Bilinguals in Publishing

[Stewart]

In Holt Uncensored, Pat Holt talks of three things she'd like to see (http://www.holtuncensored.com/hu/three-things-id-love-to-see/), one of which is publishers leaving New York. At one point she brings up the subject of translated works, recalling Horace Engdahl's comments prior to this year's Nobel.
Wouldn?t any publisher consider it a plus if a prospective assistant editor came to the job interview with a reading fluency in at least one foreign language? During college the candidate could have studied the classics in that language, traveled in that country and read all the promising modern authors. If hired, the new editorial assistant could comb through the foreign country?s publishing lists, acquire advance copies, investigate the U.S. market for prospective works in translation and write up Readers Reports that would be reviewed by a senior editor. This would be good training for the editorial assistant and it would sure breathe new life into an industry struggling to match the literary demands of the world.
Would be nice, in its way. Those with a second language today, more sympathetic to translated works, will be the ones in charge in the future. Could be a whole new culture, in time.

[Eric]

I have to say that I thought that Horrors Engdahl (the Man on Chair 17) was being a bit of a cheeky chappie when he said what he did about the Yanks. When you're the greatest intellectual in the whole of Sweden, you should pick up things like tact. Not least if you're boss of the Nobel dosh-distribution gang. In truth, I never liked him when I saw him fairly frequently speaking at the PEN club in Stockholm, some two decades ago, long before he clomb to the top of the tree.

I'm sure that mainstream U.S. writers can be parochial and inward-looking, but if the Engdahls of this world would examine the country a little more closely instead of pontificating ex cathedra, they would discover all those interesting presses such as The Dalkey Archive Press (Illinois), Open Letter (Rochester, New York State), Northwestern (Illinois again), and a few others that publishing a whole variety of literature, both American and foreign, and are not located in central NY.

However, Holt, an American insider from what I gather, does make pertinent points about mainstreamAmerican publishing, and the points she makes about editors that actually know languages is perfectly valid - both for the USA and Britain, where editors think themselves screamingly well-educated if they can read a novel in French or Spanish. Editors with only English should be made to feel inadequate and guilty of shutting out the cultures of countless countries and living in a cloud-cuckoo land where English is not only the only language, but the best. And almost priding themselves at their lack of language knowledge.

If British the universities taught a variety of living languages to first degree level and beyond, instead of shutting down whole departments (as with Scandinavian at Newcastle and UEA over the past two decades), there would be an adequate and renewable supply of editors, reviewers, etc., that knew a few different languages beyond French or German. This would, over time, mean a heightened awareness of all those literatures we look at on this website. These people could double up as talent scouts, so that British publishers didn't have to rely of what European publishers told them, but could judge books via one or two of their own in-house editors.

Even if an editor only knows French and German, there are still so many novels and other books translated from smaller, rarer languages into these two, and the editor's range of access would increase exponentially.