It’s a funny time to think about national reading habits. I’ve been looking for escape pods, personally. Books that take me far from this particular time and zip code.
Perhaps riding the same wave, our friends at The Drift dedicated a recent issue to literature in translation. In a summary note, the editors laid a gauntlet for global readers. “What are writers and readers doing, and what should they be doing, to challenge or transcend Anglocentric literary culture?”
It’s a complicated question. By some metrics, work in translation has never been easier to find. Sites like Words Without Borders and The Dial have made a project of promulgating world literature. And a cursory survey suggests that titles from international publishers like Europa, Archipelago, or Fitzcarraldo Editions have become more common at your local (and even your airport) bookstores.
General consensus is that a few big literary events augured this shift: an early aughts “boom in Scandinavian crime fiction,” care of Stieg Larsson’s Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, and the respective publishing phenomenons of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels and Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle series. In different ways and spaces, these latter two series were both treated as epics. Zeitgeists of their own making. My Brilliant Friend was one of the first contemporary books in translation that I ever sought out, and I doubt I’m alone.
But despite the increased visibility of imported books and an arguable drift toward global reading habits, the industry has been slow to slake what looks like a hungry market.
In an excellent two-part newsletter published last fall, Ann Kjellberg observed that even as translated literature has grown more popular—with sales of translated fiction growing “by over twenty percent between 2021 and 2022, primarily driven by readers 35 and younger”—small niche publishers are often unable to reap the financial benefits. And it’s never been harder to make a living as a translator.
It’s also worth considering the way many Anglophone readers learn to engage with international work: as an educational or empathic tool. As The Drift editors put it, “in the domestic marketplace, foreign writers still seem burdened with the responsibility of broadening readers’ horizons and building their empathy—assuaging guilty American readers while also, of course, entertaining them.” Which is a heavy ask for a story, any way you spin it.
So what can the humble reader do to blow up the (literary) borders? Short answer: read more books in translation. Seek out a wide literary diaspora, beyond the Anglophonic comfort zone, and whenever possible support those international hubs and publishers with your dimes and dollars. When in doubt? Begin by browsing.
In New York, the beloved indie bookstore chain McNally Jackson is known for sorting their collection by region. Visitors will find French Literature next to Caribbean and Latin American Literature. It’s the kind of organizing principle that seduces on paper—especially if you’re on a mission to read more from a particular part of the world. For the purposeful explorer, there’s no better place to scout out, say, East African classics.
But the regionalizing has drawbacks, too. Multilingual writers, ex-pats, and refugees can be hard to pin down in siloed stacks. And as the novelist Yasmin Zaher put it in a sage Drift musing, to categorize a writer by their national identity can be reductive. “Is Nabokov an American writer? Is Fanon a French writer? Should Gibran sit with Sufi poetry or next to Said, or should Said be sorted with Fanon?”
For all its usefulness as a way to find more work in translation, it’s again worth considering how we’re introduced to that work. I wonder sometimes if lumping-by-nation can be a byproduct of that cruder way of reading, where the book is tasked to “broaden a horizon.”
This goes for language as much as nationality. Discussing the designations of literature in translation and/versus world literature, Zaher argues that authors of a particular language don’t necessarily share common cause.
“What does the world of Marcel Proust have to do with the world of Édouard Louis? How about Adania Shibli and Naguib Mahfouz, or Sally Rooney and Kurt Vonnegut? And why should literature in translation be considered a category in and of itself, grouping Nawal El Saadawi and Michel Houellebecq—widely known, respectively, as a Muslim feminist and an Islamophobic sexist, both brilliant—together on the one hand, and Percival Everett and Virginia Woolf on the other?”
Takeaway?
We should read beyond our given borders. But when we pick up a book from beyond our known world, we should ask why we’ve drawn those borders in the first place. At the bookstore and beyond.
Because after all, as Zaher puts it, “drawing borders in literature runs counter to what literature does at its best: narrowing in on the specific until it’s the universal that remains, disembodying the human experience.”
