![]() Why should the literary world lag behind the streaming world of “Money Heist” and “Squid Game”? Americans appreciate K-pop in its original Korean. American audiences have shown themselves to be enthusiastic consumers of screen programming from abroad. The rest of the culture doesn’t operate this way. It’s also disrespectful to an author who is most likely proud of writing in her own language, as part of her country’s own literary tradition, to falsely create the impression she has written in a foreign tongue. But even if they hadn’t, it would be unimaginable to leave an author’s African or Asian name off the cover for “marketing” purposes. American readers seem to have gotten over that bias. Of course, the same thing was said for decades about authors with “ethnic” names - that they were a commercial liability. “In some instances and for some genres, advertising that the book is a translation may not be in the best interest of sales or marketing,” one literary agent told Poets & Writers magazine. The fear, for the publisher, is of alienating an American readership that is assumed to be uncomfortable with anything foreign. The greater a book’s commercial prospects, the less likely the translator is to get credit. These arrangements are easier to pull off if the translator’s profile remains low. Translators are also often excluded from royalty agreements, which means that even a financially successful book can have little impact on a translator’s pay. Publishing is a low-margin business, and paying translators a small fee (typically between 10 and 15 cents a word, far less than authors are paid) helps maintain the bottom line. Especially because the justifications for leaving their names off are so misbegotten. They act as de facto ambassadors for their authors, helping them navigate the press and social media - none of which, by the way, is compensated for by the publisher, but merely a part of what the translator Anton Hur has called a “horribly entrenched culture of unpaid labor.”Īt a time when America’s understanding of other cultures is of paramount importance, translators are overdue to get credit for what they do. They advocate for untranslated authors, bringing them to the attention of agents and editors. ![]() In her new book, “Translating Myself and Others,” the novelist and translator Jhumpa Lahiri writes, “I think of writing and translating as two aspects of the same activity, two faces of the same coin, or maybe two strokes, exercising distinct but complementary strengths, that allow me to swim greater distances, and at greater depths.”Īnd translators often do more than just translate. A great translator even has the power to improve upon a work of art, as Gabriel García Márquez often said of his English translator, Gregory Rabassa. ![]() Translation is an art that requires channeling an author’s voice, tone, intention and style. It isn’t something Google Translate can do. ![]() Translating literature isn’t a mere technical exercise, subbing one word for another. “The idea of collaboration in other media is expected, whereas for whatever almost superstitious reason, in the book world, it’s still considered almost a threat to name anyone other than the author,” Jennifer Croft, a translator and a key player in the effort to translate Ukrainian literature into English, told me in an interview. Remember “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” the runaway Nordic best seller? No translator on the cover. To cite a few high-profile examples, neither “The Perfect Nanny” by Leïla Slimani nor “The Anomaly” by Hervé le Tellier, both recent winners of France’s Prix Goncourt, indicated on the cover that they were originally written in a language other than English. According to one database, only 44 percent of English-language translations of fiction and poetry published in 2021 acknowledged the translator on the front cover.Īt a time when the culture as a whole is paying greater attention to which creators get publicly credited, and movie credits are only getting longer, this is a unique form of neglect. That’s what publishers routinely do to book translators: omit from the cover the name of the person who rendered the book into English. We didn’t do it on purpose.īut imagine if we had deliberately left Kissinger’s name off - just decided to downplay his role because we thought the book and its author were more important. But owing to a production error, the name of the high-profile figure who’d written the review - Henry Kissinger - was not. The book’s title and author’s name were there (“Bismarck: A Life,” by the historian Jonathan Steinberg). ![]() About a decade ago, when I was an editor at The New York Times Book Review, we left the name of the reviewer off a cover review. ![]()
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