The first volume of Best European Fiction, from the year 2010, brought together stories from 30 countries—introducing fiction by well-established writers such as Alasdair Gray and Jon Fosse in addition to stories by emerging European writers who had not yet been translated into English. Over the last six years, the series has published more than 200 stories from countries across Europe, from Iceland to Russia.
At a time when publishers are publishing dramatically less writing in translation, Dalkey Archive Press will release Best European Fiction 2016 on November 13. In an email interview, the volume’s editor, Nathaniel Davis, described the process of continuing to provide English-language readers with new artistic and intellectual windows that open out on to Europe.
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MB: The call for submissions for Best European Fiction 2016 received more than 150 stories. Describe the process of whittling that number down to 29. What were your toughest editorial decisions? For example, were you conflicted in choosing between two authors from the same country?
ND: The way the selection process works, we choose one story from each country, and multiple stories for countries with more than one national language. So we might have both French and German stories from Switzerland, or French and Flemish stories from Belgium. Part of the project of Best European Fiction is to highlight writers from neglected linguistic traditions. So BEF2016 has Spanish stories written in Basque and Catalan, but not Castilian (although we often also include Castilian authors). After the primary selection of the best submissions, we have to whittle it down to about thirty, taking space and funding into consideration. We ask the participating countries to contribute some financial support to the anthology, as it’s a very expensive undertaking that doesn’t pay for itself (despite usually selling pretty well).
Part of the pleasure of editing this anthology is having the chance to read authors who are not preceded by a reputation and whose cultural contexts I often know little about. It is a very pure and direct encounter with a piece of writing. Since I am reading all of the submissions in translation, the quality of the translation plays a huge part in the editorial decision. Often a writer might seem very interesting, but the piece is not well translated, it doesn’t come across well, and I can tell that even a very thorough round of copy editing won’t be able to make it into a good piece of writing. A decision between two stories often comes down to the quality of the translation.
MB: Which works from previously underrepresented regions, dialects, or literary traditions are you particularly enthusiastic about?
ND: This is the first edition of Best European Fiction that will include Azerbaijan. We didn’t receive any submissions from Azerbaijan, but I contacted someone at the Writers’ Union there, and they sent me three pieces translated into English. The first two were fairly conventional short stories, but the third piece, by a young writer from Baku named Nijat Mamedov, was this incredible kind of experimental philosophical prose-poem in the tradition of Stein, Creeley, or Dragomoschenko. On reading it, I immediately knew it had to be in BEF. For me, this is what the anthology is really all about: finding exciting and innovative writing coming from parts of Europe that even active readers of “world literature” often pass by.
BEF2016 also includes several representatives of what might come to be seen as a new wave of innovative Eastern-European women writers, including Krisztina Tóth from Hungary, Justyna Bargielska from Poland, Paulina Pukytė from Lithuania, and Veronika Simoniti from Slovenia. Each of these four women has developed her own idiosyncratic literary voice, is willing to experiment with form, and writes stories brimming with humor and strangeness that are firmly and refreshingly oriented towards the future.
I’m also proud of the Basque selection, by the writer Harkaitz Cano. I asked the translator Amaia Gabantxo if she had anything in mind for the anthology, and she mentioned that Cano had written stories for a collaborative project with a Basque chef, Andoni Aduriz, who runs the restaurant Mugaritz in San Sebastián. Cano wrote short stories to accompany Aduriz’s extravagant recipes, which are works of art in their own right. Amaia translated three of these stories, and Aduriz gave us permission to publish the recipes as well. I loved this idea of literary-culinary fusion, and I think it’s a particularly fitting representation of contemporary Basque culture.
The idea with BEF is not only to highlight up-and-coming writers, however; I am equally pleased to be featuring works by more established writers who never became very well-known abroad, such as the French-Belgian writer Michel Lambert, João de Melo from Portugal, and the Welsh writer Huw Lawrence.
MB: Before being anthologized in Best European Fiction, these stories would have naturally been read as independent works. As a curator, how do you negotiate your own cultural aesthetics and biases by juxtaposing these stories by, and about, Europeans and European outsiders (and all the shades in between), subsequently changing their original readings?
ND: I don’t consider myself a curator, nor do I think that the concept of a “curator” really has a place in the literary world. In art, curators are people who have a big idea but can’t make art to express that idea themselves, so they go out in search of work by other artists that fit into their big idea. But the curator’s idea always smothers the individual ideas of the works themselves. I’m against this approach to curating; a curated show should not be an essay, it should just be a collection of the best work available.
When reading through BEF submissions, I’m mostly just looking for high-quality writing (and high-quality translating). However, I do tend to favor pieces that give the reader some idea about the author’s country of origin: a story that shows a Polish way of writing, or offers a glimpse of daily life in Moldova, or expresses something Danish—but without any recourse to cultural clichés. Writing that challenges stereotypes, by way of either its form or its content, and points towards the truth. But most importantly, it must be good writing.
MB: Jon Fosse, who is often tagged “the most produced living playwright” and was a favorite for winning the 2015 Nobel Prize for Literature, wrote this year’s preface. How have Fosse’s ideas about possibilities of European fiction reinforced or changed your own, especially in relation to this anthology?
ND: Fosse is one of the giants of contemporary European literature, and we were honored to have him agree to write a preface for BEF. His preface is not so much a survey of the collection as an essay that presents a provocative thesis about literary value, which seems to be in part directed against the post-Larsson boom in Scandinavian crime fiction. He draws a line between serious literature and literature meant for entertainment, which will probably rub some people the wrong way. I had mixed feelings about the preface, because I think that noir or crime fiction can be very serious literature, and I see Chandler, Goodis, and Himes as some of the major geniuses of American writing. Furthermore, BEF is not meant to be a collection of only avant-garde literature, and some of the writers we’ve included have also written crime fiction. But Fosse does have a point, his argument is very effective, and I’ve thought about it a lot ever since copy editing it. If it does not change people’s ideas about literature, it will at least provoke serious thinking about what literature can do, and how literature relates to life as we live it.
MB: Dalkey Archive Press (founded in Chicago in 1984, and named after Flann O’Brien’s The Dalkey Archive) pioneers a tradition of experimentation and global-mindedness. Where does Best European Fiction situate within the press’s vision for promoting translated literature throughout the world?
ND: Well, it’s basically a concentrated example of what Dalkey has always done, which is to find and publish great writing that might not otherwise get published. Translation obviously plays a part in this, as there are many great writers out there who happen to write in languages other than English. But I don’t necessarily see BEF as promoting the cause of translation. Translation is going through a kind of vogue now, and it sometimes seems like books are rather condescendingly praised simply for being translations. There’s nothing great about a translation if the original’s no good. (I mean, look at the stuff AmazonCrossing is publishing.) I see BEF as more focused on bringing exposure to exciting and undeservedly neglected European writing rather than advancing the cause of translation itself.
But the anthology is just as much a showcase for translators as it is for writers. It often happens that a writer featured in BEF will be picked up by another press, and often the writer will want to continue working with the same translator. In this way, BEF does promote translated literature, but I’d like to think that what we are primarily doing is promoting high-quality literature coming from Europe.
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Nathaniel Davis is Assistant Editor at Dalkey Archive Press. He has written articles and book reviews for the Journal of Modern Literature, French Forum, SKULPI, and _list, and his translations of Peter Handke and W.G. Sebald were published by Cannon Magazine. He holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Pennsylvania.
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