booklab

(…)

Knapp neun Prozent aller Neuerscheinungen in deutschen Verlagen sind Übersetzungen. Davon entfallen etwa zwei Drittel auf die Belletristik. Zwei von drei Übersetzungen stammen von englischen Originalen ab, weitere rund zwölf Prozent aus dem Französischen. Das bedeutet, dass Übersetzungen aus allen anderen Sprachen insgesamt gerade einmal ein Fünftel aller Übersetzungen ausmachen.

Außerdem nimmt die Zahl der Übersetzungen ins Deutsche im langjährigen Durchschnitt kontinuierlich ab. Weitgehend unbemerkt hat Deutschland auch seinen Ruf als wichtigstes Übersetzungsland in jüngster Zeit an Frankreich abgeben müssen. Diese und ähnliche Daten deuten auf ein vertracktes Problem hin.

Stellt man sich die kulturelle Kommunikation zwischen unterschiedlichen Ländern und Sprachräumen als überaus komplexes Nervensystem vor, dann gehören die Übersetzungen von Büchern klarerweise zu den Hauptsträngen der Kommunikation. Komplexe Ideen und komplizierte Geschichten reisen meist nur über Sprachgrenzen hinweg, wenn sie auch als Übersetzungen angeboten werden. (…)

Die ganze Geschichte hier.

After a pause of a few months - and lots of strategizing, research and development and just a huge load of regular work, this blog is back in operation. So expect to find posts and a few improvements here on a regular basis again.

The quick link of today points to the “50 Fiction Authors Whose Work Had the Greatest Impact on European Reading Markets in 2009“.

While we are fully aware of the leading trio - with Stieg Larsson, Stephenie Meyer and Dan Brown -, the report and analysis carries quite a few surprises, too.

Only 21 of the 50 strongest authors write in English! Among the top 10, we find 3 Swedish crime authors. And we can deduct a number of insights on European reading markets - and how the reader’s curiosity seems to be much more substantial than conventional media reporting has it!

Following up on the very successful and fruitful debates at last year’s „On Translation“ conference at the Vienna book fair Buch Wien, we prepare for a next move with the “On Translation” conference and “Diversity Report” 2009 and want to encourage your participation and involvement.

Presentations and debates will focus on reliable information sources and professional tools for analyzing and better understanding translation markets, and on the relevance of publishing to cultural diversity.
A new “Author’s and Publisher’s Exchange” will link between the general debate and the requirements of publishing professionals.

The goal is to have, with the conference, a professional platform for organizations and for publishing professionals interested in translation and cultural diversity, while the report is meant to provide data and insight as a starting point for a well informed debate.

When? November 13, 2009
Where? Buch Wien 09 Messe Wien
Full details, registration and preliminary program: here

More about Buch Wien 09: here

As for the “Diversity Report 2009” please find a detailed preview here.

Please circulate the information about both the conference and the upcoming report and/or link to www.wischenbart.com/translation from your website, blog or twitter!

See you in Wien in November

Together with Miha Kovac of the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, we did a survey on book bestseller lists in seven major European markets over the past 12 months The top 40 writers divide into 13 writing in English, and 27 writing in other – European – languages, with Swedish (8), French (5) as the strongest, beating Dutch and German (each 4), Italian (3), Spanish (2), and Brazilian Portuguese (1). Not a single writer to be translated from a non-European language could make it into the top 40 author’s charts (in previous years, however, the Japanese Haruki Murakami, or Turkish Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk may have spoiled this exclusively Euro-centric pattern, yet only slightly). Not even a Central European or a Russian author is among the top listed. However within the English realm, 2 authors with clearly non-Western bearings and agendas are among those who met with the largest reading audiences across the continent, Afghanistan born Khaled Hosseini and India born Man Booker Prize Winner of 2008, Aravind Adiga.

More to this here.

A separate, yet related piece by us has been published by the Frankfurt Book Fair here.

It is rare, at least in my observation, to see various pretty serious people - essayists, journalists of high quality newspapers, editors - really in rage to the point of denouncing all (presumed) adversaries squarely as ‘childish’, ‘anti-journalists’ and ‘filthy’, oh, and yes, ‘user generated content’ is called ‘loser generated content’ because alledgedly in websites such as delicio.us, only “3 percent of the posts” refer to  ”news that shape global events”, and the rest is about “making coffee in Japan and the quality of seats in airplanes”.

Since a few weeks, major newspapers in Germany seem to fight for their very survival (and, I must add, use more latin proverbs than normally in years), as they feel threatened by the “Web 0.0” (the double zero alluding to the popular shortcut for a toilet, in fact).

These are the facts and the background: A German court ruled that owners of a website (or blog) can be liable for all posted comments - which resulted in the prestiguous Sueddeutsche Zeitung to allow postings on their website only during office hours, meaning that readers can comment on articles only Monday through Friday between 8am and 7 pm. Freedom of expressions has clear limits: No night shifts or weekend hours.

In another - pretty much unexpected - ruling this morning, a civil case of Sueddeutsche and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) against the online news portal and aggregator Perlentaucher was rejected by the court of appeal in Frankfurt. Perlentaucher (for whom I write a ca. monthly column about culture, books and the digital world), among other things, produces summaries of the daily cultural pages and book reviews of major German newspapers for a newsletter and their website, and sells those pieces to an online bookstore - which infringes, according to Sueddeutsche and FAZ their copyright. The court turned the argument down, explaining that such summaries cannot be interdicted because anyone has the right to publish a summary of a work (e.g. a newspaper article), even with a commercial purpose, provided the summary has its own “creative substance”.

Now the interesting part of the controvery is, at least in my view, absolutely not about copyright, but about culture.  Only an argument about two contrary concepts of culture is good enough for all this fury.

The debate started in fact when in October, member of the publishing board of FAZ, Frank Schirrmacher, an icon of German conservative journalism, had argued “How the Internet Changes Man”, stating - this is already his follow up explanation of the original essay - why printed newspapers have a “purpose” in society as gatekeepers for reliable information and reading, hence are among the pillars of culture (as opposed to the pillows that couch potatoes and web surfers are sitting on, I suppose).

“The newspaper”, Schirrmacher argues, “lasts for at least 24 hours, and with its opinon pieces and reviews, it claims even to have a value for following generations.”

Now, this is an interesting point, as it says that durability, life time, is the measure for cultural value.

Two answers to this. First the Austrian version, which means to point to Karl Kraus, the 20th century critic and aggressive essayist against - newspapers, because of their sloppiness, bad language and shortsightedness (’only for 24 hours!’); by such, he became the harshest benchmark for quality journalism, including for the FAZ. Kraus would never ever have thought for a second of newspapers as a guarantee for cultural value, as opposed to books.

This is the other answer: We see in this stunning German controversy a carbon copy of all those pointless debates over centuries why - please fill in your newest media beast - photography, radio, TV, the internet, comic books threaten the book, culture, civilized life.

At once, we find newspapers among the pillars, not the pillows of culture. How come? Remember the odd word of ‘nothing is less valid than yesterday’s paper’!

The German controversy on culture reflects, of course, the dramatic aging of newspaper readers, the loss of revenues from classified ads, and the competition from all those new actors who are more successful at the emerging online market place.

But the real offense comes from their younger readers whom the newspapers seem not to trust anymore. So they yell at them, in despair.

According to them, the web is  “also a medium that growingly makes not-reading or alsmost not reading possible” (Schirrmacher); those among the readers who post unfitting comments on the newspapers’ websites are “leisure activists with a little scum on their lips” (Sueddeutsche), or, in today’s FAZ: “Every serious blogger will change sides”.

So the argument points at a war - of the newspapers against a portion of their own audience. A civil war for the newsroom?

I guess not that much. It is the culture of the 19th century - where ‘culture’ equals a few knowledgeable, elder men (not women) educating the mass - against what? No, not some bland 21st century thing - but rather against the 18th century, that was much more experimental and laid the foundations of modern democracy, learning societies, peer review (Yes! Those interested readers giving their opinion on a piece, and the result is debate and, yes, often enough, squabble), yet turned from then small clubs and societies to the global mass sociteties of today, fragmented, volatile, dynamic as they are.

This points to a real and substantial cultural divide. A clash of cultures, not only in Germany. Interesting! Let’s see what’s going on next.

Last week I had the pleasure to spend a few days in Ljubljana, Slovenia, and Zagreb, Croatia, talking to publishers and writers on a trip with book people mostly from germany, to prepare (a) next year’s Leipzig book fair where Croatia is the guest of honour, and (b) next year’s brand new Vienna book fair BuchWien where I have the pleasure and duty to prepare for a Central Europe / Tranlsation / Cultural Diversity program.

Being pretty familiar with Zagreb for a long time, which looks a lot like my native town of Graz, I was struck at first by the massive monuments (I had just forgotten about them, but to be frank, they are very much similar in Graz - apologies

Anyhow, the point is how a bit more than a decade after the wars of secession within collapsing Yugoslavia, Croatia seems ready (and ambitious) to become one more normal ’small’ country and culture, yet it is still struggling to impose that normalty as opposed to the shadows of the past.

A major breakthrew, politically, was when former general Gotovina was seized for trial at the Hague tribunal as of last year, after long behind the scenes negociations - while oddly enough, at the beautiful Dalmatian coast, where Gotovina fans and nationalists are strongest, the tourist industry started to really take off.

I asked a publishers friend of mine about this oddity of political geography, and he shrugged, saying that he just does not know. Along the coast, where, aside from Dubrovnik and Split, little war fare had occured, people voted ‘national’ (just as in those provinces of Slavonia, where indeed Serb had committed the severest war crimes), while in former Krajna,  in ever disputed Istria, and, well, understandably, in urban Zagreb, most non-nationalist votes were cast.

One writer had become famous from Croatia recently, telling about the war in Bosnia, Miljenko Jergovic, but he does not appear in public anymore. Instead, I met Zoran Feric, who has been translated recently, in a beautiful club run by a couple of women (booksa).

We’ve also been introduced to several of the local literary publishers, to Nenad Popovic of Durieux, an old friend indeed - who, walking us to Booksa club, had shown us the villa of former icon Tilla Durieux after whom he had named his publishing company (in the 1990s, when people just had forgotten that she had been with partizan resistance - what an absurd twist and irony in those Tudjman years of Croatia), or Fraktura.

Earlier that day, we had walked into a really great and huge book store, Profil - and almost, being a group of almost 20, driven out all regular customers - with a really substantial foreign language section (I still can’t manage my picture upload button, but promise to show a few photographs of all this soon).

Oh, and we had lunch and dinner with 2 rivalry publishers’ associations, learning from György Dalos, our Hungarian guide to Croation book country, that in Hungary they had successfully founded 8 (!) competing book associations by now (and I admit, such things are among my favourites), so I promise that I will tell you more about all of this soon, and bring pictures for testimony as well.

So today, more than 48 hours before the official release date, the New York Times publishes a first review of Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows - and guess what, aside from, of course, not revealing the end (which, also a matter of course, everyone interested could see already for a few days everywhere on the web as reveiled by cohorts of Harry ’spoilers’ who posted a photographed early bird copy of the book), was full of praise for the ingenuitity of Mrs. Rowling’s art of story telling:
“J. K. Rowling’s monumental, spellbinding epic, 10 years in the making, is deeply rooted in traditional literature and Hollywood sagas — from the Greek myths to Dickens and Tolkien to “Star Wars.” And true to its roots, it ends not with modernist, “Soprano”-esque equivocation, but with good old-fashioned closure: a big-screen, heart-racing, bone-chilling confrontation and an epilogue that clearly lays out people’s fates.” And, if this is not enough, here the reviewer, MICHIKO KAKUTANI, goes on: This same magpie talent has enabled her to create a narrative that effortlessly mixes up allusions to Homer, Milton, Shakespeare and Kafka, with silly kid jokes about vomit-flavored candies, a narrative that fuses a plethora of genres (from the boarding-school novel to the detective story to the epic quest) into a story that could be Exhibit A in a Joseph Campbell survey of mythic archetypes.”

Wow!

By the fact that, sitting in Vienna, Austria, I am in no position to walk over to some New York book store and pick up the book way before official delivery, as the NYT seems to have done, I can only humbly hint at that magic that HP has brought to the book world. I wrote a small piece about this in Perlentaucher, in German, and these are the main thoughts:

For sure, HP will have changed the world of publishing and book retail like no single book before, but with pretty mixed results for various actors:

1. We learned over the past few weeks that studies on reading habits of youth point out that even kid who absorbed high level doses of HP won’t necessarily read other books as well;

2. While a few, like JK Rowling herself and her original publisher Bloomsbury (very deservedly, I think), wholesalers and some marketers earned a lot of money, but for many others it was more of a rollercoaster, or playing at a casino, with the highest risk due to sky rocketing fees for every right sold that could be attached to HP

3. Those mega marketing pipelines that have been build around HP for over 10 years are ready for more fuel now - and nobody will care, if that is to benefit books, or games, or whatever - so it is not necessarily a winning scheme for book lovers

4. Small indie book stores all over the place are likely not to get rich, due to discounts, or even, in countires with fixed book prices like Germany, Austria, France, a first tsunami comes with the (flexibly priced) original English language edition, which will be a hard reality check to pricing discipline everywhere, bringing up my next point;

5. English original editions have learned to fly across language barriers as if they traveled on broomsticks, which is good, I guess, as it show’s people’s ability and readiness to go for what they want, and depend less on those established content channels, but which brings ever more competition to the established, if you wish ‘old fashioned’ book trade;

6. From now on, even if that is not entirely new either, there will be ‘books’ - and those other books, meaning, those rocketing to the sky, on a global scale, and those many many other titesls that travels slowly, to limited readerships, and honestly, we shouldn’t expect that those completely diverging entities can live under one and the same economical parameters, meaning: I am deeply sceptical if for these many books (and their publishers, and the related enthousiastic book sellers) one will expect to earn money.

I don’t need to tell you more than the fact that I lost almost my entire virtual capital on the betting scheme for the Ingeborg Bachman award (see previous post), while the crowd at large narrowed their focus in an impressive curve steadily onto the winner Lutz Seiler (hence giving up in continuous, yet opportunistic - oh yes! - moves on its initial hero who was PeterLicht, a writer performer who wouldn’t reveil his face to cameras).

In fact we know about the impressive likelyhood of such crowds to demonstrate their collective wisdome since the mid / late 1990s when similar betting schemes proved to be usually more successful e.g. in predicting the outcome of general elections.

But what does that mean to all of us experts, in one field or another! Hélas, aren’t we happy to be asked for our insights every once in a while nevertheless? Lucky us.

Last night, I was invited by Gerfried Sperl of Der Standard newspaper, to sit on a panel discussing the UNESCO declaration on cultural diversity, together with Unesco’s Austrian representative Gabriele Eschig, writer Marlen Streeruwitz and Green MP Wolfgang Zinggl.

Of course, between us, we considered the Unesco convention to be a positive move in the right direction, given all the obvious changes in the cultural sphere.

But only then, during our debate, I started to realize - and was puzzled - how clearly a line separated two different approaches to its value and perspectives.

Marlen pointed out probably most clearly how she welcomed the declaration as the return of politics into a field that was recently taken over by brutal market forces, and how she expected now small island of protected, secured land to emerge within the general turmoil. For her, in an analyses of power positions, the goal of the declaration was to help those who, like artists, or other minoritarian groups, speak from low power positions, to retain control over ‘their’ cultures and hence their ‘territories’ (while those market driven forces tend to erase such borderlines and territories).

There is no doubt, I guess, that such a threat does exist, and such simple examples like the disappearence of small neighborhood book shops, giving way to non-territorial marketplaces like Amazon, well illustrate what occurs.

Yet, I have my problems with the perspective of a landscape full of fortified, little villages, as urban culture, from its beginning, was based on open spaces, and on opening doors and windows to ease the exchange and communication between the many, and by tearing down the walls of territorial entities.

There is probably no easy answer to this conflicting perspectives, but I understood at least, what the question may be. Which is a pretty good result for an hour and a half of debate, I think.

As we screen and analyse international bestseller lists for several book trade magazines month by month, we were puzzled by that the new book of Robert Fulghum, author of many essays, notably All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten (1986).

His new collection of notes, essays, and observations, titled “What On Earth Have I Done”, hit the Czech charts as of last month - while the English original is announced only for next fall. months before its publication in English. Surprised by such a strange routine, I wrote to Robert Fulghum – and got back a wonderful story that says a lot about why sharing information on interesting books from many places makes a lot of sense and a lot of fun to many people indeed. So I share that story with you in its entirety down below. 

This is what Robert Fulghum wrote:

“In partial answer to the question to you raise, I’ll tell you a nice story. All of my books have been published in Czech over the years as a result of the interest of one person, Eva Slamova, the editor-in-chief of Argo. When I began writing a novel, she wanted to see it. My own American editor didn’t want me to write fiction and wasn’t encouraging. Eva, on the other hand, published the novel as I wrote it - in three volumes and beautifully - and it has had great success. THIRD WISH is the tile. Now it has been published in Slovak and Hungarian. A radio adaptation was made for Czech Radio, and a theater piece has developed from it.  My entire contract for the novel said, “Publish it well and send me some money if you make some.” They did and they did. Nice, yes? 

And so, when I finished my new book of essays and stories, I wanted the Czechs to publish it first, in appreciation for Eva’s faith in my writing. Some critics wonder if the novel and the essays are somehow not good enough to be published in the states, but they don’t understand. It is a real honor to be published first in Czech - theirs is a long and distinguished literary tradition. My American editor and publisher find this confusing, but the

USA is not at the top of the heap in many respects these days, and it takes some getting used to. Mostly American publishers think of the sales to European countries as stripping the cow - just extra income - without much respect for the readers outside the

USA. Who cares what the Czechs and Slovaks and Hungarians think and read? Well I care very much.

 My new book of essays, What On Earth Have I Done? will be published by St. Martin’s Press in the

USA in September, and the novel is being considered now by three publishers here. Meanwhile, I am very happy to continue to have my books launched in

Czech.

 There’s more to the story, but that’s a beginning. So far, nobody has really noticed this except you. Come to the Czech or Hungarian book fairs and see first hand what’s going on.  With thanks for your interest and warmest regards, Robert Fulghum”

PS: In the mean time Fulghum has arrived in Prague, just in time for the local book fair, Prague Book World”, and enjoys the fair, the books, good company - and good Czech beer, as he told me on the phone.