Good piece on current American “translation will save the world” hype

Asks Mr O’Brien: “[A]re foreign funding agencies getting any smarter about how to get more of their countries’ literary works translated into English? The answer is “not much,” or not at all. The country that has made this easier, for Dalkey Archive at least, is Japan. Other countries are on a kind of cusp: Romania, Switzerland, Latvia, Estonia, Norway, Mexico, Lithuania, and Spain. The countries that remain nearly intransigent to changing old practices are France, Germany, Austria, and Italy. The latter group continues to fail to understand that paying for the cost of the translation (or part thereof) is of little help; nor does providing funds to send unknown authors to the States to do tours help at all unless there are substantial marketing funds made available that will help to promote the authors’ books before and after such tours.”

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