Alta Ifland's Blog: Notes on Books - Posts Tagged "bea"

After so much anticipation, some disappointment was expected. The REMAINDERS PAVILION: I had imagined a huge hall full of devilishly tempting books, all waiting to be bought at ridiculously low prices. The hall was big, all right, but the construction of the setting for the book exhibit was still going on, so there was a lot of unpleasant construction material around; there were some enticing books (by which I mean literary fiction, which is what I am mostly interested in) but most of the books on display were colorful travel guides or children’s books. And, after finding a collection of short stories by Primo Levi and one by Nathaniel Hawthorne, and getting ready to pay, what do I find out? That I can’t buy them because all that was for wholesale not for individual buyers. So much for my book orgy!

Monday, was, in fact, the pre-BEA day (officially, BEA starts on the 24th). The main event of the day was the Italian Forum, which consisted of conferences regarding book publishing in/from Italy. I had traveled all night, so being very tired, I only had the strength to attend the last part of “Buying and selling Rights,” and “Import and Export of Italian Books in the USA.” All the panelists confirmed what I already knew: that importing books from other countries (in this case, Italy) and publishing them here is a HEROIC enterprise. American publishers want to export their authors, but are not interested in buying anything (one of the reasons being that they don’t have the governmental aid other publishers have). Still, it appears that there is another country even less open than the States: Great Britain. An Italian publicist said that if she tries to sell a book to a Chinese publisher, her chances of success are about 80%; in the case of an American publisher, her chances drop to about…2 in a thousand! The one good thing (from the publishers’ perspective) about publishing in the States is that when a title is successful, the success can translate into huge profits (because the market is so large). And there were some “success stories” of some Italian publishers who have managed to penetrate the American market, but even those were depressing. One of them (whose name escapes me) publishes “art books” on famous topics (eg., the history of Harley Davidson, the Rolling Stones), travel guides, calendars. They sell hundreds of thousands of copies (!) per title, and most of their sales are through…Costco or other similar clubs. As if the junk produced in the States were not enough, and we need Italian publishers to give us more of the same!

I was happy to find some of my favorite publishers: New Directions, NYBR Books, Overlook Press and Europa Editions. (Speaking of Europa Editions, the book I am reading now is published by them: The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine by a young German novelist of Russian origin, Alina Bronsky. I haven’t been so totally immersed in a novel in a long time—this is a hilarious, engrossing novel, one of those rare books that can appeal to a very diverse readership.)

My best BEA moments today were two sessions, both on literature in translation: “Spanish and Latin American Fiction in Translation” and “Translating Italy.” In my experience, translators are the most interesting—definitely the most intelligent and knowledgeable—creatures one can meet at literary events. This is not by accident since a translator is, by definition, someone who attempts to inhabit someone else’s mind. By the way, at the session on Italian literature, the first question asked by the moderator was: “What is a translator?” Anne Goldstein’s definition was the one I liked best: a translator is someone who solves puzzles—but the puzzles don’t have a good or wrong answer; there could be a hundred good ways of solving a translation puzzle. The other two translators at the Italian session were Jonathan Galassi, who has recently published a much talked-about rendition of Leopardi, and Michael F. Moore. One piece of good news was that today, in Italy, the majority of books on the best-sellers lists are not only by authors of Italian origin, but also by writers of literary fiction (rather than genre fiction, as is usually the case).

The session on Spanish literature was very good too, though, unfortunately, I only caught the last half. Among the panelists were the ubiquitous Chad Post, editor of Three Percent (one of the best online literary magazines of reviews on books in translation), and celebrated translator Natasha Wimmer (who confessed that every single book she has translated was a book on which the publishers lost money, in spite of the fact that the authors were world-famous—this statement alone speaks volumes about the situation of books in translation in this country).