Literary translations in demand

Crossing Borders

Authors are hungry for translators and translators desperate for recognition. A new website attempts to align their desires

By Nathaniel Popkin - The Smart Set

The Indian-born Dutch writer Ernest van der Kwast has published five books, including the 2010 novel Mama Tandoori, a bestseller in the Netherlands. Van der Kwast is young, darkly handsome, intensely funny, and in search of readers — well beyond the Dutch-speaking world. “You can say a book that has sold 80-90,000 copies should be translated into many languages,” he told me last week via Skype (van der Kwast speaks beautiful English).

Both Mama Tandoori and the more recent Giovanna’s Navel (published in its original form with the English title) were picked up by the Italian publisher Isbn Edizioni and translated by Alessandra Liberati (Isbn Edizioni also brought the book out in German, with a translation by Mare Verlag). Now van der Kwast is hunting for an American publisher. “The main goal,” he says, “is to win the Nobel Prize, but second best is being published in English.”

Van der Kwast is only half joking: translation is the urgent but widely unrecognized currency of the literary world. To be sure, ask me who I’ve been reading lately: Maureen Freely, Natasha Wimmer, Bill Johnson, Chris Andrews, James Anderson, Jessica Cohen, Rhett McNeil, Tim Wilkinson, Peter Theroux — but few of these names appear on the covers of the books.
And should they? When I read António Lobo Antunes’ haunting and strikingly lyrical Splendor of Portugal, do I hear Antunes’ voice or the translator McNeil’s? Undoubtedly, as a reader I desire an authentic experience. I want to be immersed in the cultural journey (and that book is one, to be sure), but I want to understand it too. I want to hear the music and the melancholy of the Portuguese just at the same time I’m well aware of reading English — and asking myself, “am I missing something here?”

Good translation is thus a rather magical sleight of hand. The translator has to force herself through genius and instinct to become invisible, a dangerous proposition in a media world that rewards those, most of all, who shout and strut.
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