A couple of weeks ago I was looking for a book at home and my eyes kept being drawn to big books: 2666, The Emperor of Lies, Ulysses, The Satanic Verses, Stone Upon Stone. Thick books with titles and author names in large font—and I noticed all by men. And what about women? I’d studied literature, helped judge the Best Translated Book Award a couple times, and I review books, so I assumed I had lots of big books, a good balance of literary work by everyone from everywhere. In a few minutes’ time though I counted eighteen big, 500-plus-page books by men and just one by a woman: Simone De Beauvoir’s The Second Sex.
Posts filed under 'Publishing'
Jan Henrik Swahn was born in 1959 in Lund. He grew up in Copenhagen and from 1970 on has lived in Malmö. His first novel, I Can Stop a Sea, about life in two gangster’s houses in a poor village in Normandie, was published in 1986 by Bonniers, the biggest publishing house in Sweden. The ten novels that followed were all published by Bonniers, and he was chief editor of Bonniers Literary Magazine from 1997-1999.
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?
At a session of the 2013 NCell Nepal Literature Festival, Nepali author Rabi Thapa asked whether small literary magazines still have much of a role to play in the promotion and dissemination of literature, considering they are so difficult to keep afloat. It was, however, somewhat of a rhetorical question, as Thapa himself is the editor of La.Lit, a Kathmandu-based literary magazine launched in January 2013. The word lalit is derived from Sanskrit and used in modern-day Hindi, Nepali, and other languages of the Indian subcontinent to mean finesse, grace, elegance, or beauty. The play on words is clear in English (the ‘Lit’ suggesting literature), but the title has another level of meaning, as Lalitpur, where it is based, is an old kingdom of the Kathmandu Valley that these days is part of the greater Kathmandu urban conglomeration. La.Lit is produced in two forms: on the web and in print, the second volume of which was launched at the Literature Festival. There is some overlap of content in the two formats.
Several weeks ago, I was at a roundtable discussion on editing poetry translations for literary magazines1 at which the question of presenting translations along with their originals resulted in such a range of responses I’ve been unable to let the question go. Unsurprisingly, it was harder for the editors of print journals to accommodate two texts, even if they wanted to: both space and funds are at stake. On the other hand, Don Share, editor of Poetry Magazine, argued that publishing just the translation honors the translator’s work and grants the translation its independence. Erica Mena of Anomalous Press had a different—and to me, fascinating—approach to managing a translation’s independence: not wanting to encourage “reading across the gutter,” the online journal she edits (which you should absolutely visit) publishes the source text in a pop-up window, not en face. “Reading across the gutter,” as I understand it, refers to the sort of reading in which a person compares original and translation word-for-word and line-by-line, checking for “mistakes”—in other words, the sort of reading an en face presentation could unintentionally promote.
It was thanks to a phenomenon lying somewhere between chance and merit that I ended up attending the Frankfurt Book Fair. In mid-June I signed a contract for the publication of my translation of Josef Winkler’s When the Time Comes (this is a plug, but not a shameless one). Shortly thereafter I came to Berlin. Among other things, I had hoped to meet Dr. Petra Hardt, the foreign rights directress from Suhrkamp, who had been far more encouraging than one would expect from a person of her stature when I wrote her spontaneously two years back asking to translate a Büchner Prize-winning house author from one of the world’s most redoubtable publishing houses. At the lunch, attended as well by her charming colleague Nora Mercurio and Rainer J. Hanshe from Contra Mundum Press, I was asked whether I would be going to Frankfurt. Luckily the facial expression corresponding to the thought I’m still deciding is not very different from the one for I wonder what I’m supposed to say. “I’m not sure yet,” I said, playing it cool, and Petra said that if I decided to, I should come to Suhrkamp’s party. READ MORE…