Minority Literatures and English Translation

While doing some dissertation research, I came across a website which lists every Galician book ever translated into English. All 45 of them. Out of the thousands of books published in Galician every year, only 45 have reached our bookshelves, and 14 of these were in the last two years. Many of them only had runs of a few hundred prints too.

 

I found the list from an article in the Galician version of Spanish daily El País, featuring my lecturer Dr Craig Patterson (listen to my interview with him about translating Eduardo Blanco Amor's A Esmorga here). He explains that English is the medium by which most minority literatures reach publishers in other countries (they probably don't understand Galician but they certainly do understand English), so if we don't publish them, it is unlikely that anyone else will. The problem is that it's a vicious cycle: translations will only get published if they're guaranteed to sell, but there's no way of knowing whether they would sell until they've been published. If you consult the list, you'll notice that a lot of the texts are by a select few authors, because if one of their books sells, it's likely people will want to read another. Unproven authors don't stand a chance. 

This is particularly interesting for me, because it's at the heart of my interest in Latin American literature. In the last week, I've been busy organising a panel for the annual Hispanists (people who study anything to do with Spain or Latin America) conference on 'Canonicity and Latin America's Marginalised Literatures'. This stems from a deep frustration that the only literature from Latin America that tends to be studied over here is from a few big countries: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Mexico and Peru. In commercial terms, success is even more limited to big names like Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, Isabel Allende... It's not surprising people know so little about other Latin American literature when so few books make it into English, especially from countries which haven't proven their worth in terms of best-selling authors. This is turn leads to devaluing of literature in it's own country, at least in Venezuela, as it is thought that if no-one abroad wants to read it, it is clearly not very good (they're wrong, it is).

I'd like to make a list like Jonathan Dunne's Galicia one for Venezuela when I have some free time. I doubt it would be very long. Of the books I've read recently, only one has an English translation: Alberto Barrera Tyzska's The Sickness (La Enfermedad) which has had international success and also been translated into French and Italian. It's a thoroughly engrossing story of a doctor who has always been cold and removed with patients, seeing them more as bodies than spirits, until his father is diagnosed with cancer. I highly recommend it and it's only just over £5 for Kindle.

Also, if you're a poetry fan I have to recommend Guillermo Parra's translation of selected works of Venezuelan poet José Antonio Ramos Sucre which has just been published after many years of hard work .

These are very rare examples though. If the rest of the world is ever going to be able to enjoy the wonderful, multi-faceted literatures of Latin America - and other world literatures in general - publishers need to start taking a punt on unproven translations.