At the end of last year, in the wake of the annual Nobel to-do, during which J.M.G. Le Clézio took the literary prize, Horace Engdahl, permanent secretary of the jury, publicly declared that “There is powerful literature in all big cultures, but you can’t get away from the fact that Europe still is the centre of the literary world… not the United States…The US is too isolated, too insular. They don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature… That ignorance is restraining.”
A parallel compliment was paid three years ago in the selection of the late Harold Pinter; this time political intention was more baldly at play. There is absolutely no doubt that Pinter’s oeuvre was up to what we think of as Nobel standards. The problem is that Nobel standards are not always up to what we think of as literature. Pinter should have received the Nobel when his active career as a playwright was something less than a distant memory. It might have spared us the terrible poetry that was to follow. Instead, his Nobel awarders, one senses, had more regard for Pinter’s political activism, taken up when his literary output was on the wane. José Saramago, the recent Portuguese Nobel, is a similar case. If the Nobel were to go to a Portuguese author, it should have gone to António Lobo Antunes, the better novelist and (unfortunately for his Nobel prospects) as apolitical as Saramago is political.
Engdahl’s statement reads something like a corrective of these past choices. At least he’s trying to steer the criteria for the literary prize back towards the literary and away from the anti-American agitprop of aging European littérateurs.
His charge is twofold, part directed at American publishers, who have been too slow to take up – except for the obvious choices – the new European fiction; secondly that Europe, at any rate, is still the culture-producing continent par excellence. The first charge reflects economic envy, the second Eurocentric hubris. By leveling the accusation of ignorance, insularity and parochialism against the United States as an entity (its publishers, its reading public and, by extension, its cultural life in general), he contrives to condemn its novelists and poets, by default, to similar irrelevance.
Two things Americans must understand are that our Nobel secretary’s notion that Europe is a single literary or cultural agglomeration is simply false and, secondly, that the whole logic of his position is absurd, in part because Europe – the project – is absurd, having ever less to do with bringing national cultures closer together, and ever more to do with supranational ownership of industry, banking and the colonization of new consumer market space. It is not that this is necessarily a bad thing (how else should Europe proceed?) but for a cultural czar like Engdahl to misunderstand the extra-literary foundations upon which he constructs his bully pulpit borders on blindness.
Engdahl’s inability to see Europe in proportion is a side effect of the tangled procedures of post-war cultural, intellectual and political reconstruction, which in modern European history derives a good deal of its energy from a compensatory and continent-wide process of sublimation, namely the need to forget all about its reliance on the American military to protect its borders. Recently this cold-war era inheritance has been given new impetus by the breakup of the Eastern block and the war in the Balkans. What rankles Europeans the most, especially the intellectual and political classes, is that, with no standing “European” army (even though the very definition of being a nation state in Europe today depends on maintaining a highly militarized and fully equipped national police force), Europe is as dependent on parochial America as it was in 1945 for the defense of “Project Europe”, which, in practical terms, means the defense of Europe’s Eastern Front. What this boils down to is that Europe is in charge of policing it’s internal affairs, while America, under the auspices of NATO, and often overriding competing (and self-canceling) national European agendas altogether, is in charge of policing its expanding borders. The proposed anti-missile shields in Poland are just the latest manifestation. The last great expression of European inadequacy on this account was the tragic tit for tat war in Balkans. Lately the problem has shifted to Georgia, and finally, this winter, in the bitter cold of December and January, to the power games played out in the arena of essential resources, namely the gas-wars between Russian and the Ukraine – that on again off again NATO pretender.
Thus, in the cultural sphere, one of the by-products of Europe’s geopolitical weakness is its compensatory need to luxuriate in the fantasy of cultural supremacy, on the one hand, and on American vulgarity on the other. Engdahl is an old style Nordic polyglot who, according to Tom Leith, in the Telegraph, “speaks Swedish, English, German, French and Russian fluently,” (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/culturecritics/samleith/3561561/Nobel-Prize-judge-is-wrong-to-denounce-American-literature.html). Leith’s rather unhelpful opinions run to the other extreme, citing the cultural and political hegemony of the English language and basically dismissing Engdahl and his cohort of linguists as behind the times.
My question, and one which I would like to explore in a series of posts, is whether or not Horace Engdahl has a point? He might, especially where poetry is concerned.
The problem is not so much if, or how much, European poetry and fiction are translated into English and made available to readers in the United Sates (by any standards it is a significant amount), but rather the extent to which these translations are read and absorbed into the stream of American letters. The powerful influence of American authors on the Europeans, not only on the general reading public, but on European authors themselves, is a given, but does the influence extend in the other direction? At the heart of Engdalh’s complaint, though he shrouds this in arrogant exaggeration, is that American readers and authors don’t return the favor.
Martin,
Posted By: Kent Johnson on January 30, 2009 at 12:15 pmInteresting questions. Thanks for the post.
Another question, however, might be why there is so much more translation of European literature available in the U.S. than there is of literature from Latin America.
And if one were to start counting-up reviews of translated works, in poetry, say, I’ll bet the European languages would beat Latin American Spanish hands down.
Eliot Weinberger has written a bit on the matter. And the statistics are rather shocking.
Kent
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I don’t know if I agree with this. In the last couple of years alone some there have been some enormously important and much-discussed works of poetry in translation – just off the top o’ my head:
Posted By: Don Share on January 30, 2009 at 12:51 pmClayton Eshleman’s Vallejo.
The notorious Ecco Press collected poems of Zbigniew Herbert.
The F.S.G. Mayakowsky compendium, Night Wraps Day.
Selected poetry and prose of Andrea Zansotto.
Selected p. and p. of Vittorio Sereni.
Forrest Gander’s Connecting Lines: New Poetry from Mexico & Coral Bracho.
Hofmann’s 20th-Century German Poetry anthol.
Dalkey Archive’s Contemporary Russian Poetry
Yale Anthol. of 20th-c. French Poetry, ed. Mary Ann Caws
Tina Chang’s Language for a New Century – poetry from the Middle East, Asia, and beyond
New European Poets, edited by Wayne Miller & Kevin Prufer
There are currently 2 new translations of Holderlin!! Nick Hoff’s, & Maxine Chernoff and Paul Hoover’s
Copper Canyon’s publishing new Nerudas
2 new trans. of Camoes!
Tomas Salamun!!
Peter Cole’s The Dream of the Poem
Many folks have been talking about and reading Inger Christensen, even before her death.
There’s everything the Ugly Duckling Presse does…
&
Every April, Poetry publishes a translation issue, the ‘09 one coming up being the largest one yet… and one routinely finds translated work by contemporary poets in the pages of most litmags these days. Folks are absorbing such work, though it’s all a patchwork quilt.
Kent: as a translator myself, I can tell you that I translated whole tomes by Colombian poets, and no publisher large or small would take them. I had much better luck with poetry from Spain, however. Who knows why, and I think this is changing. Yet there’s no doubt an insufficient appreciation of the literary geography of Latin American poetry among U.S. book editors, most likely because of the cultural complexity of the continent, about which North Americans are not educated, sadly….
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Kent’s point is right on (and Don is insightful too). But I think what needs to be questioned even more than whether U.S. poets actually do have any dialogue with x or y country is whether (and why) there should be such a thing in the first place. If country x and y are both rich, prosperous nations, does it really make a difference that their literature is being ignored in mainstream or small press publications of the United States? In fact (if we can do the impossible of suspending for just a moment absolutely endless arguments about literary merit) it seems to me that the only conceivable reason as to why any literature anywhere should be translated and attended to is not to provide a (fair) representative selection of what’s going on around the world but rather to engage in a dialogue with what is happening in (crucial) particular regions. And I care much less about what is happening in Denmark or Switzerland than I do about, say, Bolivia or Chile or Zimbabwe. Let’s even throw Israel in, and then let’s say, tick tock, mon semblance.
Posted By: Boyd Nielson on January 30, 2009 at 1:15 pmReport this comment
Obviously, the French above should read “mon semblable.” No one needs to be reminded of this. But it is (at least for me, alas) a useful reminder of the way that programs “correct” our spelling without our even noticing. Which may tie in somewhere.
Posted By: Boyd Nielson on January 30, 2009 at 2:19 pmReport this comment
Then again, now that I think of it, semblance was, uh, just right, man.
Posted By: Boyd Nielson on January 30, 2009 at 2:48 pmReport this comment
the nobel is presided over and awarded by europeans, so how can they judge world literature except as it communicates to them as europeans? they hold this universal cachet as arbiters of genius that is always a little overplayed, especially considering how quickly their picks are forgotten, except in the countries where the nobel winner hails from and in the languages that he writes in. and even that importance is overplayed, because of how conservative nobel choices are–writers who win them have already had their reputations secured.
Posted By: james stotts on January 30, 2009 at 4:05 pmso, pretending that this is just engdahl’s personal cultural criticism of american literature, it assumes that reading foreign literature plays a central role in literacy on that higher level. that’s a funny claim, just because when it comes to the case of translations, they are already IN ENGLISH and shouldn’t be considered especially exotic or cosmopolitan–and then why isn’t engdahl claiming we don’t have enough travel writing instead?
as a translator myself, i see translated works as a sort of debased literature, anyway. most of it is bastardized, not attuned to the natural organic powers of the english language, nor really representative of the foreign literature, either, except in scholarly and historic terms. maybe we’re so isolated that our translation itself can’t hope to be as good as what europeans translate for themselves, but i don’t see that as part of engdahl’s assertion, either. i have my own opinions about why translations are so bad, but the funny thing is that there is a lower bar for works in translation and somehow at the same time they are seen as more sophisticated. and the only way to really trace most of these trends is through the markets–but if you actually read in a foreign language, how many of those books are you buying in american bookstores? sure, right now amazon.com is being tracked, but that doesn’t account for even half a generation of american readers. all my russian books, every single one, were bought in russia–either by me, or as gifts to me by friends and family there. a book that costs $1.50 there, costs $30-40 here (seriously!)
but that’s beside the point, i think, since there’s a matter of embarrassments of riches–we have access to so many great american works from so many times (including our own), it’s not as if they are being exhausted by any one writer–and really this is an argument about writers more than readers, since it stems from an explanation about why no american writers deserve a nobel prize.
as an aside, about latin american literature–alberto alvaros, roberto bolano, nicanor parra are some of the great things i read in ‘08, so this is my plug, especially for bolano’s short stories (LAST EVENINGS ON EARTH).
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*sorry, not alberto alvaro, but alvaro mutis–writer of the maqroll novellas
Posted By: james stotts on January 30, 2009 at 4:08 pmReport this comment
I’m not sure that sentences like this, “one of the by-products of Europe’s geopolitical weakness is its compensatory need to luxuriate in the fantasy of cultural supremacy” are going to advance the debate any. Are you suggesting that this actually happens in their minds, “oh we are geopolitically weaker than the mighty USA so we shall assert cultural supremacy instead?” It sounds more like tit for tat trading of schoolyard insults than rational cultural debate to me.
Posted By: Paul on January 30, 2009 at 4:17 pmReport this comment
Three comments:
Posted By: John Bloomberg-Rissman on January 30, 2009 at 7:05 pm1) “Two things Americans must understand are that our Nobel secretary’s notion that Europe is a single literary or cultural agglomeration is simply false … etc”. One thing that everyone needs to understand is that any notion that the US is a single literary or cultural agglomeration is simply false, and any statement tht talks about “American Literature” is meaningless on the face of it.
2) More than half my library consists of the literatures of non-US parts of the world. I have purchased virtually all of these items in the US. It hasn’t been hard. I’m sorry to have to differ w/Mr Stotts, and to say that, however bastardized the translations, much of it makes great reading.
3) If the question is how much have I internalized, so to speak, who can say? Besides, most Europeans or South Americans or … don’t sound all that comsopolitan. I mean, I’ve never yet thought a French writer was a German … thought there is one Argentinian who does often sound a bit like an Englishman …
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martin,
Posted By: james stotts on January 31, 2009 at 7:57 amwhat johnbr said about the u.s. itself not being a single cultural entity seems completely true to me–a nation is a political construct (read, fallacy), and a national culture is an academic one. yet if these constructs/fallacies were accepted as totally meaningless, there wouldn’t be much, if any, need for translation at all.
but they certainly aren’t idle constructs–most of us believe in them, law and human rights (even animal rights) are dependent on believing in a larger community (i give darwin all the credit for the idea that by expanding communication and community, cruelty and war become harder to wage–how else to explain why we won’t use our most powerful weapons, why almost all wars are illegal now, why we love our pets and not the japanese, etc…) but i’m carried away into a defense of translation that i’m not willing to take quite that far.
and, putting aside translations, how easy is it to buy literature in foreign languages here?–john says more than half his library is non.-u.s., but the way he says it makes me think he’s talking about books in translation. as far as i’ve known, getting books from publishers in their original languages (that is, not english) can be prohibitively expensive, and getting them delivered is a hairy business, indeed, which doesn’t cut costs nearly as much as it creates problems and delays.
i’m eager to read more ‘translation and its discontents.’
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Political construct = fallacy? “American literature” = meaningless?
Posted By: Henry Gould on January 31, 2009 at 3:14 pmI’m always struck by these kinds of facile “intellectual” reductions. You folks simply project your own deracination, and then proclaim it as normative. As if nations and cultures were simply anachronisms, mental fantasies in some people’s heads…
Cultures are slow-developing products of both nature and intellect, of conditions & choices & acts, by many generations – creating actual, concrete histories, and distinct characteristics.
I could go on, but I find it too silly to bother. Sorry.
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Dear Henry–
Posted By: John Bloomberg-Rissman on January 31, 2009 at 11:09 pmI don’t understand why noticing that the “US is not a single literary or cultural agglomeration” is silly. That the US is a melting pot or whatever is a fiction that became obvious as a fiction years and years ago. I also think that your notion that nations are “mental fantasies” is truer than you’d like to believe. F’rinstance, think of all those folks from Hegel thru Heidegger and their notions of Germanness; if those weren’t mental constructs I’ll eat my hat. Which doesn’t mean that there was/is not such thing as the state of Germany. Or that French writers can be distinguished from German ones. James notes that whether or not nations are constructs, they are not idle constructs. What more do you want?
I don’t think it takes a great deal of deracination or alienation to notice that US lit is made up of a of a number of literatures that sometimes do and sometimes do not overlap. The “canon” wars were/are not about nothing.
Dear James–
Yes, unfortunately, to my perpetual yet irremediable shame, I’m talking about translations. I do think that translations aren’t worthless, however, and help expand one’s sense of what writeers in other parts of the world are doing, etc.
By the way, I think we have lots of writers as worthy as Le Clezio. Which is not a knock on him, by any means. I hereby nominate Alice Notley for the Nobel Prize.
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Dear John,
Posted By: Henry Gould on February 1, 2009 at 11:08 amHegel & Heidegger & any other philosopher with or without the H can carry around all the mental constructs about nationhood they like; what I’m saying is you can’t simply equate such constructs with the concrete actuality, which does not appear like Athena out of the mind of either Plato or his heirs.
My dictionary defines “agglomeration” as “a heap or cluster of disparate elements”. That sounds like a pretty accurate description of the US today. What I was objecting to was the common assumption that the US has no real coherent unity or continuity as a culture or a nation (granting that said coherence is certainly imperfect & partial). I think this particular assumption is more an example of ideological “position-taking” than a reflection of the historical facts. This is not to say that any nation or culture is everlasting or fixed in its current formation.
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Henry–
Posted By: John Bloomberg-Rissman on February 1, 2009 at 2:45 pmI think we’re in “something-pretty-close-to-agreement”, here, actually. Nations are indeed constructs, but they don’t come from nowhere, and they do have effects (most mental constructs have effects, but that’s perhaps only part of the story). That’s what I was trying to get at by citing James S’s: notion that though nations are constructs, they are not idle constructs. Idle being a key word here.
And my point about there not being one USA lit is just your “said coherence is certainly imperfect & partial”, perhaps phrased imperfectly. I think someone like Engdahl tends to overlook in a perhaps inevitable ignorance is that what he calls “American Lit” is actually just part of a larger and much more complex picture. I would be that last to claim no Boolean overlap between what I call the American lits, but I would insist that the overlaps are incomplete …
I note that you didn’t say no to Alice Notley!
Cheers,
John
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“I note that you didn’t say no to Alice Notley!”
Posted By: Bill Knott on February 2, 2009 at 4:27 pm. . . can’t let this one go by—
but rather than say, “Knott says no to Notley,”
I’ll simply mention that the volumes of her numbingly
boring poems don’t sell very well,
do they—has a single one of them ever made it into
a second printing?
(though the last time I advanced this kind of observation,
I was trumped by the PR flack from SPD who
made the astonishing claim that he would rather be read
by 500 readers,
than by the thousands and thousands of Sharon Olds’ readers,
which (as well as insulting those many dozen thousands
of people who’ve bought Olds books)
flummoxed me
nonplus:—how can one refute such a masochistic
assertion?—
Really? You want FEWER readers rather than more? Fine,
fine, whatever turns you on . . .)
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whoops, i lost my pointypoint there—
Posted By: Bill Knott on February 2, 2009 at 4:35 pmwhich is:
my individual “No to Notley” is not important,
but the “No to Notley” expressed by
the American Poetry Public
(you know: the buyers and readers of poetry books?)
is important—
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Dear Bill–
Posted By: John Bloomberg-Rissman on February 2, 2009 at 6:35 pmI have no idea how well Notley’s poems sell. I doubt very much it would bother her if more people read her, tho I don’t know her, and probably shouldn’t even say what I’ve just said. But I have trouble imagining anybody saying “Please don’t buy my book.”
I will guess that if we choose Nobel prize winners by total sales, we’ll have to go by these Nielsen figures: in 08 fiction writer William P. Young had the most sales, followed by John Grisham.
And, I guess Thomas Kinkade mwill have to count as the greatest American painter …
I will rephrase my vote slightly: if the USA was the country I actually want to live in, Alice Notley would be our most famous poet.
As for your finding her “mind numbingly boring”, well, we’re just gonna have to disagree on that, aren’t we? (Maybe we don’t want to live in the same fantasy land, maybe …)
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I thought that this was a good time to chime in. What I would like to do is a series of postings that look at the practice of various translators. Boyd Nielson actually got closest to what I was trying to put on the table (as a kind of conceptual backdrop), but he takes my point in a direction I myself would have never contemplated. (Maybe it’s an interesting direction.) What he questions is whether or not there is a need for U.S. poets to have a dialogue with x or y country, through translation. Then he proceeds to compare countries; Bolivia is more interesting that Denmark, for example. (It might well be, but Denmark is pretty interesting as well.) Of course I am not talking about countries, per se, but rather poets, of whatever nationality. Mr. Nielson conflates, fatally I think, poets with countries. Poets are not countries. They are more often cosmopolitan individuals, borderless, internal or external exiles speaking in a highly stylized yet sidelined vernacular that takes (in the case of real authenticity) some generations to sort out. Translation is essential not because it informs us about countries, but because it is a way into different poetic sensibilities, and it provides us (through its built-in imperfections) a peek at the way language, not nationality (or nationalisms), are at the base of sensibilities. When we are speaking about great literature, as in the list of authors Don Share draws up in his comment, countries themselves tend to fade into the background as we draw closer to particular poetic voices. I would never read poets, as Mr. Nielson suggests, for news about a particular country.
Posted By: mearl on February 3, 2009 at 7:15 pmI was pleased with Don’s comment, though probably not for reasons that he intended. I know most of the books on his list (funny though, how I’ve always preferred Eshleman’s very first Vallejo – subsequent revisions have only deadened those early versions). And, in fact, I read Peter Cole’s The Dream of the Poem, and Richard Zenith’s new version of Camões’ lyrics closely in the various versions as they moved toward finalization. But I wonder if Don is not missing my point, perhaps because it wasn’t adequately articulated to begin with. He starts by stating that he doesn’t know whether or not he agrees with “this”. Is he referring to Kent Johnson’s comment, the first in the thread, which points out the fact European poetry is better represented than Latin American poetry, or to my post? If the latter, I would say that Don and I are, actually, in agreement. As I point out, Horace Engdahl has not done his homework. I visit America most years at least once, and I am always astonished at how much translated poetry, fiction and drama are available, whether we are speaking of younger authors or the classics. Any European country would have to take their hat off to this, not only to the volume of it but also to the excellence of the work that is being produced. Engdahl is simply practicing a kind of high-minded ignorance so typical of European elites. I would suggest that he knows he is completely off base, but considers the rhetorical gesture more important than the truth.
My question is really more about how this wealth of translated material actually affects American readers and writers. I know that thirty years ago, when I first started to read poetry seriously, translation was perhaps too important. In terms of percentages, it might have occupied more of my reading time than poetry written in English did. Once I arrived in Europe and was surrounded by European poetry, I began to correct that imbalance.
Today however, and one of the things that first led me to think about this question of translated literature in the U.S., younger generations (at least what I have been able to glean through a reading their poems and their blogs) do not talk about translation as much, if at all; or they talk about it in ways that are different than I did in the late 1970s and early 80s. (Perhaps in more political or sociological terms.) Engdahl pretends to not know how American publishers remain devoted to foreign literatures. My interest lies more in how this work is actually read in the contemporary American setting.
Martin
PS…there are several other comments that I would like to respond to. I’ll try to get to that tomorrow.
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Martin recognizes that my point above is not to call into question any particular description of what (fair) representative translation of and dialogue with the poetry of x or y country should be; it is rather to call into question the need for such things in the first place. But he gets my point precisely backwards when he suggests that in naming countries I am conflating poets with “nationality (or nationalisms).” In fact, I am suggesting that, while it might not be a mistake to say that a particular poet typifies a certain set of assumptions or ideology, it is a mistake to say that a poet is identical with country. Only if the latter point were true would it make sense to engage in a worry-fest about whether x or y country is being given adequate attention in the U.S. because only then could representative dialogue be fair or, even, possible. When I talk about “[engaging] in a dialogue with what is happening in (crucial) particular regions” I am referring not to national boundaries per se but rather to sites that are both geographical and ideological, both reducible to regional symptoms and irreducible to regional cause. This point should be wholly uncontroversial. No one needs to be reminded, for instance, of the U.S.’s influence in the widespread privatization of markets in Bolivia, Chile and Argentina (maybe we should be reminded of it, though, a few days after Bolivian voters have approved a new constitution). And no one needs to be reminded that Israel could not continue its policies in Gaza if it did not have U.S backing. And etc. I am perfectly willing to concede that lots of people think that poetry should not bother with any such thing. I am also willing to concede that the best poets to engage in these dialogues may not, in some cases, be from the region at all. We should not set aside the (unlikely) possibility that the poet who cuts to the quick of the forces behind and the consequences of la Revolución Bolivariana will come not from South America but from Denmark. But we should set aside the possibility that any variation of a metric that strives for balanced or equitable poetic selection from each country has any value at all.
Posted By: Boyd Nielson on February 4, 2009 at 12:07 amReport this comment
What interesting comments in the exchange between Martin Earl and Boyd Nielsen!
Posted By: Kent Johnson on February 4, 2009 at 9:09 amExcellent.
Kent
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I should also add that although I understand that Martin rejects Horace Engdahl’s claim that the U.S. doesn’t participate in what Engdahl calls the “big dialogue of literature,” I don’t understand how a question on the way that “this wealth of translated material actually affects American readers and writers” is really all that different from Engdahl’s interests. Or, to put this another way, Martin might be right to say the following: “The problem is not so much if, or how much, European poetry and fiction are translated into English and made available to readers in the United Sates (by any standards it is a significant amount), but rather the extent to which these translations are read and absorbed into the stream of American letters.” But I don’t understand why we should care about the latter point if we (unlike Engdahl) no longer care about the former.
Posted By: Boyd Nielson on February 4, 2009 at 10:03 amReport this comment
Wouldn’t all these questions be really easy to answer by actually *reading* the stuff Americans write? And seeing whether they (we) are in dialog with the rest of the world (tho dialog is way to simple-minded a term)? Rather than just wondering? My only point in this whole discussion has been you’d better read pretty widely, because, to paraphrase Henry G, Am lit is hardly one perfectly coherent “thing”. It’s, rather, an “agglomeration”, “a heap or cluster of disparate elements”.
Posted By: John Bloomberg-Rissman on February 6, 2009 at 8:42 amReport this comment