THAT'S NOT NARROWING; IT'S WINNOWING

Lost in translation: the narrowing of the American mind (K.A. Dilday, May 1, 2003, Open Democracy)

The indifference of American public culture to the imaginative experience of other peoples is reflected in the dearth of work translated from foreign languages. As the world becomes more complex and its literary voices more varied and challenging, the damage of this complacency is not only to unheard, unread writers, but to the American mind itself. [...]

It is detrimental to deprive our intellectual exchange of the rich and varied stimuli that results from the infusion of different views, but, as Americans learned on 9/11, we need to know what is going on in the rest of the world as a matter of self-preservation. It shouldn?t be that, as an editor at Oxford University Press remarked drily during a seminar on world literature, ?Everything seems to take Americans by surprise.?

Politically, America has become infamous as the beast that feeds only its own appetite, but this isn?t surprising since, given the nature of the US publishing industry, our own appetites are all that we know. And there is much to fear from a global power whose people remain unaware of cultural contradiction, uninterested in the passions of others; contented with mother?s milk from birth to death.

About 3% of the fiction and poetry published in the United States in 1999 was translated (approximately 330 out of the total 11,570 fiction and poetry titles published). America compares unfavourably to almost every other country and most unfavourably to western Europe, the region closest to an ideological sibling.

There, Germany translates the most works - about six times as many as the US each year. Spain is close behind, while the French publishing industry exceeds the US by four times.

Without translations, Americans, who are notoriously monolingual, have access only to the perspectives of those who write and speak in English; thus the ideas of millions are lost to them.

An article from the Index Translationum, the global database of lingual exchange that Unesco has maintained since 1948, reports:

?Several writers writing in languages other than English be it French, Arabic or Hindi complain of the overwhelming influence wielded by the Anglo-Saxon publishing industry. There is a certain arrogance, they claim, on the part of British and American publishing houses. It is as if they consider anything published in another language to be automatically inferior to what appears in English. They are reluctant to translate foreign books. So widespread is the influence of English as a language that publishers in Japan will accept a book for translation only if it has first been translated in English, as if being accepted by the publishing industry there had added intrinsic value to the work. And then the translation is often done from the English version, not from the original.?

When the Nobel Prize for literature is announced each year, most people in the United States have never heard of the winner unless the writer is American or British. As ideas traverse borders with increasing ease, among some American intellectuals it seems to be a point of pride to stay focused solely on the minds at home. [...]

The writer Primo Levi wrote this in an essay about translation (translated by Zaia Alexander):

?Furthermore, there are many people who believe, more or less consciously, that a person who speaks another language is an outsider by definition, a foreigner, strange and, hence, a potential enemy, or at least a barbarian; that is, etymologically, a stutterer, a person who doesn't know how to speak, almost a nonperson. In this way, linguistic friction tends to turn into racial and political friction, another of our maledictions.?

Since 1970, more books have been translated into German than any other language. It may be that Germany?s moral pain has given Germans an active need to humanise the rest of the world. Shame is our bitter literary guide when intellectual rigour has failed. If only intellectual hunger would send us skidding to hinterlands in search of stimuli, we might avoid some corrosive human indecencies.

The peregrine voracity of the American appetite is infamous, the parochial nature of our reading tastes anomalous. As Steve Wasserman says, ?I find it an irony in a land when there is much chest thumping about the merits of globalisation that we are becoming an ever more provincial people.?

When the Soviet Union collapsed, the Berlin Wall came down and the US ascended, Francis Fukuyama speculated that it might mean ?the end of history.? The phrase well describes the domesticity that has landlocked the US publishing industry, and the intellectual and moral complacency that has allowed the American public to accept it.

This is an odd essay. The world has at long last accepted that the liberal democratic capitalism established several hundred years ago within the Anglosphere is the only sensible way to structure a society. Humanity is converging on a set of ideas that has a tradition here in America and Britain--a history, a music, an art, a literature, an architecture, a mythos, etc., etc., etc.. Yet K. A. Dilday can't understand why people read our books while we don't much read theirs. Mind you, we do have university departments that specialize in all these literatures, studying them like relics of the lost and/or failed civilizations that they represent. But, take for instance one example from the story: Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Mr. Marquez did indeed win a Nobel Prize. He also, mere months ago, reiterated his support for Fidel Castro. What exactly is it that Marxism still has to say to us that we need to hear? People like Mr.Marquez are not "potential enemies"; they are real enemies and deserve to be treated as no better than "nonpersons". It is not his race that is at issue, but his ideas--and his ideas are not worth reading. Posted by Orrin Judd at May 27, 2003 4:01 PM