Anyone can see that publishing is in upheaval. I've mostly experienced it as a reader, one who's daily offered new opportunities to discover and read books (e-readers, web distribution, social platforms like Goodreads) while other means of access are closed off (Borders goes belly-up, indies struggle, conglomerates squabble). These changes are usually laid at the feet of technology, as though we have no control over it, and as though the really disruptive contemporary changes in the economy (of publishing as well as everything else) are only some minor annoying side-effect of Pure Technological Progress.
So I was surprised and glad to see the reaction last week to major press coverage (The Guardian) of England's new small press And Other Stories as a possible savior of translation publishing. Surprised, because I called it two years ago (but I guess that would assume anyone read my blog); glad, because the responses were genuinely pleased and welcoming.
But two years is a long time to wait for just one newspaper feature. Publishing is still messed up, translation publishing perhaps most of all, and AOS can't fix it all by themselves. That's why I'm thinking more and more that I might as well give it a try myself.
The problem
According to apocryphal but persistent statistics, translated works account for less than 3% of the US publishing market, versus 40% and up in pretty much every other developed country. The work is underpaid, often working out to $10 an hour or less. Except for a dozen or two superstars (who attract steady work and can demand per-unit royalties rather than a flat rate), literary translators have to have day jobs—either as commercial translators or, usually, as academics—to make ends meet. With profit thus off the table as a possible motivating factor—and because they still have to justify their work to tenure and promotion committees—many translators tend to choose to translate works which are interesting academically, rather than entertaining and engaging stories. Which then just helps keep the market and readership small.
Some people have made a fuss lately about AmazonCrossing, which is a publishing imprint launched by the e-commerce giant to produce both Kindle and print books translated from other languages into English. They use their global sales data to find out what people buy and read in other countries, then bring it home to the Big Daddy market. (Disclosure: I've done some sample translations for them, for which they paid a fair rate—and if they offer more work in the future, I'll probably take it.) But it's not something they're doing for the benefit of translators; it's a move against the giant New York conglomerates (Random House/Bertelsmann, HarperCollins, Penguin/Pearson, Simon & Schuster/CBS, Hachette, Macmillan/Holtzbrinck) and the remaining big-box chain (Barnes & Noble). Amazon wants to take money away from those competitors by cutting out their middleman roles, and if that means they need to give translators a little more work and pay them a little bit more, well, they can afford it. They are squeezing efficiencies out of the existing tired business model, not inventing a new one. It's not about the technology, either; Kindle is just a marketing device which happens to display text.
The real problem is that there are books and readers out there who don't find each other. Many Americans really do want to learn about the rest of the world—hell, about non-corporate culture within their own country—but they have few opportunities to do so. Language is a barrier, but a superable one. The real impediment is the (economic) structure of the publishing business.
[to be continued]
20 February 2012
10 February 2012
Making room in the madhouse
My translation of Machado de Assis' classic novella "O Alienista" will be coming out in May from Calypso Editions, a small artist-run cooperative press which I'm a member of, under the title The Psychiatrist. (Cue applause.)
Yesterday, I found out that Melville House is reprinting William L. Grossman's 1963 translation under the new title The Alienist, and it's coming out in August. (There's also Alfred Mac Adam's 1998 translation under that title, published by Arion Press as a limited-edition fine press volume; I've never seen, let alone read, that translation. But it's the Melville House edition that got my attention.)
Quite possibly, yes, someone I talked to at ALTA last fall mentioned my Calypso translation to Dennis Johnson at Melville House—but no matter, it's validation of a great work by a great author, both deserving better recognition in the U.S.
Most likely Melville House will sell more books, because they've been around for more than a decade now, they're distributed by Random House, and the Art of the Novella series is well established. Probably they only paid a small fee to Grossman's estate for the right to reprint the translation, no royalties. (Machado died in 1908, so in Portuguese his work is public domain.) Looks like theirs will be priced to move at $8, which strongly suggests they're not paying anybody a per-unit royalty.
My translation will be only Calypso Editions' sixth book, and we're just now working out a distribution agreement which will make it easier for Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and your local indie bookstore (if you have one) to carry our books. The price will be $15, which is as low as we can go and still guarantee the author (or translator) a fair share of the income. We'll sell it to you direct, postpaid. Thanks to distribution, you may be able to find it for less at the mass-market vendors—and if that's important to you, go right ahead.
Because of the schedule coincidence, it's hard not to see it as a head-to-head competition. But this isn't about who "wins" by making the most money. My translation is 50 years newer and will come out 3 months sooner, but those are no measure of quality any more than are sales or price. At this point, I can't even say that my translation is better than Grossman's, because I haven't read it for years and specifically avoided it while I was creating my own.
I know mine is loose and raucous in style, in a way we don't expect of books written in 1882, but which seems to me completely appropriate for Machado, especially for a satire on madness and other extremes. I'm pretty sure that makes my translation different than Grossman's—most translators imprison his wild experiments in narrative within staid Victorian English prose structures. Of course he wasn't Woolf or Joyce, but neither was he Dickens or Eliot. In "O Alienista," Machado makes a distinction between the madmen who laugh quietly to themselves and those who run riot in the streets. With "O Alienista" and the contemporaneous Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, Machado moved from the former group to the latter.
Yesterday, I found out that Melville House is reprinting William L. Grossman's 1963 translation under the new title The Alienist, and it's coming out in August. (There's also Alfred Mac Adam's 1998 translation under that title, published by Arion Press as a limited-edition fine press volume; I've never seen, let alone read, that translation. But it's the Melville House edition that got my attention.)
Quite possibly, yes, someone I talked to at ALTA last fall mentioned my Calypso translation to Dennis Johnson at Melville House—but no matter, it's validation of a great work by a great author, both deserving better recognition in the U.S.
Most likely Melville House will sell more books, because they've been around for more than a decade now, they're distributed by Random House, and the Art of the Novella series is well established. Probably they only paid a small fee to Grossman's estate for the right to reprint the translation, no royalties. (Machado died in 1908, so in Portuguese his work is public domain.) Looks like theirs will be priced to move at $8, which strongly suggests they're not paying anybody a per-unit royalty.
My translation will be only Calypso Editions' sixth book, and we're just now working out a distribution agreement which will make it easier for Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and your local indie bookstore (if you have one) to carry our books. The price will be $15, which is as low as we can go and still guarantee the author (or translator) a fair share of the income. We'll sell it to you direct, postpaid. Thanks to distribution, you may be able to find it for less at the mass-market vendors—and if that's important to you, go right ahead.
Because of the schedule coincidence, it's hard not to see it as a head-to-head competition. But this isn't about who "wins" by making the most money. My translation is 50 years newer and will come out 3 months sooner, but those are no measure of quality any more than are sales or price. At this point, I can't even say that my translation is better than Grossman's, because I haven't read it for years and specifically avoided it while I was creating my own.
I know mine is loose and raucous in style, in a way we don't expect of books written in 1882, but which seems to me completely appropriate for Machado, especially for a satire on madness and other extremes. I'm pretty sure that makes my translation different than Grossman's—most translators imprison his wild experiments in narrative within staid Victorian English prose structures. Of course he wasn't Woolf or Joyce, but neither was he Dickens or Eliot. In "O Alienista," Machado makes a distinction between the madmen who laugh quietly to themselves and those who run riot in the streets. With "O Alienista" and the contemporaneous Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, Machado moved from the former group to the latter.
07 February 2012
Awake Again, or:
I've been meaning to reactivate this blog for a couple months now, but as usual I've been sitting around waiting for the perfect comprehensive re-launch post to spontaneously type itself into the browser window. No more.
A number of factors prompt my return. Two prompt me to re-establish my "home" on the web, and will prompt further clean-up and refocusing in the months to come:
A number of factors prompt my return. Two prompt me to re-establish my "home" on the web, and will prompt further clean-up and refocusing in the months to come:
- I'm getting more active in translation, reviewing, and publishing
- I'm establishing more local connections, which (sometimes mysteriously) feed and support my . . . let's call them trans-local activities (since "global" sounds a bit much)
- The Occupy movement has re-opened discussion of cooperative and other post-capitalist ways of organizing work
- Publishing, prompted largely by e-books, continues to transform itself
- new writing (usually fiction, or at least narrative) in English as well as French, Italian, and Portuguese
- and how it gets from writer to reader, by way of publishers, translators, designers, reviewers, bookstores, audiobooks, e-book devices, and so on
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