This interview marks the launch of a new series here at the Asymptote blog: “Meet the Publisher.” Every month, we will bring you an insider’s look at the world via in-depth, intimate conversations with publishers of literature in translation from around the globe. This week, contributor Sarah Moses brings us an interview with editor Stephen Henighan of Biblioasis in Ontario, Canada, on the process, politics, and passion of publishing translations.
Sarah Moses says: “Biblioasis started out as a bookshop in Windsor, Ontario in the late 1990s. In 2003, founder and owner Daniel Wells took an interest in publishing and, alongside editor John Metcalf, began to acquire, edit, and launch the press’s first titles. Biblioasis now publishes between twenty-two and twenty-five books a year divided between new literary fiction, non-fiction, and poetry, alongside reprints and regional-interest books. Biblioasis’s head office still includes a bookstore, and the press also runs a quarterly magazine, Canadian Notes & Queries. The Biblioasis International Translation Series, which accounts for four titles a year, includes works from French Canada and around the world, as well as books written in Canada in languages other than French or English. I sat down with series editor Stephen Henighan to chat about the press and literary translation in Canada.”
Sarah Moses (SM): I’d like to begin by asking you about literary translation in Canada. How would you say it differs from other countries?
Stephen Henighan (SH): In other cultures—and Buenos Aires, where you’ve just come from, is a good example, if you think back to Jorge Luis Borges and his friends in the early part of their careers, but also in New York or London or Paris—translation was an avant-garde activity. It was an activity that might nourish national literary debate, but above all it was there to give you aesthetic relief from the national context.
I think what happened in Canada is that, especially in the 1960s and 1970s, the literary elite was nationalist and therefore wasn’t all that interested in translation. There had been odd translations from French-Canadian literature to English-Canadian literature, mainly in the 1940s and 1950s, but the real translation culture begins in the late 1960s in the Eastern Townships of Quebec, where in the village of North Hatley writers of English and French were living side by side. That’s where Sheila Fischman, who has gone on to translate more than one hundred and fifty books, got her start.
But translation started not as a way of nourishing the avant-garde by putting us in touch with literature from other parts of the world—it started as a way of bolstering national identity by making English-Canadian fiction available to French Canadians and vice versa. Because of that, it was a subsidized activity, so people who were avant-garde tended to flee it as an expression of the government-sanctioned, official culture that they were trying to escape. These patterns predominated from the 1960s until about ten years ago.
SM: So what has changed?
SH: What has changed, to put it in a simplistic nutshell, is globalization: the breakdown of national narratives. At the same time, events at Biblioasis reflect a reassessment that occurred throughout the English-speaking world, particularly during the George W. Bush presidency in the United States, where there was a feeling of English-speaking people being cut off from the rest of the world. A lot of intellectuals in the English-speaking world were aware of belonging to a rather parochial culture. There was a quest to find out what was going on out there. So you began getting these little nodes of literary translation insurgency occurring in some obvious places like San Francisco or Americans in Paris, but also some not-at-all obvious places like Indiana.
It started off very small but it’s obvious that now we’re in the midst of a big wave of literature in translation in the English-speaking world. I think part of that is a natural consequence of immigration, of people coming into more contact with people from other cultures, even in their own communities. Some of it is on a higher, more intellectual level of people rebelling against the various strains of parochialism that one sees in the Western world. We see this very strongly in the English-speaking world from George W. Bush to Trump to Brexit, through efforts to create a sort of positive globalization if you will: a globalization of exchanges of differences rather than a globalization of a Big Mac for everybody.
SM: Can you tell me about the origins of Biblioasis and also how the translation series came to be?
SH: Daniel Wells, the founder and owner and publisher of Biblioasis, dropped out of a PhD program at the University of Western Ontario, and somebody offered him a room full of books, and he bought them with money I think someone in his family lent him, and then he opened a book store on Ouellette Avenue in downtown Windsor. He did that for a few years and then he met the editor John Metcalf right at the moment when John’s relationship with The Porcupine’s Quill, a press he had been working with for a few years, was disintegrating. John was interested in finding another publisher to work with and Dan was interested in getting into publishing.
The press has always worked with the help of a kind of community. John edits the fiction, along with Dan; Eric Ormsby and Zach Wells have edited the poetry; and I edit the translations—and we are all unpaid volunteers.
I got involved because I was at a literary event where John came up to me and said, “Well, since you read various languages, why don’t you and Dan have a talk. I think you could advise him on translations.” That was really how it started. It has become a huge amount of work—in some ways it is almost as much work as my real job—but it has led to very interesting experiences. I think we have done some really good books. We have brought sensibilities into English that might not have got into English otherwise, and it has allowed us to open up certain areas. The whole greater awareness, for example, of African writing in Portuguese that has developed in the last five or ten years—we are at the heart of that. I feel like I could almost take personal credit for getting that ball rolling in North America by publishing Ondjaki, who had never been published in English, and then Mia Couto, who was well known in the United Kingdom, but totally unknown in North America. We published him and he got the Neustadt Prize. Then suddenly everybody is swarming all over writers like José Eduardo Agualusa and Paulina Chiziane, looking for a similar type of voice.
SM: How do you discover books in other languages?
SH: I would have to say it has gotten harder in recent years for a number of reasons. One is that at the time I started working with Dan, through a combination of a sabbatical year and a generous grant that bought me out of some of my teaching, I basically had two years off. My personal life was such at the time that I was able to spend most of those two years roaming the world and sitting in cafes and reading in about ten or twelve countries. So I was very up to date at the time we started the series on what was coming out in a number of places. I was aware of good writers who had not yet been translated.
Also, at that stage, the translation boom had not started yet. Today the Man Booker International Prize is essentially a translation prize. That would have been unthinkable ten years ago. Now, the moment a promising new short story writer pops up in Korean or Punjabi, there are five people wanting to translate them. But that was not the case before. I was looking at writers who had been translated into eight or nine or ten languages but not into English. On the other hand, our reputation has grown, so sometimes agents or writers come to us first.
SM: What is Biblioasis’ approach to publishing French-Canadian works in translation?
SH: Our approach to Quebec has been to look for things that are breaking the mould a bit, the avant-garde. We started off with Mauricio Segura, who is a Québécois novelist of Chilean ancestry. I think this is one place where, in addition to doing what I initially wanted to do with the series—which was to say, “Why the hell should all the books translated into English be translated in New York and London, why can’t they be translated here in Canada?”—I also wanted to remind English Canada that it needs to break away from its stereotypes about Quebec: the idea that English Canada is this wonderful, multicultural paradise and Quebec is full of chauvinists who are obsessed with ethnic purity. There’s lots of racism in English Canada and there’s lots of acceptance of diversity in Quebec.
Publishing Segura—the two novels we have published so far about the Latino immigrant experience in Quebec—is the kind of thing that I see as potentially salutary in breaking down some Anglo-Canadian stereotypes. The second novel in particular, Eucalyptus, is a really fine book, I think. That novel is a good indication of our mixed vocation.
We have recently, of course, published two of the rising stars of Quebec literature: Samuel Archibald and Catherine Leroux. There we are introducing new writers who we hope will be with us for a while and will continue to publish with Biblioasis in English.
SM: What have been some of the successes in the translation series?
SH: I’m very happy that we did Kahn & Engelmann by Hans Eichner, who was the retired head of the German Department at the University of Toronto. He wrote the novel in 1930s Viennese German in Rockwood, Ontario, after he retired from being a German professor. It did very well in Austria and Germany; it came out as a paperback with Rowohlt, a major German paperback publisher. Nobody would do it in English. We were fortunate to convince the Canada Council that since Eichner had been a Canadian citizen for fifty years, even though he was not writing in English or French, the translation should be funded.
By the same token, I’m very proud that we brought Mihail Sebastian’s The Accident into English. It didn’t sell very well, but I really think it’s a point in our favour. Obviously, I’m delighted we got Mia Couto before Farrar, Straus and Giroux snapped him up. And we’re still publishing his short stories and essays. We have a new Couto short story collection, Rain and Other Stories, coming out in early 2017 and a selected stories slated for 2018. We broke him big in North America by publishing The Tuner of Silences, so that was a real success for us. In some ways I would say that, at least in the States, that’s what people know about Biblioasis—that we’re the ones that brought Mia Couto into the North American market.
SM: What translations are new or forthcoming?
SH: I’m very hyped up about the new Ondjaki novel, Os Transparentes, that I’ve just finished translating. “It’s the first novel I have written that is really for adults,” Ondjaki told me. It’s a contemporary urban novel, four hundred pages long, with lots of wordplay and jokes and horrendous events with touches of magical realism. We’re probably going to call it Transparent in the City in English. I think it will get a lot of attention. So I’m very excited about that.
I really like Black Bread, by the Catalan writer Emili Teixidor, which we’ve just done. That one may not do as well in the early stages, but everyone who reads it is hugely impressed. Peter Bush’s translation may be about the best translation—the most precise, the most concrete—we’ve published. The clarity and the precision with which he has rendered the minute details of rural Catalan life are really impressive.
We’re also continuing to publish occasional translations from immigrant writing in Canada; in 2017 we’re bringing out Red, Yellow and Green by Alejandro Saravia, a novel that was written in Bolivian Spanish, mixed with French and Quechua, in Montreal. So our mixed vocation continues.
Sarah Moses is a poet, translator, and science writer. Her work has appeared in chapbook form, as well as in various journals, including Brick and TNTR. Sarah divides her time between Toronto and Buenos Aires. She plays a mean game of ping-pong.
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