[…] Translation matters. It always has, of course – and should you be interested in the many ways it can affect the reader’s response to a book, I recommend both Tim Parks’s essay collection Where I’m Reading From, in which he asks interesting questions about the global market for fiction, and Julian Barnes’s brilliant and questing 2010 essay, Translating Madame Bovary. But perhaps right now translation is more important than ever – for suddenly, foreign literature seems finally to be finding its place in Britain, an island where it has previously struggled to attract substantial numbers of readers. How did this happen? It’s hard to say, but perhaps it began, thinking back, with the Scandinavian crime sagas — by Stieg Larsson, Henning Mankell, Jo Nesbø et al – that we all began gobbling up in increasingly vast quantities around the turn of the century.

[…] “There are some books whose success is very local,” says Adam Freudenheim, the publisher of Pushkin Press, and the man who introduced me to the Russian writer Teffi (and to Gundar-Goshen). “But the best fiction almost always travels well, in my view.” For him, as for other presses that specialise in translated work (Harvill Secker, Portobello, And Other Stories, MacLehose Press and others), the focus is simply on publishing a great book; the fact that it is translated is “not the decisive thing”. And this, in turn, is how he accounts for the increasing popularity of foreign fiction – a shift that he, like Ann Goldstein, believes is real enough to turn out to be permanent. There are, quite simply, a lot of great translated books out there now, their covers appetising, their introductions informative, their translations (mostly) works of art in their own right. More.

See: The Guardian

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