Jessica Papin on "Vampires, New Years Resolutions, and Works in Translation"

One of my favorite moments of the 2008 holiday season took place in a local bookstore: it was shortly before closing, and as I waited for a clerk to check to see if a title I wanted was in stock, I watched her weary looking colleague at work constructing a Stephanie Meyer ziggurat. Red and black and several feet high, built in alternating layers of Twilight titles, it was a marvel of retail engineering.

“Wow,” I said, “that’s quite a tower.”

“Yes, she said—and they’ll sell out, too.”

“Every,” She placed a book. “Single,” she aligned another at a precise right angle. “One.” She surveyed her handiwork, then turned to me.

“God bless the vampires,” she said. “They saved Christmas.”

Further to the holiday theme, and in the spirit of New Year/New You releases, gym solicitations, my inaugural entry and that other Inauguration to come, I thought I might take as my subject New Year’s resolutions. Which, for most folks, are well on their way toward being forgotten. This need not be the case. My technique for cleaving to my resolutions is two-fold: make as few as possible—ideally only one—and then be certain it is a pleasure to accomplish.

That said, my resolution is as follows: to read more fiction in translation.

Funnily, works in translation are—by virtue of being foreign—considered about as suited to the mainstream American reader as a macrobiotic diet to fans of Texas Barbeque. Yet (with apologies to macrobiotic gourmands) there is nothing especially virtuous, seaweed-like, or indigestible about reading Orhan Pamuk’s My Name is Red, Haruki Murakami’s Wind Up Bird Chronicle, or Naguib Mahfouz’s Miramar.

I had always been interested in international literature, but while working as an editor in a predominantly commercial house, and then later representing overwhelmingly American clients, I’d not devoted much thought to the role of contemporary fiction in translation. This changed when I left to work for the American University in Cairo Press. For all intents and purposes, I was still agenting—albeit in a part of the world where literary agents don’t exist. Thus, whether I said I was an “agent” (what sort of agent?) or that I dealt in “International Rights” (surely international human rights?) few people seemed to have any idea what I did. Nevertheless, if the truth of my occupation was neither as clandestine nor as noble as my acquaintances imagined, selling a list of modern Arabic fiction to publishers in the U.S. and around the world was certainly fascinating. Both the nature of my work and its location, in Cairo—far from the epicenter of American publishing both in distance and outlook—were focused on the book business beyond the USA. It was an eye opening experience, not least because it became acutely obvious that the global world of letters is one in which my own country participates precious little.

Only three percent of the books published in the US are translations from other languages (and as it happened, only one percent of those were from Arabic;). To be sure, houses face no shortage of barriers to publishing translations; the expense of commissioning a translation, which is a cost above and beyond the advance, the fact that the author is probably unknown and possibly unable to promote in the US. In this, the age in which the ideal author is not only a fine writer but an articulate and persuasive promoter with a rolodex of media connections—language barriers, as well as sheer physical distance, can be especially problematic. Few trade publishers are willing or able to take on so potentially unrewarding a task. Indeed, in many cases it has fallen to small independent and university presses, whose print runs are small and expectations of profit modest (or nonexistent) to pick up the slack. They provide an invaluable service, but receive limited media coverage, and reinforce the idea that these books are somehow academic exercises, fit for the Ivory Tower and little else.

True, we are a big country, internally diverse and externally uninterested. It could be that we heeded too well the exhortations of the transcendentalists, those brilliant, bewhiskered granddaddies of American letters, who urged us to develop a literature uniquely our own. In his influential address, The American Scholar, Emerson complained that we have “listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe.” These days, few European muses, courtly or otherwise, get a hearing, let alone those from other continents. Some people posit that there are so many people writing in English that we need not look beyond our linguistic borders. This of all possibilities seems most absurd—indeed as pointless as deciding that “American cuisine” is sufficiently robust that we need never eat foreign foods. Indeed, reading literature in translation is perhaps as onerous as dipping into a subtly spiced curry, or a baklava sticky with syrup. Neither tastes like mac’n cheese or apple pie, but they are no less delicious.

Which is to say that my less-than-ambitious but happily anticipated resolution to up my intake of fiction in translation is as easily honored as my plan to return to the Persian restaurant whose albaloo pollo convinced me that cherries and chicken is a match made in heaven. As to what books are on my to-read list, I already have some ideas: Roberto Bolano’s 2666 is this season’s undisputed choice for Serious Readers of Serious Books, and I am curious to read his work. But I’m also interested in the books that have not been so anointed—and for that, I’ll have a look at Words without Borders and Three Percent, two wonderful on-line publications devoted to works in translation.

I’m also happy to hear reader recommendations.

And who knows: Perhaps next year, some weary bookseller will bless translators as the saviors of Christmas.