Found in translation
TWO WEEKS AGO, when Elfriede Jelinek won the Nobel Prize in Literature, could you blame Americans if we'd never heard of the Austrian writer? As The New York Times reported last summer, many trade publishers and university presses have all but ceased publishing contemporary literature in translation; the US market for it, apparently, is smaller than ever.
Perhaps the only litterateur who isn't entirely dismayed by this state of affairs is Chad Post, associate director of the Dalkey Archive Press, which specializes in publishing what founder John O'Brien calls "subversive" fiction, and which is located on the Illinois State University campus in Normal, Ill. "If America's literary culture should ever become less nationalistic, our tiny little press would face much stiffer competition for some of the best writing from France, Germany, Eastern Europe, Latin America, and Russia, and other parts of the world," the 29-year-old Post pointed out last week, during a trip to Boston for a New England Booksellers Association event.
He wasn't just boasting. Since 1984, Dalkey Archive Press has reissued works by experimentalist authors from Gertrude Stein and Flann O'Brien (author of the Joycean comic fantasy "The Dalkey Archive") to Ishmael Reed, John Barth, and Stanley Elkin, as well as publishing original translations of novels, poetry, and criticism from such innovative writers as Mexico's Carlos Fuentes, Serbia's Danilo Kis, Germany's Arno Schmidt, and Russia's Viktor Shklovsky. This fall will see the republication of "Tom Harris," a neglected 1967 philosophical detective novel by the Polish expat Stefan Themerson, and "Night," a translation of Croatian writer Vedrana Rudan's fictionalized diatribe against everything from married life to large corporations, among other "surprising and funny" titles, Post says.
"Americans really ought to read outside of America," he mused aloud. "Forget all the high-minded arguments for doing so -- isn't anyone else tired of endless Carver and Franzen imitations?"
