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A NEW GREAT WALLAuthor(s): EDITH GROSSMANSource: Foreign Policy, No. 179 (May/June 2010), pp. 88-90Published by: Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive, LLCStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20753949 .

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ANEW

GREAT WALL Why the crisis in translation matters, by edith Grossman

One of the truly great war correspondents, a mon

umental figure who reported from Afghanistan for 20 years and won almost every literary prize offered in

Italy; a humanistic French-Tunisian scholar who has

sought a middle way between Islam and secularism; an Eritrean writer whose epic saga of his country's troubled history subverts both official versions, the

Ethiopian and the American. They are some of the most important voices in the world today, honored intellectuals in their own countries. You're not likely to have heard of Et tore Mo, Abdelwahab Meddeb, or Alemseged Tesfai, however, because they are rarely translated into English. In the English speaking world, in fact, major publishing houses are inexplica bly resistant to any kind of translated material at all. The statistics are shocking in this age of so-called globalization:

In the United States and Britain, only 2 to 3 percent of books pub lished each year are translations, compared with almost 35 per cent in Latin America and Western Europe. Horace Engdahl, then the secretary of the Swedish Academy, chided the United States in 2008 for its literary parochialism: "The U.S. is too isolated, too insular. They don't translate enough and don't really participate in the big dialogue of literature." But this is no mere national embarrassment: The dearth of trans

lated literature in the English-speaking world represents a new kind of iron curtain we have constructed around ourselves. We are

choosing to block off access to the writing of a large and significant portion of the world, including movements and societies whose

potentially dreadful political impact on us is made even more menacing by our

general lack of familiarity with them. Our stubborn and willful ignorance could have?and arguably, already has had?dangerous consequences.The prob lem starts in the Anglophone publishing industry, where translated books are not

only avoided but actively discouraged. They can be commercially successful (think of the cachet enjoyed in the United States by The Name of the Rose, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, or anything by Roberto Bola?o), and still most U.S. and British publishers resist the very idea of translation. Some years ago, a senior

editor at a prestigious house told me that he could not even consider taking on an

other translation because he already had two on his list.

Publishers have their excuses, of course. A persistent but not very con

vincing explanation is that English language readers are, for some reason,

put off by translations. This is nothing but a publishing shibboleth that leads to a chicken-and-egg conundrum: Is a

limited readership for translations the reason so few are published in the An

glophone world? Or is that readership limited because English-language pub lishers provide their readers with so few translations? Certainly, the number of readers of literature?in any language? is on the decline, and serious, dedicated editors face real difficulties bringing good books to the marketplace. But that is not the fault of translation. And ignor ing literature in translation in no way helps solve the problem. On the con

trary, we need to ask what we forfeit as readers and as a society if we lose access

to translated literature by voluntarily reducing its presence in our community or quietly standing by as it is drastically and arbitrarily curtailed.

The crisis in translation does not hurt only English-speaking readers?it affects everyone who cares about

knowledge worldwide. For one, the

English-language market is immense and

generally located in areas where the

population tends to be literate and pros

Edith Grossman, translator of such Spanish-language writers as Miguel de Cervantes and Gabriel Garcia

M?rquez, is the author ofWhy Translation Matters.

3

May I June 2010 89

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IN OTHER WORDS

perous enough to purchase books. Then,

too, a truism has it that a body of work must be translated into English before a writer can even be considered for the

Nobel Prize in literature because it is claimed, perhaps with reason, that ours

is the only language all the judges read. Even more significant may be the fact that English often serves as the linguis tic bridge for the translation of a book into a number of Asian and African lan

guages. For a book written in Spanish to enter the enormous potential market

of China, for example, it must often be translated into English first. By limiting English translation, we're turning off a

spigot that flows not just to us but to the rest of the world as well. Most important, we confront a hov

ering and constant threat to civil liber

ties as we reduce the number of transla

tions we publish. The free exchange of

literary ideas, insights, and intuitions? a basic reciprocity of thought facilitated by the translation of works from other cultures?is central to a free society. Dictators know this: They place tre mendous importance on language, how

it is used, to what end, and by whom. Imprisoned writers, banned books, censored media, restrictions on transla

tions, even repeated attempts to abolish

what are called "minority" languages are all clear indications that tyrannies take language, books, and access to

information and ideas very seriously. Democracies have an obligation to take

these matters even more seriously?and at the moment, the English-speaking world is failing in that task.

It may well be that in the best of all possible worlds?the one that predates the construction of the Tower of Ba

bel?all humans were able to commu

nicate with all other humans and the function of translators was quite literally unthinkable. But here we are in a world

whose shrinking store of languages comes to roughly 6,000, a world where isolationism and rampaging nationalism are on the rise and countries are begin

ning to erect actual as well as metaphori cal walls around themselves. I do not

believe I am overstating the case when

I say that translation can be, for readers as well as writers, one of the ways past a menacing babble of incomprehensible tongues and closed frontiers into mutual

comprehension. It is not a possibility we

can safely turn our backs on.

What You're Missing So why does translation matter? Here are two reasons

why: unpublished translations from a young South African essayist and a renowned Indian novelist. Our translation project, with many more entries online, takes you from Vietnam's version of the Agent Orange disaster to an inside look at Russian refugees in Germany?stories you won't read anywhere else, at least not in English.

Linguistic Apartheid From Thomas Dreyer, Not OurLeguaan, translated by Dreyerfrom the Afrikaans.

IAM AN AFRIKAANS WRITER. I write in a language that is Dutch but not Dutch, European but not European, African but not African?even though it is the only language named

after this (or any other) continent. I write in a language that has little to do with tulips, windmills, or silly snowmen with carrot noses, a language honed to denote Africa in all

its harshness, cruelty, and beauty. "Aardvark," "veld," and "wildebeest"-?these are the

words that Afrikaans has given to the world. As is "trek," of course: to migrate, to get

going, to yield to the fever of the horizon. Yes, in the language of the Enterprise, to boldly go

where no man has gone before. I write in Afrikaans, a language of wanderers and migrants, of

"trekkers," who trekked rather than submit to British rule, who trekked again when the British

occupied Natal in turn, who kept on doggedly trekking as the Free State and Transvaal and ail the other dreams fell to the juggernaut

of Empire. And finally, just when the smoke of war was clearing,

just when it seemed that things were finally looking up, just when Tranciatimi it seemed that there would be no need of further trekking, these #

ran hp imp nt migrants, these god-fearing people who had given the world vf 1 uc ?ih*?l

"Boer" and "spoor" and "commando" and "puff adder," embarked 6 W3yS p3Sl on their final and most ambitious journey. Inventing the word 3 13(! ? "apartheid," they proceeded to trek away from sanity and even bsbblC Of

" from reality itself.

And this thing, this big A, this abomination that strung barbed wire between us and the only country we ever knew or loved, has

made migrants of us all. How can we forget the freedom fighters, forced into exile or into that

other kind of exile from which there can be no return? How can we forget the men and women

who had to flee to fight another day, or the activists, harried by the security police (whose tactics were of course always extremely interesting)? And how could we forget the writers who had to abandon everything to escape persecution or hardship or any hint of kinship with

these bastards who were turning the country into a parody of all they had ever dreamed of or

believed? But we shouldn't forget the silent majority either, those who stayed behind, those

who suffered in a country that was becoming more and more like a foreign country every day.

They were the migrant workers with their passes designating them as temporary sojourners in the country of their birth. They were the vagrants and the dispossessed, but also those who

retreated into a kind of inner exile, a moral stupor where the sky was still as blue as it was on

90 Foreign Policy

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