BTBA Longlist / Four Point Five Percent

First of all, the fiction longlist for the Best Translated Book Award has been announced - and includes four books translated from German:

Awakening to the Great Sleep War by Gert Jonke, translated from the German by Jean M. Snook (Dalkey Archive Press; Austria)

The Hunger Angel by Herta Müller, translated from the German by Philip Boehm (Metropolitan Books; Romania)

Island of Second Sight by Albert Vigoleis Thelen, translated from the German by Donald O. White (Overlook; Germany)

My Father’s Book by Urs Widmer, translated from the German by Donal McLaughlin (Seagull Books; Switzerland)

My fingers are crossed quite hard, although not equally for all four.

And then, speaking of Three Percent, Literature Across Frontiers has published a report on translation statistics in the UK and Ireland. At last, someone's done a study - and come up with some figures. According to LAF, translations constitute 2.5% of published titles (all literary genres including biography, literary criticism and others) and 4.5% of published literary titles (fiction, poetry and drama) in the UK and Ireland. German was the second-most translated language in the years under review (after French and before Spanish). The study used data from the British Library, which is more reliable than the Index Translationum for various reasons, as the author reports.

I've oversimplified. The two categories in particular are more complicated and especially interesting for anyone who's worked in a library with the Dewey Decimal system - oh those 800s! The main part of the study is only 28 pages long and well worth a read - especially for publishers. There are some great appendices too including useful resources - a list of publishers who do translations, for instance. Here's my favourite quote:

As previous reports have shown, the status of the translators themselves is precarious in the UK, with reviewers, for example, sometimes even failing to mention that the work is a translation, and failing to name the translator. Publishers play the most important role in raising the profile of translators and translation – and in this apparently small matter, they can make a significant difference.

The small matter is providing the industry with detailed data, but obviously publishers can and do make all sorts of significant differences.

Helen and Kurt Wolff Translation Prize to Jean M. Snook

The news isn't up in English yet, but if you speak German you can read all about Jean M. Snook and her award-winning translation of Gert Jonke's The Distant Sound.

The Helen and Kurt Wolff prize is the most prestigious award for German-English translation, and comes with a stay in Berlin. I do like the way they praise Gert Jonke (1946-2009) as a great contemporary writer - alongside Thomas Bernhard and Arno Schmidt, who have been dead since 1989 and 1979 respectively.

I'm very pleased that it's gone to a woman this time, only the sixth in sixteen years. And not just any woman! I really respect Jean Snook's work as very conscientious and empathetic - as the judges say, she makes translation look easy. The prize will be awarded in Chicago on 13 June - I'm sure the deserving winner will have fun with the $10,000 cheque.