Translation in publishing in the USA

Book publisher John O’Brien got into the publishing world for the same reason many others do, he said.

He was angry.

Frustrated at the lack of coverage and the poor way critics treated many writers, O’Brien began the Review of Contemporary Fiction as a way to give visibility to lesser known writers. Later on he began the Dalkey Archive Press, a nonprofit publishing house that publishes and promotes literature from around the world.

“This all began because I wanted to vent. The problem with that, though, is sometimes, when you start venting, it becomes successful and then you become a part of the mainstream that you were protesting against,” he said. “So we have to constantly reinvent ourselves to keep our counter-culture roots.”

O’Brien, who travels the world looking for literary masterpieces to translate into English, was the speaker for the American Book Review reading series on Thursday at the University of Houston-Victoria. Although fighting a cold and suffering from jet lag from a Tokyo flight, O’Brien kept the audience captivated by discussing the changing face of the publishing world both here and abroad.

One of the biggest changes in publishing happened in the late 1970s and early 1980s, he said. American writers took precedence over foreign writers by critics and the major publishing houses began to change as the founders stepped down and corporations took over.

“Literature that they used to publish began to disappear, including drama, poetry, translations and experimental fiction,” O’Brien said. “This allowed small presses to publish authors they never thought they would, which was a great thing.”

But even with small presses picking up the slack, translated books only make up about 2.5 percent of the 250,000 books published each year in the U.S.

“In the last 30 years, the U.S. has isolated itself from world literature and that has political consequences,” he said. “Our position on art has become our political position. We got in a position where we just don’t know what the rest of the world is writing. And it’s not on the part of the readers, but it’s the media, publishers and book stores.”

The assumption by those institutions is that the American people are not interested in reading literature that has been translated from another language.

“There’s a whole new generation of French writers that are doing wonderful things but those books will probably never see the light of day in the U.S.,” he added.

With major publishing houses worried about the future of the industry as new technology changes how people read, translated books will be the first on the chopping block. Luckily, there is hope.

“It’s terrifying but it does leave room for small publishers to do wonderful things,” he said. “It’s an interesting time for the publishing world right now.”