Since I began publishing translations in Slovakia in 2011, I am often asked the same question: Why start a publishing house when there are so many different options and people are so distracted by new technologies that they do not have time to read anyway?
Usually I say something about how I studied literature and languages, or provide them with some statistics about how many titles are published each year, reminding them that the number of bookshops and publishers is constantly rising in Slovakia, for instance, and adding that I believe that people always find time to read a good book.
However, the real reason is hidden somewhere in between these arguments, and it is not so easy to explain it in a few sentences. It is the belief I have in literature. I read, translate, publish and write about books because I have a strange and inexplicable faith in literature itself. As Jonathan Franzen describes it in his essay collection How To Be Alone, reading novels helps us to understand the world and our place within it. In “Mr. Difficult,” for instance, Franzen details the seven days that he spent reading William Gaddis’ The Recognitions—not an easy text to digest by any means—and how afterwards he felt better equipped to face the problems that were waiting for him beyond the pages of the novel.
Beginnings are always hard and I struggled for some time to find the editorial identity of the publishing house. I knew that I wanted to publish foreign titles that I thought would be important for Slovak readers. This idea was admittedly quite vague. I had returned to Slovakia in 2011 after more than ten years spent abroad and needed time to learn the local book market. Slovakia is a relatively small country with only about five million Slovak speakers, quite different than in France or the UK, whose literary scenes I happened to have experience with. But translation has a long tradition in Slovakia and for many decades translators have helped to create and enrich the literary language. Yet Slovak publishers are both influenced and restricted by the choices of Czech publishers when it comes to translated literature. Slovak and Czech are very similar due to their common Czechoslovakian origins and most readers in Slovakia are naturally bilingual. The number of readers is limited and if literary fiction, be it contemporary classics or prize-winning novels, is published in Czech translation, there is sadly often little the Slovak publisher can do to boost her sales. Because of this, I try to focus on works by contemporary authors from the United States, Great Britain and France, whose novels or short stories have not been published in Czech translation yet, or at least I choose different titles. Most recently I’ve chosen Andrei Makine’s The Book of Brief Loves That Last Forever and Alexandar Hemon’s The Question of Bruno.
Luckily for us this for some reason does not apply to nonfiction titles or to young adult fiction. As a result I am able to choose the nonfiction titles more freely. Last year I started to publish a series of books called La Pomme in which I focus on unconventional works of renowned philosophers, essayists or novelists. The interview with the French philosopher Alain Badiou, The Praise of Love, was the first title published in this series, followed by the commencement address This is Water by the late David Foster Wallace and André Gorz’s Letter to D. Critics and readers have appreciated these choices because they have never had the opportunity to hear them before.
These texts are not unconventional in just their form (interviews, letters, a commencement address), they also challenge the entrenched ideas of the Slovak readers. In times like these, I believe it is very important to have free access to information and diverse arguments. Our publishing house’s name, INAQUE, means “differently;” I hope to choose texts that offer a new, fresh perspective. Sometimes I have the impression that Slovak nonfiction, whether it be essays or blogs published in book form, speak in the same (often cynical and simple) voice. That is why I took the advice of a friend and the first title of 2014 will be the British journalist Jon Ronson’s Them (Adventures with Extremists), a book of collected articles that presents ideas in a different light.
As I work with other independent Slovak publishers, I’ve learned that the way small publishing houses can survive is by staying small, taking care of the visual presentation of the book and choosing titles that speak for themselves.
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Aňa Ostrihoňová studied English, American and French language and literature at Charles University in Prague and has a PhD in translating studies from Constantine the Philosopher University in Nitra. After living abroad for several years, including working as a translator for the European Commission and the European Parliament, she returned to Slovakia in 2011 and founded her own publishing house, Inaque. She writes essays and book reviews and translates fiction and non-fiction from English, French and German.