You may have noticed, if you ever look at the News Discussion section of the WLF, that I have posted three threads with almost identical wording wondering whether three British dailies, the Guardian, Independent, and Daily Telegraph, have a dearth or surfeit of translated literature on their books pages.

The idea is to draw people's attention to the fact that these three papers have in fact very little coverage, at least on the online website as opposed to the printed editions, of new translated books, whether fiction, poetry or non-fiction. I would rather not look at the Times for two reasons. One is there exists something called the Times Literary Supplement (TLS), which I believe is affiliated and is similar to the LRB, and the other is that the whole scandal with Rupert Murdoch has put me off looking at the daily Times. Now and again, the books editors of all the papers mentioned appear to have a few weeks of interest in foreign writers from Europe, then interest sinks away again.

Then there are weeklies in the UK, such as Prospect, the New Statesman, the Spectator, the Tablet, etc., and monthlies such as Standpoint, the New Left Review and, no doubt, many others. These too appear to follow the trend of a little interest now and again, but not too much over the space of the year.

Even the book weeklies TLS and LRB are not overwhelmingly good when it comes to reviews of foreign literature (though I was happy, of course, to see Paul Binding's "minority interest" review of the anthology I translated in the TLS!).

What do you think can be done to get the British press, proud of the English language and of Brits, Yanks and the occasional Aussie, Kiwi, or Irish writer, to review more translated novels, and books of short-stories and poetry?