Frisch and Co. is an electronic books publisher based in Berlin that focuses on contemporary world literature translated into English. The company has partnered with numerous international publishers and releases its books through traditional ebook marketplaces and in DRM-free format on its website. E.J. van Lanen is the founder of the press.
Can you talk about some of the reactions you’ve gotten to your books that have encouraged you to keep going?
There have been lots of positive reactions to our books, though having two of our books on World Literature Today’s 75 Notable Translations list—Anna Kim’s Anatomy of a Night, translated by Bradley Schmidt, and Joaquín Pérez Azaústre’s The Swimmers, translated by Lucas Lyndes—was a particularly gratifying one. Another would be the reaction of the online book reviewing community; it wasn’t clear to me in the beginning exactly what their reaction to ebooks would be. But many have taken to the concept quite naturally, have appreciated the books as the great reads they are, and given Frisch & Co. and our books a good push—one that hasn’t been forthcoming from the traditional media, who are more conservative where ebooks are concerned.
Which writers do you feel are particularly underserved in English translation?
That’s hard to say, for lots of reasons, but one way to answer would be: Nearly all of them. English-readers have access to so little of the writing—literary, controversial, genre, ambitious, commercial, you name it—that is going on around the world. From time to time, a book or an author will fall from the sky fully-formed, blow us away, and we’re left wondering, Where the hell did that come from? Well, it came from somewhere, and while we’ll never see the whole picture, that’s impossible, we should be seeing so much more of it than we are. Or maybe not ‘should’, but I would certainly like to see more.
The thing about what Frisch & Co. and so many other translation publishing houses do isn’t that we know, necessarily, who the underserved writers are, though I don’t doubt everyone has an idea or two they’re keeping to themselves. It’s that we know there are underserved writers, and that there will be underserved writers; we make it our job to try to find them, and we put systems in place that will help us.
What gap in the publishing landscape does your press fill?
There are a few things that Frisch & Co. does a bit differently than the usual translation publisher, but two things spring to mind: first, our books are available worldwide. With physical books, it’s a tricky and expensive proposition for a publisher to distribute their titles outside their home countries. And if the books are distributed internationally, they usually only have a minor presence in these other places. This creates a strange (well, to me) situation. Say a traditional print publisher translates a novel from Estonia and sells it in the US. On the one hand, this is great news: the book is now available in English, which confers all the benefits that such a book could bring on US readers and creates a much larger potential audience for our fictional Estonian. On the other hand, what about readers in the UK, Canada, Australia, and in all the other places with English readers? The book has cleared a significant hurdle, making it into English, only to face another, perhaps even larger one–the absence of a common literary space in the various English-reading countries. Of course, some translated books manage to migrate across these spaces, but not very many. Ebooks have the potential to create a real common space for literature in English translation, which is an exciting proposition for readers, authors, critics, publishers, etc. Frisch & Co. is trying to participate in growing this common space. That’s one thing.
Second, due to the small number of translations that are published overall, many prestigious foreign publishers don’t have regular access to English readers. That is, world-class literary publishers, with outstanding authors and a history of publishing significant authors in their languages, struggle to find English publishers for their authors. Frisch & Co. partners with a number of these publishers directly–each year, we translate and publish a book or two from each of our partners. This is great for our partners, but it also guarantees that our readers will have more direct access to what’s happening right now at the most important publishers around the world. I think that’s pretty exciting.
Do you think physical books will eventually go away, or be a collector’s item like records? How do you feel about the idea of future generations who won’t have an attachment to holding a book in their hands?
How I feel about all of this varies from day to day. Some days I think ebooks will play some significant role in our reading future and I don’t understand what everyone is worried about. A good book is a good book, no? On other days… The devices are still in their infancy, as are the file formats, and then there are the bookstore silos, which are attempting to make sure we only ever buy an iPad or a Kindle or whatever, and don’t get me started on DRM–all of it would be comical if it wasn’t so harmful. That’s just the tip of the iceberg: the whole thing is chaos. Naturally, there are no guarantees that any of this will be sorted out in a satisfactory way. On those days, I’m less sanguine, and it feels like ebooks will never sort themselves out and we’ll just stick with the formats we already enjoy.
Well, that’s a fancy way to dodge the question.
But I’ll make a hand-on-hips pronouncement about future readers: they’ll never know what they’re missing, of course, and our worry about the question stems from our tendency to overestimate the importance of the way we happen to do things now. Of course something will be lost, and there’s a sadness in that loss, and I don’t mean that the future will be better, insofar as ‘better’ means anything in this context; reading and writing will be different, that’s all, just like our way of reading and writing is different than that of our forebears.
Which new translated works from other publishers were you most recently impressed by?
At the moment, there’s only one answer to this for me: Karl Ove Knausgård’s My Struggle. I first heard about this crazy six-volume thing on an editor’s trip to Norway–Jill Schoolman from Archipelago was there too–and everyone there was talking about it. Then I had a copy of the first volume on my desk at Open Letter, just staring at me, for years. But I couldn’t see how to do it, or couldn’t bring myself to believe it would work. I mean, it was a scandal in Norway, OK, but in the US? Then I read the Archipelago edition last year, and the magnitude of my short-sightedness… Well, as always, I’m glad Archipelago is around and continuing to do brilliant things.
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EJ Van Lanen is the founder and Publisher of Frisch & Co. A life-long devotee of literature in translation, he has edited and published work by Dubravka Ugresic, Jan Kjærstad, Mathias Énard, Gabriel Josipovici, Ingrid Winterbach, and Mikhail Shishkin, among many others, at Ecco, Dalkey Archive Press, and Open Letter Books, which he co-founded in 2007. You can follow him @ejvanlanen.