+ American Publishers Shy Away from Foreign Books

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The Frankfurt Book Fair, the annual gathering of the international literary world, happens at this time every year.  Publishers from 100 countries are showing off  their best — or best selling — books.

Motoko Rich, in an article in the NY Times, suggests that the belief persists in Frankfurt that American publishers won’t spend much time in any room but Hall 8, the enormous exhibit space where English-language publishers hold court. 

Although there are exceptions to the translation-averse Americans theory, editors from the United States are usually more likely to bid on other hyped American or British titles than to look for new literature in the international halls.

David R Godine, a small independent publisher from Boston, is one of a handful of American publishers who regularly seek out books to translate during the fair every year.  He emerged prescient and lucky this month.  One of the authors he publishes in translation, the French novelist Jean-Marie Le Clezio, won the Nobel Prize in Literature.

According to Chad W Post, the director of Open Letter, a new press focusing exclusively on books in translation and based at the University of Rochester, 330 works of foreign literature — or a little more than 2 percent of the estimated total of 15,000 titles released — have been published in the US so far this year.

This dearth of literature in translation in the US was the subject of controversial remarks a week before the prize did not go to an American. 

Horace Engdahl, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, which awards the Nobel Prize, said “The US is too insular.  They don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature.” 

It is left mostly to the small publishers like Mr Godine to scavenge for hidden treasures among the European booths.

Godine met with Anne Bouteloup, the director of foreign rights at the children’s imprint of Gallimard, and indicated an interest in Mr Le Clezio’s children’s book “Voyage au Pays des Arbres” (“Journey to the Country of Trees”).

About 10 to 15 percent of Mr Godine’s list is composed of books in translation.  He hears about them each year at this book fair.  He says he publishes foreign authors because it gives his tiny press literary credibility.

But there is also an economic reason, he acknowledges.

“When you look at how much is paid for a mediocre midlist author in the United Sates,” he says, “and how much you have to pay to get a world-class author who has been translated into 18 languages, it is ridiculous that more people don’t invest in buying great literature.”  He has purchased the rights to a foreign book for as little as $2000.

The publisher of Graywolf Press, a nonprofit publisher based in St Paul, has had a breakout best seller with “Out Stealing Horses,” a novel by Per Petterson of Norway.  Fiona McCrae says that small publishers could not afford to buy books by the best authors in the US, but that they often could acquire works of top authors from abroad.

“Philip Roth is not going to suddenly be published by Graywolf,” she says.  “So you see who is the Philip Roth of Italy or who is an interesting writer out of Sweden.”  McCrae also notes that Graywolf is supported by foundation grants specifically aimed at publishing foreign titles.

To help spur more translations, government-sponsored cultural agencies in Europe and elsewhere subsidize — and often fully cover — the cost of translating a book into English.

Jill Schoolman, the publisher and editor-in-chief of the Brooklyn nonprofit Archipelago Books, says her press will bring out Hugo Claus’s Belgian novel “Wonder.”  Claus was discussed as a Nobel contender, but died by euthanasia earlier this year.  Greet Ramael, the prose grants manager at the Flemish Literary Fund, has given her an application for translation reimbursement.

“Translation costs are often a deterrent or a reason not to translate a book,” says Ramael.

American publishers say monolingual editors fear making risky decisions based on short translated excerpts.  “It is hard enough to publish a book when you have read the whole thing and know you love it,” says Michael Pietsch, publisher of Little, Brown.

And there is the often heard maxim among American publishers that books in translation don’t sell.  But according to Anne-Solange Noble, the foreign-rights director at Gallimard, American publishers don’t provide marketing budgets to support translated books, and then compain that they don’t sell.

She was amused — and irritated — when an American publisher on the first night of the fair described Mr Le Clezio (the Nobel winner) as “an unknown writer.”

She calls it “the poverty of the rich.”

“American publishers are depriving the American readership of the cultural diversity through translation to which they are entitled.”

Noble makes it clear that she is not commenting on the quality of American writers: Philip Roth and Claire Messud are published by Gallimard.

American publishers who are devoted to foreign literature say there is no shortage of gems.  Mr Post plunged into one of the international halls on a certain evening and plucked brochures of translated English excerpts from stands hosted by cultural agencies from Croatia, Latvia, Poland, China and Korea.

Frankfurt Book Fair, he says, is about renewing contacts with people whose judgement he trusts, who can help him winnow the hundreds of titles he hears about here and elsewhere.

And David Godine notes that Frankfurt helped him discover, among many others, the Nobel-winning Mr Le Clezio. 

sole source: article by Motoko Rich, 10/18/08 in the NY Times   www.nytimes.com  

tutoring in Columbus OH:  Adrienne Edwards   614-579-6021   or email   aedwardstutor@columbus.rr.com

+ Harvard Will Post Scholarly & Research Papers Online

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The arts and science faculty at Harvard has voted unanimously to post their scholarly articles and research online.  They will be available free to the public.

An article in the Boston Globe by Megan Woolhouse says the vote came after several months of meetings on the subject.

Academic journal officials voiced concerns about whether such a move would affect the quality of research by hurting the peer review process.

Stuart Schieber, a computer science professor who sponsored the motion, says some journals are run like monopolies, charging exorbitant prices for subscriptions.  The journal Brain Research, for example, charges $21,000 a year.

“This can be the first step in the process of increasing access to the Harvard faculty’s writings.  That’s really the goal,” says Sheiber.

The plan is to create an office and repository for professors’ finished papers.  It will be run by the university’s library, and would instantly make them available on the Internet.  The projected name for this office is the Office for Scholarly Communication.

Often, academics sign over the copyright to a journal before publication.  University libraries then buy back the work by subscribing to the publication.

Under the new system, academics would retain copyright to their work, allowing the university to post it unless they opt out by filing a waiver.  Those faculty would then be allowed to publish their work in an academic journal.

The vice-president for legal and governmental affairs at the Association of American Publishers, Allan Adler, praised the opt-out provision, saying it allows authors to continue to seek publication in prestigious joournals.  Still, he expresses concern that the peer review could be harmed.

The way high quality is assured in research is that academics voluntarily and at no cost conduct “peer review” of work submitted to journals.    

Adler notes that many journals have an editing staff that coordinates the peer review process, and that staff must be paid.  He calls the issue a “vendor-customer dispute over price.”

Another computer science professor, Henry Lewis, supports the move because commercial publishers often require university libraries to buy bundled journals at steep prices.

But more importantly, says Lewis, the vote is a win for the open-access movement, which seeks to make as much scientific and scholarly research available as possible.

“Harvard is in a unique position to do the right thing in the academic world,” continues Lewis.  “In this case, I think others will be emboldened by Harvard to follow its lead, and the course of collective action will be greater than the course any individual school will take.”

The director of Harvard’s university library, Robert Darnton, wrote in the Harvard Crimson that the change reresents an opportunity to “reshape the landscape of learning.”  It is a “first step in freeing scholarship from the stanglehold of commercial publishers.”

He writes, “The system would be collective, not cooercive.  The motion give Harvard the possibility of setting an example that could spread.

“In place of a closed, privileged, and costly system, it will help open up the world of learning to everyone who wants to learn.” 

sole source: Boston Globe article by Megan Woolhouse on 2/13/08. www.boston.com

tutoring in Columbus OH:   Adrienne Edwards   614-579-6021   or email  aedwardstutor@columbus.rr.com

+ Why Does English Have All Those Silent Letters?

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More from David Crystal’s wonderful book, “The Fight for English”. 

Reformers began complaining, in the middle of the 16th century, that the language was full of “vices and corruptions”.  It wasn’t just the arrival of French spellings.  It was because of the mess made by well-intentioned people in their attempts to fix the language.

“The renewed interest in classical languages and cultures, which formed part of the ethos of the Renaissance, had introduced a new perspective into spelling: etymology.  Etymology is the study of the history of words, and there was a widespread view that words should show their history in the way they were spelled.

“These weren’t classicists showing off.  There was a general belief that it would help people if they could ‘see’ the original Latin in a Latin-derived word.”

And so: someone added b to the word  det (or dett, or dette) because the source in Latin was debitum.  So now we have “debt”.   Someone decided that peple needed an o, because it came from populum.  Now children have to learn “people” as a sight word.  Similarly an s was added to ile and iland, because the word in Latin is insula.  So we are burdened with “island”.

And those extra  e‘s.

Blame the printers who operated the new printing presses.  If a line of type was a bit too short on a page, well, just add an –e  to a few words; that would fill it out.  Conversely, if a line was too long: take out some e ‘s — then it would fit!

To be sure, many of the typesetters were foreign anyway, and would have had no inkling what was happening .  They were probably confused enough as it was.

But there was also widespread opposition in the 16th century to ‘too many letters’.  And so the extra consonant and final e in words like goode, sette, and hadde eventually died out.  Crystal says that within fifty years such spellings had almost disappeared: the First Folio of Shakespeare (1623) has 1,398 instances of had, but only one hadde.    

In a separate development, the letters  j  and  v  were introduced, making our 24 letter alphabet a 26 letter collection.  One could now write “avast” instead of “auast”; “ejectment” instead of “eiectment”.

And speaking of vacillating fashions in orthography (the writing out of words): in the late 17th century it became fashionable to capitalize the first letter of nouns, following a trend in Continental printing.  Jonathan Swift writes: In antient Time, as Story tells/The Saints would often leave their Cells…

But this only lasted a century or so. 

“The Fight for English”, David Crystal’s gentle, delightful and informative screed against language prescriptivists, is published by Oxford University Press, 2006.  ISBN 978-0-19-920764-0.

tutoring in Columbus OH:   Adrienne Edwards   614-579-6021   or         aedwardstutor@columbus.rr.com