By Emily Williams
NEW YORK: Parts one, two and three of my series on scouting looked at American efforts to sell American books overseas. Today, this fourth and final installment of the series looks at the other side of the equation and brings us to a question most scouts run into sooner or later, often posed by one of their foreign publishing clients: Why is it so hard for foreign authors to get published in the US? It’s clear to anyone working in international rights that the sophisticated marketplace involving scouts, rights sellers and foreign publishers that exists to get American books out into the world does not exist to the same degree in the other direction.
There are a number of explanations for this phenomenon, very few of which have to do with stereotypes of American readers as being culturally insulated or lacking curiosity about the outside world.
It is well known that placing a foreign book with a US editor can be devilishly difficult. First, there are the unforgiving economic calculations that publishers face in taking a translation to market. Rather than go into those here, I defer to my fellow Publishing Perspectives contributor Chad Post, publisher of Open Letter Books, who has written more knowledgeably than I could ever hope to on this subject on his blog, Three Percent.
And while there are, indeed, a number of small, independent presses doing great work bringing translated authors to the US, including Open Letter, New Directions, Other Press, Melville House, Europa Editions, Archipelago, Graywolf, and others, their business models tend to be different, often relying on some form of outside support — be it academic or philanthropic — from the bigger commercial houses. For the purposes of this article, which looks at the submissions and acquisitions side of the market, my focus is on the large scale houses that compete for high profile submissions and are not always actively seeking out translations as part of their publishing mission.
Apart from economics, the often cited reason for the difficult of placing translations with American publishers is the limited number of US editors who speak a foreign language. This is indeed an obstacle. Rachel Kahan, a senior editor at the Putnam, says, “There doesn’t seem to me to be as concerted an effort to bring [foreign language] authors to the US as there is to bring UK authors to the US, but I think a lot of that is just the language barrier.”
One remedy is for a publisher to prepare a good sample translation — with an emphasis here on the word good. Still, points out Kahan, “It costs a lot to have something translated and get it gussied up and ready for the American market. They have to decide, is it really a book that’s likely to find a US publisher anyway?”
A vicious cycle develops where the difficulty of placing books in the US makes it less likely foreign publishers and agents will invest in packaging their authors to submit here, which makes it harder for US editors to develop an understanding of foreign markets and what authors might be the best match for their audience. This, in turn, arguably contributes to the scattershot nature of publishing translations here and the chances that the books that do get published will find success.
That said, the issue is more complex, and in defense of the Americans, despite the cliché, I have found that we’re not the only country with language barriers. I would argue there aren’t necessarily more Dutch or Italian or Russian editors than there are in the United States who have enough of a command of, say, Spanish, to evaluate a manuscript. European countries may have old colonial connections or regional affinities that encourage some cross-pollination, but the ideal of a market that provides equal access to writers from any language or region is hard to find (France, with its strict cultural protections, might come closest).
So by what standards are Americans being judged? By the fact that a high percentage of editors in other countries do speak English well enough to read and evaluate a manuscript. In fact, for many, that’s their primary job, and one they may have been performing for decades. That, quite simply, is the difference.
There has been a hegemony for years of English-language books being translated into many other languages, a cultural phenomenon comparable (though much smaller in scale) to US dominance of the worldwide film market. Bestselling American authors like Michael Crichton and John Grisham and Danielle Steele and Stephen King have, in translation, reliably topped bestseller lists around the world. As the market for matching these authors to publishers abroad matured, it opened the door to less commercial writers and other genres (in nonfiction, for example, American business books continue to be in high demand).
A certain savvy in picking the right American books to translate developed into a valuable editorial skill in markets abroad. Imprints and publishing strategies were then established to capitalize on books in translation. Foreign rights turned into a profit center for US publishers, and scouting agencies sprang up to help navigate the increasingly complex marketplace.
The rising fortunes of US books abroad coincides with the rise of American pop culture in general, but also has to be partly attributed to a strong culture of commercial fiction (and the editorial skills that evolved to serve these books) that, until quite recently, simply didn’t exist in many other countries. A foreign editor I worked with once compared US commercial fiction to Hollywood blockbusters: any one book might be better or worse overall, but there’s a certain level of craftsmanship you can depend on.
There is no comparably mature translation market for any one language in the English speaking world, and the fact that books coming into the American market come from many different countries and languages makes it harder for editors here to develop the expertise in what any market has to offer, and which books from that country have the best shot of appealing to American readers. The books that are sold for translation here are more likely to come through the handful of US agents with close ties to one region or another, who are themselves usually working through professional relationships with particular agents or publishers abroad. What books by foreign authors that end up crossing an American editor’s desk, then, depends in no small part on chance and good connections. Rachel Kahan, a Senior Editor at Putnam who reads fluently in Spanish, admits, “If they don’t have a US agent and they aren’t being conspicuously packaged for the US sale, which is the case a lot of the time, I tend to luck into things.”
There are some instances where the absence of an American agent offers a savvy editor the advantage of speed, but in most cases American representation makes things easier.
“Not all editors in the business have relationships with their colleagues overseas or with foreign agents, so if there’s an American on board, I think in some cases it lends the project a little more visibility,” said Kahan. “And also if there’s an American agent there’s usually a translation or a partial translation of the book itself. That [US] subagent will have packaged it in a way that’s the most accessible and maximizes its potential for the American market. Whereas when it’s been an author that I’ve discovered, then I’m doing all of that work myself. [I'm] the one saying, ‘You really have to trust me here, I think this is going to work, I’m staking my reputation on it.’”
In Kahan’s experience it is the established authors that most often get picked up by US agents who can offer the kind of treatment that helps them sell. ”Carlos Ruiz Zafón has a US agent and is presented to publishers in pretty much the same way any big bestselling author would be. The people who are debuts or who haven’t been published in the US, a lot of them don’t have those kinds of agents or those kinds of relationships and there’s no one really promoting them to US publishers.”
As mentioned before, foreign books with a good sample English translation have an advantage, as they can be treated more like the domestic submissions that make up the lion’s share of most US editors’ lists. ”It’s a lot easier because you can share it the same way you would any other project,” explains Kahan. “You can share it with people in your paperback division, you can share it with people in marketing, share it with other editors, to get other reads.” A compelling sample in English that gives a good sense of the book’s strengths can also be a great tool in finding publishers in other countries, because it gives the author access to the extensive network of editors in other countries around the world who acquire books from the English-language markets. (It is easier to find a German editor who reads English, for example, than one who reads Mandarin or Croatian.)
For literary editors, even when a rare sample translation exists, the decision more often comes down to personal recommendations. Robert Weil, an Executive Editor at Norton, is fluent in German but has also published authors in translation from numerous languages he doesn’t speak. In those cases, “I can’t read the book so I have to go on reports from people and the reputation of the person overseas,” he explains. “I know many of the great translators in the different languages and if a book comes to me in Spanish I will call up translator Edith Grossman, whom I’ve published, and say ‘Edie, what do you think of this book? Do you think this writer has merit?’”
Again, this system tends to favor established authors — though, to be fair, there are many established authors to choose from simply because so few are likely to have already found a US publisher.
“It’s an especially brutal market out there for new authors,” Weil notes. “You generally don’t have the author in the country, and with the collapse of so many reviews it makes it even tougher because you have no one really beating the drums here.”
Weil’s strategy is to pick prestige projects that he can turn into literary events. ”I signed up the complete works of Isaac Babel and it took me years to put that together, and that was a huge success about 8-9 years ago. [Or] this book The Greek Poets which I commissioned eight years ago, half of the 700-800 page book is Greek poetry which has never appeared before in English. There’s a 2000 year tradition of Greek poetry which no one knew about. I love that book. I think in a year I’ll be at 10,000 copies of a $40 book. I did a big fat book and you have to pay attention to it. Then I can separate the book into little books. I’m going to be living happily ever after with these Greek poets.”
However, on a more commercially-minded list like Putnam’s, a book is more likely to be judged strictly on its potential to appeal to US readers. “I’ve always worked for very overtly commercial houses,” says Kahan. “None of the houses I’ve worked at have a mandate to go out and search for world authors, but we’ve certainly been able to publish some of them, and publish them well, using exactly the same formula as we use for our English language authors. About 30% of my authors are not American — a fair number of them are from the UK, which is the same language but a different culture. We’re able to make these people who are not Americans work in the American market using pretty much the same marketing and the same kind of packaging. You have to find the right book that is going to appeal to the audience that your imprint serves.”
Norton, true to its heritage as an independent publisher of serious literary titles, has more of a cultural mission, though in the end the criteria that determine what Weil publishes in translation are not so different from the rest of his list. “Norton’s had a commitment to translations forever,” Weil recounts. “Polly Norton used to translate Rilke herself in the 1930s, so Norton knows how to do translated books. But you still have to be very careful assessing the market. I think it’s the same with any book, it’s just a lot harder.”
This difficulty restricts the number of translations Weil is able to take on, while he struggles with the fact that this leaves American readers without access to some excellent writers. “I always feel almost bereft that so much great literature is being ignored,” says Weil. “If you were to sit down and comprehend how much we’re missing in English you would have nightmares. You can’t really worry about what you’re missing, you can only do as much as what you can do.”
As for what makes a translation more likely to succeed in the market, well, the factors are going to sound very familiar. First, the book’s author should be able to help the publisher promote the book, preferably in English. As an example, Weil mentions Words Without Borders: Writings from the Middle East, an anthology coming up in 2010 edited by author and television political commentator Reza Aslan. “I’m incredibly excited about that book,” says Weil, “not only is the literature gorgeous, Reza Aslan is a great promoter and he’s on television. That will be very good for this book. This is a case where we may be in great shape.”
Kahan emphatically agrees, citing authors Marek Halter, the French-speaking author of religious historical fiction whose books she acquired while working at Crown, and Luis Miguel Rocha, the Portuguese author of the thrillers The Last Pope and The Holy Bullet, which she publishes at Putnam.
“Both speak reasonably good English and are very charismatic and very interesting,” says Kahan, “and in both cases they came to New York, they met our sales people, they were involved in the publicity of the book. And, yes, that made a really big difference.”
These success stories have given Kahan the impetus to continue to look for great authors from abroad. “I know it’s very often said, Americans don’t read books in translation, and publishers aren’t interested in foreign writers, and that is not the case,” she asserts. “We’re not buying as much in other languages as our counterparts overseas are, but we are definitely buying them and there are certainly ones who break out. The first book I bought by Marek Halter [Sarah] has sold over 200,000 copies. They do work. They’re harder to make work, there’s no doubt about that, but there’s this idea that American publishers just throw up a wall and don’t take a chance on writers who don’t write in English, and I don’t think that’s the case.”
It’s true that, lately, there has been more diversity on bestseller lists around the world. And, it’s important to note, many of those same books that have been international hits — such as those by Stieg Larsson, Carlos Ruiz Zafón, Muriel Barbery and Roberto Bolaño — and have sold equally well in the US.
Despite the perceived difficulties, Kahan is optimistic about the future of publishing translations in the US. ”We’re definitely actively looking for authors. We don’t ever want to leave a stone unturned. At Putnam we’ve had a really good experience with [translation], it’s something that I’ve really enjoyed as an editor. The rewards are the same — the rewards of finding a really good story and an author who really speaks to you, and working with that author, all of those things are the same no matter what language the author happens to speak. And with translation you’re able to bring something to people that maybe they wouldn’t otherwise be getting.”
Emily Williams is a former literary scout who currently works as an independent publishing consultant.
DISCUSS: Is the Cliche of the Culturally Insulated American a Myth?
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Is the Cliche of the Culturally Insulated American a Myth?
6 months ago
[...] lead article by Emily Williams looks at the question of why so few foreign writers make it into print in the US. [...]
Mark
6 months ago
As someone who was born outside the US, came to this country as an adult and still writes and publishes books in English, I am curious about your definitions. What is your definition of a foreign author? Someone who resides abroad, like Hemingway did? Or someone who was born abroad like Nabokov did? I guess you mean someone who is writing in a language other than English? Those people are not necessarily foreign. They may as well be American citizen. Other than that, I enjoyed the article.
Richard Nash
6 months ago
Emily, and Ed in his companion piece, and Mark just above, are all indicating how limiting our definitions of transcultural curiosity are. It is arguable that it is more important to embrace entire cultures by having them live amongst us than than having twice as many books from that culture be translated in published amongst us. The ignorance of that man from the Nobel committee living in a very homogenous society lecturing America on interculturality was just shocking.
Tyler
6 months ago
Mark, since the title is “The Translation Gap” and the article is specifically about non-English speaking authors and works in translation, I’m not sure why you’re curious about definitions.
“I guess you mean someone who is writing in a language other than English.” Yes. Obviously.
Mark
6 months ago
Richard, good point. Cultural diversity is a rich meal for the soul.
Mark
6 months ago
Tyler, I questioned (but not objected to) the word “foreign.” There are thousands or maybe tens of thousands of people who write in a language other then English and still reside in America.
Kim Richards
6 months ago
I don’t believe most publishers exclude non-American authors. It’s a matter of the manuscript being submitted in English. If the author is from the UK or Australia, there’s not much problem. But if they’re in a non-English speaking country, the burden of translation is on the author prior to submission. Both Damnation Books and Eternal Press have authors from around the world but in all cases the story was submitted in English.
Tyler
6 months ago
Yes, Mark, that’s true, but the article is unambiguously about foreign authors and bringing their work from the international publishing market to the US market. At absolutely no time does the author of the article talk about US residents who are either foreign-born or write in a language other than English, so your question seems either disingenuous or just another attempt to derail a discussion about foreign authors and the value of their work.
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Daniel E. Pritchard
6 months ago
Aside from the aspects of hegemony, don’t forget about the practical issues of scale and market: the US is roughly the half the population of Europe, but it and has a wholly contained, monolingual literary market therein. No national / linguistic group in Europe compares (even Russia is less than 150 million people). If Missouri spoke a different language than Massachusetts (sometimes we think it does), and Illinois from California, etc., then translation and multilingualism would be not just commonplace but necessary for practical everyday matters of governance. Comparing a multilingual and heterogeneous continent with centuries of inter-cultural relationships to a single mono-lingual and geographically isolated nation is disingenuous. I’m not excusing the state of translation, and I both support ant read translation, but this stereotype of Americans is a myth.
I wrote about this myth at my site:
http://danpritch.blogspot.com/2009/12/literature-in-translation-bumpkin.html
JP Smith
6 months ago
When I was published by Grove Press back in the 80s, because I read French I was one of the imprint’s “scouts” for fiction from France. I was paid $100 per report, and my job came to an end when I was sent a quirky little novel called La Salle de Bain by a new writer named Jean-Philippe Toussaint. I loved the book and said so, but I was torn because, really, I was also supposed to be finding fiction that would succeed in this country. So, sadly, I suggested that this would be a very tough sell.
A week or so later Dutton picked it up, and I was back to being just a simple novelist once again. But I remain a fan of Toussaint to this day.
Rick Rofihe
6 months ago
I am a Canadian-born writer and publisher who started off slowly in the U.S., but within months of receiving my green card (courtesy President Ronald Reagan’s amnesty program) I was on my way to having my fiction appear in such places as The New Yorker, having a short-story collection published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, and receiving my first legal paycheck — from Columbia University’s graduate writing program, where I’d begun teaching. Now, twenty or so years later, I try to keep an eye out — both as an interested reader and in my role as a literary publisher — for foreign-born American-domiciled writers (writing and/or publishing in English, my only language) to connect with, but I’ve found very few….
Mark
6 months ago
I was hoping to enhance the discussion, Tyler, rather than derailing it. If the author of the article didn’t mention something, I felt free to add my opinion. That’s what the “add comment” button is for. N’est-ce pas?
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John T. Cullen
6 months ago
The US is a marketplace, like any other. The best way to remedy the problem is to publish in digital form, which is much cheaper. The marketplace will correct itself. US readers over the years have shown a considerable hunger for good foreign-language fiction in translation, from Hermann Hesse to Jorge Luis Borges and many other authors around the world. The extreme cost of print publication has crippled the ability of US authors to “get published” by the six conglomerates in NYC who run the US industry. But again, it’s purely an economic problem of supply and demand.
Michael Reynolds
6 months ago
I’d like to point out one inaccuracy in Emily’s otherwise rather complete analysis. “I would argue there aren’t necessarily more Dutch or Italian or Russian editors than there are in the United States who have enough of a command of, say, Spanish, to evaluate a manuscript.”
The vast majority of editors working at European houses speak and read in more than one language. Many houses have distinct editorial divisions—foreign and, say, french for french houses. The editors working in the foreign division will typically read in two or three different languages in addition to their native language. And, given that the publication of writers from abroad is more common in all of Europe, even if an editor cannot read a book in the language in which it was written, he or she may be able to read it one of other languages in which it has already been published. That many (most?) editors at US houses do not read in any language other English is not so much a clichè but one of the main obstacles to the publication of foreign fiction in America.
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Emily W.
6 months ago
Thanks to everyone for reading and commenting. @Mark, I understand the word foreign can sound a little jarring, in the publishing world it’s used pragmatically to mean not American. For the purposes of this article, I was concerned with people from other countries writing in languages other than English, as @Tyler says. These writers are much less likely to have representation or connections inside US publishing, which leads to the dynamic described above – though I appreciate the wider conversation about multicultural diversity that you and @Richard Nash introduced. @Michael Reynolds, I assure you I’m well aware of the structure of European houses, I worked closely with several very large such houses in my years as a literary scout. As I point out in my piece, the editors that work in the divisions devoted to foreign books generally have an excellent command of English in addition to their native language, and sometimes French as well, with German as a distant third. It was my experience, however, that command of languages besides English was not much more widespread than in the US. There are also more editors in New York who read French than any other foreign language, with a scattering of German and other languages as well, and these editors can of course evaluate books once they’ve been translated into one of the additional languages they speak (this is why France plays a valuable role as a gateway to authors from many countries, a role I personally think the US has the potential to play and wish it would play more often). When it comes to other languages, however, like Japanese or Mandarin or Arabic or Turkish or even Spanish and Italian, I found the scouts were able to provide a valuable role if we could read and report on a book from one of these regions because the international editors we worked with not only didn’t have anyone in house who read in those languages but had no readers they worked with on a regular basis and whose judgment they could trust.
The main difference with US houses is that there is no equivalent to these divisions devoted to translated books, for all the reasons I go into in the article, so a foreign book on submission is competing for editors’ attention with all the US submissions underway at the same time. Since there is often only one editor with the language skills to read and evaluate the foreign manuscript, that person cannot share the material and get additional support and has to become the book’s sole champion, as Rachel Kahan describes so vividly. This is more of a risk for the individual editor and it is also simply harder to get such an acquisition approved. (And no, we are not the only ones in the world with this problem, I ran into similar roadblocks in other countries – Japan, for instance – whenever a publisher did not have editors specifically tasked with acquiring for translation.)
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Michael Reynolds
6 months ago
My feeling is that command of a second, third or fourth language among editors is more common in European houses than it is in American ones. But, honestly, it is only on anecdotal evidence that I base this affirmation. And your point is well taken: single editors’ command of second or third languages is less important than having a structure within the house itself that focuses on foreign work. As we all know, much of our work depends on creating and nurturing personal relationships. The publication of a single Turkish author, for example, can open the doors to a wealth of interesting work from that country if one has the time, the support, and the means to nurture relationships with said author, his or her agent and editor, people at the original publishing house, editors that have published the same work in other countries, organizations with which the author may be affiliated, critics who have written about the work in question, translation funding agencies, etc. etc. But an editor cannot do this kind of work alone, in a vacuum, without the support of a “division” dedicated to the search for foreign books.
Whether it is editors’ polyglotism or the lack of a structure supporting the search and publication of foreign work that is the problem, it is the industry itself that needs fixing. The issue is not the American reader’s infamous insularity or cultural isolationism—a hypothesis, by the way, I find to be nonsense, a cliché, one that, at least in my experience at Europa Editions, is largely unfounded.
If these issues were addressed in US publishing, not only would it enrich our reading possibilities, but this market could, as you suggest, be an extraordinary gateway to foreign literature, one that would be much broader and much less conditioned by “secondary”, i.e. historical or political factors, than any of the existing European “gateways.”
Thanks for this article and the many considerations it has provoked.
sid
6 months ago
Why is it so difficult for many foreign writers, writing in English, to find a publisher in the US. In their case language is not an issue, it is the story. Americans like stories about Americans.
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Vern
6 months ago
Let’s not get too carried away with complimenting ourselves on how culturally open America is. I walk into Barnes and Noble and I see a pitifully limited selection of books; just the other week this site had an editorial on how Open Letter press is yet to sell more than 3000 copies of any one edition. Even the travel literature sections, written by native English speakers about foreign lands are pretty feeble.
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Al Kalar
6 months ago
Good article, Emily.
Sid may have something. We at AKW Books published an excellent English translation of a best-selling Russian spy novel in 4 eBook formats (thanks for the plug of eBooks, John). The translation is so good, that it’s hard to believe it was originally written in Russian (the owner of the English rights is of Russian heritage reared in the USA). The title sucked (probably made sense in Russian), so we renamed it “KGB in High Heels”.
It sold 600,000 copies in Russia and Israel (Israel???) and was made into a 4-part TV miniseries in Russia. Yes, the story is that good.
It’s been greeted with a huge yawn by the American public. Maybe at $4.45 it’s not priced high enough to get respect? Or is it, as Sid said, that it’s not about an American (the protagonist is a Russian cultural reporter)?
Ramdane ISSAAD
6 months ago
Hello,
I’m a french novelist, I wrote my last text FAULT LINES directly in american, you could read it for free at this adress :
http://rushes.com.free.fr/FAULT%20LINES.htm
It’s impossible for me to find a publisher for it in France. PLEASE HELP ME, I need your advises.
Thanks
Ramdane ISSAAD (Wikipedia)
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5 months ago
[...] The Translation Gap [...]
Victoria Dixon
2 weeks ago
Great post on a sad topic. It hurts to think how much American readers have missed.