The One Thing I Actually Did in Leipzig

I seem to know a lot of lovely translators who maintain blogs nowadays. Another friend, Jamie Lee Searle, writes at translatingbetweenthelines.wordpress.com. And she brightened up my short stay in Leipzig and has written much more about it than I managed, which you ought to read.

Anyway, her post has prompted me to say a little something after all about one of the events we attended together, a discussion on the future of the book. Yes, I am a sucker for punishment. I'd been drawing a tactful veil of silence over it to be honest. But now I think, why not just let it all out in one big therapeutic rant. Jamie's given it the polite treatment, so now I can vent.

First of all, the format. An hour and a half! With seven people on the panel! And one of them was a famous American who attracted an adoring audience, which meant they had to cart along extra chairs and there were still people standing at the back. And then despite the event having a rather cute title - The Perfect Reading Machine - all that happened was that two people defended print books to the hilt, two people defended ebooks with a little less enthusiasm, and two people sat on the fence. What made me want to vomit the most was the way the reactionaries got peals of applause every time they mentioned workmanship, binding methods or typefaces. What made me want to vomit second-most was that almost everyone on the panel assumed that everybody who reads books is equipped with unlimited wealth and space for building up enormous libraries.

There was one golden moment, when poetry publishing empress Daniela Seel questioned the whole notion of reading for understanding - we'd been told that students reading on computers were distracted and therefore comprehended less - by asking: What is understanding in the first place? But nobody picked up her thread to crochet a more imaginative future for readers. And nor did the genuine argument that seemed to be brewing between Seel and the reactionaries ever break out into full-blown mud wrestling. Jamie and I started shuffling in our seats after an hour or so and I encouraged her to join me in walking out extra specially loudly in our clacky analogue high heeled boots. I felt like Nancy Sinatra. It was good.

Of course, having mouthed off loudly outside about paper fetishists, I did blow a hole in my budget the next day on a 1966 edition of Ernst Jandl poems on deckle-edged handmade paper. I shall add it to my infinite library as a reminder not to go to any more discussions on the future of the book, unless they involve real mud.

Lowest Common Denominator Marketing? That's What Friends Are For

You might be on Facebook, dear reader. You might "like" German publishers. You might be amazed at some of the things they get up to there.

It's not so much the persistent cat content-level crap - the photos of wacky bookshelves, the "Today is international chocolate day. Thumbs up who likes chocolate!!! ;-)"-type like-grabbing that makes publishers look interchangeable with any other commercial enterprise. Because let's face it, many publishers are interchangeable with any other commercial enterprise. I think what bothers me most is the apparent need to get in your face at least once a day, regardless of whether they have anything to report. You'll often get news-related posts, which aren't always well thought out. My favourites so far have been "International Writers in Prison Day - buy our calendar" and "Hurricane Sandy floods New York - buy our book about New York subway stations". I'm waiting for "Bubonic Plague hits Calcutta - buy our book on beautiful Indian textiles".

I'm noticing this extra specially much at the moment, because it's advent. The Germans make a big fucking deal out of advent. You're supposed to make decorations out of fir trees and candles and hang them on your front door. You're supposed to know how many Sundays there are until your annual church visit on Christmas Eve and count them down using more candles and fir trees, wishing people a "good second Sunday before Christmas" in a cheery way. And of course you're supposed to have an advent calendar, preferably one you made yourself when you were six out of raffia and cotton wool. Good parents will put little healthy treats in 24 cloth bags on a string for their healthy children. So of course good publishers want to give their Facebook fans saccharine crap once a day throughout December.

Now I'm not naming names here, but you'd be surprised at the levels to which publishers I'd previously considered highbrow will sink. They'd have you making up rhymes and guessing the number of chocolates left in the box and sending in photos of your cat in order to win a free book. Publishing people! Just because we're pathetically addicted to social networking, you don't have to treat us like idiots! Actually, there is an exception to prove the rule (now that was the turn of phrase I was looking for last time): Literaturverlag Droschl, which is giving us tiny soundbites from its books once a day. Like.

On Displaying Translated Titles

Not long ago, I referred to the podcasts from the Helene and Kurt Wolff Symposium in Chicago, which I listened to in the bath and can thoroughly recommend. Various translators, publishers and clever individuals all talking about translation (in particular of German literature). And I believe two of the panels touched on the subject of whether international literature should be marketed as translations or just plain ole books.

There was some disagreement, and it's a tricky issue. In the past, publishers have tried various approaches, including printing the translator's name in tiny letters and hoping nobody noticed the book was written by a dirty foreigner. Obviously, this didn't meet with major approval on the translators' side. Now we seem to be seeing a slight backlash, with special bookstore displays dedicated to translated fiction. I was in London last week and paid a visit to my old local bookshop, a suburban branch of Waterstones.

And lo and behold, there was a special shelf labelled "Lost in Translation". (A brief aside - is there anyone out there who doesn't groan instantly the moment they hear this hackneyed phrase? I've lost count of the number of articles I've read with this headline, which always makes my heart sink. But that could just be me I suppose.) In fact, however, I walked past the special "Lost in Translation" shelf and my mother had to call my attention to it. And do you know why? Because all the books were a strange shade of browny-grey. I can only assume that either most published translations come in strangely unexciting jackets or that Waterstones carefully picked titles that colour-coordinated with this dull scheme.

I probably ought to have taken notes, because I instantly forgot which books they were - apart from Charlotte Roche's Wetlands, which stood out a mile with its fuchsia pink avocadoed cover. And I also noticed they had committed the great folly of stocking the old Vintage Classics translation of The Tin Drum - surely some mistake what with Breon Mitchell's infinitely more interesting new version out there, even down to its much more funky jacket. But the overall impression I retained is that these books were worthy and old and not terribly sexy, and would probably make you a good person if you read them all. Which you would probably do sitting in your bath chair in front of a blazing fire, gouty leg raised on an upholstered footstool.

Now elsewhere in the store, there was a good sprinkling of more colourful translated titles - Roberto Bolano and Bulgakov under "Bad Boys" or some such, Stieg Larsson under "Local Favourites". So they seemed to be taking a belt-and-braces type approach, or at least not ghettoising international literature as such. And of course we should probably be grateful that the mighty Waterstones is highlighting translated fiction at all.

But I have to say the whole sorry spectacle placed me once and for all in the No To Special Sections camp. I much prefer the way German bookshops display their titles: arranged by genre pure and simple, no matter where the books come from. So you get Sophie Kinsella piled up next to Kerstin Gier, Feridun Zaimoglu next to Zadie Smith. Of course the huge difference is that translations are a perfectly normal phenomenon here and certainly don't need special attention.

But still, in an ideal world my perfect English-language bookshop would go to the trouble of stocking international literature but place it on the shelves alongside the books' untranslated peers. Readers would come across less well-known books as they browsed, rather than being explicitly alerted to them as translations. The translators would be credited on the covers, as is increasingly the case in the US but still unusual in Britain. And yes, it can make sense to highlight translations through events such as the (now defunct?) Reading the World series in the States, but in my personal utopia international writers would always be teamed up with domestic talents - firstly to foster exchange, and secondly to draw a larger crowd.

And there'd be a never-ending range of world literature in English, some with sexy covers and some fine upstanding re-translations of classics. And some fine upstanding re-translations of classics with sexy covers. And genre fiction and throwaway beach reading and books that change your life, and the booksellers would have read them all due to a secret time machine in the back room that enabled them to spend five hours of every day reading but still man the store all day long. And books would be really cheap because the state would subsidise them out of a special tax on tobacco, saturated fat and fossil fuels, but writers would be allowed to write anything they liked. And, you know, everything would be awesome.

Is It Just Laziness?

This past weekend's Guardian and Observer are suddenly awash with reviews of translations. Enzensberger, Pamuk (twice!), Bolano, Su Tong. Crack open the champagne!

But wait just one moment. There's something odd going on. With the exception of James Lasdun's review of The Museum of Innocence in the Guardian, no one has had the courtesy to mention the translators. Shall I type that again? FOUR OUT OF FIVE REVIEWS FAIL TO MENTION THE TRANSLATORS.

And that although someone has come up with the sparklingly witty and original link headline "Found in Translation" for Yiyun Li's review of Su Tong's The Boat to Redemption (Guardian). This one is a particular treasure, as for one reason or another the reviewer tells us:

The familiar language and the story have not revealed anything new, though perhaps it is fair to point out that some of these issues are resolved in translation. This is because the process of translation allows the familiar to become strange and the strange familiar, a quality that is unfortunately absent from the original text.

Yet the reviewer neglects to name the person who did all this.

Ironically, the Observer letters section contains this:

"Stephanie Merritt's review of Javier Marias's Your Face Tomorrow ("Through the moral maze to a breathtaking finale", 3 January) is most interesting; too few translations get reviewed nowadays. However, when they do, the least one expects is that the translator's name will be mentioned and some comment offered on the quality of his work. Ms Merritt provides neither; she doesn't even tell us Marias's nationality or what language he writes in - though one guesses he is Spanish."

William Dorrell, London.

So allow me to give credit where credit is due. To Martin Chalmers for translating Hans Magnus Enzensberger's The Silences of Hammerstein from German. To Maureen Freely for translating Orhan Pamuk's The Museum of Innocence from Turkish. To Chris Andrews for translating Roberto Bolano's Nazi Literature in America from Spanish. And to Howard Goldblatt for translating Su Tong's The Boat to Redemption from Chinese.

For future reference, reviewers and editors, why not take a look at PEN American Center's very useful Reviewers Guidelines for Translated Books?

Stephan Wackwitz on NY, Berlin and Literature

...Sort of. The programme director of the New York Goethe Institut has given a rather interesting interview to Die Welt, Berlin's conservative broadsheet. He talks about the institute's move to the Wyoming Building and its cultural history in New York, the influence of The Tin Drum and German film on the city.

Then he tells us how

The Americans are actually very interested in Germany: German art and German electronic club music. And above all they have a burning interest in Berlin. What's true is that the Americans aren't interested in German literature whatsoever. They don't translate it and they don't read it.

Then he (or the interviewer) talks about how Berlin is still living off the image Christopher Isherwood gave it before the war - arty, erotic, cheap. He's not wrong there - even the mayor plays along with his "poor but sexy" slogan.

Wackwitz himself is an accomplished writer; you can read samples (in German of course) from his forthcoming book Fifth Avenue Spaziergänge durch das letzte Jahrhundert on the Wyoming Building blog. It sounds from the interview, though, as if he's succumbed to the common phenomenon of cultural pessimism when it comes to foreign literature in the States. Call me a dreamer, but is there any reason why people can't harness that existing enthusiasm and interest in Germany's art, music and capital city to promote its books too?

Why not sell writers on the back of their coolness? Half the younger generation does the odd spot of DJing - why not get the likes of Wladimir Kaminer or Thomas Meinecke to bring a few records along? Clemens Meyer has written about both techno and art - presumably a dream combination... (OK, he's been to NY twice already.) Or someone like Maike Wetzel, whose short stories are undeniably Berlin and who makes - gasp! - films too. And although nobody springs to mind immediately in what's rapidly turning into a rant here, there are bound to be plenty of German writers with links to the art world, of various generations.

Luckily, there is balm for my soul: the excellent work of Edna McCown and Katherine Lorimer at the Goethe Institut New York in promoting literature, as showcased on their beautiful Current Writing blog. For all I know from all the way over here, they're already doing all that stuff I naively suggest above.

I'm waiting to see how the Goethe Institut commemorates the fall of the Berlin Wall around the world... plenty of scope for mega-budget literary events there! David Hare + Thomas Brussig, John Le Carré + Julia Franck, Margaret Thatcher + Helmut Kohl – aaah, the possibilities are endless.

Update: As an interested reader points out in the comments, you can read Wackwitz in English: his An Invisible Country is published by Paul Dry Books (trans: Wendy Lesser).