My experience with publishers thus far—eight books with eight different imprints—has not left a positive impression. Editors often grumble about having to actually edit manuscripts because they’ve been assigned too many titles to look after, and as a result, they end up emotionally and intellectually detached from their own projects.
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The old-fashioned editor was part sleuth and part sidekick. Above all, they displayed an unwavering commitment to what they believed would enrich the public consciousness. Alas, I wager the modern equivalents of Maxwell Perkins, Diana Athill, Carmen Callil, and Gordon Lish simply wouldn’t get past the interview stage any more. Who wants to take those sorts of risks, or better yet, invest that kind of money? Publishing in London, for instance, is neatly dominated by youngsters in their twenties and early thirties, who should by all rights be paid interns—stress on paid—but are instead hired because it’s easier to pay them ridiculously low wages rather than for those companies to hire real professionals.
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When passing on a proposal, a publisher will often tell you that there just isn’t a readership for the book you have pitched, basing his or her judgment not on the book’s actual merit, but on its so-called “appeal,” although it has been proven time and time again that one cannot predict how well a title will do. Authors who are given advances of hundreds of thousands of pounds will sell a couple thousand copies, while books that were rejected by dozens of houses suddenly become best-sellers. What marketing professionals define as “saleability” is an intrinsically pernicious concept: it roughly translates to “tried and tested” or “topical,” of course forgetting Pound’s dictum about literature being “news that stays news.” Last month, I successfully interested a major—read: corporate—publisher in London in re-translating the works of a little-known, but highly deserving, French author. I sent them an extract, a synopsis, and a brief essay on the man’s work. All I received in reply was a statement of interest and a mention of how suitable a project it was because it would be cheap, as the books had fallen out of copyright.
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When a book is finally printed, after numerous delays and needless headaches, the real work begins. Newspaper literary editors constantly have to fight for what little space they have, and, a few exceptions aside (John Palattella at The Nation and Boyd Tonkin at The Independent being one of them), translation is their lowest priority, if you can even call it that. To top it off, cutbacks following the Great Recession have meant publicists rarely send out review copies unless you repeatedly pester them. Editors nervously eye Nielsen BookScan to see how many copies are being sold, driven by the not-completely-unjustified paranoia that too many duds will add up to a redundancy letter.
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I hazard that the future for quality literature lies in the hands of small, talented teams that work with practical, small-scale models, allowing them to build elegant lists without bankrupting themselves. Among others, Marc Lowenthal’s Wakefield Press, David Shook’s Phoneme Books, and Charles Boyle’s CB Editions spring to mind. The internet has also opened the doors to outfits like Stefan Tobler’s And Other Stories. It’s only the beginning.
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More than a decade after I left my parents’ house, all my possessions still fit into a modest suitcase. My travelling mementoes—the physical ones, anyway—seem to mostly amount to ticket stubs and visa stamps. My books I usually post back when they become too many to carry. Seeing them on my shelves reminds of the snippets of various languages floating around in my head. Each time I look at Upamanyu Chatterjee’s novels English, August or Way to Go, Bengali and Hindi words come flooding back, as do the sights and smells of Kolkata, with its damp bookshops and sweaty, commodious coffee houses.
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Yet wherever I go, I remain the same person, kind of, which is why I will always envy Casanova, another fellow translator—who penned an Italian version of the Iliad—and was the living embodiment of “truthiness” long before Stephen Colbert coined it. Casanova switched professions and identities every time he crossed a border. Remembered as a champion philanderer, Casanova was also a priest, soldier, professional gambler, musician, and spy—and that’s just before he was thirty. It’s almost impossible to fathom anyone achieving that level of freedom now thanks to CCTVs, biometric passports, and instant background checks.
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How many authors have hidden behind a translator’s mask? Horace Walpole famously claimed The Castle of Otranto was a translation of an Italian novel, while Sir Richard Burton tried to pass his Kasîdah off as originally written by one Hâjî Abdû El-Yezdî, a pseudonym. In the era before mass visibility, it certainly provided an interesting way of circumventing the pressures created by publication. Libellous, you say? Well, I just translated it. Take it up with the author—and no, I don’t know where he is.
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The coming year will likely be entirely devoted to completing the English translation of Alessandro Spina’s I confini dell’ombra in terra d’oltremare—The Confines of the Shadow: In Lands Overseas —a cycle of eleven historical novels that chart the Libya’s tumultuous history from the Italian invasion in 1911 to the beginning of oil exports in the 1960s. When published in a 1300-page omnibus edition in 2007, it immediately received numerous prizes, notably the Premio Bagutta. “Alessandro Spina” is a pseudonym that Basili Khouzam, a Syrian
Maronite born in Benghazi in 1927, adopted in middle age when he began publishing his works in limited editions of two- to three-hundred copies.
Translating Spina’s epic—which shares stylistic and thematic affinities with Lawrence Durrell’s The Alexandria Quartet, Albert Cohen’s Belle Du Seigneur, and Giorgio Bassani’s Il Romanzo Di Ferrara —will be daunting, especially considering that what took Spina half a century of work will course through me in under eighteen months.
Spina died in mid-July 2013, a week before I found a publisher for the project, quashing my hopes of flying out to see him in Lombardy, where he had spent the last thirty years of his life after being forced to leave Libya when Gaddafi’s rule became increasingly authoritarian in the late 1970s. The letter I’d penned remains in my drafts folder, and I’ve occasionally looked at it with a little melancholy: the reminder of exchanges that will never happen. After all, as Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o pointed out, “translation seen as conversation—for conversation assumes equality among the speakers—is clearly the language of languages, the language that all languages should speak.” While I cannot speak to Spina, he can still speak to English readers he never thought he’d have. He might have better luck with the English anyway, since to date I haven’t met a single Italian who is slightly perturbed by the disastrous situation their former colonies are in, all of which were subjected to outright genocide. Why? They hardly even know where to find Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Somalia on a world map. Libya fares a little better because it is literally next door (it also helps that Gaddafi was a flamboyant dresser).
While I was deprived the privilege of conversing with Spina, I have his Work Diary, which the author kept while writing his saga. He records an amusing run-in with Vittorio Sereni at the premiere of a play in the early 1980s. Sereni introduced Spina to his wife with the following: “Darling, this is Alessandro Spina, who is trying to educate Italians about the magnitude of the crimes they committed in their colonies, all to no avail of course.”
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Lately I find myself drifting back to a slim collection of philosophical essays by the Capetonian Martin Versfeld:
Political and colonial conquests are closely connected with the conquest of space and time. The quicker you can get at people, the quicker you can conquer them. The Romans built roads, the Portuguese improved ocean-going ships, Kitchener obliterated the Sudanese with a railway and the magazine rifle, and we get at each other with jet planes and nuclear rockets.
Yet doesn’t translation also shorten those distances? Shouldn’t it be the way to do so? The quicker we begin to unpack the myriad mentalities and sensibilities that populate our disordered world, perhaps the sooner we’ll learn to inquire, learn, and work towards a common good, rather than simply bomb. At least Versfeld didn’t live to see the advent of military drones.
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André Naffis-Sahely’s poetry was most recently featured in New Poetries VI (Carcanet, 2015) and The Best British Poetry 2014. His translations from the French and the Italian include Balzac’s The Physiology of the Employee and Émile Zola’s Money. He has also translated several works by North African authors, among whom Rashid Boudjedra, Abdellatif Laâbi, Mohamed Nedali and Tahar Ben Jelloun. His translation of Abdellatif Laâbi’s Selected Poems was selected for a Writers in Translation award by English PEN in April 2015. The first volume of his translation of Alessandro Spina’s Libyan multi-generational saga, The Confines of the Shadow, will be published in June 2015.