A few weeks ago I wrote about a project at Bristol University that is studying reader opinions of translated fiction, and how such fiction, in particular from smaller European countries, can better be promoted. Last night I headed into Bath for a workshop being jointly run by the project team and my friends at Mr. B’s Emporium of Reading Delights.
From my point of view the most interesting part of the evening was the panel discussion with three people heavily involved in selling translated books.
First up was Simon Winder of Penguin. He was clearly still very much in the old-fashioned cottage industry type of publishing business, not the ruthless, marketing-driven thing we are used to with mass market fiction. From that point of view, although he is from a big company, he’s much more like a small press. He can publish books just because they are interesting.
The main thing that I latched onto from his talk was a book he is publishing this month called Tales of the Marvellous and News of the Strange. Here’s the blurb:
A great cache of ancient, magical stories in the same tradition as The Arabian Nights, Tales of the Marvellous and News of the Strange is an extraordinary find. Dating from at least a millennium ago, these are the earliest-known Arabic short stories, which survived in a single, ragged manuscript in a library in Istanbul. Some found their way into The Arabian Nights, but most have never been read in English before.
These stories are believed to date from the 9th Century, a time when England was being merrily overrun by viking hordes. I’m really looking forward to this book.
Later in the year Penguin are doing a new edition of 2000 Leagues Under The Sea. Simon told me that it is a new translation, not the crappy original one that removed all of the rude comments about the English, favorable mentions of Socialism and so on.
Something else that Simon had to promote was a new range of “short classics” published to mark the 80th anniversary of the Penguin Classics range. These are chapbooks coming in at 64 pages. Some are complete stories, others self-contained extracts from longer works. They will be priced at 80p each, and Penguin doubtless hopes that lots of people will take the “gotta catch ’em all” view of the series. I picked up a Poe story, The Tell-Tale Heart, from the pile he was giving away, and will doubtless buy a few others, including Sinbad the Sailor and Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market. It is a nice idea, though I’m disappointed to count only 10 obviously female names in the list of 80 titles (there may be more — I’m not familiar with all of the non-European writers). Penguin will doubtless say that the gender balance reflects their Classics range, but I think they could have tried harder.
The second speaker was Nic Bottomley, the owner of Mr. B’s. The most notable thing in his talk was the revelation of how well his store is able to sell translations. Of course they are a niche business, but they are trading off in-depth knowledge. People come to them for recommendations, and in the “more like this but different” stakes there’s nothing better to trigger the “wow, never heard of that!” response than a translation. Their best selling book of last year was a translation.
Finally we had Stephanie Seegmuller of Pushkin Press, a company which only publishes translations. I glowed with pride when she talked happily about the “most bonkers” book they have ever published. It is, of course, Finnish. Take a bow, Pasi Ilmari Jääskeläinen. Everyone else go buy The Rabbit Back Literature Society.
There was some discussion afterwards. I’m not sure if it produced anything useful. The audience was very self-selected, and many of them were translators. I suspect I was the only publisher there besides Simon and Stephanie. We did agree, however, that the Finns are awesome, and promote their writers very effectively.
I gave away a couple of copies of The Finnish Weird. Hopefully something will come of that.
