdriven away in trucks, their houses tattooed by machineguns, lived on only in Hebrew; in 2008 the grim lyricismof S. Yizhars prose was translated into English; and in2011 it was newly published in England, encouragingour reviewer Toby Lichtig to predict for the book theinternational audience it had always deserved.

The Bulgarian Nobel Prize-winner and much-translatedwriter, Elias Canetti, wrote in German. But DeyanEnevs Circus Bulgaria, the result of a life spent half

under communism and half in its aftermath, had to betranslated from Bulgarian. As our critic, Julian Evans,put it, Enevs work is here now to revitalise those of ustired of too many well-groomed, linear, consequentialand contained Anglo-Saxon narratives. To revitalise:that is one of the essentials of the translators art.Translations of Mrquezs One Hundred Years ofSolitude revitalised readers and writers of the Englishnovel in the 1970s and 1980s. That was not justbecause of the style that became known as magicalrealism, important though that was, but because ofwhat it described, what it said.

In translations we may also nd literary techniqueswe have forgotten or never known. We noted thisyear, with admiration and some bemusement,The Piano Cemetery by the Portuguese writer, Jos

Lus Peixoto, a novel of inner marathons based on thelife of a Benca Olympian in 1912 who lived next toa house of abandoned keyboards. Peixoto, concludedMadeline Clements, has an extraordinary way ofperceiving, one that is enhanced in Daniel Hahns neand sensitive translation.

One way of assisting translated literature is to recognise

better both nancially and critically those whotranslate it. Payment for translation is often poor. Criticalrecognition is too often absent, sometimes because thereviewer prefers to ignore it (the British have a betterrecord here than the French) and often because thereviewer does not know the original language.

A powerful virtue of translation into English or Spanishis to nd readers in Britain, America and Spain forbooks that for various reasons appeal less at home.This year the TLS noted the publication history ofBernhard Schlinks hugely successful novel and

lm treatment, The Reader, noting how Schlink wasknown at home only as a crime novelist and howthe The Reader was judged in Germany to be toosoft on the Nazis. Reviewing a later book by the sameauthor, The Weekend, Julian Preece judged his style tobe even possibly better suited to English.

Translation from languages with few readers to thosewith many is an important way of spreading a story, afact, a message, a style. But like almost every aspectof this subject, the benets are laced with dangers.The novelist Tim Parks warned in the TLS this April thatwriters have begun to seek an international readershipto the neglect of one close to home. The rewardsof celebrity abroad may come at the expense of thevery literary distinctiveness that originally attractedreaders to the Dutch or the Danish or the EgyptianArabic. Kafka and Beckett may tell of essential humanvalues; but the ability to travel far from home, forwords as much as wine, is not the only test of quality.A campaign for translated literature should bewareof promoting prizes and subsidies only for those thatmeet the demands of internationalism.

It is worth asking too whether the responsibility for

reviewing translated literature and other worksdeserving extended critical attention needs to bespread more widely. In October 2009 there was aconference at Princeton during which, alongsidethe now ritual abuse of newspapers and TV forabandoning literary criticism, there were distinguishedvoices asking whether the mainstream media had, infact, undertaken this task longer, and for less prot,than might have been expected. Perhaps universities and their presses need to work harder to produce andmarket places where the good can be recognised. Thatwill require respect for journalistic independence as well

as academic rigour. The internet age offers enormouspossibilities. Those who care for the traditions oftranslation must act as well as complain about theinaction of others.

Peter Stothard

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In the dry, brownish town of El Toboso in La Mancha,

early morning and late afternoon, the streets are full ofsheep, trotting tangily past with a clangour of bells; thedescendants of those same sheep that a sixteenth-century knight of ction once rode into with his lance,believing them to be an army of his mortal enemies whoonly looked like sheep because a sorcerer had changedtheir shape. To a twenty-rst-century city-dweller thesight is still simultaneously prosaic and enchanted:the contemporary urban eye sees a herd of sheepas a remote, inscrutable quantity, and the herdsmenwho pause, smoke, and watch expressionlessly forstragglers as outlandish as that distant ctional gure.

El Toboso is real, ancient and ordinary, but it too hasits elements of fancy. Another of its sights is the casade Dulcinea, the restored farmhouse of the empressof La Mancha ... mistress of my most hidden thoughts

accolades bestowed by a lanky, complex, deludedhero on a woman who didnt exist. As if to pay furthertribute to the power of that heros imagination, a coupleof streets away and across the square from the churchof San Antonio Abad, at the Instituto Cervantes is alibrary of many editions of the novel in which he appears.They are here because the institutes curator once hadthe idea of asking the internationally famous to donatea copy of the Quixote to its collection. In its rst-oorshowcases you can see signed copies that oncebelonged to the actor Alec Guinness, to Mrs Thatcher,Ronald Reagan, Benito Mussolini and others.

Among the ideas that Miguel de Cervantess novelcontinues to stir into being what constitutes reality,the attraction and repulsion of unfamiliarity, how vitalto us as humans the made-up elements of reality are

is also an interplay in our everyday lives that oftengoes unacknowledged. But if we tend to behave asthough we live in a purely factual world, our curiosityabout the world and its sensations conrms our needfor non-factual input; our impulse to absorb the worldsotherness by seeing, listening, reading for ourselveshas a strong component (as for Quixote) of the might-be and the not-yet known and the emotions that gowith them. In order to know, to make sense, to quellour fears, we tell ourselves stories (as Quixote did) andconsume the stories of others.

This absorption is never exclusively factual.

For instance, we feel the settings, narratives and

characters of lms, plays or novels to be authentic (or

not) on aesthetic rather than objective grounds; we feel

different places, cultures and people to be imbued with

a romance of difference. Why is there no alternative

to the word exotic, when we know it to be the mostabused of clichs? Postmodernism has not relativised

our understanding to the point where we see everything

as constructed, subjective, ctional; but our curiosity

is a yearning to bring the outside (exotikos) inside

by whatever means are at our disposal. Storytelling is

about both gaining more knowledge and reconciling

our desires and fears of otherness. Recent research

at Erasmus University, Rotterdam, has suggested that

we dont just tell stories to present and make sense

of ourselves: we also adopt the stories of others as

though we were the protagonist.

In literary terms, it is routinely asserted that in Britain(and often the anglophone world as a whole) we areresistant to this wider curiosity; that islands are traps,and we are intrinsically insular; that, linguistically, our

A Brief History ofIntercultural AwarenessJulian Evans, writer and former Chair of the English PEN

Writers in Translation Committee, navigates the translationtrail from sixteenth-century Spain to the present day

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sense of superiority and self-sufciency as English-speakers makes us less receptive than the owners ofother languages and cultures. Is it so?

If it is, it wasnt always. Before passing on from theQuixote, at the Castilian university town of Alcal deHenares, in the house where Cervantes is supposed tohave spent his boyhood, there is another library, of rst

editions of his novel. Though he died a year after thesecond volume was published (in April 1616, the samemonth as Shakespeare), he had lived long enough tosee his Quixote become the rst international bestsellerin ction. The rst translation had appeared in 1612;others took the novel to France, Belgium and Italy.But that earliest translation, by Thomas Shelton, wasinto youve guessed it English, beginning a Britishrelationship with this quintessentially Spanish novelthat deepened through the eighteenth century andfundamentally inuenced its writers Tobias Smollett,Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne and the rest.

Translations role in establishing the most central novelin world literature is thus itself central and enduring (theQuixotes most recent English translation, a superbversion by Edith Grossman, came out as recentlyas 2004). It might even be argued that anglophonereaders have had more access to the Quixote and tosixteenth-century Spain than Spanish readers have,for, re-translated from time to time, our Quixote nevergets marooned in one century, while his Spanish-language double becomes ever more archaic tomodern Spanish readers.

In fact, literary translations ability to regenerate itssources, over and over again, driven each time by newlanguage and imagery, lends it a particularly renewingperspective. Turning books outwards to other cultures,growing and reviving their appeal, translation helps topilot literature through space and time. And not onlythat: Harold Bloom, echoing the professor at ErasmusUniversity, has pointed out that Cervantes novel socontains us that, as with Shakespeare, we cannotget out of it. For that crucial invention of ourselves,Cervantes translators continue to deserve some ofthe credit. The books we read in translation from day to

day may be more modest in their claims to greatness,but translations proposal is still an expansive one. Ithumbly offers to facilitate our curiosity; it also wants,to borrow the title of English PENs recent anthology,nothing more nor less than to make the world legible.

Yet such intercultural trafc, we know from experience,doesnt come out of nowhere. The willingness to becurious, as child psychologists tell us, needs to bestimulated by attention and example. From the 1980s tomid-1990s the readership for translated work in the UKdeclined to a point of stagnation. The ambitious British

Centre for Literary Translation had opened in 1989, butit was perhaps ultimately our revival of interest throughpivotal historical events (the fall of the Berlin Walland the end of Soviet Communism; the Balkan wars;middle-East conict; 9/11) combined with a revolution

in news-gathering that tended towards the personaland the narrative citizen reporting, blogs, socialnetworking that jolted us to look outwards again.

From 2000 to 2002 I travelled through Europe, on ameandering Quixote-like course, to record someradio programmes on the rise of the European novel.In the BBCs commissioning of the rst series and

its re-commissioning of the second were signs of achange in anglophone attitudes. Maybe theprogrammes themselves changed a few more attitudes;but in terms of reader numbers our curiosity continuedto need stimulus. In these circumstances, in 2004,English PENs Writers in Translation (WiT) programmedecided to expend its main energy and funding onhelping to promote and market translated literature. Asdeputy chair of the WiT committee at its foundation,I had a hand in that decision, for which there was aclear rationale. By supporting the promotion andmarketing costs of a translated title so often at the

bottom of the publishers heap of priorities with anemphasis on staging readings and events with authorsand translators, you build both readers and readerscuriosity; you reassure publishers that there is a viablemarket for translated ction and non-ction (ratherthan just a good cause to be ministered to); and youcreate leverage by which the funding programme itselfbecomes more widely known, attracting new clients andcollaborations to the process. Writers in Translationsreputation today, after six years of operation, suggeststhat it has to some degree accomplished all thosethings, and gone a long way towards redistributingreaders and publishers literary priorities.

The vitality of all literature rests on an insistence: thatwe question historical experience, seeking theindividual in the communal and the communal in theindividual. That search is bound for inconclusion,because the sense of who we are is never xed, buta constituent part of our engagement with a changingworld. At the most personal level, a book is a workmade by an individual about his or her world for anotherindividual; as much as a metaphor, its a requestfrom writer to reader: Here I am, as a human being.Do you recognise anything? Are we both human

beings? (TheQuixote, by the way, is a supreme exampleof that request for recognition. In the ingenious knightsdelusions we nd, are entertained by, and forgive ourown.) At a collective or communal level, a book issomething different: a form of awareness, a signier,a cultural specicity, that its text both conservesand seeks to communicate. Translation takes thatawareness beyond its own specicity and makes it partof our intercultural trafc through linguistic empathy.

Theories of translation need not, perhaps, concernus overmuch here. But what cultural weight does

that intercultural awareness, and the work oftranslation that facilitates it, have? First, it opposesthe surly borders thrown up by concepts of nationalliterature; it creates relations between writersand readers that dissolve not only literary barriers

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but barriers of economics, politics, nationalismand cultural materialism. Being European (forinstance) becomes not about living in the shrunkensimplications of euro-Europe, dependent on aready-made cultural Europe of cappuccino andcity-breaks or a political Europe whose ideals andambitions are principally economic, but aboutsharing a reality with readers in Estonia, Greece,

the Netherlands, Portugal, or Sweden. In thatexperience lies the profound promise of relationsand understanding. Through such explorations weunderstand, for example, that others want and needthe freedoms we have as we have seen nightly inrecent TV broadcasts from Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrainand Libya, although anyone who had been readingNaguib Mahfouz, Ahdaf Soueif or Alaa al-Aswanywould already have known very well what journalistsin Cairo and Benghazi have been telling us. We alsounderstand that we must not lose our own freedomsthrough complacency, political misdirection or fear.

These are vital human and political matters; to all ofthem translation is essential.

Is it possible to measure intercultural awareness?There are social and cultural conditions that make itmore likely: the extent and effectiveness of languageteaching, the possibility and levels of travel/emigration,the outwardness or lack of it in schools teaching ofgeography, history and literature, the inclusivenessor provincialism of the prevailing political and mediaclimate. Yet even in the absence of healthy levels ofmost of those conditions as in the last decade in theUK a healthy landscape of literary translation canproduce a healthy level of awareness without borders.In Britain in the last ten years or so our own landscapehas changed almost out of recognition, with the revival ofthe Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, the introductionof the Man Booker International Prize and the annualSebald Lecture on the Art of Literary Translation, thearrival of a new generation of more experimentalsmall publishers, abetted by new technology, and theblooming of a thousand translation blogs.

This evolution is one to which PENs Writers inTranslation programme has contributed through

both its funding and initiatives, including its onlineWorld Atlas and collaborations with other agencies.Writers in Translation is reactive, as grant-givingbodies tend to be, but in the energy of its reactions in particular its energetic participation in the planningand realisation of marketing campaigns for every bookit funds it is widely acknowledged to have addedvalue and inuence to the UK translation scene.Its insistence on the mutual value and visibility oftranslator and author has helped improve the standingof translators. Its willingness to reect on its ownactivity, and to seek to operate outside its comfort zone

and that of translation generally, has helped produceexible strategies to support a wide variety of booksand situations. It has worked not only with publishers,authors and translators but with festivals, libraries, bookfairs, conferences, schools and external agencies to

reach new readers and enthuse existing ones. Markedagainst these criteria, it has made a signicant impact.

How much WiT might be capable of leveragingour awareness further is a question to which itscommittee must continue to address itself. One ofthe programmes requirements is that a funded titlescontent and intention conform to PENs Charter.

While this may be interpreted more widely in future,the other rule of engagement that both title andtranslation must show literary excellence must not.There remains more that can be done, and some groundto make up. A secondary feature of the programmehas been its sample translation and readers reportscheme: basically the provision of a synopsis, reportand English-language sample of a book that has notyet found a UK publisher, which is then made availablefree to publishers. So far the sample translationscommissioned by WiT have generally not resulted inEnglish publication of the book in question. A reason,

if not the reason, for this failure is that the programmehas not established its brand as a source of worthwhile,innovative texts as well as it has established itself asa marketing funder of energy and judgement. Anotherarea in which the programme might expand its activityis among the UKs constituency of refugee and migrantwriters, poets especially, who have no access to theusual publication channels in their own language.

It is, of course, absolutely vital above all thatWriters in Translation continues to operate, as it canexceptionally well within English PENs embrace, asa respected champion of literature beyond nationaland linguistic borders and beyond conventionalliterary expectations. In the diversity of its constitution writers, translators, publishers, literary journalists,scouts and agents it has become a benchmark forcritical judgement, independence and commitment inthe UK translation scene, free of the prejudices andpartis pris not just of insular publishers, provincialpoliticians and trivia-hungry media but of all special-interest groups including perhaps even translators!However it changes in the future, it must retain thatdisinterested passion.

I dont want to end on a moralistic or triumphalistnote; and there is one further annotation to be madeto the brief history of intercultural awareness Iveattempted here, which offers us an opportunity tocalculate the consequences of dismissing or denyingthe value of that sort of understanding. It takes usback to the rst-oor room at the Instituto Cervantesat El Toboso. Here, among the showcases anddonated copies of Cervantes novel, there is a single,green-bound, bulky volume that is an exception to allthe other editions in the library. It is not an edition ofthe Quixote, as all the others are, but of the German

epic poem Das Nibelungenlied, pointedly sent inits place and dedicated to the Cervantes Society inEl Toboso by the German Reichskanzler in his ownhand, A Hitler, 1. Juli 1933.

Julian Evans

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Name

Destination of Choice

Other Activities of Interest

Occupation

Languages

Spanish,Isthmus Zapotec,

English

Hammock; Any bar with VctorTern; Nightclubs in Malabo withRecaredo Silebo Boturu

Editor of online broadside Molossus; competitivefoosballer; sponsored representative of OregonWild Hair Moustache Wax

Translator

David Shook; a.k.a. Tekwani (Nahuatl for tiger, shark,maneater; literally habitual eater of people)

David Shooks commitment to translating andpublishing minority voices has taken him onmany intriguing and dangerous journeys

David Shook

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Translation offers the young writer the same benetsCreative Writing programmes do, often for considerablyless money. One offers a diploma, neither muchguarantee of future income. Ive learned both ways,and while I am proud to have worked with severalpoets of international reputation during my mastersprogramme, I think I have learned at least as muchfrom Octavio Paz, from Jos Saramago, from Tedi

Lpez Mills, Vctor Tern, Mario Bellatn, FranciscoHernndez and many others. Translation is a course inunderstanding the blurred boundaries between craftand genius, in the exibility and limitations of syntax,and in the core tone of the work. Translation is as oldas literature, an important teacher, especially since thebeginnings of Modernism. That masters programmesdont require it is a short-sightedness that I supposeis attributable to an increasingly internationalised butvisually communicated media culture. Monolingualismis a poor excuse; cribs have their own set of teachingsto offer. Our Babelic delusion is just that.

My efforts as translator, poet and editor have centredon the idea that literature in translation is essentialto an informed transnational dialogue, that minorityvoices like that of Isthmus Zapotec poet Vctor Terndeserve attention and that once received, standup to critical analysis and even receive popularacclaim. In early 2010 this proved to be just the case,when the Poetry Translation Centre sponsored theMexican Poets Tour, featuring Terns work in mytranslation alongside work by poet-translator pairsCoral Bracho/Katherine Pierpoint and David Huerta/Jamie McKendrick. The three-week tour featureddates in major cities of England and Scotland, and

exposed Tern to a major international audiencefor the rst time, something especially signicantbecause of the low cultural status of indigenouslanguages and literatures in Mexico. As poet DavidHuerta explained in an interview with BBC4, theindigenous literatures of Mexico are quite distinctfrom the Spanish-language tradition of the majority,increasingly visible but often considered sub-literaryby the Mexican establishment.

Since late 2009 I have edited Molossus, an onlinebroadside of world literature, with a special emphasison literature in translation, often from the perspective

of the literary translator. The site features reviews aswell as original content, such as our recent interviewswith translators including Jeffrey Yang, Mark Schafer,Sudeep Sen, Pascale Petit, Ilya Kaminsky and JamieMcKendrick. In addition to serving the practicingtranslator, my hope is that the site might promotethe translator and their work to a broader literary andintelligent mainstream audience. One current initiative,which should launch in 2011, is our companionwebisode series Lit Minute, which will primarilyfeature literature in translation. Our small productionteam includes several of Los Angeles best young TVwriters and producers, and early titles include Ugly

Duckling Presses recent 5 Meters of Poems, anaccordion-style fold-out poetry collection by PeruvianVanguardist Carlos Oquendo de Amat, in JoshuaBeckmans and Alejandro de Acostas translation.

February 2011 saw the incorporation of my non-protMolossus Productions, a boutique publisher of worldliterature in translation. Our rst title is the Mexicanwriter Mario Bellatins novella Shiki Nagaoka proledin the New York Times in late 2009 which usestranslation as a narrative strategy to authenticate afalse biography. Molossus Productions will use aprimarily-electronic distribution system, marketing

titles to both mainstream and specialised audiencesacross platforms including Kindle, Nook and iBooks,with secondary hard copies produced in limited runsat a slight premium and an exclusive lettered run ofsigned copies. The Mexican Consulate in Los Angelesis supporting our launch by bringing Mario Bellatin toLos Angeles, and similar events are being planned inother major US cities.

Our second title is a collection of poetry by theEquatoguinean poet Marcelo Ensema Nsang, aClaretian priest imprisoned and tortured underMacas for his social activism. To accompany that,

Im also producing a documentary about EnsemaNsang, using my on-the-ground hunt for the poet asthe starting point for a story about translation, poetry,the life of the artist in society, and a portrait of one ofthe worlds most unusual and unusually repressive places. Other projects to come include Tecuani, aseries of poetry chapbooks by indigenous Mexicans,edited by Vctor Tern, and including work fromIsthmus Zapotec, Zoque, Yucatec, Wixritari (Huichol)and Mazateco.

Critical defence and promotion of literary translationare important, but even more so, in my view, is an

emphasis on just how enjoyable literature in translationcan be, in both its creation and its consumption.Translation is a great democratiser, allowing anyoneto study with the best writers in the world. I encourageall masters programmes in the UK to include it in theircurricula so that they might avoid the provincialismand cliquishness that the more developed AmericanMFA community is often guilty of. Good translatorsmust be good writers, even if they do not writethemselves, and it is high time we pay them the praisethey deserve for their often invisible work.

I leave Los Angeles tonight for Malabo, Equatorial

Guinea, to produce my documentary about MarceloEnsema Nsang, motivated to take an 8,000+ mile tripof considerable cost and potential danger because ofthe power of Nsangs verse. He writes,

its not possible to step on the ight of batsor to steal the blind song of the barn owl

In response to those impossibilities, I suggest that itis a miracle of equal power to be able to read andengage with literatures from other languages andcultures. Indeed, translation is a necessary andachievable miracle, increasingly important in our

globalised world. I recommend its practice to all.

David Shook

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Our author events started in June 1974.By October 1980 we had inaugurated what is nowour signature event: the International Festival ofAuthors (IFOA). From the very beginning of thefestival, works translated into English were anintegral part of the programming. Since those earlyyears we have presented over 7,500 writers from100 nations. 60 per cent of these scribes werefrom outside Canada. And of those, at least halfwere from countries where English is a second orthird language.

Canada is ofcially a bilingual country; in practice,however, it is a country that speaks not twolanguages but hundreds. Currently 47 per centof Canadians consider English their secondlanguage. Once you learn that over 50 per cent ofthe population was born outside of the country,

this seems only logical.

Thanks to Torontos multiculturalism, we have beenable to attract a great variety of linguistic groups toour venues. We have presented events in dozensof different languages over the years. We havefound that currently it is the second generation ofnew Canadians, and later ones, that are lookingfor the stories of their parents homelands. Thishas invariably meant that this new generation,and in many cases a new generation of readers, isinterested in and needs works in English. This has

resulted in the vast majority of our events beingpresented in that language.

Most editions of the IFOA have had a theme ofsorts. Last year we focused on mystery and thriller

writers, and not too long ago we had an in-depthlook at graphic novels. In past years it has beena country-of-focus such as Denmark, Japan,Sweden, Germany, Hungary, Scotland or Ireland.In 2011 the IFOA will examine works in translation.This programming focus aims to bring new worksof literature from a wide range of international andnational authors to Canadian audiences with thepurpose of sparking discussion on the benefitsand challenges of literary translation.

This focus on translation evolved from a stand-alonefestival that we presented in June 2010, Found inTranslation. This festival highlighted authors whoseworks originated in a language other than their nativetongue. Held over three days, the festival featuredevents in English, French, Spanish, and Japanese.Authors who participated included Laura Alcoba

(Argentina), Kebir Mustapha Ammi (Morroco), YingChen (China), Louis-Philippe Dalembert (Haiti),Wayne Grady (Canada), Andre Makine (Russia),Tierno Monnembo (Guinea), Gilda Piersanti (Italy)and Ryoko Sekiguchi (Japan). Our lead partner onthis project was the Consulate General of Francewith support from The Japan Foundation, IstitutoItaliano di Cultura, the Conseil de la communautmarocaine a ltranger, Bureau du Qubec and others.Events were held both within the different culturalcommunities as well as in the heart of the city atTorontos Harbourfront Centre. Hosting these events

throughout the city, helped reiterate the importanceof building communities through translation.

This mini-festival paved the way for our themefor 2011. By embedding the Found in Translation

Found in TranslationGeoffrey Taylor, director of the Toronto International

Festival of Authors, shows how literature in translation can

bridge festival communities, reach far-ung audiencesandboost the translation of books into English

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festival within the IFOA we hope to gain a cross-over audience from our main festival. The IFOA aimsto convey the importance of literary translation asa foundation for cultural exchange through a widerange of events including readings, round tablesand talks. The focus also aims to open doors forthose who have not yet been discovered in Canada.Also, the festival hopes this focus is a spring-board

for more translated works.

Translation allows for both unique interpretationand a broader audience than a work written in justone language. It also means that many versionsof one work can exist. For example, PabloNerudas poem Me gustas cuando callas hasbeen translated as I Like for You to be Still, I LikeYou When You Are Quiet, I Like You When YouAre Stil l and I Like it When Youre Silent. Theseare just a handful of the numerous renditions thatare available, and English readers will of course

favour one translation over another for reasons ofpersonal taste and understanding.

Similarly, translation gives us access: access tomaterial we may never have been able to read orunderstand without the translation. A number ofyears ago a group of authors was discussing booksat the IFOA and the conversation turned to themerits of a new translation of Homer that had justbeen released. A member of the group turned to SirWilliam Golding to ask his opinion. His reply wasthat he had not read the new release, but that it wasunlikely to be as good as the ancient Greek version.This goes to show that although we may lack theskills to read much of the worlds literature in itsoriginal voice, translation allows us to experienceat least one interpretation of a piece.

Translation is a vehicle of access and awareness.The original creator of a work provides a glimpse oftheir characters familial situation, their communityand what political, economic or social issues maybe affecting their characters at a given time. Whilenot every nuance or saying can be translated, aneffective translated work includes a local take on

characters while maintaining the original feeling ormessage of a story. As a result, translation increasesreaders awareness of shared human emotionand experience. It allows readers to explore newworlds and cultures. The role of the translator isto provide us with the best approximation of theauthors voice so that it also reflects the world inwhich we live.

This reflection can be seen throughout time as thelanguages, words and phrases that we are mostfrequently touched by trickle into daily usage: words

like dj vu, orang-utan, assassin or doppelgnger.Even one of the languages that seems most distantfrom English, that spoken by the Inuit, has providedus with the word kayak. In fact, there is a wealthof such languages that we have scarcely begun

to understand and truly appreciate: the urbanlegend that the Eskimo have many more words forsnow then we do is just a misunderstanding of thestructure of the Eskimo-Aleut languages. (Throughthe use of suffixes, their vocabulary seemsunlimited.) Even confusion over words like Eskimoadds to the discussion. Most recent textbookswill tell you there are no Eskimos, that they are

called Inuit or the people. That said, thousands ofYupik speakers who consider themselves Eskimowould disagree. All of these examples open us upto an entirely new interpretation of language andmeaning to be explored through the understandingof translation.

It is often asked how non-native speakers canparticipate in English-language festivals. Theanswer is quite simple: their works are translatedinto English. This hints at just how many greatforeign works there are that we will never be able

to experience.

Last year marked the start of an ongoingcollaboration between five of the worlds top literaryfestivals, in a partnership called the Word Alliance.The IFOA, Edinburgh International Book Festival, theBookworm Beijing literary festival, InternationalesLiteraturfestival Berlin and Melbourne WritersFestival joined together to share their high-calibrepresentations of international authors and tofacilitate dialogue between their countries bestwriters. The IFOA and its collaborators hope theirpartnerships will encourage the discussion ofnew translation opportunities for the hundreds ofauthors they present on their stages. The WordAlliance will be announcing the addition of morefestivals including non-English language festivalsin the not-too-distant future.

Globalisation and instant media have given us theimpression that we have a partial understanding ofthe worlds cultures. However, until we know eachothers stories, we are condemned to think of theworld in sound bites and left wondering if we havemissed something. A good translation of a good

work of literature provides us with a window on toa culture that can never be closed. It is our hopethat by providing access to translations through ourfestival programming, the readership of translatedworks will increase and thus the opportunities fortranslators will too. To have more, and in somecases better, translations would create morebridges of understanding that could lead to thebest principles of enlightenment.

Geoffrey Taylor

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The New Zealand book market is a small one,and publishers here have as their prime objective, quiteunderstandably, the publication and promotion of NewZealand books. Where literary translation is concerned,the initial response has been that it is of no concern to thelocal market, neither as regards support for the translationof our writers, nor as a factor in importing work from other

languages. The exception to this is in the area of childrensbooks, in which a great deal of translation is done from andinto Pacic languages. This recognises the importance ofpreserving the cultural heritage of community groups thathave migrated here principally since the 1960s and 1970s.Other than this, two small publishers, Gecko Press andSmall World, specialise in translated childrens books.

For adults, the situation is a lot less promising. Currently,support for translation and publication costs must comefrom the source countries, several of which do havefunds for this purpose. However, it would seem thatmost publishers are not aware of these. There are very

few literary translators in New Zealand, and they tend tohave a low prole compared with those working in thecommercial translation sector. Literary translations here,with just a handful of exceptions a half-dozen titles areself-published (probably another half dozen). This is anestimate of the total number of works of translated adultliterature everpublished in book form in this country.

At government level, there is as yet little recognition ofthe role of translation as an important element of culturaldiplomacy, although a recent initiative (2005-2007) sawthe publication of a selection of New Zealand poetry inRussia and of Russian poetry in New Zealand to some

acclaim among afcionados of the genre.

It would obviously be an overstatement to claim this asa breakthrough. There are some small signs of change

on the horizon, however. The main Arts funding body,Creative New Zealand, set up a special fund in late 2010specically to provide support for the translation of NewZealand writing into other languages. While the sumsinvolved are modest, it is at least an acknowledgementof the strategic importance of translation in promotingour national literature. A further initiative in 2011 has

seen the Publishers Association of New Zealand aimto provide publicity for this new fund at the FrankfurtBook Fair, and perhaps to provide materials in the targetlanguage to improve accessibility.

Unfortunately there is no corresponding local fund forthe translation of foreign-language works into English forpublication in New Zealand. While the point of view thatpublishers in Great Britain or the United States will takecare of market needs for translations into English, andthat such books can be distributed here once they areavailable, is perhaps understandable given the size of thelocal market, it nevertheless perpetuates something of a

misunderstanding of New Zealands place in the world.

To put it simply, readers here do not have the sameinterests or literary tastes as the American or Britishmarket. This may seem like a generalisation, but it shouldgive us pause. New Zealand is a small country in theSouth Pacic. An increasing proportion of our populationis of Pacic origin, and while the active eld of translatingchildrens literature is testament to the ow and exchangethat can happen between languages, it seems strange thatthere is no perceived need to support this same culturalexchange at the level of a more mature readership.

Wellington-based Huia Books is, to some degree, anexception to this rule. While they specialise once againin childrens literature, either written or translated intothe indigenous language, Maori, and in ction and non-

A Small Country in the South PacicJean Anderson, Director of the New Zealand Centre for

Literary Translation, asks: shouldnt this small country focus

primarily on the translation of writing from its closest neighbours?

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ction by Maori writers in English, their list also containsa small number of translated works of adult ction, forexample, Patricia Graces Potiki, translated from Englishto Maori, and Tahitian writer Chantal Spitzs now equallyclassic Island of Shattered Dreams. But the key word hereis small. An Auckland publisher, Little Island books, isshowing interest in translations of Pacic writing, andtwo university presses, in Auckland and Wellington, have

made minor forays into the wider eld, as have a handful ofliterary reviews (notably LandfallandPoetry New Zealand).However it is very much the translators initiative, both inapproaching a suitable publisher and in securing funding,that drives these occasional projects.

Exceptionally, in 2007, the French Embassy sponsored amonth-long festival designed to highlight New Caledonianculture and provide an opportunity for New Zealanders tosample some translated works from our nearest French-speaking neighbour, chiey poetry and dramatic pieces.

We should not forget that some of New Zealands

closest neighbours are not English- or Pacic language-speaking, but Francophone. French Polynesia (Tahiti)has a small but active group of writers whose workwould certainly appeal to other Pasika peoples, butthat audience cannot currently access these booksbecause of the English-French divide; and NewCaledonia (Kanaky), with more than twenty indigenouslanguages, is united on the literary level by the languageof French colonisation, but separated from a potentialanglophone readership in the region.

While translations from the wider world of literatureremain important, the Pacic should, arguably, be our

rst area of interest. In the past, Australian efforts,throughthe Pandanus imprint at Australian National University,to bring the works of these more local writers intoEnglish have eventually foundered as funding has beenwithdrawn. Currently a small number of academics areworking to help Pacic literatures to cross this divide, butthat remains an uphill battle.

The founding of the New Zealand Centre for LiteraryTranslation, Te Tumu Whakawhiti Tuhinga o Aotearoa,at Victoria University of Wellington, has provided afocal point for the development of a higher prolefor literary translation. Although some elements of

academia remain unconvinced of the scholarly and/or artistic value of literary translation, the setting upof specialist postgraduate degrees in the discipline atVictoria University in 2010 has gone some way towardsa recognition of the skills required.

The Centre hosted its inaugural international conferencein December 2010, attracting high-quality proposalsfrom scholars and practitioners from over twentycountries. Keynote speakers were Gayatri ChakravortySpivak, Lawrence Venuti and Paulo Britto, and a numberof foreign Embassies added their support to that ofVictoria University.

The conference provided an important opportunity tocreate links with translators and academics from aroundthe world, and work on editing a collection of essays by

participants is currently underway. It is hoped in this wayto strengthen the community of scholars and practitionersin the Pacic region in particular, but with extensive linksinto the wider world of literary translation. Given moderncommunications technology, there is in fact no reason whytranslators in, say, the Philippines or New Zealand, couldnot readily work with colleagues or indeed publishers around the globe.

Here we come to the crux of the problem. How can we getpublishers to come to the party? How can we move pastthe nancial bottom line? Should we even be thinking thisway? The economics of the process are quite rightly avital consideration for the publisher, and presumably notranslator or writer wants to see a successfully completedproject jeopardise the existence of the publishing house.

And without proper funding, the publisher cannot committo effective marketing and yet another important bookcan fail to make an impact, thus perpetuating the viciouscircle of translations perceived as a costly burden.

Sadly, it is hard to see past the nancial aspect of thedilemma. Can publishers with a small local readership nda way to connect to international markets more easily?Is the ebook the answer? Will online publishing makeroom for a bigger number of more diverse texts?

It is difcult to imagine now what the publishing scenemight look like in another decade or quarter century. Thespeed of technological innovation has already brought usto the point of having to reimagine the book: while somephysical form will no doubt remain, ction is becomingincreasingly virtual.Perhaps, from the point of view of thosewith a stake in translated literature, these technological

developments are positive and point, not to the deathof the book, but to a brighter future. The question thenbecomes, How to get the maximum advantage from theseinnovations? The ebook is arguably a means by which theproduct of creative minds wherever their geographicaland linguistic roots may be could reach out through amuch more ethereal medium, and much more rapidlyand inexpensively, to a truly global readership. For thisto be possible, however, literary translation will need tocome into its own. Unless we become a planet of Englishspeakers (or Chinese speakers, why not?), there will be noworld literature without translation.

We could adopt a pessimistic stance, and see recentGoogle initiatives as either impinging on the fundamental

rights of the creator, or AmazonCrossing focusing only on

the translation of best-sellers, at the potential expense of all

those undiscovered gems Or we could be more optimistic

perhaps unusually for the literary translation community

and suggest that if Google, Amazon, Kindle and the other

components of this emerging technological network do

in fact become some kind of vast reading-machine, then

surely that machine can only increase the need for an

appreciation of our work, especially if it creates a space for

the dissemination of lesser-known literatures which might

then be issued with a lower nancial risk for the publisher

Watch this space.

Jean Anderson

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Should a language that is still

restricted to 6 per cent of Indias

population, an English-educated

elite, be invested with such global

representational power in literary

and cultural terms? What does

it mean that the world reads and

believes that it comprehends India

through Rushdie and Roy rather

than Kamleshwar (Hindi), Ambai

(Tamil), or Qurrutalain Hyder (Urdu)?

These questions are important ones

and have necessarily animated the

critical discussion. Fortunately, good

translations and scholarly editions

of bhasha or indigenous language

literatures are beginning to make

their appearance and are beginning

to challenge sanctioned ignorance

of these literary languages and

traditions.

Priyamvada Gopal, The Indian English Novel:Nation, History and Narration

While Midnights Children was a watershedwhich had a huge impact on how the world viewedIndian writing, Salman Rushdies magical prose alsotransformed the way Indian writing looked at itself.Although some critics saw it as a valorisation ofthe post-colonial exotic, Pico Iyers famous essayThe Empire Writes Back described it as a call tofree spirits everywhere to remake the world withimagination, opening up a new universe by changingthe way we tell stories and see the world aroundus. Saleem Sinais voice reclaimed the language ofthe Mumbai streets, bringing the spoken sounds ofIndia into English literary usage.

My rst novel, Paro: Dreams of Passion, waspublished in 1984. There were few quality Englishlanguage publishers in India at the time, andbeing published there and receiving the offshore

validation of the western world was an importantrite of passage for aspiring writers. The rst of thesari rippers, Paro, published by Chatto & Windus,received the full twice-born treatment yet itsnon-squeamish use of Mumbai patois still puzzledthose Indians who equated good books with theQueens English.

Now, Indians have accepted and appropriatedEnglish as an Indian language, using it in the easystyle of lms like Jab We Met. Several importantinternational publishers have taken root in India,

including Penguin, Harper Collins, Picador,Random House and Hachette. Many of these, suchas Penguin, Harper Collins and Random House,have accepted publishing in the Indian languagesas part of their mandate.

Many Languages, One LiteratureNamita Gokhale, co-director of the Jaipur Literary Festival,

reects on the role of literary festivals in a nation where language,culture and literature exist in a constant state of translation

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Indian writing in English has now found its place inthe world. Vikram Seth, Arundhati Roy, Amitav Ghosh,Kiran Desai, Aravind Adiga and others have refractedpowerful, personal images of their homeland throughtheir works. Vikas Swarups Q&A was adapted intothe lm Slumdog Millionaire and won eight Oscars.Suketu Mehtas Maximum City, Sunil Khilnanis TheIdea of India, and Ramchandra Guhas India after

Gandhi all interrogate Indian realities using differentvoices and perspectives.

This was the climate in which we began the JaipurLiterature Festival in 2006. Of the 18 invited writers,two didnt turn up, and the festival began with16 writers and audiences of 40 to 50 people persession. That year, and every year after, peoplecame, listened and argued. While setting up thefestival, we tried to establish that the main intentionof this event was to showcase Indian literature.In the rst few years we had to ght for this ground;

to explain to academics and the media that if wehad a great poet or writer from a tribal part of India,he or she deserved exactly the same space as thebiggest names in the world. Even quite recently thiswas not the prevailing view, as there was a ratherinsecure condescension and disdain reserved forthe vernacular.

In the nineties, Rushdie had made a contentiouscomment on Indian literature, claiming that bothction and non-ction by writers working in Englishwas proving a more important body of work than thatproduced in the so-called vernacular languages.Khushwant Singh added to the controversy bystating provocatively that vocabulary in all Indianlanguages is comparatively limited; English is aricher language and has a larger market. WhenRushdie came to Jaipur in the third year of thefestival, writers in the Indian bhasha languageswere still hostile to him on this count, but he wasenthused as he listened to new Indian voices. TheDiaspora writers, the so-called international names,also have an emotive need to remember the soundof their own languages. Its a subtext no bilingualwriter can completely erase.

Over the last six years, the phenomenal success ofthe Jaipur Literature Festival has convinced me of theacute need for a space of simultaneous interpretation:interpretation of the contradictory and often conictingrealities of India and South Asia. Jaipurs platform forthe shared South Asian languages, such as Urdu,Nepali, Bangla and Tamil, led to even more engagedlevels of debate on literature and society in regionsthat are fractured by distinct political identities andconjoined by linguistic and cultural identity. Forexample, the Jaipur session on Sindhi writing in 2010

brought both Muslim writers from Sind Pakistan andHindu Sindhi litterateurs together to celebrate andreclaim their common language and literature. TheHindi word for translation is Anuvad. An allied word,Sethubandhan implies the building of bridges,

and that was how the Sindhi sessions, conductedtrilingually in Sindhi, Hindi and English, reached outto the local, national and international communities.

India is, and always has been, a bahubhashitmultilingual society. The Vedas, the earliestremembered expression of our literary culture, recorda moving prayer which urges invoking the Gods in

many languages. Today, with 22 national languages,122 regional languages and 1,726 mother tongues,India is engaged in an act of constant, ongoingcultural and literary translation.

Like democracy, translation must seek equity.There should be no dominant bias towards the twolanguages, and the cultural cues and subtexts withinthe work need to be projected for effective literarytranslation. This is, naturally, not an easy process,requiring intensive dual-language skills and culturalknowledge. However, while it is generally easier

to translate between cognate rather than non-cognate language clusters (Marathi to Gujaratiis easier than Marathi to Mizo, for instance), theconnecting language for translation in the Indianliteratures still tends to be English. The existenceof this middleman language is a mixed blessing:while making space for more translations, it cansometimes also result in distancing in the translationprocess, a second level of distortion.

India has had a peculiar hierarchy of languages.On the surface it appears plural, polyphonic, butbetween those many languages there has alwaysbeen a clear dominant language. The aestheticdistinction between desi and margi, that is,between the classical and the folk styles, has beentransmuted but not disappeared. At the top of theheap, historically, was Sanskrit followed by the localmedian languages and then the folk tongues anddialects. Somewhere along the line, in the processof colonisation, English effectively replaced Sanskritas the elite and aspirational tongue. As India foundits own voice, and the national languages ourishedin the supportive environment of the press, mediaand technology, the balance shifted back to the local

bhasha languages.

An important aspect of contemporary Indianwriting is exemplied by the transformational Dalitwriting movement. This literary articulation bythe emergent, previously marginalised voices ofdisadvantaged castes is in part the assertion of aclass struggle, a Black-Panther-style movement.There is also a tremendous outpouring of hurt andpain; a process of catharsis. Caste and communityare sensitive issues in India. Every category feelsbadly treated and victimised by others, so there

is endless potential for provocation, anger andconict. The Dalit readings and panels at the DSCJaipur festival last year discussed the rejection ofmainstream Indian literature and the assertion of analternative sensibility. Despite the inherent politics

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and propaganda there were people weeping in theaudiences, as the raw pain and hurt of these writerswas immensely revealing to those of a cocooned,middle-class mindset. There was also a lot of mediaattention, in India and internationally, focused onthese writers and issues.

One of the leading ideologues of the caste struggle,

Kancha Ilaiah, wrote a moving editorial piece abouthow this was the rst time that Dalit literatureengaged with mainstream literary space and insteadof feeling rejected found that they had a lot to give,and a lot to take from the experience too. He wrotein the Deccan Herald, literary festivals teach howto connect oneself to social mass culture, if one isdoing transformative writing. If it helps even a sectionof oppressors to identify with the viewpoint of theoppressed, writing becomes more meaningful. TheJaipur festival has shown the signs of such positiveexchange of views. In India, because we feel so

passionately about our literatures, it does providea space for people to share problems, and anger isa very important part of the process. I dont knowwhere else in the world so much anger is associatedwith literature. It is valuable, because its a thinkinganger; its a talking anger, not a stone-pelting anger.Thats the unique energy at Jaipur the buzz inthe air, the passionate enthusiasm and curiosity ofpeople who are trying to gure themselves out in themidst of challenges and change.

South Asian Literary space is redening its borders.The Pakistani segment at Jaipur is an importantpart of the literary dialogue. The Karachi literaturefestival was a resounding success. The Bhutanliterature festival, where the youngest democracyin the world is learning to use language to assertand to understand, has entered its second year. Anexciting literary festival in Nepal is being planned.

Another crucial aspect of literary traditionresides in the oral heritage. It is assumed that asociety which is not literate in modern terms isilliterate. This is clearly not true. Such fragile andendangered cultures have a continuity of ancient

oral literatures which, though intangible, havebeen mindfully nurtured and passed on fromgeneration to generation. Most of these are nowsadly facing extinction. One cant simply record,archive and store them, as this would render themstatic. Oral literatures are precious things and to beeffectively transmitted they must be understood,contextualised and valued. In a space like Jaipur,or other places where they are respected andshowcased, the process of transmission becomespossible not necessarily to genetic heirs, butintellectual and cultural heirs: people who want to

learn and take these stories forward.

In most cultures today, writers who are not exposedto at least some formal education might nd itdifcult to articulate their talent within a tradition.

But we in India collectively inhabit the miraculousplasma of a vibrant oral literature: a continuouslyimprovised and reinterpreted dramatic literaturewhich constantly revalidates its understanding ofthat tradition. That is the many languages, oneliterature trope, and the environment which Jaipuris rediscovering.

After many millennia of complex stratication,Indians are emerging into an individuatedunderstanding of themselves. It is a beginning forwomen to be given new spaces, for people fromsuppressed castes and repressive backgrounds tostruggle for equity and equal opportunities. Thereis an immense amount of suffering and corruptionand cynicism, but it is still a new India, ghting forits voice through different languages and literarytraditions. I say voice, but in India we wouldnever speak in one voice; rather we would speakin the manner of what is called jugalbandi, where

two musicians perform together within classicalstructures but with variations which are completelyimprovised in that moment.

Modern India exists in a constant state of translation.The simultaneous worlds of the internet and theimpact of new technologies have made this processeasier. To quote a great Indian writer and poet,A.K. Ramanujan: By a curious perversity I readTamil constantly in the Kannada area, Kannadain the Tamil area, studied and taught English inIndia, and India and Indian languages in the US. InRamanujans ctional autobiography the protagonist,an Indian with an American wife teaching history ata college in Iowa, recalls his childhood. In my earlyyears, I spoke Madras Tamil to Amma. I switchedto Mysore Tamil with our Iyengar housemaidswho cooked for us. Outside the house, I spokeKannada with friends. Upstairs in his ofce, Appaconversed in English Thus upstairs-downstairs,inside-outside, I grew accustomed to threelanguages.

While Indians live in many languages, they are rarelyaware of this plurality. I conclude with a tribute

to the curious perversity of our complex literaryculture and the conviction that this spontaneousand accepting multilingualism will persist, andower to greater glory, in its upstairs-downstairs,inside-outside trajectory.

Namita Gokhale

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On the eve of the Second World War, the intellectualand author Georges Duhamel bemoaned the fact thatFrench books were no longer being translated andsold elsewhere in Europe. He felt that the Frenchspirit was in peril, and that the voice of his culturewas not being heard in other countries. He alsomade the point that culture and economics havealways walked hand in hand. The French book hasalways opened up the way for our dealers in brandy,champagne, or silk stockings. The English had asimilar attitude, and its signicant that the BritishCouncil was set up in recognition of the importanceof cultural propaganda in promoting British politicaland economic interests abroad. Thus these days itdirects most of its efforts towards China and India(where Germanys Goethe Institute is also very active)as in the twenty-rst century, these are the countrieswith burgeoning economies. Aesthetic considerations

go hand in hand with a nations economic interests.You could argue that any author who takes part insuch a project is a sort of secular missionary, whetherhe or she is aware of that or not.

Unfortunately, the position of authors from countrieswhere minority languages are spoken is ratherdifferent. Often, the linguistic minority has beenconquered and exists within the borders of a largernation state, like the Welsh in Britain or the Bretonsin France. Concerted attempts were then made tosuppress and eradicate their languages, Matthew

Arnold describing the aim of such a policy in Walesin the nineteenth century as to render homogenousthe linguistic differences between England andWales. This was seen as desirable for the sake ofadministrative convenience and cultural cohesion

and was usually enforced through legislation banningthe use of the native language in schools and all otherpublic and ofcial settings such as courts of law. Intime this creates a psychological condition wherethe native population loses its sense of identity,internalises the values of its oppressors and comesto hate its own culture.

Luckily this process was only partially successful inWales. Welsh speakers still have their own literatureand culture even though it is little known elsewhere.Waless idea of itself as a nation has been fosteredover many centuries through a long and rich poetictradition sustained by a home-grown aristocracy.Indeed, our countrys bardic tradition until the fteenthcentury is richer than any other European country.We have a poet of world class in Dafydd ap Gwilym(13201370), whose work has been translated into

several languages. He is still not fully acknowledgedas he should be, though: I would argue hes a betterpoet than Chaucer. The language of the Welsh poetswas used to its highest effect in the sixteenth centuryfor a translation of the Bible, published in 1588. Alongwith most European countries, our most importantbook is a translated one.

The Acts of Union in 1536 and 1542 joined Walespolitically, economically and culturally to England.The indigenous ruling class re-located to London andbecame anglicised, and the fate of Welsh-language-

literature in a country without a single university was left in the care of the petite bourgeoisie.Colonies do not benet from the energy of historicalcurrents, becoming instead stagnant backwaters, tothe detriment of their literature which in the case

For Wales: See EnglandWiliam Owen Roberts, winner of the 2009 Wales Book of

the Year Award, tells the story of a language and literature

that have been successfully ghting suppression, and evenextermination, for centuries

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of Welsh literature meant becoming timid and overtlyreligious, with folkish undertones. From the sixteenthto the twentieth century, the history of Europeanliterature is that of the ruling class, the bourgeoisie which reached its apogee with Modernism at thebeginning of the last century. This is the movementwhich has mapped the European imagination andgone deepest into its psyche, but it did not really

penetrate the fabric of Welsh-language literature untilthe second half of the twentieth century, much to ourcultural impairment.

The other major barrier to be overcome is theinternational image of Wales. For years, the entryfor Wales in the Encyclopaedia Britannica read:For Wales: See England. When the poet ChrisMeredith and I toured Southern Germany withthe British Council in 1995 we quickly learnt theadvisability of beginning our sessions by locatingWales on a map of the UK for our audience, and

by the end of the week, we had perfected a fteen-minute introductory prcis of the history of Walesand its literature to put our own work in a moredeveloped context. After all, having lacked anypolitical representation in Europe since 1418, howis an emerging nation to represent itself?

Until the successful Devolution of 1997, Wales wasruled exclusively from Westminster. Only now isWales beginning to emerge, tentatively, as a countryin its own right. In this brave new post-colonial world,weve looked to other small countries for inspirationas to the best way to foster our publishing industry,to present and publicise our literature in translationto an international readership. Iceland, for instance,with a total population of just 300,000, has a healthybook industry that is sponsored by the government.We used this blueprint in Wales to lobby AssemblyMembers for increased funding for Welsh authors.The campaign proved successful and the increase infunding has had a very benecial effect, energising apreviously dormant sector of the arts.

Translation is an all-important tool for projecting ourliterature globally. To this end the Wales Literature

Exchange, based in Aberystwyth, was establishedin 2001 with the simple but challenging brief offacilitating the translation of Wales literature, andthen promoting it internationally. The Exchange hasdone excellent work on a small budget, workingwith foreign partners and publishers, participating ininternational book fairs as well as other events. It hassucceeded in its brief with a very wide range of books.As the native publishing industry is made up of manysmall publishing houses, only very limited resourcesare available for publicity and promotion, althoughthis is, encouragingly, starting to change, and in

recent years there has been a limited internationaldimension emerging. Nevertheless, the role of theWelsh Literature Exchange in this respect is extremelyvaluable and given the excellent work it does, it fullydeserves further support.

Some promising developments notwithstanding,in this corporate age it is still more benecial fora Welsh-language writer to have his or her booktranslated into English and placed with an Englishpublisher in London, in order to take advantageof the marketing resources and expertise there.The danger is, European translators may thenwork from the English text. This is far from ideal,

and something of a paradox, but until we in Walesachieve an international presence, it will remain apragmatic option.

The changing attitude of London publishers towardsWelsh language literature is in itself interesting.Traditionally, due to a sense of