America first?

[Bubba]

"America First?" is the title of a fairly interesting review article by translator and writer Tim Parks in a recent issue of the New York Review of Books, an often boring publication that, for me, focuses far too much on things like politics in the Mid-East and on people like Christopher Hitchens--does anybody really want to read about this guy?--and, for a "review of books," as it calls itself, far too little on literature.

Parks's article reviews, in addition to two other books, Grossman's Why Translation Matters and A. Hemon's recently published best European fiction collection. I was struck by Parks's suggestion, made in response to an editor's complaint about the terminal condition of translation in the US, that the French, Germans, and Italians don't translate any more than we Americans do if you take away their translations of books from the US. It's true that the French and the Italians--I don't know about the Germans--translate too many American books, many of them very bad. But I still think Parks is wrong: in France, as a visit to any bookstore or library will make abundantly clear, there are more titles translated from languages other than American English than in the US there are translations of books from all languages. And France, of course, is a smaller market than the US.

An odd thing is that American dominance on this score is abetted not so much by American multinationals (many of the largest publishing conglomerates are in fact European) as by a faction of the continental European intelligentsia, a class more usually known for its knee-jerk anti-Americanism. I can conclude only that a kind of inferiority complex is at work.

On a slightly different subject, Parks also writes:

Of my own translations, I should say that I was always happy when the author got the praise and I escaped mention; it?s self-evident that only a good translation makes it possible for the reviewer to praise the author.

It's nice when a reviewer mentions your work, of course, but I've never been able to share my fellow translators' indignation when reviews of the books they've translated don't mention them. Now and then, I've wondered idly why I don't get upset, but I never really came up a satisfactory reason. Parks, with an elegant and almost obvious observation, has perhaps given me one.

[Eric]

Yes, the NYRB does tend to have rather narcissistic and rambling articles by intellectuals, as does the LRB in Britain. Vicar of Bray Christopher Hitchens, like Rod Liddle, is one of those irritating celebrities who pushed their way up in society on a radical left-wing ticket, only to become righter than the righteous in old age (well, middle age, then).

I remember listening to Tim Parks giving a lecture on translation at a translation conference there back in the mid-1990s. I think that Italian is his main foreign language. Translation is not in terminal decline in the USA, judging by a number of smaller publishing houses such as Dalkey, Open Letter Books, and Northwestern. I feel that the land of my birth, Britain, is doing less well.

From what I can see, the Germans (also the Dutch and Scandinavians) translate plenty of non-English-language books. For instance, you can get several Latvian and Lithuanian novels in German that are simply not available in English translation.

And simple statistics speak for themselves. If the French have translations at about 23% of all publications, and the Germans-Scandinavians-Dutch about 50% each, then the paltry 3% in both Britain and the USA sticks out like a sore thumb, however you juggle around with the number of translations from English. (Hence the U.S. literary translation website calling itself Three Percent, by the way.)

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As for the mention of the translator, it is a question of professional honour. If, like I'm doing this very summer, a hot one, you are translating a sophisticated 300-page novel, it would seem a damned cheek if the publisher had the company brand name all over the book so that they would sell more, and this name is always mentioned by reviewers, while the poor little unimportant dogsbody translator, who has taken the trouble to learn the fucking language, and masses of general knowledge about the country the book comes from, were just ignored or treated like a glorified typist.

The translator does not need a lot of smarmy or insincere praise by a reviewer who cannot possibly know whether the translation is any good - as he can't read the source language - but mentioning the translator's name is civilised. In that way, if the translation reads well, we translators might get more work without having to go begging for translation assignments.

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As for America, it is first militarily and economically right now, whether you happen to love the country or hate it. I'd rather have the Yanks defending my country when it's in a tight spot than being administered, dominated, or occupied by a sneaky one which poisons ex-spies with polonium, and then sends out sleeper after sleeper to sleep until needed. Sorry chaps, but my history books just don't seem to mention all those U.S. labour camps (OK, labor camps, then), just like they fatally omit any mention of Israeli suicide bombers.

Some countries, however keen they are on exerting foreign influence, do occasionally help others when they are in a fix. I do seem to remember the USA helping Britain and the rest to liberate Europe during WWII, while that sneaky country in the east of Europe was again doing deals with Hitler, then breaking them, and even after WWII was still sending hundreds of thousands of innocent people to the Cold Country to work them to death for state profit, as Anne Applebaum more than adequately demonstrates.

And if you criticise American literary, cultural ,or political policy, you don't get sent to prison, or get shot in a lift.

If people think that all European so-called intellectuals are anti-American, they should read some of the more thoughtful weeklies and monthlies. But that, of course, means knowing a few European languages. Not everything is translated for Eurozine.