In Translation, Or Otherwise: Part V

One of the most impressive and fascinating accounts of worldwide literary translation is To Be To Translated Or Not To Be, a rich report from International PEN/Instut Ramon Llull on the "international situation of literary translation" and edited by Esther Allen. Sure, it was released in 2007, but I only just read through it all. And it's too good for me to keep quiet -- or to paraphrase it. In a series of posts on Isak this week over the next two three weeks, I will share excerpts from the report. If you want to read the full report (highly encouraged), click here for the PDF. See Part I of this series here, Part II here, Part III here, and Part IV here. Part V is from the chapter on "Six Cases on Literary Translation." This case, on Argentina, was written by Gabriela Adamo, editor and director of the Buenos Aires Book Fair's "Publisher's Week" : Fundación TyPA, Buenos Aires.

Publishing in Buenos Aires, like Mexico City, had its golden years between the end of the 1940s and early 1960s. The Franco dictatorship had obliged Spain’s best publishers to seek refuge on this side of the Atlantic, where they set up publishing houses and began to bring out the most outstanding Spanish-language writers along with the major writers of Europe and the United States. Faulkner, Baudelaire, Malraux, Virginia Woolf, Genet, Greene and Henry James, among many others, were translated in Latin America before Spain.

This would be unthinkable today. The military dictators and economic crises that devastated Latin America over decades eventually led to the ruin of local publishers, while Spain’s recovery and it’s entry as a full member into the European Economic community meant that it would become a new leader—at least in commercial terms—in the world of Spanish-language books. In the domain of translating, the competition is very lopsided because Spanish companies not only have more resources (the devalued currencies of different Latin-American countries compete with the euro when bidding for translation rights) but they are also geographically and “psycho-logically” closer to their English, French and German peers.

Similar conditions hold in reverse. In evaluating what books originally written in Spanish might be translated, many first-world publishers turn to Spanish catalogues and critics. It is not surprising, then, to note how desperate Latin-American writers are to see their works published in Spain, which they regard as the only real gateway into their international world.

Whatever Latin America’s level of culture, a great number of people in the international publishing world still see it merely as the big backyard of Spain.

{…}

The Argentine reader does not shrink from translations but, on the contrary, has always admired and felt close to foreign literature, especially that coming from Europe

{…}

Argentina has a considerable list of writers who, at some point in their careers, also engaged in translation. Jorge Luis Borges is, without a doubt, the most famous of these. To him we owe Faulkner’s Las palmeras salvajes (The Wild Palms) and Kafka’s La metamorfosis (Metamorphosis), among other versions.  …

Comments

[Misera e stupenda città]

Not related to Argentina but female poets we're working on translating or promoting or highly recommending or /based also in part on our location and linguistic abilities/:

Marie Luise Kaschnitz (Germany)
Nelly Sachs (Germany)
Else Lasker-Schueler (Germany)

Friederike Mayroecker (Austria)

Antonia Pozzi (Italy)
Amelia Rosselli (Italy)
Patrizia Cavalli (Italy)

Buona lettura!