A librarian puts forth a shopping list for international literature

Have you opened the refrigerator only to find the same things that were there yesterday? Times like these I'm thankful to live in an immigrant community, where I can count on finding something to eat that I've never tried before. There's a certain amount of trepidation in ordering something unfamiliar for lunch…the little shock on the tongue of something different…but then I recognize some flavors, start to identify new ones, and suddenly I'm a bigger person than I was before. And not just in girth.

Our reading lives should be like this. Varied, changing, exciting–foreign. Yet there seems to be an unspoken quota system for imported books in the U.S. children's publishing market. Especially for translated books. Though statistics are challenging to gather, Carl Tomlinson points out in the introduction to his Children's Books from Other Countries that not much more than 1 percent of children's books published in the U.S. are translations. Compare this to the 30-60 percent published in the early 1990s in Denmark, Germany, Italy, Japan, The Netherlands, and Sweden.

These abysmal numbers are not for lack of support. Out of post-WWII Germany came the International Youth Library (IYL) and the International Board on Books for Young People (IBBY), through the efforts of Jella Lepman, “Adviser on the Cultural and Educational Needs of Women and Children,” who convinced American generals and world leaders that peace could be built through sharing children's books. These organizations continue their work today. Lepman's contemporary, Mildred Batchelder, head of the children's services division of the American Library Association, helped support the efforts of the IYL, and in 1966, the Association for Library Service to Children created an award in her honor, given to the publisher of the most distinguished translated book in a given year. The United States Board on Books for Young People (USBBY), a section of IBBY, supports the Hans Christian Andersen medal, IBBY Honor List, and Bookbird magazine in the U.S., and is now, in this very issue, debuting its first annual list cosponsored with the Children's Book Council, Outstanding International Books.

Yet, “The attitude is still: 'Imports don't sell' and 'No one cares,'” says Arthur Levine, of Arthur A. Levine Books (an imprint of Scholastic). Stephen Roxburgh, of Front Street Books, remarks in his article “The Myopic American” that “The sad fact is that very few publishers are commissioning translations because they tend to be expensive, time-consuming, and unsuccessful in the marketplace. I attribute it to an insular mind-set visible everywhere in our American culture.”

One might ask why publishers even bother, given the complications of bringing a foreign book to the American market. In her doctoral research at Florida State University College of Information, Tallahassee, Annette Goldsmith found that editors try to identify books that both fit the house's list and will sell at least moderately well, and that give readers both a rich literary and cultural experience. But in the face of poor sales, lack of interest, reviews that “flag” the books as “too French,” etc., and a much more difficult production process than for domestic books, editors are hard pressed.

Firstly, how do editors select titles in languages they don't read? Roxburgh says that for him it used to be a matter of knowing the tastes and judgment of particular foreign editors. “Unfortunately much publishing in Europe, once remarkably stable, has over the last decade or more begun to resemble the game of musical chairs that has so diminished American publishing.” Levine has spent a decade piecing together a network of readers who are not only fluent in a foreign language and English, but are “fluent” in children's literature and in Levine's particular tastes. “It's a lot to ask....Scholastic is the first publisher I've worked for that has actively encouraged this passion of mine.”

Purchasing rights is a second hurdle. Roxburgh explains, “when you license a book you acquire rights for a territory and a language. For example, there are North American English language rights or World English language rights. Most foreign publishers selling the rights don't want to grant World English language rights. They want you to translate the book and then they can use your translation as a tool to license the rights to other English-language publishers.”

The translation is time consuming, expensive, and artistically integral to the work. Even books acquired in the English language are usually “translated” to some degree. Translation from English to English has been a particularly hot topic since Harry Potter, and Jane Whitehead delved into the issue in her two-part article in The Horn Book Magazine. Reshaping a text to engage American kids without destroying the author's work is a delicate task. At HarperCollins, Anne Hoppe coedits Terry Prachett's novels with his British publisher. “Terry is particularly anxious to have the same version of his book available on both sides of the Atlantic.…The balance is precarious, and it takes a writer as skilled with words and as certain in his craft as Terry to get it just right.”

Translations from a different language into English walk a shifting line between a literal rendition and an interpretation of the author's vision. Dan Bellm, who recently translated Laura Gallego Garcia's The Legend of the Wandering King (Scholatic/Arthur A. Levine Books, 2005), wrote an article on translating poetry (“Words Fail” Voice Literary Supplement, Feb. 1990, p.19) in which he stated, “since there is no way to separate words from the complexity of what they mean, a one-to-one correspondence between languages is impossible, and there is no such thing as a literal translation.…It's often said that a translation should be unobtrusive, invisible, as though the original were written in our language and in our time. But a faithful translation can also mean indicating to the reader that the text was not born among us. We are trying to render not only poetry but a distinct culture.”

Roxburgh suggests, “Think of the process as akin to light passing through a series of filters. One filter–by far and away the most important–is the author's perspective and vision. Another is his or her language. The reader is a third filter. The translator becomes another filter. Readers of the translation another. That's a lot of filters. Things can get blurry.” And yet, it's these filters that are at the heart, really, of why we read imports. The filters are our means of sharing experience. “All writing is translation,” says Levine, and he's right in a very general sense. After all, translation means literally “to carry across.”

“Literary travel is the safest, easiest way to encounter other people and to see oneself in their eyes, to recognize one's own experience in an experience that at first blush seems radically different,” says Levine. But Americans on the whole, it seems, are adverse to radical difference in their children's books. This may have changed somewhat since Harry Potter, though, arguably, only for English-language imports. Rosemary Brosnan, an editor at HarperCollins, remarks, “After the incredibly successful publication of the first [Harry Potter] book, U.S. publishers realized that there was gold to mine on foreign publishers' lists–and they also realized that American kids are not as myopic as they had thought. Having said that, I also have to admit that–aside from fantasy–it is often still difficult to publish translated literature.”

This attitude is all the more perplexing when we consider the lengths to which publishers go to be “multicultural.” Roxburgh points out that “Every major publisher has a list of multicultural books.…However, the vast majority of these books deal with the inclusion, if not assimilation, of other cultures into our American one.” By focusing so exclusively on the American experience are publishers breeding a short-sighted narcissism among young readers? A surface treatment of “we're different—but the same!” short-circuits the whole point. How do we learn to go the distance?

Really what these editors and others are after is to bring a diversity of excellent transformative literature to readers–and to do that, they have to cast a wide net. We read to find out something about who we are and where we stand among others. The farther afield we go to make these connections, the better equipped we are to build community. We have to cultivate the middle ground ourselves. With what tools? Let's make sure our cupboards are stocked with variety.