world book summit 2011
the Bearer Book: the Book: Bearer
of Human Development
of Human Development
svetovni vrh knjige
Book: the Bearer
of Human Development world book summit 2011
Book: the Bearer of Human Development Supporters
In cooperation svetovni with vrh
knjige 2011
Knjiga: nosilka Ljubljana, Marchc - April 1, 2011 razvoja ˇ31 loves ˇtva www.wbs2011.si
Contents Welcome addresses. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .3 Committees and organisation. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .7 Programme. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .9 Plenary speakers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 Plenary papers. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 Diversity report 2010. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57 The Ljubljana Resolution on Books . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117
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Address by the President of the Republic of Slovenia, Dr Danilo Türk, to mark the World Book Summit 2011 Book is the symbol of culture, the human spirit and human progress. Slovenia attaches great significance to books, and the Slovenes could also be referred to as a “nation of the book”. This is demonstrated by the number of books issued per year, amounting to over 5,000, which is a great achievement for a nation of two million people. Furthermore, Slovenes have also been a book nation in historical terms. The first books printed in Slovene were issued in the middle of the 16th century, thanks to Slovene Protestants, and with the translation of the Bible in 1584, the Slovenes became one of the first nations to obtain a complete translation of this great work. Through most of our history, we lived in a country where we did not rule and we did not have our own political institutions, and throughout this time, culture, and in particular literary culture, was a strong bond between us as a nation. On this basis, as a nation with a strong culture and respect for books, we eventually created our own country. For all these reasons, the Slovene capital, Ljubljana, was, quite naturally and reasonably, designated World Book Capital 2010. Books today face many challenges, and this is also the key theme of the World Book Summit 2011 to be held under the auspices of UNESCO from 30 March to 2 April 2011 in Ljubljana. The summit will be attended by many world-renowned authors, researchers and experts from the fields of publishing and bookselling, literary critics, and experts on cultural policies for books and copyright. Under the title “Books: Promoters of Human Development”, the congress will highlight many topical issues, including book globalisation and reading in the digital era, publishing books in smaller language markets, translating books from minor national languages into world languages, monitoring book markets and reading culture, and strategies to encourage reading culture. I am convinced that this summit will further reinforce the recognition that books will retain their role as the most important guarantee of the quality of our thinking, intellectual creativity and overall development in the future. To all participants and debaters at the World Book Summit, I wish an interesting and productive debate and a pleasant stay in Ljubljana – the World Book Capital 2010. Dr Danilo Türk President of the Republic of Slovenia
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Heralding the Book When Ljubljana was given the unique opportunity to be in the centre of worldwide attention as a world book capital for a year, I among others pointed out that this was a golden opportunity to address a few issues – the issues relating to the promotion of reading culture, amelioration of the publishing business, and bolstering the paths carved by translators. Besides confronting the challenges posed by globalisation and technical advancements of the digital age, we must continually bear in mind the fact that, in one way or another, here or there, the book is the bearer of human development. Therefore I find it important that within the scope of the World Book Summit, one of the key events of this year-long festival of the book, the topical issues are viewed not only from the global but also from the regional perspective. That is the reason why I am especially pleased that the Ministry of Culture, in association with the UNESCO Office in Venice and the Slovenian National Commission for UNESCO, will organise a special regional forum entitled “Writing, publishing, translating: building cultural diversity in South-East Europe”. The forum will provide a platform for the exchange of valuable experience: of people involved in promotion of literature beyond the limits of their language, the people turning the UNESCO Convention on the Protection and Promotion of Diversity in Cultural Expression into a collection of actual quality projects, and the people who advocate the protection of small languages. If this platform succeeds in encouraging further reflections on the ways of reinforcing the existent networks of cooperation and perhaps establishing new ones; on the ways of facilitating and fostering the flow of words and their authors; and the ways of sending out the voice of this region beyond its borders, across the entire Europe, then our goal has been reached. Majda Širca Minister of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia
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Dear Reader, Book at hand; handed down devotedly time and time again… Could it be handed down any better? Allow me to address you with a verse by the Slovenian poet Oton Župančič, which was adopted as the motto of our Ljubljana - World Book Capital 2010 programme. The poet relates his belief that what is written in a book is passed down from generation to generation, each of them gleaning a message from these sources for its own creativity. I would like to welcome you warmly to Ljubljana, the capital of the Republic of Slovenia and the city of books. We are proud of UNESCO’s title of World Book Capital and of the year during which we have built our programme on the solid foundations that books have enjoyed in Slovenia. The collaborative energy between all the links in the book chain has helped us set up a foundation for long-term networking. At the World Book Summit 2011 world congress, researchers and experts of world renown concerned with cultural policies and copyright, and researchers of publishing and literary criticism will be seeking answers to the question of the sense that books and reading today signify the basis of development for the individual and society. My wish for all of you is to find effective models of support for books, to stress the importance of books and reading for the individual and society and to highlight practices that establish the book as an important factor of social cohesion, as well as the role of electronic books and digitisation in developing the culture of reading – and finally to record your findings in the Ljubljana Resolution on Books as Promoters of Human Development. Let our guiding idea in seeking the global dimension of books be that the book, as a medium of all types of knowledge, creativity, information and noble entertainment, is still one of the mainstays of the development of the individual and of society. Zoran Janković Mayor of the City of Ljubljana
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A Word of Welcome In terms of previous World Book Capital programmes, the World Book Summit - WBS is unique. Under its kaleidoscopic umbrella it has gathered, for the first time, everyone involved in the book business: authors, contributors, experts, libraries, publishers, and others (the public sector and the publishing industry). The desire to connect the developed countries and to offer help to the Third World through knowledge and dialogue, to give meaning to cultural diversity and establish intercultural dialogue with a view to fostering harmonious relations between nations and countries on the bases of learning, knowledge, literature and respect for diversity and equality also through language, is the primary mission of this world conference. What has been printed in a book can never be erased. With this in mind we have devised the slogan of the Ljubljana World Book Capital – “Book: the Bearer of Human Development”. WBS represents the high point of 1,380 professional events that have been organised throughout this period. Its accomplished mission invites other world capitals to follow suit with new world book summits. The World Book Summit has been organised through the support of Slovenian professional associations, Cankarjev dom, the Municipality of Ljubljana and the Slovenian Book Agency, and in cooperation with UNESCO, IPA, IBF, IFLA and FEP. Enjoy your stay in Slovenia, and we wish you lots of success with your contribution to the Book Summit. May the WBS also be handed down faithfully! Mitja Zupančič Chairman of the WBS Executive Committee
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Conference Organisation Venue
Cankarjev dom, Cultural and Congress Centre Prešernova 10 SI-1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia Phone: +386 1 241 71 00 Fax: +386 1 241 72 96 Web: http://www.cd-cc.si
Honorary President: Janez Pergar
Executive Committee: Mitja Zupančič - Chairman
Miha Kovač - Programme Director Andrej Blatnik - Programme Director Breda Pečovnik - Logistic Director
Organising Committee Members: Alenka Kregar Metka Zver Tilka Jamnik Marjutka Hafner Gašper Hrastelj Tatjana Radovič Dušanka Zabukovec Matjaž Vračko
Secretariat: Alenka Kregar
Cankarjev dom, Cultural and Congress Centre Prešernova 10 SI-1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia Phone: +386 1 241 71 00 Fax:
+386 1 241 72 96
E mail: alenka.kregar@cd-cc.si 7
Acknowledgements The Organising Committee is deeply appreciative of the sponsorship, generously provided by the following companies:
Media Sponsor
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Printed Media Sponsor
Programme of the World Book Summit, March 31 – April 1, 2011, Cankarjev dom, Ljubljana, Slovenia Thursday, March 31, 2011 9.30–10.15 Opening ceremony and opening addresses Zoran Janković, Mayor of Ljubljana Majda Širca, Minister of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia Irina Bokova, Director–General of UNESCO Dr Danilo Türk, President of the Republic of Slovenia 10.15–11.00 Jens Bammel, International Publishers Association, Switzerland: Digital Migration in Publishing: International Trends and Challenges 11.30–12.15 Mike Shatzkin, The Idea Logical Company, USA: Digital Change in Publishing: Lessons Learned in the US 12.15–13.00 Aleš Debeljak, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia: Concentric Circles of Identity 14.00–16.00 Publishing session, chaired and introduced by Miha Kovač, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia 14.15–14.45 Francis Galloway, University of Pretoria, South Africa: Publishing in Eleven Tongues: The South African Publishing Landscape. 14.45–15.15 Claire Squires, Stirling Centre for International Publishing and Communication, UK: Great Northern? and a Dragon Tattoo: European Publishing Landscapes 15.15–15.45 Angus Phillips, Oxford–Brookes University, UK: The Digital Tide in Europe 16.15–18.00 Reading session, chaired and introduced by Meta Grosman, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia 16.30–17.00 Roger Sell, Ǻbo Akademi, Finland: Encouraging the Readers of Tomorrow: Books and Empathy 17.00–17.30 John Carlin, writer and journalist, Spain: On Reading 14.00–18.00 UNESCO Forum: “Promoting the diversity of cultural expressions in South East Europe,” chaired and introduced by Marjan Strojan, Slovene PEN Centre 14.00–14.20 Mauro Rosi, Section of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions, UNESCO 14.20–14.40 Mery Ciacci, European University Institute, Italy 14.40–15.00 Péter Inkei, Regional Observatory on Financing Culture in East–Central Europe, Hungary 15.00–15.20 Socrates Kabouropoulous, National Book Center, Greece 16.00–16.20 Dubravka Đurić Nemec, Department for Literature and Reading Promotion, Ministry of Culture, Croatia 9
16.20–16.40 Sylvain Pasqua, Directorate General for Education and Culture, European Commission 16.40–17.00 José Pessoa, UNESCO Institute for Statistics, Canada
Friday, April 1, 2011 10.00–11.45 Translation session, chaired and introduced by Andrej Blatnik, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia 10.15–11.00 Rüdiger Wischenbart, Austria: Diversity Report 2010 11.00–11.30 Pramod Kapoor, Roli Books Publishing, India: Publishing for Billion: Perception and Reality 12.00–13.00 Presentation of publishing studies programs of European universities (round table discussion) 14.00–18.00 UNESCO Forum: “Translating to, from and within South East Europe: building new opportunities for cultural diversity,” chaired and introduced by Marjan Strojan, Slovene PEN Centre 14.00–14.20 Antje Contius, S. Fischer Foundation, Germany 14.20–14.40 Dragoljub Janković, Department of Cultural and Artistic Creativity, Ministry of Culture, Montenegro 14.40–15.00 Kata Kulavkova, Vice President of the International P.E.N. Centre and Editor in Chief of “Diversity”, FYR of Macedonia 15.00–15.20 Mariela Nankova, State University of Library Studies and Information Technologies, Bulgaria 16.00–16.20 Nicoleta Rahme, National Library, Romania 16.20–16.40 Hana Stojić, Regional Coordinator of Traduki, Bosnia and Herzegovina 16.40–17.00 Mladen Vesković, Senior Advisor, Ministry of Culture, Serbia 17.00–17.20 Hélène Zervas, Director Ekemel network, European Translation Centre, Greece 17.40–18.00 Closing of UNESCO Forum, conclusions by Anthony Krause, Chief of Culture Unit, UNESCO Venice Office 18.00–19.00 Inaugural ceremony on the occasion of the adoption of the Ljubljana Resolution on Books and closing ceremony
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Mitja Zupančič, Chairman of the WBS 2011 Executive Committee Slavko Pregl, Director of the Slovenian Book Agency Fergal Torbin, President of the Federation of European Publishers Uroš Grilc, Head of the Department for Culture of the City of Ljubljana
Plenary Speakers 11
Jens Bammel, Switzerland
Jens Bammel is the Secretary General of the International Publishers Association, the Geneva based organisation that represents educational, scientific and trade publishers world-wide. Born in Germany, Mr Bammel studied law in Berlin, Geneva and Heidelberg. Mr Bammel started his professional career as Head of Legal and Public Affairs at the British magazine publishers trade association. He then served five years as the Chief Executive of the Publishers Licensing Society, the body that represents UK book and magazine publishers interests in collective licensing. Mr Bammel has joined the IPA in September 2003.
Andrej Blatnik, Slovenia
Andrej Blatnik holds a PhD in communication studies. He teaches creative writing and book studies at the Faculty of Arts in Ljubljana, Slovenia. His fields of research are books in popular culture and literary sociology. He has published twelve books in Slovenia, including three books of theory, and twenty abroad, in English, German, Spanish, French, Czech, Slovakian, Hungarian, Macedonian, Turkish, and Croatian. Blatnik’s latest collection of short stories, Saj razumeš? (You Do Understand, 2009), was published in English by Dalkey Archive Press in 2010. He won some major Slovenian literary awards. A list of his publications, along with some samples, is available at www.andrejblatnik.com.
John Carlin, Spain
He is the author of a book on Nelson Mandela, Playing the Enemy (2008, translated into 14 languages, made into a Warner Bros film Invictus), and other books on Africa and sports (Real Madrid), senior international writer for El País, the world’s leading newspaper in the Spanish language, contributor to London Independent, Observer, New York Times etc. He won the 2004 “Food and Drink Writer of the Year” British Press Awards and the 2000 Ortega y Gasset prize.
Francis Galloway, South Africa
Francis Galloway is an independent researcher and editor. Her research interests include publishing history, the relationship between publishing philosophy, poetics and social / cultural identity and statistical trends in the South African book market. She is responsible for the development and management of the Production Trends Database that profiles local book production. She is the author of a monograph on Breyten Breytenbach, the Afrikaans poet and intellectual.
Uroš Grilc
After obtaining his doctoral degree from the Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana, Uroš Grilc, worked for some time in the publishing industry as an author, translator and editor for publishers specialising in the humanities. At the Ministry of Culture he was in 2003 appointed the Head of the Sector for the Book 12
and Libraries ̶ under his leadership a broad system of state support for the book was established, which provided assistance to publishers, bookshops, authors and the development of reading culture. In 2004, still under his leadership, the public lending right system was introduced. In the same year he coordinated the drafting of the National Cultural Programme 2004-2007 and led the drafting of the law on the Slovenian Book Agency. In 2007 Mr. Grilc became the Head of the Department for Culture at the Municipality of Ljubljana. In 2008 he was the coordinator of the Municipality of Ljubljana’s Cultural Development Strategy 2008-2011 and in 2010 Ljubljana was nominated by UNESCO the World Book Capital City.
Meta Grosman, Slovenia
Meta Grosman is full professor of English and American Literature, through her teaching mostly involved in contemporary English novel and Anglo-American literary theory and criticism. She was a Fulbright research fellow at UC Berkeley between 1987 and 1988. Meta Grosman’s special interests are reading and reception of literature, interculturality, languages in education and theory of translation. She has published extensively in Slovenian and international publications on literature in English, translation studies and interculturality and is member of international societies dealing with the above issues. She has published a number of monographs.
Pramod Kapoor, India
Pramod Kapoor and his wife Kiran, owners of Roli Books, have made a niche for themselves as the producers of the India’s best coffee-tablers. Pramod Kapoor got a degree in business management before he joined Macmillan and then McGraw Hill. In 1985, he started publishing Sunday Mail (which he sold at considerable profit) and launched his publishing house.
Miha Kovač, Slovenia
Miha Kovač is Professor at the Department for Library and Information Science and Book Studies, Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana. He has over two decades of experience as editor-in-chief. He occassionally lectures at various universities in Europe and the USA, and within the ECMAP program he has contributed to the initiation of the postgraduate study program of the Oxford Brookes University. He has published a monograph on the transition in Slovenian publishing business as well as several articles on publishing studies in various international magazines. In 2008, Chandos Publishing published his first independent monograph in English.
Angus Phillips, UK
Angus Phillips is a leading academic and author in the area of publishing studies, with many years experience of working in and with the publishing industry. Before joining Oxford Brookes he ran a trade and reference
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list at Oxford University Press. He works as a consultant to the international industry and his books include Inside Book Publishing (with Giles Clark) and The Future of the Book in the Digital Age (with Bill Cope). He is the Editor-in-Chief of the journal Logos.
Roger D. Sell, Finland
Roger D. Sell is author/editor, editor/board member who has been researching literature as communication, the relationship between linguistic theory, especially pragmatics, and literary theory, mediating criticism and the re-humanization of literary education, and children’s literature within language education. He is H.W. Donner Research Professor of Literary Communication. His books include Literature as Communication: The Foundations of Mediating Criticism (2000), Mediating Criticism: Literary Education Humanized (2001) and Children’s Literature as Communication (2002).
Mike Shatzkin, USA
The Founder & CEO of The Idea Logical Company and of BaseballLibrary.com. He has four decades of experience as a published writer and working in all aspects of the publishing. As a consultant, he worked on separate projects for the sales department, marketers in both trade and technical areas, and editors. He published a book Baseball Explained and other books on baseball, including The Ballplayers which started BaseballLibrary.com. His company is helping publishers improve the performance of their inventory at Barnes & Noble, to the benefit of both the publishers and the bookseller. Shatzkin ‘s writing has appeared in Publishers Weekly, The Bookseller, Publishing News, and Publishing Research Quarterly, among many other publications.
Claire Squires, UK
Claire Squires is the Director of the Stirling Centre for International Publishing and Communication. Previously she worked at Oxford Brookes University, where she was Programme Director for the MAs in Publishing. Her books and publications include Marketing Literature: The Making of Contemporary Writing in Britain (Palgrave, 2007), books on Philip Pullman and Zadie Smith, and articles on the contemporary literary marketplace, book awards, and children’s publishing.
Rüdiger Wischenbart, Austria
A consultant and writer specialized in culture, cultural industries, the global book markets, innovation in the book industry, literature, media, and communication. He researched and (co) authored the 2009 Diversity Report and (in 2008) started mapping translation markets and cultures across Europe. Global Ranking of the Publishing Industry, initiated in 2007 by Livres Hebdo, and co-published by The Bookseller, Publishers Weekly, buchreport and Svensk Bokhandel was also his invention. He holds a PhD in German literature, served as Director of Communication to the Frankfurt Book Fair (1998 to 2001) and now runs his own company. 14
Plenary Papers 15
Andrej Blatnik Who Can Speak Out in the Language of Translation? In 1996, when the Chicago Northwestern University Press published a book by Volodymyr Dibrova, Peltse and Pentameron, the introduction stated: “The appearance of these novels constitutes the first Ukrainian fiction published by a major U. S. house since 1960.” (Melnyczuk 1996: xiii) The champions of the publishing greats might have frowned at the notion that a university press, limited at the Frankfurt Book Fair to three shelves of the Association of American Publishers stall, could be dubbed ‘a major publisher’, but this can hardly have dampened the spirits of the Ukrainian literary community, whatever their opinion of the author presented. After a drought of 36 years, finally a publication for a nation of almost 50 million people! The publication was an achievement, no doubt about that: there are not many American publishers willing to publish translated literature. Various statistics estimate the share of literary translations in the USA at 2 or 3 per cent, adding that the yearly crop of translated titles is between 300 and 400, ranging from French and Russian classics to contemporary poetry. Taking into account only the titles which have elicited any kind of response reduces the number still further. “A 1999 study of translation by the National Endowment for the arts gathered its figures from reviews published in all the country’s literary magazines, no matter how small. The NFA study found that of a total of 12,828 works of fiction and poetry in the United States in 1999 (as reported by Bowker), only 297 were translations – that is, a little over 2% of all fiction and poetry published, and far less than 1% of all books published. A closer look at these 297 titles further reveals that the list includes many new translations of classic works.” (Allen 2007: 25) You can count on the fingers of one hand the publishers who deal with translated literature systematically, pushing their books into the major bookstore chains and having their reviews published in prominent media; in addition to Northwestern University Press, two outstanding examples are Dalkey Archive Press and New Directions. Why start with the US translation statistics, which are so unfavourable (and only outdone in this respect, it seems, by the statistics of the UK)? Because the role of English as an intermediate translation language is increasing. This is partly because the role of English in general is increasing: it has become, after all, the lingua franca of the world’s intelligentsia, and sometimes even of the intelligentsia in multilingual countries, such as India. But it is also because the authors are increasingly longing to transcend the boundaries of their language, a desire not due simply to the overall globalisation and restructuring of borders. The original reason may be a more banal one. Without a reader, literature does not exist: this 16
is what we are told by both theory (the theory of the intentional existence of a literary work, developed by Roman Ingarden and his numerous successors) and common sense. And since potential readers are being drawn today to other practices of art and life, with the impact of literature duly diminishing, literature is seeking to compensate for this loss by passing into other reading milieus. By ‘exporting’ itself, to use a contemporary phrase. Apart from a better chance of existence, an additional motive is a better chance of recognition. Deprived of the expected recognition in their own time, artists used to hope for a fairer judgment of posterity, for success in another time. Today they hope to make good in another place, in another cultural milieu. The promise of correcting one’s status is no longer held out by a ‘fairer’ posterity but by another, ‘fairer’, milieu. And the passage to a larger milieu is accompanied by an intentionally heightened chance of affirmation. The literary world of today sees few imitations of the example set by the African man of letters, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, who established a sound reputation in English but then rejected the language, opting for his native Kikuyu instead. What usually happens is the opposite: authors will replace minor languages with major ones. To be is to be translated; the authors writing in English are already born translated, while others may become so. But not all. Perhaps not even all the best of them. Still, translation into English will enable translations, indirect or direct, into other languages, which may well lack direct translators or literary contacts with the source culture. There are countless testimonies to the translation snowball effect in the literary world. A translation into English triggers translations into other languages, partly because it makes the text accessible for checking to most book professionals, but also because a translation into English is, for the percentage reasons mentioned above, an achievement worth checking. Or if not into English, then at least into French or German. Harvill, the one-time sworn publisher of translated literature, included a Slovenian author in their programme only after her book had been published by Gallimard, who, incidentally, was the one who sold the rights to Harvill. Books by Central European authors appear in their neighbouring countries only after publication in the USA, France, or Germany. Cultural exchange is increasingly dependent on a preliminary affirmation by the major cultures. While Simona Škrabec concludes, in the light of the previously mentioned figures and other criteria, that the literary milieu which finds expression in English is self-sufficient (Allen 2006: 119), even this self-sufficient market may be perceived to contain (or should we say: to have contained?) market niches. Most of the Eastern European writers known in the USA are known in their role as victims of communism, curtailed freedom of speech, communist repression, or postcommunist depression. That was why the West would print their books: who has never known the experience of suffering is willing to import it from wherever it abounds. However, a similar complaint can be voiced by Western writers 17
about the selection of materials considered suitable for translation abroad. In a text analysing European literary expectations, Adam Thorpe observes: “Thus the literature of Europe that is translated does not necessarily break new ground – of mutual understanding or awareness – but solidifies, by dint of the need to sell, the old clichés: Scandinavian gloom, Polish trauma, French sex.” (Rodoreda 2010: 21) With some cynicism we might say: there is no need to import love stories or other commonplaces from far away, regardless of how they are written; there are plenty to be found at home. We might also reassure ourselves: if those of us who do not speak or write in English translate more than the Englishspeaking world does, we have more possibilities. More choice. It is only when the Other’s voice is heard that ‘free choice’ really begins. Who is the real loser in one-way translating? Those who have no choice, or those who cannot be chosen? If the world of the spirit admitted a competition with victories and losses, we could measure and calculate. As it is, we can probably only say: Both. According to a catchphrase, the language of Europe is translation. But just how much of Europe can speak out in this language? Of course we can establish that the share of translated literature published by European houses is significantly larger in comparison with their Anglo-American counterparts; we can even reassure ourselves with the encouraging, sometimes astonishing sales of crime fiction penned by Swedish and Spanish authors. Translations, then, sometimes do have Europe’s ear. But which translations? According to the Maltese writer Immanuel Mifsud, the period since Malta’s entry into the EU, that is, the years 2004—2010, saw but two works of Maltese literature translated into another European language. (Rodoreda 2010: 203) As a key reason for this situation, Mifsud cites not only the paucity of Maltese speakers but also – and indeed primarily – the absence of systemic support for translation (after all, the 400,000 Maltese still outnumber by a third the considerably more translated Icelanders). Indeed, there are figures galore to corroborate the connection between the public funds spent on translating national literatures, and the international recognition gained by these literatures: from the subsidy granted to Margaret Jull Costa for her translation (published by Harvill) of the Spanish novel A Heart So White, whose author, Javier Marías, soared to international fame after receiving the IMPAC Award, to the effects of the Guest of Honour status observed at the Frankfurt Book Fair. The 2010 Nobel Prize winner, Mario Vargas Llosa, said in his acceptance speech: “Good literature erects bridges between different peoples, and by having us enjoy, suffer, or feel surprise, unites us beneath the languages, beliefs, habits, customs, and prejudices that separate us.” (Llosa 2010) But good literature does not entail good sales: it seems that, without subsidies, everything will grind to a halt, with no bridges erected, no unions formed; and it seems that the richer will, once again, achieve more than the poorer – and we are not talking literary wealth here.
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Still, let not scepticism grow into pessimism – I come from a country where, before the declaration of independence in 1991, each publication of a Slovenian book in translation was a Literary Event occurring once in several years. Today, when Slovenia is slowly building up a minimal international identity, slowly setting up various systems of support for Slovenian literature at home and abroad, works of literature, are being published by about a hundred Slovenian writers in foreign languages as well, which is no mean feat for a two-million nation. Every year welcomes several dozen Slovenian books in translation, every year a few more; some authors are perhaps to be found on your own bookstore shelves at home – if these still exist, that is. And if they do not, the digital future brings us new hopes still: the passage of texts via the World Wide Web will be faster and simpler. However, even the digital book knows digital divides, one of which I may illustrate with a personal example. In 2009 I published a book of short stories, You Do Understand? (Saj razumeš?), which came out in the USA the very next year at the earlier mentioned Dalkey Archive Press, both on paper and in an electronic edition. But the digitally aware Slovenian reader, eager to read the book on his Kindle, will have to download the English translation and translate it back into Slovenian by himself. The 19 languages in which you can upload on Kindle’s web interface the e-books to which you hold the copyright, if this is not done by your publisher (or if you have no publisher), do not include Slovenian. Or, for that matter, any other Slavic language. Who is to blame – the haceks, that is, technology, or ignorance, that is, philosophy? I will hazard no guesses: all I know is that it is long since these languages were joined by a new member. Supposing that e-readers were to oust printed tomes completely one day, we are nearing a new translation paradox – no longer “publish or perish”, meaning “you do not exist unless you are published”, but rather “you do not exist unless you are published in a language permitted by the prescribed reading interface”. Now this is a conclusion which may remind readers, at least those in Eastern Europe, of other times – of times which we had considered past and gone. Allen, Esther (ed.). To Be Translated or Not to Be. PEN/IRL Report on the International Situation of Literary Translation. Institut Ramon Llull, Barcelona, 2007. Llosa, Mario Vargas. In Praise of Reading and Fiction. http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2010/vargas_llosa-lecture_en.html (Dec 7, 2010) Melnyczuk, Askold. ‘News from Lennon Square.’ In Dibrova, Volodymyr: Peltse and Pentameron, Northwestern University Press, Evanston, 1996. Rodoreda, Geoff (ed.). Europe Reads – Literature in Europe. (http://www.ifa.de/pdf/kr/2010/kr2010_en.pdf)
Translated by Nada Grošelj
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John Carlin On Reading I have a son called James Nelson who is now ten years old. Since he was very small his mother and I have read stories to him in bed at night. For the greater part of his life he has fallen asleep while one of us was reading. In the last two or three years we have been encouraging him to read on his own, without quite the success we would have wished. There are too many distractions: TV, computer games, football, football…and football. We have the fortune, or misfortune, to live in Barcelona, a city whose football team not only wins and wins, but has elevated the game to an art form. He also loves playing: a very large part of his life is spent with a ball at his feet. But we are making progress with his reading. Through a combination of threats, occasional bribery and, above all, efforts by the parents to hit upon books that he enjoys, he is displaying a growing disposition to read alone. Just today, as I write, he has returned with his mother from a trip to Israel. She reported joyfully – and I greeted the news joyfully -- that he had spent most of the flight home consumed by a book. Why this fixation with getting my son – my one and only child -- to acquire the habit of reading? Why is it so important to me? Well, at one level it is probably pure paternal narcissism. I want him to be like me! I began reading in a sustained way at around the age of eight. Sherlock Holmes was one of my first passions; then historical adventures set at the time of the Napoleonic wars; then Dickens and, when I was 15 or 16, Graham Greene. After that, the classics. I ended up studying English literature at university, which meant full immersion in the works of Shakespeare, John Donne, John Dryden, Alexander Pope, Henry Fielding, Jonathan Swift, Samuel Johnson, Lord Byron, Jane Austen, Tennyson, Yeats. But always, always coming back to Shakespeare, whom I prefer reading to watching in the theatre. For some years after leaving university I was a bit of a snob. Not reading anything modern, anything written after George Orwell; catching up on the Russian greats, Tolstoy and Dostoievsky, and on Flaubert. But in time I expanded my range. Today I read voraciously, promiscuously. One day it is crime thrillers, then it is Turgenev, then it is spy novels set in the Second World War, then it is Roth, or Bellow, or Vargas Llosa, or Eduardo Mendoza, or Vasily Grossman, or Homer, or Cormac McCarthy. And always plenty of poetry and, time and again, back to Shakespeare, to re-read for the ninth, tenth, eleventh time King Lear, Macbeth, Hamlet, the sonnets. What have I got from all this? I’ve never really thought about it very much until now. Let me try.. 20
Reading, especially reading fiction, transports me in time and space. I suspend my disbelief and I set off on extraordinary adventures. I find myself sailing around the Indian Ocean in 1802 in a wooden vessel belonging to His Majesty’s navy, engaging in battles with formidable French fleets, really absorbed in what is going on, really beliving it, caring passionately about the outcome of the battles, the fates of entirely invented characters in whom I have temporarily invested as much emotion as I do with my flesh and blood friends. Or I am in Ancient Rome or Victorian London or Tsarist Russia or Jewish New York or the dark heart of the Congo or cool, contemporary Sweden (Stieg Larsson or Henning Mankell!), unable to stop reading, devouring the words, consumed by dramas that seem to me to be entirely real, as believable as anything I read (or myself have written) in the newspapers. It’s a great deal! I get travel and adventure and suspense and sorrow and laughter and tragedy and joy without having to leave my home, all at an exceptionally low price. What else? Reading allows me to escape the limitations, and tribulations, of my own narrow life and broadens my understanding of the human species and the world. All the more so if the writer happpnes to be wise and shrewd and observant, which all the best writers by definition are. Reading helps in the heroic but ultimately futile attempt to get to know myself better and allows me to see that I am not alone, that my problems and confusions and hopes and dreams are shared, and have been shared through the ages, by everyone. There is a wonderful line from Joseph Conrad, the Pole who wrote in English as well as any English novelist ever did, in which he sets out the writer’s mission: “He speaks to our capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives; to our sense of pity, and beauty, and pain; to the latent feeling of fellowship with all creation -- and to the subtle but invincible, conviction of solidarity that knits together the loneliness of innumerable hearts: to the solidarity in dreams, in joy, in sorrow, in aspirations, in illusions, in hope, in fear, which binds men to each other, which binds together all humanity -- the dead to the living and the living to the unborn.” Re-reading now these words of Conrad’s, with which I have long been familiar, I am moved. By the brilliance of the thought but also by the beauty of the words, by their rhythm. There is an aesthetic delight in fine writing such as one has in response to music, or art, or nature, or – for that matter – the way Barcelona play football. When I read Shakespeare delight ascends to the sublime. Take these lines (I could choose a hundred more that have the same effect on me) from one of his sonnets: “Not marble, nor the gilded monuments Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme; But you shall shine more bright in these contents Than unswept stone, besmear’d with sluttish time. 21
When wasteful war shall statues overturn, And broils root out the work of masonry, Nor Mars his sword, nor war’s quick fire shall burn The living record of your memory.” I read, or recite to myself, these words, I feel the power of the romantic love they so consummately express, and I am left breathless. Every time. Every single time. The harmony between the power of the love and the power of the wordsThere are whole books that leave me stunned, during the reading and after -- for a long time after. King Lear, for me the greatest piece of writing, does that to me. I read this work with fear, horror, pity while feeling, at the same time, an overwhelming sense of awe and wonder at the knowledge that I am in the presence of greatness. Something similar happened to me recently reading ‘the Road’ by Cormac McCarthy. But that is maybe, in part, because it is about the relationship between a father and a son my boy’s age. I don’t want James to be a writer – my narcissm does not go that far! (Well, if he does become a writer, good luck to him, but it is not an ambition I have for him.) But I do want him to be a reader. The notion of how much he would be missing otherwise is too terrible to contemplate.
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Uroš Grilc Ljubljana: World Book Capital 2010 – Principles, Practice, Lasting Effects To Be a UNESCO World Book Capital Ljubljana’s year-long celebration of the book is drawing to a close. On 23 April, 2010 the city took over, from Brussels, UNESCO’s title of World Book Capital, and since that time the capital of Slovenia, the broader region and the country, have been marked in various ways by books. In various ways: since the announcement of its programme to UNESCO, Ljubljana has been emphasising and promoting “book culture,” focusing on authors, publishers, book stores, libraries, reading culture, and also book design, the history of the book and the printing press, while linking the book with all areas of the arts, and bringing books into the public space and the city. Various agents, from public institutions, publishers, to non-governmental organizations, have carried out 86 different projects, and within the programme Ljubljana World Book Capital there was, over eight months in 2010, a total of 1246 events. Broken down into types, the projects and events are the following: TYPE OF PROGRAMME
NUMBER OF PROJECTS
NUMBER OF EVENTS
The Book and Creativity Cultural Realms
48
684
The Book and the City
17
200
Ljubljana City Library
6
40
Fabula Festival 2010
1
100
Embassy Programmes in Ljubljana
12
53
Trubar Literature House
1
130
The Biweekly Cultural Newspaper “Pogledi”
1
19
Books for Everybody
20
20
TOTAL
86
1246
The Municipality of Ljubljana’s rich and varied programme was successfully carried out with the support of the Slovenian Book Agency and the Slovenian Ministry of Culture; the Embassies in Ljubljana, such as the French Embassy, also prepared a rich programme, including an entire range of fruitful exchanges between authors from Slovenia and abroad. A total of 3 602 654 Euros was invested in the project, of which the Municipality of Ljubljana invested 2 648 951 Euros. These amounts will be even higher by the time the project comes to a close. Not until the title of World Book Capital is handed over to Buenos Aires at the end of April 2011 will it be time for a final evaluation of the project, as there are still a number of upcoming projects, including the 23
largest: the World Book Summit. As the literary festival concludes, a total of 14 projects and some 300 events await us. As organizers we announced around 500 events. That this amount increased almost threefold results from the fact that the programme Ljubljana: World Book Capital 2010 was linked in a constructive manner with various parties and received a warm welcome among experts and the media public, most likely because its acceptance among the broader public exceeded expectations. Though the programme encompassed all links in the book chain, from authors, to publishers, to book stores, to libraries, no single link was in the spotlight. To be more precise: the spotlight was always on the reader. The reader was the focal point of the programme Ljubljana: World Book Capital 2010, but for this to be maintained, the programme had to weave a complex web that included publishers and booksellers as well as book stores, writers and various artistic genres (film, theatre, music, and the visual arts), while bringing books into both the public space and the media. Innovation, and sometimes also experimentation and daring, as well as an earnest insistence on the quality of the programme Ljubljana: World Book Capital are what kept books at centre stage during this period in various productive and societal contexts. It was this quality that was responsible for the fact that the programme exceeded its goals. We can already say something about the long-lasting effects that will remain in Ljubljana and in the Slovenian book market even after the title has been relinquished. We will also say something about what we see as missed or inadequately exploited opportunities which, if rectified, would establish an even more solid foundation for the development of book culture: Did publishers, book stores, and libraries make use of the great attention paid to books and of the general climate felt in 2010, which was favourable for books? Have the strategies of publishers, book stores and libraries respected those dimensions of the programme Ljubljana: World Book Capital (LWBC) that pertain to the development of the book market? Have the professional and experts associations been successful, on the basis of the programme of LWBC, in creating durable models for their activities? The crucial point of departure for the programme was, after all, to link various factors with the book, with the aim of working in an optimal manner with the book chain. Only if this is balanced can long-term development in book culture be ensured. To be more precise: a long-term, perhaps overly ambitious, development is envisioned; but exactly that was an essential aim of the Programme Ljubljana: World Book Capital 2010, namely, to establish a trend that would increase the average number of books sold per year from 2-3 per person to 4, to increase the average print run of books by approximately 30% (to about 2000 per title) as well as to reduce by 20% the average price of a Slovenian book, which in 2009 was 20.03 Euros. Over the next two years we will see how successful we were in obtaining these results. But let’s look at the results to date of the programme Ljubljana World Book Capital 2010. While we cannot, of course, expect the city to continue to see such a plentiful array of book-related events, 24
without a doubt the programme Ljubljana: World Book Capital has left and will continue to leave long-lasting traces. These traces or long-term effects of the World Book Capital programme can be divided into three types. The first have to do with infrastructure: as of September 2010 Ljubljana has the first literature house in Slovenia – the Trubar Literature House is not only a new public space, it has also, in four months and through 130 events related to books, literature, the humanities and critical thinking about on culture and society, brought new wind to the capital through its programmes. The first children’s library in Ljubljana, Kres pod Gradom, is yet another child of the Book Capital, one which has been offering a rich variety of offerings in the “Mestni Dom” theatre, with its reading portals in Severni park, as well as the nascent Labyrinth of Art will be a durable mark of Ljubljana, and at the same time each is an innovative contribution to the public space, an attempt at cultivating public space by means of the book. TipoRenesansa, situated on the river bank, began to operate an antique press, which will carry out an important public programme, among which the Festival of Letters, which invites new perspectives on the history of the printing press and book design. The second type of long-terms effects have to do with content: these are the most numerous in terms of the great variety of the programme and the orientation into “book culture” in the broadest sense. The new biweekly Pogledi is a key gain for the entire area of culture, one that represents both a new media space, while acting as a harbinger of a shift in both reflecting on culture and society and in promoting quality cultural offerings. The Books for Everybody project allowed for an insight into the living workings of the Slovenian book market: this campaign to promote books and reading linked authors, publishers, book stores and libraries, and created a network of 220 sales points throughout all of Slovenia. Also, to the surprise of virtually everyone, it showed that sales of even high quality and challenging books can exceed a few thousand and that such books are thus not limited to small print runs; we will speak more of this project, since it is to a certain extent an indicative part of the entire programme Ljubljana World Book Capital 2010. The Festival World Literatures – Fabula 2010 offered an entirely new perspective on the popularity of international literary figures, while the interest in reading renowned world writers who visited Ljubljana proved enormous. The Festival so strongly marked the goings-on in Ljubljana that we would like to continue with it. Many projects investigated the relations between the book and the arts, whether film, music, theatre, or the visual arts. A series of exhibitions thematised books, words, idioms or set phrases. A significant contribution among these was the unique exhibition of miniature books “In a Small Coat of Words,” from the collection of Dr. Martin Žnideršič. This exhibition which be extended both in Slovenia and abroad. During the year of the book, Dr. Žnideršič donated his collection to Ljubljana, a fact of which we are especially proud. Last year the Library under the Treetops experienced an enormous boost as books found their way into parks and other open public spaces, thus lending them a new identity. Through the project Ljubljana Reads we donated exquisite 25
and original picture books (7000 of them) to primary school children, while under the project Growing up with a Book all Slovenian pupils in the first year of high school received a work of Slovenian youth fiction when visiting a library; 21 000 books in total were distributed. It should also be emphasised that the Ministry of Education and Sport declared the school year 2010/11 to be the year of the book and in connection with this school the Ministry systematically promoted various book-related activities. The third type of effects are symbolic: The programme Ljubljana – World Book Capital 2010 made possible the first dramatization of Boris Pahor’s novel Necropolis, which was subsequently hosted at the Verdi theatre in Trieste; in symbolic terms this was an extraordinary event, since that space had previously been closed to both the Slovenian language and intellectual magnificence in Slovenian. Will the doors remain open to Slovenian? Fecund exchanges between Trieste and Ljubljana theatres have been announced. Ljubljana is soon to be included in the International Cities of Refuge Network (ICORN), which operates under the aegis of PEN International, which will in fact confirm the city’s cosmopolitan outlook. In October Ljubljana paid tribute to protestant writers and printers by unveiling a Lujo Vodopivec sculpture dedicated to them. The Ljubljana Resolution on the Book, formed on the basis of experience from Ljubljana: World Book Capital and adopted in March 2011 at the World Book Summit in Ljubljana, is a message to world governments and expert societies in the area of books that proposes concrete and detailed directions for promoting book culture. Perhaps the most important symbolic heritage of the programme Ljubljana: World Book Capital 2010 is the unflagging fact, emphasised at various levels, that too often books are invisible travel companions in our lives, when they are in fact crucial for all of our undertakings and in all periods of human life, and it is for this reason that we encounter books in various forms and in various spaces. In was not by chance that so many projects were carried out in public spaces, that we came across books on trains, at bus stations, in parks and in city markets. In 2010 the media spoke more than ever about books. Ljubljana: World Book Capital 2010 introduced a new discourse about the book and book culture. This heritage must be preserved, put to solid use, cultivated and enriched, for the book is the foundation of both individual and societal development. This intention to ensure long-term traces of the programme Ljubljana: World Book Capital was realised already in early 2011 through a public tender calling for proposals to continue some of the most vital programme aspects. What is more, the Municipality of Ljubljana has pledged that it will, immediately after the conclusion of the World Book Capital programme, present its candidacy in hopes of joining Iowa City, Melbourne, Edinburgh and Dublin as a UNESCO City of Literature. Books for Everybody – An Analysis of Some Campaigns to Promote Reading The Programme Ljubljana: World Book Capital added excitement to the goings-on in the Slovenian
26
book and literature market through individual projects, in particular through the project Books for Everybody. It was previously inconceivable, almost blasphemous, to think that in the Slovenian book market high quality and challenging literature could be printed in 8000 copies and sold at a price of 3 Euros, and on top of that not only in book stores but also in libraries and other cultural institutions. But while this blasphemy was especially noted among publishers, what resonated among the general public were the clearly-presented sales figures for individual titles, since in this regard Slovenian publishing houses stake their claim with an evident lack of transparency and we can therefore only guess at sales figures for books. There are two true benefits to Books for Everybody. First, it is the only project and only campaign for the promotion of books and reading to join all the links in the book chain – authors, publishers, book stores and libraries – with a clear aim: to raise awareness of the importance of reading culture and to promote book sales. The second has to do with content and pertains to the quantity of the high quality books sold. But in what sort of an environment did the project Books for Everybody take place? The context of the Slovenian market is, in brief, the following: the average print run of books in 2009 was 1543 per titles, 1098 for literature, and the average price of a book was 20.03 Euros. More challenging literature was not printed in more than 600 copies. While Slovenians borrow library books at average of 12.8 books per capita, which places us at the top of Europe, we are at the bottom in terms of book purchases, which are 2-3 per capita. If we take these numbers at face value (though they are in all probability exaggerated), it means that approximately 6 million books are sold annually in Slovenia, and in 2009, 447 664 of these were purchased by libraries. The number of new book titles in 2009 was 6586, of which 1765 were literary works, including 921 by Slovenian authors. From the very start, the project Books for Everybody met with another crucial factor: the problematic nature of the Slovenian book store network. Obviously Slovenian book stores are the ideal selling point for books, but there are too few of them, and because of the demographic breakdown of Slovenia, book stores simply do not have a widespread reach. Stated differently, if, as a pre-condition for inclusion in the project, a book store must offer at least 1000 titles from at least 20 publishers, then we see that the number falls to around fifty. As unbelievable as this is, it is a fact. At the same time, we are aware that book stores have to remain the primary and “natural” place to sell books, which is why it is not taken into consideration that the broader sales network encompasses supermarkets and post offices, although the number in these would undoubtedly be higher. But in the project it is not just a matter of sales figures, it is a matter of searching for long-term positive effects, which is why a conscious decision was made to limit ourselves to cultural institutions. On the other hand, the network of libraries is much more developed and in 2009 there were 261 lending libraries, not including stations of the “bibliobus”; as well, 27
in 2009 libraries had 9 200 197 visitors who borrowed 23 958 653 books (source: NUK Slovenian Libraries in Numbers. 2009 Report). Libraries thus represent a solid infrastructure that is worth exploiting for extra purposes and for offering users new services. A particularity of the project Books for Everybody lies in the fact that the sales network is made up of book stores, libraries and other cultural institutions, the total of which is now 220, which ensures accessibility to books throughout Slovenia as well as in the cross-border regions in which Slovenian is spoken. Regularly scheduled project evaluations based on exact sales numbers for individual titles per sales point are an important principle of Books for Everybody. Only on the basis of them will we be able to speak seriously of and judge the project’s effects. The reports show the following: from the beginning of the project on 23 April, 2010, to the end of the year 20 books appeared, each in 8000 copies; 75497 copies of these were sold. This means that of 160 000 printed copies, 47.19% were sold. 65.8% of the books were sold in book stores, 28.1% in libraries, 4% in museums, and 1.9% in other cultural institutions. This number, however, is the most significant, as we can define it (somewhat histrionically) as an achievement for Books for Everybody: 7335 books written by Svetlana Makarovič were sold, 7206 by Slavoj Žižek, 6942 by Boris Pahor, 6744 by Tone Pavček, 5509 of the anthology of Slovenian poets, 4597 by Herta Müller, and so on. Leading authors found a path to readers, and did so in impressive numbers, increasing previous Slovenian print runs tenfold, and almost twenty-fold for poetry. It is especially heartening to see that the most successful book sales were for Slovenian authors. Does a better way of promoting these authors exist? We must, however, immediately add the following to these observations: will publishers and the authors themselves be able to maintain the attention that was devoted to them in such a surprising manner? Particular attention in the project is focused on libraries. In the third period of the project (SeptemberDecember 2010) sales in libraries increased by over one per cent, while books store sales fell by one per cent. If we limit ourselves solely to this period, the sales picture is the following: 61% in book stores, 30% in libraries, while sales in other places (museums and cultural institutions) exceeded 8%. In we translate this into individual figures, up to now libraries have sold 21 230 books, including 10 153 in the Ljubljana City Library alone. We can conclude that the sale of books in libraries and other cultural institutions is stable or even growing slightly, whereas in book stores things are going in the opposite direction. The reason for this is perhaps attributable to two factors: first, that visitors to libraries and other cultural institutions experienced the very possibility of buying books there as something new, while on the other hand we can risk affirming that libraries and other cultural institutions have a wider circle of readers who are not necessarily also regular visitors of book stores and book-purchasers. In any case, it is indisputable that the reach of libraries in comparison with books stores is much larger. We can 28
roughly illustrate this by comparing visits to the largest Slovenian book store and the largest Slovenian library: the Konzorcij book store was visited on the last day of January, 2011 by some 600 people, and 415 of them purchased a book. The Oton Župančič Library was visited by 2316, and lent 4238 books. If we are yet more concrete and compare the results of libraries in the two largest Slovenian book store networks: Mladinska Knjiga sold a total of 29 045 books, libraries 7815 less. The second-largest book store network, DZS, has sold 11 589 books to date, which is almost half less than in libraries, since the City Library alone, with 10 153 books sold, almost totalled DZS’s results. So what do these numbers tell us? They tell us that libraries are a good place to sell books. It is worth addressing library users with such a campaign to promote books and reading because there are many of them and because there are many places in Slovenia that have a library but no book store. Though libraries buy books in the largest quantities, and though they are the foundation for making books accessible, they are too little used a surrounding when it comes to promoting book production. In any case, libraries, through the project Books for Everybody, came to terms with a number of challenges and seriously dedicated themselves to the quality of a new service for users. This is an important new dimension of “public service,” since the library is a space that is indelibly linked to the needs of the local environment. The success of libraries lies, therefore, also in knowing how to answer to the needs of the local environment in terms of buying high quality books, which is something about which they had known practically nothing. Also, because of this, general libraries today are better than they were before, and they have more to offer visitors. Of course it will also be necessary to make sure that libraries do not fall to temptation in terms of future selling of books, since publishers will now no doubt seek new opportunities more intensively. This temptation can be resolved in only one way: by having libraries very clearly follow the criteria for quality book production and the public interest regarding Slovenian books. Of course, libraries cannot and may not become ad hoc sales point for books, but must establish both clear goals in terms of possible future forms of such projects and also long-term orientation linked with the general goals of national cultural policy in book culture in addition to the needs of the local environment. There is still much room for projects of this variety. Stated differently, the key factor in the project Books for Everybody is the stability and reach of the sales network throughout Slovenia as a whole, an area that is not sufficiently covered by book stores. However, if libraries are included in the picture, it changes greatly. This sales network, and with that the assured “physical” accessibility of books, is key to deciding on how the project should continue, since it has proven to be too valuable to dissolve. One cannot overlook the fact that some cultural institutions have been extremely successful in selling books, among them the Museum and Galleries of Ljubljana (302), the National Museum of Slovenia (364), the Open-Air Museum Rogatec (322), and Kinodvor (1069). 29
In terms of results, there is no doubt that readers were receptive to the project and are anticipating its continuation. And from the start the project was aimed at readers, not at publishers, book stores or libraries. None of these three links in the book chain was able to rely on its “natural” legitimacy or special interest within the project Books for Everybody; rather, that only came in second or third place, as everything was subordinated to the reader and the public interest, which took centre stage in this national campaign to promote the book and reading. It is because of this that there was inevitable trauma among the three links in the book chain – publishers (books for 3 Euros and print runs that were ten times higher than usual? Why bother with such a low profit margin? The project is not profitable in economic terms!), book stores (why the competition in selling books in libraries? Will buyers visit book stores even less frequently? Will they in future purchase only books that are 3 Euros, and none of the others?!), and libraries (is part of a library’s public service also to sell books?!). There were two other general reproaches heard from the very beginning of the project, each of which falls into the so-called ideological realm of the Slovenian book. The first speaks of the “devaluing of the book” on account of low prices. This reproach is interesting because it equates the price of the book with its metaphysical value, and they actually turn the other cheek towards each other. Does anyone know how to respond to a question about the proper cost of a book? Is it 5 Euros, 10 Euros, 20 Euros? Is a book perhaps devalued when, regardless of its quality, it finds no readers, when it, forgotten, yellowed and neglected, it ends up in the recycling bin? Perhaps it is devalued when, even if it has been sold and read in mass amounts, it remains incomprehensible and its content are understood only by an exclusive handful of readers? And, if we look at the books on offer, are there not a fair number of inexpensive books? This is very slippery ground, but I fear that it is not the terrain of Books for Everybody, since excellent books and excellent authors found their way to a number of readers through this project. Publishers engaged themselves with the book editions of Books for Everybody in the conviction that they would have already secured books financing both through approved subventions and through sales profits, and as the results show, they did not account for this: the only difference is that the project did not bring the “usual” publishing profits, but the value of promoting publishers and their programmes can be very high, and in the long term it is surely also economically interesting. A second reproach is that the project damaged book market relations through “dumping” practices. This, along with all the real economic disturbances to healthy competition in the over-determined Slovenian book market (in which a single publishing house dominates), in addition to a complex system of subsidising in the field of books (in clear terms: disturbing the market through national help, as there are more than 400 subsidized book titles whose market price does not differ greatly from those books that books that are published without subsidies), is a claim that one – if those who uttered it did so in 30
earnest – could easily check with the competition bureau, which exists to ensure that market activities take place within healthy competition. But seriously and in numbers: can we realistically expect that 21 titles that were published during a short period could undermine a book market that publishes 6589 titles per year (2009)? Could these 21 titles seriously affect events on the narrower book market, that is, on the market for literature, which in 2009, according to statistics by the National and University library, saw 1765 literary works published, in an average of 1098 copies per volume? This is hard to fathom. At first glance we could say that the traumas are an inevitable ballast of the project as a whole and that their weight is such that sooner or later the project will suffocate under it. But the results of the project put the lie to this. These traumas are sine qua non conditions of the project’s success, for if they did not exist, it would imply that the project would have collapsed or not met with success; these traumas are a guarantee that none of the links in the book chain “owns” the project and that none of them prospered in a self-interested manner. That is essential for a campaign to promote books and reading, to connect all the links with the aim of raising awareness of the significance of high quality books. Furthermore, because the goals and the essence of the project were clear from the start, the public interest of this campaign can easily be justified and accounted for. In short, all of these traumas are the “soul” of the project, as it was on account of them that the project Books for Everybody was remarkably successful. And something else came to be seen: the project Books for Everybody can be an interesting testing ground for bolder publishing and editorial undertakings, such as Graffit, the Cankar Publishing House’s readers, the Sorcerer’s Apprentice in graphic novel form and Passion de Pressheren. The last two of these were clearly successful and are an important signal to publishing houses in terms of future forming of programmes. Regarding the first, we will have to wait a little bit for the results. The project thus also from the production viewpoint brings a new dynamic to the Slovenian book market, which in light of the market’s previous rigidity and predictability is a good sign. Rozman and Horjak’s Passion de Pressheren experienced great resonance among the expert public and, moreover, it is an attempt to introduce something completely new into the poetic discourse, namely discussion of graphic novels. Another positive characteristic of the collection of books: five of them were ranked by Pogledi as being among the best books of 2010. With all this in mind, there can be no doubt that the main goal of the project Books for Everybody – to promote books and reading as well as to encourage buying books as an essential part of reading culture – is a marathon of which we have traversed only the first kilometre of the race. But the start was a success, since nowhere else in Slovenia can we find a book-related project in which publishers, book stores and libraries are linked with a common goal and thus forget their special interests. The achieved goal of this marathon is linked to the question of the durability and innovation that the Slovenian book market requires more than ever, regardless of whether all are aware of its limits. Within the programme 31
Ljubljana: World Book Capital 2010 we determined that through concrete projects these limits are questioned; rather than taking them as firmly-established, we regard them as an opportunity and we seek new developmental impulses for Slovenian books not in spite of these limits but because of them. The Municipality of Ljubljana and the Slovenian Book Agency have decided, on the basis of the evaluation of the results, to continue the project Books for Everybody. At the end of January, 2011, a call for proposals was announced to determine the new high quality books that will be made available to readers in all Slovenian book stores, libraries and other cultural institutions. The project Books for Everybody also brought some weakness to light, and for this reason certain project parameters will be modified, even though the project’s philosophy, including the sales points, will remain the same. The main change is the increased flexibility regarding print runs, as publishers who apply will be able to choose from among three categories (5000, 8000, 12000), while the goals of the tender will privilege higher print runs through higher subventions. The second change is in the price of the books, which will be 5 Euros including VAT. Compared to the average book price, this is still very inexpensive, but because it will make the project more financially viable, increase interest among publishers, and result in a better choice for readers. The results of the new call for proposals will surely be interesting to see. A year or so ago the project was full of unknown variables in terms of the working of the system as a whole and also in terms of results; in the first instance, there was great doubt on the part of publishers as to the possibility of selling 8000 copies of individual high quality books, in spite of the attractive price. This riddle is now solved, since the project offered a concrete view into the inner workings of the Slovenian book market while offering new knowledge to all those involved. This knowledge is valuable for drafting and publishing programmes, and it for this reason that we anticipate a great deal of interest among publishers in the new call for proposals, a larger collection of proposed high quality books and hence a better offer for readers. We are convinced that important reserves for the project Books for Everybody remain, both in terms of books offered and in terms of linking sales networks, and that is why pointing in these directions is a must. We must, finally, ask the question of where the publishers and book stores could better exploit the project in terms of their own interest or primary mission. Though we have established that a condition for the success of the campaign to promote books and reading is that it not be founded on the special interests of publishers, book stores and libraries, this does not mean that it is not possible to unite the goals of the project Books for Everybody with certain business aims of individual subjects. By offering their users additional services, is it possible that libraries will also attract new members? Can books stores make use of the increased visits on account of the project promotion and the inexpensive 32
offers of high quality books in order to attract new customers? Can publishers also promote their own publishing programmes via the books published in the project? And can publishers, according to the model Books for Everybody, form a model based on entirely commercial interests? Can permanent unions (of publishers, book stores and libraries) create their own campaign models for the promotion of books and reading? Or does the Slovenian publishing industry at this moment require a campaign to encourage the buying of books? These are questions that remain to be answered. Travel Provisions for Future World Book Capitals The programmes of past World Book Capitals have differed so much that it is practically impossible to determine their common traits. This is by no means amiss, since in spite of the UNESCO criteria for earning the title of World Book Capital, books are, as a medium, greatly dependent on the national language; also, the individual publishing houses of each market are of a specific nature. Even if it is not a matter of searching for common contents of past and future Book Capitals, one necessity, on the basis of the experiences of Ljubljana, must be emphasized – namely, that the programmes of the Book Capitals should not just be symbolic but also bold and aimed at developing book culture. This of course means that the programmes have to pay heed to all links in the book chain and search for possibilities of uniting them. Only in this manner can they create a basis on which they can promote literacy, elevate reading culture and give impetus to the book market. It means not treading the safe and well-worn paths of the individual book and literary market, but questioning the limits of that market, seeking new approaches to promote books and reading. The question of national interest as linked to books is thus a question that each Book Capital must ask itself. And this question must be followed by discussions of public policies (cultural, educational, scientific, tax) that influence the role of books. In this regard, however, discussion should not necessarily be of an abstract academic nature, but it must rather be set in motion by concrete projects. The book is a complex organism and as such is demands complex and concentrated answers, and we cannot approach the subject lightly, which is why reflections must be well-founded and include all those who are part of the book chain. It is precisely here that the Ljubljana Resolution on the Book strives to be of service to public policy planners. The programme Ljubljana: World Book Capital 2010 is an example of discourse on books that left traces in the city and formed a very stable basis for the development of the area of the book even after the title is to be handed on. Ljubljana has changed through books for the better, and precisely this should be the goal of all future UNESCO World Book Capitals: developed city that is cultivated in matters of literature.
Translated by Jason Blake 33
Meta Grosman New challenges of reading The capacity of books to promote development and to spread knowledge and communication among people has been taken for granted ever since printing was invented. The social functions and possible impact of books have been studied from a variety of perspectives by scholars of different disciplines. Yet the central fact that books are essentially linguistic objects pieces of language with potential ability to evoke controlled imaginative experience which only come to life when read has been paid less attention. To exercise any social influence and promote public interest books first need to be read. Similarly, the importance of welldeveloped literacy for all members of societies aspiring to become societies of knowledge and hoping to benefit from books is often neglected. The reading ability as required today for efficient social functioning can no longer be taken for granted; it is rather considered a sophisticated accomplishment in language use to be taught by wellinformed teachers of reading. In general terms, reading is now described as the most complex form of human cognitive activity/behavior in which readers interact with various texts/books in a complex process of semiosis. In this process readers give meaning to texts by interacting with them, and what readers actually do when they are reading is now subject to extensive empirical examination. Though adding to current understanding of reading, recent research about it reveals evernew questions about the still unknown dimensions of reading and points to our lack of reliable experimentally proved knowledge of the component processes of reading. In recent decades the new electronic forms of texts made possible by electronic communication have added new unknowns/dimensions to the questions about reading and about readers’ changed activities when reading e-books. The emergence of new ways of reading has opened the question of the relationships between the traditional linear and new electronic processing of e-texts. It is more and more obvious that the new forms of e-texts and various possibilities of electronic communication will not only bring about major changes in the reader’s interaction with electronic books but also result in profound cultural, social, economic, cognitive and epistemological changes. Today, any discussion of the promotion of reading has to take into account the different possibilities of the kinds of reading to choose for what types of texts and for what possible purposes/uses of them. On the one hand, we have to deal with linear reading which with the advent of radically different electronic reading has come to be regarded as the ‘traditional’ reading and as reading encouraging deep thought. To yield their meaning, ‘traditional’ written texts have to be related to the world of sound, the natural habitat of language. Reading a text, a piece of dead language, means converting it to 34
sound, aloud or in one’s imagination, syllable-by-syllable in slow reading or sketchily in the rapid/silent reading. In this process/interaction readers encounter letter shapes of alphabetic writing representing the corresponding sound shapes, and are expected to fill these shapes with meaning using their previously acquired knowledge of words, language and experience, and according to their individual social position in time-space. To produce textual meaning readers have to use their imagination for turning letters into sound, and thus unlocking sound and meaning deriving it from letters. In linear reading texts as lifeless linguistic objects must be filled with the reader’s meaning and converted into the ‘reader’s mental representation of the text’, as understood by cognitive psychologists as the final comprehension of the text, or rather into ‘textual worlds’, as linguists and literary critics describe the result of the reader’s interaction with texts. On the other hand, readers of electronic texts and new forms of hybrid books face a more complex task of deriving meaning from such texts, since they need to gather the meaning of all the co-present elements in a multimodal text: chunks of language by sounding letter shapes, images, movable images, music, and other sound effects. They have to produce meaning simultaneously, taking account of all the codes of the message and making decisions about their importance. Their reading is no longer controlled by the author’s predetermined linear distribution of textual clues as characteristic of ‘traditional’ texts but rather involves choosing the path through the text by deciding on the salience of individual components and the use of links. The choice of path through the e-text may call for surpassing mere linguistic activity of imaginatively ‘unlocking sound and meaning’ and require complex designing. The reading path of multimodal texts is not automatically given or readily recoverable as in linear texts. Even when the author uses the possibilities of guiding the reader, the readers/viewers may still not notice it or not wish to follow it, since the reading/viewing has not yet been regulated as strongly as the reading of linear texts. They should, however, focus on all codes of the message and decide how the elements making up the text-ensemble cohere in the space on the screen and what meaning is to be derived from their spatially constructed relations marked by their particular positions, shape etc. The reading on the screen must thus bring together the meanings realized by several codes, language along with visual clues such as salience and color, spatial configuration of individual components, sound and music. The required strategy for successful reading, i.e. establishing the reading path on the screen, can be more complex than the reading of linear texts. The reading path has to be established according to the principles of relevance for the reader, which involves considerable creativity. In spite of the complexity of the reading of multimodal texts, in which readers encounter a web page using music, speech, writing, moving and still images, soundtrack that all need to be comprehended together and made into one coherent text in their mental representation, a number of specialists in 35
reading consider the reading behavior encouraged by e-texts a possible threat to the ‘more serious’ linear reading and the possibility of deep thought resulting from it. They point out that the shift from paper to the screen does not merely change the way we navigate a piece of writing, but also influences the degree of the reader’s attention devoted to the text and the depth of immersion in it. The rapid happening of things should diminish the experience of emotions about other people’s psychological states and the reader’s capacity for empathy. The very habits of independent thought stimulated by silent reading could change owing to the new kinds of ‘simpler’ e-texts encouraging fast and inattentive reading. Though this may well be the impact of digital reading on some inexperienced readers, such effects should not be generalized to all readers and definitely not to reading at large in the future. The new forms of reading as stimulated by contemporary communication and e-texts are here to stay and will certainly proliferate a great deal. That is why the evermore intense presence of multimodal forms of contemporary texts should rather stimulate the search for novel notions of what reading is in new circumstances that could accommodate several ways of reading, both linear and digital, and promote their adequate teaching and acquisition in school. To follow such a course of action we should first try to find answers to several questions concerning the similarities and differences of various possible kinds of reading depending on the challenges of traditional and new e-texts. We should also gain a much better knowledge of the actual practices of the young in reading multimodal texts and of their experiences of various forms of new and old texts. Why do they see images as being more immediately accessible and consider them a better communicational route? Do they understand their entire meaning potential? Before reaching any conclusions about the qualities and demands of different ways of reading, we should learn more about the functions of individual components of multimodal texts, for instance the relationships between language and images and their possible meaning function. What is it that language can do that image cannot do? Can image do things that language cannot? Or rather: What are the potentials of language and image as a resource for meaning production? What are the differences between their expressive possibilities if we take it into consideration that language is governed by the logic of time, i.e. the temporal sequence of elements in time often encouraging causal perception, whereas images are governed by the logic of space and by the logic of simultaneity of their visual elements in spatial organization? How to read the textual ensembles on the screen combining language, images, color, music and soundtrack when each of these elements bears meaning and is to be read as part of one message? Does each of the components have partial meaning only and how to decide about their relations, salience and relevance to the reader? How is the use of language changing because of its partial role? How should the reader cope with the change from unidirectionality to bidirectionality and invited interactivity? These and numerous other questions need to be answered before we are able to say that we are beginning to understand the new communicational possibilities of e-texts. 36
To really master literacy well for all kinds of texts readers should be aware of the differences between the meaning potentials and the impacts of linear texts and electronic texts. Insights into such differences can be gained by asking various questions, as for instance whether linear texts offer readers better possibilities of finding an appropriate balance between viewing characters as formal, literary tools and viewing them as representations of human experience than electronic presentations. Or: Is it possible to go further beyond the text in linear reading and reach different forms of deep thought? The answers to such questions must not be generalized, since all texts have no meaning until someone reads them, so each text has to be moved outside the text and related to the reader’s world. Any reading rests on the reader’s willingness and ability to select aspects of their lives as being relevant and attachable to the text. So it is on the readers to decide what forms of reading they prefer. Today it is more important than ever to understand the meaning potential of different codes, so schools should be sure to teach reading of all forms of texts and for various purposes. And it should never be forgotten that books can exercise their positive developmental influence only in circumstances of high literacy of all people.
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Miha Kovač The end of Codex and Corporatization of Publishing: Seven Hypotheses on the Future of Publishing The aim of this paper is to look at changes in organizational structure that have taken place in publishing houses in last twenty years as a result of changed patterns in book production and consumption. As there was no research done on these issues in the nineties and in the first five years of the new millennium, it is challenging to construct incisive hypotheses. Accordingly, we will use rather unorthodox methodology: we will not set hypotheses that will be checked throughout the research paper. Instead, we will analyze personal accounts on publishing developments, available data collected by organizations such as Book industry Study Group in USA or Publishing Market Watch research project in Europe, and the few academic studies on book industries that have appeared in journals such as Logos and Publishing Research Quarterly or in monographs in last five years. In all this, we will look for trends and patterns that appear both in publishing suburbia and publishing capitals. In other words, we will bypass traditional scientific epistemology in favor of what might be called a “Googley kind of science” (Goetz): we will collect data first and then hypothesize. On this basis, a set of seven hypotheses will arise that need further discussion and research1. 1.0. Changes in Publishing Suburbia In the spirit of this formative analysis, let me therefore start with a personal account. A long time ago, deep in the socialist era, when I started to work in what was at that time one of biggest Slovene publishing houses, I triggered a small management revolution. One of the house’s rituals was creation of the catalogue of next year’s production that took place each year in early fall. Editing of the catalogue was also a kind of a list-creation process as neither the database with titles that were chosen for publication nor the database of the titles that were in the production process existed. Such information was safely kept in editors’ heads and retrieved through oral conversation when necessary (which was not very often). Each fall, production of the catalogue was the first serious attempt to put together the list of books that were to be published in the forthcoming year. The catalogue was then discussed in sometime bizarre debates (Gosh! When did we decide to publish this book?), and the first attempt to financially evaluate the production was made. This too created rather bewildered questioning about the financial sustainability 1 This paper has been based upon two lectures presented in seminars on contemporary publishing, which took place in Oslo and Ljubljana in 2011. Vivid discussion after the presentations enabled me to sharpen my views on contemporary book markets. Special thanks go to Adriaan van der Weel, Angus Phillips, and Mike Shatzkin, who read the written version of the paper and provided me with additional insight into the curious world of contemporary book production. All flaws and mistakes in the paper are entirely mine. Slightly modified version of the paper was published in Logos. Reprinted by permission.
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of the list (Oh my god! Will we run out of money for wages if we publish all this?). And last but not least, the list was discussed by the publishing houses’ board of trustees, which consisted of writers, politicians and employees and acted as a kind of censorship body (although a soft one, as in Yugoslavia at that time it was possible to publish almost everything, with the minor exception of works of a small number of domestic dissidents and of international liberal and conservative thinkers.)2. Such late list-preparation created many problems, the main one being the fact that it was hard to plan the cash flow without knowing what would be published in forthcoming year. As the Yugoslav model of socialism was a combination of market economy and collective ownership, such planning was necessary even in the socialist era. When both socialism and Yugoslavia started to approach their end, cash flow control became part of the daily agenda and such relaxed list planning was coming to be considered unacceptable by the management of the house. Therefore, as a young deputy editor in chief, I decided that each year I would start preparing the list more than a year in advance. Even more radically, I decided that the list would not be kept only in my head but it should also exist in a written form and contain all necessary data about production process. The list was typed on an old typewriter and occasionally photocopied for editors and designers. We marked the changes on it with a pencil after every editorial meeting and re-typed it every time we decided to change its structure (which didn’t happened very often as I didn’t have a secretary and was both a lazy and lousy typist). This change was not accepted warmly by all the editors. Some of them considered this a cruel attack on their editorial freedom and an attempt to exercise control over their work (which, as a matter of fact, it was). However, in the long run, the list in a printed form as a tool for planning and production control was accepted as a necessity by everybody. When the company switched to PCs and it became easy to update and rearrange the list, it became used almost on a daily basis. When I moved to the biggest Slovene publishing house in the mid-nineties, I encountered a similar list there. As time passed by, we upgraded and re-designed it in a way that it was possible to see it online on an intranet system. In the second step, sales data were added. As a result, in 1999 when I left the company for academia, an information system was developed that was called “Project Folder.” In summer 2009, when I returned to the same publishing house as a publisher at large, I encountered an industry almost obsessed with data, project folders and planning. The yearly budget for production 2 Additionally, it was quite common that editors in socialist publishing houses executed minor changes in translated literary works in a way that they changed Christmas holiday to New Year holiday, etc. As far as the author of this paper knows, there were no written instructions on what and how to change. Editors just knew; in other words, self-censorship seemed to be even more important in order to understand the publishing industry in former Yugoslavia than censorship.
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was meticulously decided on the basis of the last year’s sales and on estimations of sales potential of the titles on the list. For each title that was considered for publication, a cost calculation was made — and if the title didn’t break even, it either didn’t enter the list or was moved to the list of titles that were published with state subsidy (which was frequently the case with narrative books targeted to more sophisticated readers)3. Already in June, a review was conducted of whether the costs of the next year’s titles correspond with production budget, and if not, the list got readapted. Data about sales and costs were checked on a daily basis, and origination, translation, and production deadlines were controlled thoroughly. To use the words of one of the editors, the company sometimes behaved as if it was a publish-on-demand facility run by control freaks: its ideal seemed to be that the new titles should be supplied to the market on the day the sales plan requests it, with just a short stopover in the warehouse. But is this experience typically Slovenian? In other words, did publishing change from a relaxed, rather bohemian activity to a planned, process-controlled, and professional industry only in European suburbs that underwent a complex transition to a market economy? Or was there a global dimension in all this? 2.0 Changes in Publishing Capitals In Britain, industry commentators (see, for example, De Bellaque) and book historians (Stevenson) describe a transformation of British publishing from family owned and relatively small businesses to public companies and corporations. Through this process, the culture of the whole industry changed in such a way that it ceased to be a “gentlemen’s profession” (Stevenson 203-245) and accountants and marketers took the industry from the hands of editors (see, for example, Eliot). Written on the other side of the Atlantic, Andre Schiffrin’s and Jason Epstein’s memoirs tell similar stories. They both describe the transformation of two mid-sized and high-brow publishing houses into media corporations and the change of company culture that followed. Although they put different emphasis on the processes they were part of, the bottom line is similar: by the end of twentieth century, the whole set of procedures in publishing houses changed in a way that the financial background of publishing processes became more controlled and – what especially bothered Schiffrin – much bigger emphasis was put on profit as the main indicator of the quality of publishing operations than ever before. In short, corporatization of publishing in Slovenia seems to have been a distant replica of more sophisticated processes that took place in publishing capitals. But what triggered all these changes? 3 In Slovenia, Agency for the Book, a semi-state body, subsidizes a great deal of book production, with a special emphasis on more highbrow narrative books.
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2.1. Four Mechanisms of Title Growth The available data on book production in Europe and the USA show that the number of published titles in developed countries was growing throughout the whole post-WW2 period. At least to my knowledge, this growth was first observed in the late fifties by French sociologist Robert Escarpit, who – rather shocked – discovered that there were more than 20,000 new titles published yearly in the UK and France (Escarpit). Today, in both countries yearly number of published titles is incomparably bigger that it was fifty years ago (for more on this see Kovač). Only between 1990 and 2004, the number of newly published titles in France grew by 75%, and in the UK the growth was more than 40% between 2000 and 2004. In the USA, the number of newly published titles grew from around 50.000 in 1987 (Dessauer) to more than one million in 2010, when trade e-book publishing took the momentum and publishers decided to attribute different ISBNs to the same title published in epub and pdf format (not to mention hardcover and paperback printed editions).4 This growth in the number of published titles was made possible by a set of technological, management and societal changes. First, the book was traditionally a product with relatively high fixed production and origination costs. Throughout last two decades, predominantly thanks to development of digital technology, fixed printing costs have decreased, allowing publishers to print books with lower print-runs for the same production price per copy. With the advent of e-books and print on demand, even a “print-run” of one copy became economically feasible. Second, throughout the twentieth century, education became one of the fastest growing sectors in Western societies (see for example Drucker 55-58), which significantly changed the social context in which books were published, bought, and read. As shown by numerous authors (Kovač; Dessauer; de Bellaigue), there is a correlation between the growth of the educational sector and usage of books: in Europe and the USA, book industry growth corresponded with the growth of educational institutions and libraries. As already mentioned, this growth of publishing industry was followed by a transformation of predominantly family businesses to public companies. Through mergers and acquisitions, some of these companies became huge international publishing conglomerates and some publishing houses became part of larger media corporations. As any corporation, they had two predominant goals: to maximize profits and enlarge market share. Obviously, the easiest way to reach these two goals was to enlarge their production. And thirdly, as described by Miller (2), as a result of growing demand, the second half of the twentieth 4 These changes were briefly discussed at Tools of Change conference and Rights directors seminar that both took place at Frankfurt book fair on October 5th, 2010.
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century witnessed a growth of shelf space in bookshops followed by the corporatization of bookselling: in 1970 an average Crown book store in the USA carried around 10,000 titles — by 1995, an average chain superstore in the USA carried more than 125,000 titles plus a lot of other media items (Miller 50). An additional push to book sales came from megastores and shopping malls that started to sell predominantly bestsellers. Similar processes occurred in Britain (for a detailed account on this see Thompson 2010). Available shelf space became literally limitless with the arrival of internet bookstores: in the time when this paper was written, Amazon offered more than 4 million titles. This brings us to the forth mechanism that enabled title growth: selling, distributing and stocking literally millions of titles would not be possible without development of information technology. In other words, IT not only brought online book stores into existence, it also made it possible to control enormously complex distribution and fulfillment processes for hundreds of thousands of titles that could not be executed without sophisticated software and hardware. 2.2. More titles, smaller earnings per title All these changes led to the so-called long tail phenomenon. As observed by Chris Anderson, the online book retailers in the USA, such as Amazon, started to sell a small number of hits in large quantities and a large number of titles with just one or two copies sold yearly (for more on this see Anderson). As shown by Brynjolfsson et al., the number of books in print in the USA went up from 2.3 million in 2003 to 3.5 million in 2008, and the book industry revenue climbed from $24.6 billion to $ 37.3 billion over the same period. This means that regardless the title growth the average contribution of each book in print to the turnover of the industry did not change much in this period ($10696 in 2003 and $10650 in 2008). In the USA, the internet bookstores became one of the most important generators of this title and sales growth, as the share of internet sales has risen from 6% in 2000 to 21-30% in 2008. Unfortunately, there is no data available on the number of titles in print for the majority of European countries, so we cannot compare European and American data. However, we can calculate the value of yearly book sales per published title, which can indicate the overall trends in the incomes of book industry per title. In general, in Europe, the print runs and incomes per yearly published title started to shrink over last fifteen years: between 1990 and 2004, when the title growth was 75% in France, print-run of all published books grew only for 45%. Additionally, in 2005, there were 67,000 titles published and the total value of book sales was 2.7 billion euros; in 1995, there were 42,000 titles published and total value of book sales was 2,2 billion euros (European Publishing Monitor – France 55-62). This means that in 2005, the value of yearly book sales per yearly published title was 40,298 euros, and in 1995, this sum was 52,380 euros. 42
In Germany, the number of published titles went up by 8.4%, but the sales declined by 3% between 2000-2004. In both 2005 and in 2000, total value of book sales was around 9.2 billion euros; however, the number of published titles was 90,000 in 2005 and 82,000 in 2000 (European Publishing MonitorGermany 60-63). The average yearly value of German book sales per published title was 102,222 in 2005, and in 2000, this sum was 112,195 euros. In UK during the same period, the number of published titles went up for 40% but the sales remained the same (European Publishing Monitor 2007 – UK, 53-62). This trend is even more obvious in a longer time period: in 1995, the number of published titles was 85,000, and in 2004, 161,000; however, in 1995, the total value of sales was 3,3 billion euros, and in 2004, it was 4,8 billion. This means that in 1995 in the UK, the value of yearly book sales per published title was 38,823 euros, while in 2004 it was only 29,813. We can find this phenomenon in much smaller book cultures too. The Slovene book market for example, is about 150 times smaller than US book market in terms of population and has no secondary book markets for exports. Nevertheless, the number of published titles in Slovene grew from 2000 in 1990 to almost 6000 in 2010. Unfortunately, there are no sales data available for the whole Slovene book market, but the biggest Slovene publisher, Mladinska Knjiga, with its turnover representing approximately one third of the Slovene book industry, published 370 titles in 1999 with a cumulative print-run of 1.680.079 and in 2009 published 486 titles with smaller cumulative print-run of 1,386,586. Its yearly turnovers are unfortunately not comparable, as Slovenia entered EU and Eurozone during that period and all prices in country increased. Additionally, the company made a partnership with Readers Digest that created enormous growth in turnover with not more than thirty additionally published titles yearly in the first years of its presence in the Slovene market. The estimation is that without Readers Digest, the overall sales would be more or less the same in 2009 as in 19995 and as a result, turnover per yearly published title would be much lower in 2009 than in 1999. 2.3. Diversification of Book Audiences There exist no longitudinal studies about how reading and book buying habits changed in last fifty years in Europe and USA; even worse, there is no research on how the content of published books diversified during this period. Nevertheless, we can assume that this enlarged book audience became more diversified than precedent book reading audiences and that by the turn of the millennium, book 5 The list of titles that were put on sale in Slovenia’s biggest online and brick and mortar book retailer, Mladinska Knjiga, in 2010, shows that the biggest publisher in the country between January and October 2010 supplied 338 new titles to the market. The tenth biggest publisher supplied only 41 titles and the 50th publisher supplied 11 titles. There were more than 150 “publishers” that supplied only one title. The data about sales are similar: in first nine months of 2010, Mladinska Knjiga had 1436 titles in print; out of these, only 135 titles sold more than 100 copies. Out of the remaining titles in print, 209 sold only one copy. These data were retrieved from the internal MKT system in early October 2010.
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reading and book browsing had become more extensive than ever before. If this was not the case (if the growth of reading audience didn’t mean bigger diversification of reading tastes, i.e. if reading audience would be growing without diversification), the print-runs would be growing faster that the number of published titles and not the opposite. In other words, long tail brings us to a conclusion that throughout last decades, book production has been becoming more niche-oriented such that it aimed to a variety of specialized and smaller audiences. This hypothesis was, to a certain extent, confirmed by Brynjolfsson et al., who found out that in the USA, online sales of niche books that were unavailable in brick-and-mortar bookshops led “to a consumer surplus of $3.93 billion to $ 5.05 billion in 2008” (Brynjolfsson et al.)6. Undoubtedly, this enormous growth of online book sales in USA was triggered by the fact that American online booksellers operated in a 300 million linguistically monolithic and economically reach market that is by its volume incomparable with book markets in continental Europe. As a result, US internet book sales developed faster and on a level unprecedented in Europe: In France in 2008, for example, internet book sales (as a percentage of all book sales) were three times lower than in the USA (6,1%; The Bookseller, 19.5.2008;); in Germany, they were about half of those of the USA in 2010 (10%). Furthermore, we can assume that the balance between book sales value and number of published titles being healthier in USA than in Europe is also because of the ubiquity of English as a second language that enables US online booksellers to sell American books all around the globe. In Germany, for example, the market for novels in English has doubled in 2004-2010 (Bowen). However, in order to confirm this assumption, we would need more data on book sales in Europe and further research into European reading habits. Therefore, first of seven hypotheses arise that require further attention: Faster development of American online booksellers and the fact that English is the biggest second language in the world enabled American book industry to target niche audiences and expand its export markets. As a result, long tail seems to have a positive impact on American book industry. It is having a less positive impact on European book industries because they developed fewer internet sales and were consequently less capable to target their niche audiences.
6 The phrase “To a certain extent” was used because Brynjolfsson et al. didn’t execute content analysis that would define the exact notion of either niche books or of their audiences. As a result, we don’t know whether these books were outdated bestsellers published by main publishers that were not available in brick and mortar bookshops anymore or were meant for audiences with niche tastes published by small or even vanity publishers that, by definition, couldn’t find their way to mainstream bookstores.
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2.4. Changes in Economics of Publishing As observed by Anderson, about 98% of book titles published in the USA don’t generate profit and are, as such, “noncommercial, whether they were intended that way or not” (Anderson). Anderson did not reveal what exactly he means by “noncommercial,” so that we can only assume that many of these books hardly break even and some even do not cover the basic printing costs. If he is right, this means that all management and technological changes that lowered per unit production costs (digital printing, coeditions, outsourcing editorial work, desk top publishing, picture banks, advent of cheap printing in Asia, etc) weren’t enough to make small print-runs profitable. In addition, we can – again, only assume as there is no hard data about this for either Europe or the USA - that the two percent of “commercial” books have to carry the burden of the majority of the costs of the entire book industry and make it profitable. As observed by Thompson, at least in the USA and UK (no similar research was done in continental Europe), publishers tried to maximize profits of bestsellers by publishing them in hardcover format as long as possible. If in 1990 half a million sold copies of a hardcover meant tremendous success, The Da Vinci Code sold 18 million in hardcover in the USA alone between 2003 and 2006. At the same time, the hardcover and paperback price differential fell from 10:1 in 1970 to 3:1. Nevertheless, sales of hardcover bestsellers were still drastically more lucrative than sales of paperback bestsellers (for more on this see Thompson 2010 36-40). This brings us to hypothesis number two: On both sides of Atlantic, bestsellers are crucial for maintaining financial sustainability of book industries. As both predominant ways to publish a bestseller7 require huge amounts of money, such developments caught the publishing industry in a vicious circle. In order to cover investment needed to publish as many promising titles as possible, companies need a large turnover. As many of these titles do not become bestsellers, an even larger number of promising titles and of bestsellers is needed to cover operational costs and investments in advances for newly promising books or for books written by established bestselling authors or celebrities – and of course to cover the loses of the supposedly promising books that earned big advances but never made it to the top of bestseller lists. Obviously, such logic seems to fit best the companies that publish a huge number of titles. From this point of view, it is not surprising that over the last 15 years, 5-10 biggest publishing houses dominated majority of developed book markets in Europe and in USA (PMW; Greco; Thompson 2007). 7 Either by publishing as many promising titles as possible and hoping to hit as many bestsellers among them as possible, or by investing large amounts of money in order to buy a book written by an already established bestselling author or a celebrity. For more on this see Kovac and Wischenbart; Thompson.
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3.0 From bestsellers to bureaucrats All this enables us to explain connections among mechanisms that fueled the title growth: growth of the educational sector increased the demand for books that triggered the growth of shelf space, and technological changes in book production made it possible to publish enough titles to fill this space. As a consequence, publishing houses changed from private businesses to public companies and media conglomerates on the one hand, and both the long tail and – at least in UK and USA - hardback revolutions were born on the other. As it is impossible to publish and distribute large amounts of titles with small or no margins without rigorous financial planning and process control, the long tail required a more bureaucratic approach to both book production and bookselling - and big publishing and bookselling companies in combination with corporate culture provided it. This seems to be true also for a huge number of titles that are published outside mainstream publishing developments: today, even vanity publishing cannot exist without online bookselling corporations such as Amazon that distribute such books to their minuscule audiences. Out of this, hypothesis number three arises: Long tail is both a symptom and an amplifier of changes that are taking place in organizational structures of publishing houses, in working processes and in professional lives of all those who are part of book business. But how are these changes affecting the content and quality of published books? Again, there is no cut and dry answers to this question. Authors such as Schiffrin stressed that the combination of the corporatization of the book industry and increased greed created a new kind of censorship that expelled all innovative and nonconformist books from big publishing companies. Additionally, in his memoirs, Christopher Davis describes how fascination with huge sales and greed for never-ending profit growth brought to power managers who almost destroyed Dorling Kindersley, up till then a highly profitable, stable, and respected publishing house (Davis). Nevertheless, both Schiffrin and Davis found new jobs in publishing organizations in which they were able to continue their publishing careers that had been interrupted by the corporatization craze and greed. Moreover, as shown by Stevenson, Schifrin was exaggerating with his claims that publishing standards are deteriorating across the whole industry as some big companies succeeded to maintain high quality standards(Stevenson 2000). Furthermore, research on European bestsellers (KovaÄ?; Wischenbart) showed that at least on the old
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continent till 2010, bestsellers were published by a variety of small, medium, and large publishing houses8. Additionally, the bestseller markets in different European countries seem to be highly diversified according to genres, as top European bestselling authors in last five years, such as Pascal Mercier, Carlos Ruiz Zafon, Stieg Larrson, Muriel Barbery, and Ildefonso Falcones, belong to very different genres9. To make a long story short, two processes could be observed in the development of book publishing in recent decades: on one hand, title growth and increased demand for books triggered corporatization of publishing; on the other, at least globally, these processes didn’t kill the diversity of published content. Even if the corporate publishing culture tended to produce “more of the same”, as Schifrin warns, the need for books in online and brick and mortar bookshops all around the world was so big that it was impossible to fill it without offering a highly diverse range of titles. In other words, the only way to put 4 million titles on sale as Amazon does is to offer almost everything, including titles published in backyard garages. “Books by less know authors were not ignored,” writes Thompson about mega bookstores’ buying policy in his treatise on contemporary US and UK trade publishing. On the contrary – “the central buyers in the chains were always eager to find new authors and new titles that might appeal to their customers” (Thompson 2010, 35). Of course, differences started to appear in what was exposed, promoted, and displayed: here, authors of bestsellers were strongly advantaged as exposing their books both in shop windows and inside the shops was the easiest way to generate enough income to cover both high publisher’s costs and costs of running large retail businesses. Nevertheless, there seemed always to be enough space for new authors and genres to resurrect from nothing and start climbing bestsellers lists when changes in reading tastes and book buying habits took place: if this was not the case, Stieg Larsson would never have become a posthumous star on both sides of Atlantic. In short, European book markets were indeed dominated by big companies and by established bestselling authors, but among them, many smaller companies existed and – what matters most – the book production was diversified and not at all dominated only by one or two genres. Such a state of 8 For example, the biggest made-in-Europe bestseller in the last two years, Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy, was published in the UK by Maclehose publishing, an imprint of independent Quercus. In France, Slovenia, and Denmark Larsson was published by Actes Sud, Presernova druzba and Modtryk, that are considered as small or mid-sized publishers in their respective markets, and in Spain and Germany, by Random house and Destino that are part of big conglomerates. An important factor that influenced this plurality in Europe were literary agents that controled copyrights of major bestsellers and, for a variety of economic and business reasons, preferred to distribute bestselling titles to different companies in different countries (for more on this, see Squires 2007). 9 The research was not focused on overall sales of bestselling titles in Europe, but on time and place of various authors on a variety of bestseller lists. The authors believe that such approach helps to show the variety of reading tastes in different European cultures. For more on this see Kovac and Wischenbart, 2010.
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affairs could lead us to the conclusion that market mechanisms did their best for the book industry over the last few decades. Regardless of the fact that many book companies became highly corporatized and professionally organized, they were still able to recognize new trends – and if some failed to do so because they became too greedy or too petrified, this didn’t endanger the diversity of the book market, as there were new players that jumped in and filled the gap. Therefore, this brings us to a fourth hypothesis: Regardless of corporatization, book industries in Europe published a huge variety of diversified titles and as such sustained plurality of reading tastes. But was it really so good and so simple? Can we really say that European book markets sustained their diversity regardless of corporatization? Is the book production indeed more diversified and pluralistic than even before? And, if so, will remain so in the long run? 3.1. Codex under Question: USA There are no simple answers to such questions. The main reason for this ambivalence is that described processes should be considered as a part of larger technological and societal processes that are putting under question the codex as the main platform for book content storage. For instance, in 2010, the sales of trade e-books in USA reached 10%; in October 2010, one third of the sales of Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom were e-books (Shatzkin files October 11th 2010). In June 2010, a panel of CEOs of the largest American publishers predicted that in five years time, 40% to 50% of all fiction book sales will be e-books. Such developments lead to the conclusion that brick and mortar bookshop sales will decline from 72% today to only 25% in 2015. (Shatzkin Files, July 11 2010). As a consequence, the shelf space and with it, the number of brick and mortar bookshops - might decline significantly in the USA. If this happens, many US publishers will remain without their main sales channels for printed books. On the other hand, the structure of the e-book business seems to favor different players than print publishing does. In the last two years, many American authors have skipped publishers and made direct deals with Amazon (Shatzkin Files, 2010). This means that authors started to take on the role of their own publisher or agent; furthermore, as many printed papers and magazines went bankrupt due to internet proxy, at least in the Anglo-Saxon world, many professional authors seem to be losing their additional sources of income and have to reinvent themselves. On the other hand, Apple suddenly became a bookseller and agents such as Andrew Wiley started to run their own publishing operations
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for e-books in order to directly negotiate with Amazon10. In short, all classical book trade professions seem to be going through turmoil of change in the USA: authors, agents and booksellers are becoming publishers and hardware producers are becoming booksellers – and at the time when this paper is being written it is not clear where all this is leading. 3.2. Codex under Question: Europe Due to a variety of reasons, in the first decade of 21st century, there was no e-book revolution in continental Europe as it was in USA. Firstly, there was no European Amazon. The reason for this is obvious: thanks to linguistic diversity there were no online retailers that could sell and distribute all the books published in all the European languages in the same way that Amazon distributed and sold almost all books published in English. As a result, European online booksellers do not have enough resources to invest either in heavy discounting in order to buy market share or in development of e-book infrastructure. Furthermore, European online bookshops are predominantly owned by bricks and mortar booksellers that were not interested in risking the classical bookselling business model. As such, they lacked not only financial resources but also interest to fight with brick and mortars on the same way as Amazon does in USA. Secondly, in most EU countries, taxes on e-books doubled the taxes on p-books, thanks to a bizarre ruling of the European Commission, which decided that the supply of a “book on any physical support comes under supply of goods, whereas the downloading of an e-book is defined as a supply of services. Therefore different VAT rates apply.” (http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getAllAnswers. do?reference=E-2010-0673&language=EN). This quite clearly means that, according to EU bureaucrats, taxation on books should be lower because they are printed on paper or stored on a DVD, and not because the book as such is a repository of culture and knowledge. To go a step further down this line of reasoning, from European bureaucrats’ point of view, novels read on paper are culture, but the ones read on Kindle are not11. Thirdly, in continental Europe, many of the published books are translations. When these books are re-published in e-format, the publisher will have to pay again for the translation for many of them, as e-rights did not exist when these books were first translated. Therefore, if for example Andrew Wylie decides to charge 50% for the e-edition of backlisted books (as he does in USA), and if one adds 20% 10 Wiley pulled back only when publishers furiously protested and threatened that they would stop buying rights for printed books from him as they saw no reason to promote an author and allow somebody else to gain from this in the e-book market. 11 At the time when this paper was being written Federation of European Publishers was fighting a battle to change such regulation stressing a very obvious fact – that such ruling is not only controversial but is as a matter of fact in favor of dominance of US online e-booksellers in European e-book markets.
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taxes and 30% for the e-bookseller (if the agency model is applied) to it, the sum is 100% - which means that nothing remains for the publishers and translators. Even if the agent charges only 25%, the sum is around 75% - and out of 25%, it is almost impossible to cover all the publisher’s and translator’s costs. In short, in the first decade of new millennium, not technophobia, but its organizational structure, economic realities, and its cultural context were stopping the European book industry from becoming more engaged in the e-book business. Consequently, projections about the sudden fall of the classical bookselling model do not apply to Europe – at least not on the short run. However, in the long run such a state of affairs doesn’t seem to be sustainable. As already mentioned, there are strong indications that throughout last decade there were more and more non-English Europeans who were reading books in English. Therefore, we can assume that in the second decade of 21st century, the spread of e-readers to continental Europe will further enhance the growth of English reading and consequently strengthen the role of English as the biggest second language in the continent. In fall 2010, when this paper was written, Amazon’s Kindle worked perfectly almost anywhere in Europe and with it, users could buy a huge amount of books in English at American prices without EU taxes or customs being applied, as wise European bureaucrats haven’t yet found a way to tax e-content that is being electronically sent across EU borders12. For an European reader, this means that for a relatively small price of a Kindle device, he or she could buy an entrance to a 24/7 open, half a million custom-free American bookstore with immediate and cost-free delivery of purchased goods. One of the possible conclusions of this paper therefore doesn’t sound very European: if development of e-book trade publishing in USA doesn’t stop, European book readers will join the tide by buying more and more books in English. Longer this situation persists bumpier will be the ride to catch up by European publishers. This brings us to hypothesis number five: The differing pace of development in e-book publishing in Europe and the USA will strengthen dominance of English as a second language and of US publishing/bookselling organizations. At least from the perspective of a book researcher, the current difference between the state of affairs in Europe (no changes yet in the roles of publishers, agents and booksellers) and USA (roles of publishers, agents and booksellers being in flux) indicates at least one important fact that was not obvious before 12 The author of this paper purchased a Kindle in October 2009, and with it, between October 2009 and November 2010, purchased e-books from the Amazon website in Slovenia, Croatia, Slovakia, Austria, Italy, Grece, Belgium, Netherlands, UK, Latvia, Germany, France, Norway and Sweden. It is worth noting that such developments might change power relations in the book industry as for the last fifty years all major companies were European, and developments in e-publishinhg are clearly very much in favour of US companies. Additionally, books seem to be one of the first goods that could be sold globaly on a way that is beyond the ability of the states to control their free flow.
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the advent of e-books. Roles in the classical book business model (or in the “communication circuit� of the book, as Robert Darnton would say) seem to be linked to the nature of the platform on which the book content is stored. This brings us to the hypothesis number six: The communication circuit of the book changes if the platform on which book content is stored changes. 4.0 Conclusion: Is the Medium the Message? Not only changes in organization structure of publishing houses and publishing professions, but also a huge set of important cultural issues seems to be link to this hypothesis. If there is a link between the platform and communication circuit of the book, then how does the change of the platform and of the circuit affect the content of a book? Could we rather paradoxically, say that the corporatization and long-tailization of book industry, coupled with the analog platform, somehow preserved both linguistic and cultural diversity and pluralism of book production in Europe? Could we expect that this pluralism and diversity might become endangered with the change of the platform that is linked to only one, linguistically dominant book culture in a globalized world? Secondly, how does the change of the platform - and related business models - affect our perception of the book? Will our understanding of a novel change if the length of a literary text will no more be determined by the size of printed page and by the number of pages that can be stored in a codex? This last question seems to be even more pertinent as a change of platform means change in economics too. Simply put, throughout the twentieth century, publishers all around Europe and the USA didn’t publish novels that had less than roughly 150 or more than 900 pages and they avoided the texts with which they estimated that they would not be able to sell at least a couple of hundred of copies. They did so not because they followed canons of literary criticism about what a novel is, but because they were forced into this by the very economics of printing as it was technically impossible to print a book with more than 900 pages and was economically insane to print books with less than 150 pages in print-runs lower than 1000. Therefore, they automatically selected for publication only those fiction texts that fit into this pattern. With Kindle and other e-book readers, this is no longer the case, as there are no print-run or length limitations. Therefore, it is quite likely that if e-books prevail, the notion of a novel will change too. This brings us to hypothesis number 7, which was for the first time written in 1964 by Marshall McLuhan but will need to be re-evaluated and re-thought in forthcoming years in a different social context than when it was coined: The medium is the message. 51
As the codex dominated the information exchange in Europe for the last two thousand years and print for last five hundred, this undoubtedly represents one of the main research questions of our time. Perhaps the efforts to understand the consequences of the transition to the digital era should start somewhere here.
Anderson, Chris. The Long Tail. New York: Hipernion ebooks, 2006 (Kindle edition) Bowen, Kate. International Bestsellers gets German Reading in English. 2010 (Accessed on October 2010 on http:// www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,,4199574,00.html) The Evergreens, the next generation. The Bookseller, March 2010 Pira International. The EU Publishing Industry: an Assessment of Competitiveness. Luxembourg: Office for Official Publications of European Communities, 2003. European Publishing Monitor 2007: France. Media Group Turku School of Economics and KEA European affairs. (Accessed on November 7th 2010 at http://ec.europa.eu/avpolicy/docs/library/studies/finalised/publish/france_en.pdf) European Publishing Monitor 2007: Germany. Media Group Turku School of Economics and KEA European affairs. (Accessed on November 7th 2010 at http://ec.europa.eu/avpolicy/docs/library/studies/finalised/publish/ germany_en.pdf) European Publishing Monitor 2007: United Kingdom. Media Group Turku School of Economics and KEA European affairs. (Accessed on November 7th 2010 at http://ec.europa.eu/avpolicy/docs/library/studies/finalised/publish/ uk_en.pdf) Davis, Christopher. Eyewitness: The Rise and Fall of Dorling Kindersley. London: Harriman House Publishing, 2009. De Bellaigue, Eric. British Book publishing as a Business since 1960. London: British Library, 2004. Dessauer, John. Book Publishing. New York: Continuum, 1993. Drucker, Peter. 1999. Management Challenges for 21st Century. New York: Harper Business. Elliot, D. A Trade of Charms. London: Bellew Publishing, 1992. Epstein, Jason. Book Business. New York: Norton & Co., 2002. Escarpit, R. La Revolution du Livre. Paris: Unesco, 1972. Goetz, Thomas. Sergey’s Search. Wired, July 2010. Greco, Albert N. The Book Publishing Industry, 2nd edn. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2005. Miller, Laura. Reluctant Capitalists. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Schiffrin, Andre. The Business of Books. London: Verso, 2001. Stevenson, Iain. Review of Andre Schiffrin’s Business of Books. The Bookseller, November 2000. Stevenson, Iain. Book Makers. British Publishing in Twentieth Century. London: British Library, 2010. Thompson, John. Merchants of Culture. Cambridge: Polity, 2010. Thompson, John. Books in a Digital Age. Cambridge: Polity, 2006. Shatzkin Files http://www.idealog.com/blog/
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Roger D. Sell
Encouraging the Readers of Tomorrow: Books and Empathy The main reason why people learn to read is not in order to read books. They need reading for so many other purposes in life, and most of the texts they read are far shorter than a book. Nor are books the most obvious form of communication and understanding in multicultural experience. There is no substitute for actually getting to know real people in their own milieu, and nowadays the major alternative to this is presumably the internet and the social media made possible by digital technology. A book, after all, does not provide you with a feed-back channel. Normally you just take a book or leave it. The new forms of communication, by contrast, have already broken down traditional distinctions between public and private and between authority and lay-personhood. Whereas a book seems to be something separate, something that in one way or another is essentially about the world, or about life, by using Facebook, for instance, you can intensify your feeling of actually being in the world, your feeling of actually being alive and in touch with other living people, and this within a social sphere where everyone is equal, and where everybody’s knowledge and experience is taken to be equally valuable. In a digital universe where everyone is using English and exchanging views and information about the same international trends, fashions, hobbies, cuisine, interests, sports, celebrities and so on, the levelling of distinctions between one person and another applies to their cultural markers as well. As a result of this cyberspatial homogenization, the kind of rainbow societies and hybrid identities which men and women of good will are hoping to promote in the world’s great metropoli, and in countries with complex ethnic and cultural histories, are perhaps already being realized. If so, then the book, as a less democratic medium which is not restricted to the world language and which often reaches readers in only one segment of only one society, would perhaps have to be seen as an elitist vehicle of political reactionism. In that case, writing or reading a book would be a way of trying to turn the clock back. And to promote reading in the form of reading books, and to do this in the interests of communication and understanding in multicultural experience, would be deeply self-contradictory. Some champions of the book might reply here that cyberspatial homogenization cannot be nearly as beneficial as this suggests, because it is driven by huge multinational economic interests. But even if the new digital media and interactive technologies are putting astronomical sums of money into
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somebody’s pockets, this would be a price well worth paying for a lasting world peace. If cyberspatial homogenization could remove the differences which are manipulated by politicians when they persuade people to fight wars, we should perhaps be grateful. Lasting world peace would hardly be worth having, however, if human life were no longer worth living. The only relevant defence of the book, it seems to me, lies in the risk that cyberspatial homogenization, if not counterbalanced by a resilient and widespread bibliophilia, could leave human life seriously impoverished. The cyberspace, by having as its main stock in trade such events, information, enthusiasms and values as constitute a universal common denominator, is arguably doomed to a superficiality which cannot do justice to any particular life-experience. Think only of the mode of attention it encourages in its users. In terms of the human concentration span, nothing can be more deleterious than surfing or twittering, for instance. To penetrate a topic in a depth that is humanly interesting and valuable, we do perhaps need the time-consuming modes of composition and use that have always been demanded by books. But if this means that there is indeed a place within national education programmes for promoting the reading of books, the task must now be re-conceptualized. Over the last five or six decades, there has been a huge change in political attitudes, a change prompted by the type of ideological critique often labelled as postmodern, which culminated in the so-called cultures wars of the 1990s. Power bases run by people belonging to just a single class, gender, religion or ethnic background are a thing of the past, and many groupings which were previously marginalized and underprivileged have now found their voice and won recognition. This egalitarian trend in society as a whole is strongly reinforced by contemporary communicational practice, precisely because so many people now live their lives in symbiosis with the new digital media. Cyberspace levelling and democracy may already be the prototype of all human interaction. And books will never effectively compensate for the new medias’ potential superficiality if the promoters of book-reading invoke political attitudes which have lost their legitimacy. To be more precise, reading education can no longer be an education in something called Literature (capital “L”). Especially during the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, the notion of Literature was inherently elitist and very narrow in scope. Literature consisted of a number of poems, plays, and novels which were approved by respected authorities as having sufficient merit to qualify for the literary cachet. The criteria on which these texts were assessed reflected establishment values, or when they did not, reflected the values of an intelligentsia which was critical of the establishment, yet which was in its own way just as strongly established and authoritative. This kind of regime will no longer work, because the potential book readers of tomorrow are today’s children, who have been digitally literate since the age of four or five, and who, in cyberspace, are already fully accustomed to finding their own way
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around. In all their interests and tastes they do make value judgements between things that are good and things that are less good. But they very much have the sense that they are making up their own minds. When they do accept advice, it is from somebody whom they regard as basically like themselves and of their own status, even if the adviser happens to be some sort of celebrity. The traditional teacher of Literature in schools and universities, and the traditional literary critic or reviewer, like all the other old-fashioned kinds of authority figures, are dying breeds. Two questions I am often asked are: Why is the standard of literacy is so high in Finland? And why, relatively speaking, are far more books borrowed from public libraries in Finland than in any other country? Well, one point is that, in Finnish society as a whole, adults have never talked down to children and have never given them unexplained commands. With infinite patience, they have always treated children as adults in the making, who are perfectly capable of using their own brains and learning from their own mistakes. This is something so deeply rooted in Finnish culture that it is not even mentioned in official descriptions of educational aims. It is simply taken for granted. The other point is that Finnish schools have never done all that much to promote book-reading and Literature. Because neither of Finland’s national languages is a world language, Finnish children study a total of four or five languages altogether, and because Finland has traditionally believed in a broad-based education there have always been a lot of other subjects to cram into the school timetable as well. Under these circumstances book-reading and Literature have had very little space. In fact questions on literary texts came into the national matriculation examination only a few years ago. In other words, Finnish people have been very likely to use books in the way that their authors have intended. They have not studied them, but have read them, which is a completely different thing. They have not wasted their time trying to come up with a so-called definitive interpretation of a book – the kind of interpretation which would in principle mean that the book no longer needs to be read and discussed – but have really read it, with a completely open mind, and allowing it to go on challenging them to further thought and questioning. By the same token, they have not been encouraged to think that one particular kind of book is infinitely better any other. That is why, whereas in Britain and America, for instance, most publishers of books on literary topics regard the general reader as long since dead and buried, and therefore produce books only for literary specialists, in Finland the general reader is alive and well. If we are really hoping that today’s young people will develop the kind of attention span they will need in order to move between surfing the internet and reading a full-length book, we shall indeed have to acknowledge that books can be of many different kinds and on many different topics. To give youngsters a shortlist of recommended reading within a very narrow range of genres would be completely counterproductive. They themselves can easily see that, with millions of highly variegated 55
books being published every year, any such shortlist would be absurdly presumptuous. As adults, parents, educators, our motto can only be, “Let them read around!” Or to put this another way: “Let them make the most of the limitless digital library they can now access through their reading pads!”. To the extent that book-reading does figure within educational programmes, the aim should be to promote an appreciation of human otherness and of ethical communication. One critical mode will be that of a mediating criticism which, by focusing on the ethics of response, seeks to ensure that writers are given a fair hearing. Among other things, mediating criticism will supply any necessary information about differences of society, culture and ideology, and in this way foster a sense of human otherness as a stimulus to self-scrutiny and self-renewing mergings of horizon. The other critical mode will be that of communicational criticism. This focuses on the ethics of address, and will hold up for emulation examples of communicational good practice, i.e. a practice which truly respects the addressee’s human autonomy. What the best books of widely different kinds do tend to share is a considerate anticipation of their readers’ potential otherness. This empathetic sensitivity is what, at the deepest level, any good book teaches. Discussed along these lines, books will promote in-depth understanding and communication within a very wide circle. The old notion of Literature involved a canon of great books that were allegedly accessible to the entire human race, because Human Nature was said to be basically the same in any time and place. We might still feel some enthusiasm for this idea, if postmodern critics of the late twentieth century had not shown it to have been an ideological subterfuge which obscured the structures whereby some groupings maintained power over others. But in arguing that literature (small “l” now) could only be thought of as many separate canons for many different groupings, postmodern critics themselves could go too far, almost suggesting that different groupings had so little in common that they were incapable of mutual understanding. The facts are that both authors and readers, although they are social beings, also have a certain relative independence of imagination, intellect and will, and that this predisposes both parties in the author-reader relationship to empathize with formations that are different from their own. An appropriately post-postmodern way to view the writing and reading of books is not only as involving many different sociohistorical positionalities, but as encouraging interchanges between them. Communities of readers do grow up around books, and a book may have some particular historical context, and specially address some particular grouping of readers. But a book can also have a wider reach than that, and tends to make for a community that is much more openly heterogeneous than that of the new digital media. A book’s readership, when distributed across space and through time, is not a homogenized consensus but a coming-together in genuine dialogue.
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Diversity Report 2010 57
Diversity Report 2010
Literary Translation in Current European Book Markets. An analysis of authors, languages, and flows. Written by Miha KovaÄ? and RĂźdiger Wischenbart, with Jennifer Jursitzky and Sabine Kaldonek, and additional research by Julia Coufal.
www.wischenbart.com/DiversityReport2010
Contact: ruediger@wischenbart.com
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Executive Summary The Diversity Report 2010, building on previous research presented in the respective reports of 2008 and 2009, surveys and analyzes 187 mostly European authors of contemporary fiction concerning translations of their works in 14 European languages and book markets. The goal of this study is to develop a more structured, data-based understanding of the patterns and driving forces of the translation markets across Europe. The key questions include the following: What characterizes the writers who succeed particularly well at being picked up by scouts, agents, and publishers for translation? Are patterns recognizable in the writers’ working biographies or their cultural background, the language in which a work is initially written, or the target languages most open for new voices? What forces shape a well-established literary career internationally? What channels and platforms are most helpful, or critical, for starting a path in translation? How do translations spread? The Diversity Report 2010 argues that translated books reflect a broad diversity of authors and styles, languages and career paths. We have confirmed, as a trend with great momentum, that the few authors and books at the very top, in terms of sales and recognition, expand their share of the overall reading markets with remarkable vigor. Not only are the real global stars to be counted on not very many fingers. Even those strongly represented in more than just one or two languages are few in number. Those at the top who write in English however, amount altogether to roughly one third, far below the expected threshold, contradicting assumptions of a globally homogenized best-seller literature flatly dominated by Anglo-Saxon serial authors. However, the group of strong languages from which an international career can reasonably be started is limited to mostly half a dozen West European idioms, including notably English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Swedish. All Asian and African languages, or even those of Central and Southeast Europe, are significantly underrepresented. Contrasting the role models of the older generations of writers, the study identifies how recently a new type of author and book has emerged, taking advantage of new dynamics of aggressive and highly volatile market forces and powerful drivers. Instead of patiently building a lifelong writing career, these authors, often with a biography that is global, or at least multi-cultural, hit the international scene with great fanfare of one smashing hit book, sometimes additionally propelled by one of the very few awards with impact on the international rights markets, namely, the Man Booker or, to a slightly lesser degree, the Prix Goncourt. 59
While the globalization of publishing markets (and those of culture more broadly) as reflected in the formation of huge transnational publishing and media corporations has a role as an accelerator, as do internationally acting literary agents, the study finds a remarkable number among the most widely, and best-selling translated authors, for whom small- or medium-sized independent publishing houses are the key forces for international success, and agents are not always involved in representing these authors. The findings also reflect that the spheres of new talent for a potentially wider international readership are clearly underexplored, notably in those markets and languages traditionally underrepresented in the translation charts of the West European main markets. Tools and strategies as presented in this Diversity Report will allow to identify thus far only locally thriving talent for future translations, and hence for a much broader, international reading audience.
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Table of Contents Introduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63 On the selected authors and the applied methodology. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65 The broad flows of translations in Europe. Summaries of relevant findings from the Diversity Report 2008. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69 Mapping languages and markets. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73 Author role models. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77 The most translated, the newly translated, the ‘non-translated,’ and the establishment forming the ‘middle class.’. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77 Close-up on authors and author role models.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78 Publishers and translation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82 The role of transnationals and of independent publishing houses.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82 The literary masters and some oddities of the Long Tail.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84 Who publishes whom in translation?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84 The impact (and the limits) of awards. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89 Introduction and general remarks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89 The Man Booker. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90 Le Prix Goncourt. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91 Der Deutsche Buchpreis. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91 The European Union Prize for Literature (EUPL) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93 Translations and best sellers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95 Basic patterns of distribution by best-selling authors and languages. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96 Best sellers in translation, and the ‘Long Tail’. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100 Close-up of selected author and market profiles. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102 France: Dynamics and complexities of a premier translation market. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102 Best sellers and translations from Central and Southeast Europe. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106 Conclusions. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107 Annex . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110 Acknowledgements. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110 Sources and data. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110 Surveyed markets and authors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110 The author list . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111
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List of Figures
Figure 1: Development of translations from the main original languages German, English, Spanish, French, and Italian in all European countries, 1990 to 2005. Source UNESCO.. . . . . . . . . . . . . 69 Figure 2: Translations from German, English, Spanish, French, and Italian into languages of Central and Southeast Europe, 1990 to 2005. Source: UNESCO. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69 Figure 3: Translations from CSEE languages in CSEE countries, 1990 to 2005. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70 Figure 4: Translations from CSEE languages into German, 1990 to 2005. Source UNESCO. . . . . . 71 Figure 5: CSEE languages into French, 1990 to 2005. Source UNESCO.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72 Figure 6: All languages into French, 1990 to 2005. Source: UNESCO. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73 Figure 7: The presence of Stieg Larsson: Millennium on international best-seller lists, in various countries and in various translations, 2007 to 2010.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88 Figure 8: Representation of languages among the 20 best-performing authors (as in table 7). . . 98 Figure 9: Original language of all 451 surveyed authors from top 10 charts (2008-2010). . . . . . 99 Figure 10: Selected authors and their impact of the 20 best-performing authors (2008 to 2010). 99 Figure 11: The performance of Muriel Barbery’s “L’élégance du hérisson” on the top 10 fiction bestseller charts in selected markets, 2006 to 2010. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103
List of Tables
Table 1: The 36 least-translated authors from the ‘author list’ of this report. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76 Table 2: Three recently highly successful authors in major EUWest markets and the publishers of the authors’ translated works.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87 Table 3: Three winners of the German Book Price and their domestic performance on the top 10 bestseller charts in Germany (2007 to 2010). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92 Table 4: Selected authors and their performance in Germany on the top 10 best-seller charts (2007 to 2010). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92 Table 5: The strongest-performing authors of fiction across the top 10 best-seller lists in Austria, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, and the UK for the 36-month period of January 2008 to December 2010.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96 Table 6: Breakdown of authors in table 5 by original language of the surveyed works. . . . . . . . 97 Table 7: Representation of languages among the 20 best-performing authors (as in table 6). . . 97 Table 8: Original language of all 451 surveyed authors from the top 10 charts (2008-2010). . . . 98 Table 9: Breakdown of 29 authors with a presence in the top 10 in three or more markets, by the original language of their works.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100 Table 10: Muriel Barbery’s “L’élégance du hérisson” and its publishers in selected markets.. . . . 104 Table 11: Katherine Pancol on selected top 10 best-seller charts.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105 62
Introduction
Browsing a well-stocked bookshop in any city or town in Europe is not only a delightful adventure for any avid reader. The selection of works presented on the tables and shelves quickly bring the curious mind on a journey across times and cultures, as books, and notably fiction, are to this day the most powerful vehicles by which ideas can travel. While literary translation is at the core of exchanging stories and ideas across political and linguistic boundaries, and hence of cultural diversity, little systematic analysis is available for a solid understanding of this topic. As we have already argued in the Diversity Reports 2008 and 2009, even the most general statistical data on the number of translated works are missing for most parts of Europe, and those data that are available, such as the UNESCO Index Translationum, are difficult to compare to the book market. The goal of this report is to develop a structured overview of a number of contemporary literary authors and their translated works across a representative selection of languages and markets. In fact, we want to better understand what characterizes the writers who succeed particularly well at being picked up for translation by scouts, agents, and publishers. Are patterns recognizable in the writers’ working biographies or their cultural background, the language in which a work is initially written, or the target languages most open to new voices? However, we also want to ask what forces shape the international aspect of a well-established literary career. What are the channels and platforms that are most helpful, or critical, to start a path in translation? How do translations spread? What is the role of transfer languages, which not only cater to their own readership but also are crucial for editors in third languages to identify and further spread new talent? Often enough, answers to such questions are at best anecdotal, as some argue that it was all about ‘talent,’ or the ‘power of the agents,’ or the preferences of an unpredictable, fickle reading audience. However, even a cursory look at translations on a best-seller list, or on the title list of any significant trade publisher, or the author lineup at one of the many thriving literary festivals will quickly discover a rich diversity in styles and stories, cultures and backgrounds represented by a highly varied author community. Thus, any shortcut answer will fall short of this reality. However, the many different voices can also be seen as forming a complexity with no underlying patterns at all, claiming for a methodology that duly accounts for every single aspect, from an author’s 63
biography to the literary tradition that a work is based upon to all the accidental events of an artistic career, so that no overarching analysis seems possible in the first place. Between such extremes, we opt for a pragmatic approach, centered on a sample of almost 200 authors, characterized by a number of parameters that make the sample fit to represent what we would call the European literary mainstream, at least from a reader’s point of view. This corpus of authors and their works was tracked across a broad selection of European languages and book markets, in terms of a number of factors: • Which authors are translated into which languages, and how many of their works? • What is the distribution between languages, as originating and target languages? • What are exemplary channels and platforms boosting translations, such as awards, and what portion do translations occupy in the top segment of reader appreciation, such as best-seller lists? • What types of author role models can be identified, and which forces and which market actors shape the career paths of the translated authors? Our pragmatic approach to these questions is based on various empirical data, and centered on the author. We focused very strictly on the author as he or she carries the ‘brand’ in the landscapes of books and reading. And we learned to follow authors across languages by mimicking a reader’s perspective and selecting her or his reading. Researching via online bookshops and their lists, and library catalogues if an author has been translated, and with how many works, in a broad set of languages produces a basic grid that allows framing of each author systematically and from various perspectives. The approach in this research is strongly crafted by the aims of the questions that we want to pursue. Just as in the previous Diversity Reports, we want to map cultural diversity as it is reflected by a segment of authors and their literary works that currently have a notable presence for readers, by being easily available, or even by being displayed more prominently through best-seller lists, awards, or, as a result of the latter, mirrored in the general media. But going one step further in this edition of our reporting, we want to compare the actual translation market, as it is, with potentially new talent, and authors, who have not been identified and allowed to reach all the readers and languages ready for their welcome.
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As a piece of applied research, this report aims to open minds and pathways to encourage more literary translation, notably at a moment when translation and diversity often tend to be seen, by many market actors, as particularly risky and costly to launch.
On the selected authors and the applied methodology At the core of our report is a list of 187 writers of contemporary fiction from a wide variety of national, linguistic, and cultural backgrounds, representing diverse literary ambitions and career paths, styles, and profiles. The goal in building this list of authors was to develop a corpus representing in as many ways as possible the general preferences of European readers and book markets in current literary fiction. As no standard definition is available for such a selection of writers and works, we decided in the first step to select the names to list through many objective parameters. We wanted to develop a list reflecting as broadly as reasonably possible linguistic and biographical diversity among authors from various backgrounds, with a special emphasis on European authors originating in many different countries (however, we decided to not specifically highlight authors writing in minority languages), but adding a number of non-European writers, notably when they fell in one of the other categories that we drew upon. In this perspective, we chose the following: • The winners of well-known literary awards of broad recognition in their country of origin, and beyond, from the past 5 to 10 years, namely • Büchnerpreis o Deutscher Buchpreis
o European Union Prize for Literature
o Großer österreichischer Staatspreis für europäische Literatur o Man Booker
o Nobel Prize for Literature o Premio Fundacion Lara o Premio Strega
o Prince of Asturias Prize o Prix Femina
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o Prix Femina étranger o Prix Goncourt;
• Fiction authors writing in languages other than English, with a particularly strong performance on various European best-seller lists in 2009, as these successful books might have received particularly strong visibility in the trade for translation rights; • To this, we added, specifically for countries and languages less represented in the international literature and translation markets, additional names that we identified as having a strong presence in their domestic markets and cultures, either by having been well represented on their respective domestic best-seller lists or by having a significant degree of visibility in recent years at international literary festivals, or fairs, or awards other than the ones listed above. This produced a draft list that we sent to about 30 experts from cultural and literary organizations who were already familiar with the earlier Diversity Reports and their approaches and findings, to complete the selections for better representativeness, based on these experts’ judgment. In the end, this selection process resulted in a list of authors from about 40 different countries, writing in roughly the same number of languages. We are perfectly aware that, despite all our scrutiny, this author list could be criticized for being arbitrary or not evenly balanced, or representative according to various criteria, but it was the best we could come up with for our pragmatic approach. With this list, we started a mapping process, trying to identify which of these authors are currently available to readers in a broad selection of European countries, namely in the following: • Croatia • Czech Republic • France • Germany (and Austria) • Hungary • Italy • The Netherlands • Poland • Romania • Slovakia • Slovenia 66
• Spain • Sweden • The United Kingdom This selection of countries was meant to represent markets according to many parameters, namely the market size and number of readers in the countries’ main languages, countries from all European regions, including old and new members of the European Union plus one candidate country for membership (Croatia), as well as countries with various reading and publishing traditions. For some steps of the subsequent analysis, we decided, as we did in the Diversity Report 2009, to group countries into two distinct regional entities, namely • EUWest, which includes countries of various sizes, which were market economies before 1989, and • Central and Southeast Europe, or CSEE, which includes countries that became market economies only after 1989. Technically, the mapping was meant to check for titles available in the original language that they had been written in; for translations, one author at a time, in at least one leading online bookshop per country from the above defined list; and, in addition, cross-referencing findings with online resources with transnational and multilingual title catalogues, namely Amazon’s sites in France, Germany, Italy, and the UK. We based this tracking on previous exercises we had undertaken for earlier research, notably the Diversity Report 2009. For practical reasons, our ambition was to count translations per language only up to five titles per author. If we identified more than five available titles of an author in a market, in original editions or translations, we understood this as a specifically strong presence of an author in a given language and market, and flagged the author with a separate identifier (represented, in the research table in the Annex, by the value ‘50’—instead of a title count between 0 and 5). The author team of this report checked the findings for plausibility, resulting in additional corrections. Independently of this tracking of book ‘market’ resources, we then undertook one additional check for notable authors with particularly few results, in the form of library research with the help of the Karlsruhe Virtual Catalogue (KVK) and, for Slovenia, the COBISS catalogue.1 Despite all this scrutiny in the tracking and mapping, we cannot deny that we might have missed 1 See http://www.ubka.uni-karlsruhe.de/kvk.html and http://www.cobiss.si/ .
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translations. On the contrary, we still discovered, notably on dedicated author or title websites, mentions of translations into additional languages, though we could not track them in our other resources. But as already underlined in the introduction, our goal is not to establish an academic bibliography of translations but a grid of books that the average, normally interested, and informed reader may be able to find and access. If a title has been translated into and published in a language, and yet escapes research such as we undertook, the title most likely has only limited visibility (and hence impact with readers) in its market. However, assessing such a presence and the resulting visibility and impact with readers is the focus of this study, as we want to understand, in the end, how authors and their works travel across countries and languages to readers.
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The broad flows of translations in Europe. Summaries of relevant findings from the Diversity Report 2008 In the Diversity Report 2008, we started our research by developing the broadest possible picture of flows of translation across Europe, mainly with the help of data from the UNESCO Index Translationum, a database fed mostly by legal deposit entries provided to UNESCO by national libraries since the 1930s. While these data are certainly not perfect in every detail, they allowed us to reliably chart general trends and developments over a longer period. We can therefore show very clearly the uneven distribution of languages in general, with translations
from
English
representing roughly two out of every three translated books, and with French and German well behind second and third, leaving a mere 20 percent for all the other languages combined. Figure 1: Development of translations from the main original languages German, English, Spanish, French, and Italian in all European countries, 1990 to 2005. Source UNESCO.
The overview for Central and Eastern Europe, was quite telling, as expected, as it showed the continuous increase in translations from English in the formerly Soviet-dominated region. Figure 2: Translations from German, English, Spanish, French, and Italian in Central and Southeast Europe, 1990 to 2005. Source: UNESCO.
In the same 15-year period, the number of translations within Central and Southeast Europe grew steadily. However, this development took place on a much more modest scope in terms of the absolute numbers of translations, with a peak of 69
16.000 translations from the EUWEST languages into regional languages, and only one tenth of this number occurring between the regional languages.
Figure 3: Translations from CSEE languages in CSEE countries, 1990 to 2005. Source UNESCO. Attention needs to be paid to the absolute numbers, between a few hundred and up to 1600 items at the peak—against 10 times as many translations from EUWest into CSEE.
The flow of translations from Central and Southeast Europe into Germany and Austria, as the region’s closest neighbors, and German serving as the preeminent transfer language for the region developed strongly in the 1990s, peaking at the end of the decade in highly successful promotion of Hungarian and Polish literary works as guests of honor at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 1999 and 2000, respectively, but thereafter declining.
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Figure 4: Translations from selected CSEE languages into German, 1990 to 2005. Source UNESCO. Attention needs to be paid again to the absolute numbers that, during the 1990s, are roughly at the same level as all of the inter-regional translations in CSEE in this same period. Only after 2000, while the number of inter-regional translations grew significantly, did the flow into German decline.
Most interesting is, for a comparison, the parallel development of translations from CSEE into French. Here we see a robust overall situation, with continuous change in ranking of the individual languages.
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Figure 5: CSEE languages into French, 1990 to 2005. Source UNESCO.
The absolute numbers of translations from CSEE into French are, compared to German, of course modest, which underlines the still crucial relationship between Germany and the CSEE region. But overall, looking at translations from all languages into French well illustrates the rise of France as probably Europe’s premier hub for translating books (while a respective view on Germany plus Austria mirrors a slight, yet continuous, decrease, a development that we confirmed when comparing UNESCO data with data from the book markets).
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Figure 1: All languages into French, 1990 to 2005. Source: UNESCO.Top languages are English
(dark-red), German (blue), Italian1990 (yellow) andSource: Spanish (turquoise), Figure 6: All languages into French, to 2005. UNESCO. Top languages are English (dark-red), German (blue), Italian (yellow) and Spanish (turquoise).
Mapping languages and markets At first glance, the universe of literature looks exactly as one would expect, as it mirrors a pantheon of big names who are all familiar to the cultured reader, populated by clearly more men than women, from various backgrounds, and a clear advantage to writers from Europe and North America, with the occasional Japanese, Israeli, South African, or Turkish author in between. Among the top three or four dozen names for which we could effectively track the highest numbers of works translated (a ranking that must be taken with all due caution for methodological reasons, as explained already), we find the expected line-up of Nobel laureates (such as Günter Grass, Orhan Pamuk, Imre Kertész, and José Saramago), winners of other particularly recognized awards (such as Peter Esterházy and Amos Oz for the German Peace Prize), and the jet set of the most renowned festivals and media appearances (such as Milan Kundera, Haruki Murakami, and Salman Rushdie). Represented by powerful international literary agents, these authors have every new book instantly translated into dozens of languages immediately, if they are not, in a recently evolving habit, newly released simultaneously in several languages, with carefully orchestrated international promotion campaigns.
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Normally, a publisher is keen to keep such an author, even at high cost, on its lists, and these books will not go out of print. And even if one such member of this elite group initially decides against being translated, as Arturo Pérez-Reverte did2 (at first allowing his work to be published, aside from Spanish, only in French), over time he will be omnipresent nevertheless. However, not every author who is highly regarded—and translated—in some languages will automatically be picked up for further dissemination. The most staggering case in our corpus of study is A. F. Th. van der Heijden, a Dutch author born in 1951, who started publishing novels in 1978 and has been awarded many prizes in his own country. His work has been translated into German—and according to some sources, selected titles have also been translated into Russian, Finnish, Swedish, Spanish, and Bulgarian.3 However, obviously this did not give him a more permanent presence outside the Netherlands and Germany. And yet, “A. F. Th.,” as he is known to his community of fans, has true followers, as can be seen from certain reviews of his books in more specialized literary journals. Another good example of such highly individual trajectories is Matthias Zschokke, a Swiss-German writer born in 1954, who has won German-language awards since 1981, and yet even in his home country is a little-known “stealth author.” However, surprisingly, he landed the influential French Prix Femina Etranger in 2009 for the French translation of “Maurice mit Huhn” (“Maurice With Chicken,” initially released in Switzerland in 2006).4 Yet we could not trace any other translations of his work, until today. Thus, at first, differences seem to be more prevalent than similarities. However, inverting the list, to highlight not the strongest performers in translation but those with few or no translations at all, tells a clearer story. Almost two out of three of the least translated authors on our list write in a Central or Southeast European language, and while, due to tracking problems, we may have missed a translation of a work, the overall finding is obvious: When it comes to entering major (‘old’ or ‘Western’) European Union book markets, some original languages and cultural backgrounds seem to confront a structural disadvantage. But again, one must be cautiously aware of the difference between ‘new entrants’ to these markets and those authors who form the above-mentioned elite group, and who, in the case of the formerly socialist bloc countries, still owe much of their reputation and penetration of translation channels to 2 See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arturo_Pérez-Reverte , looked up on 02-08-2011. 3 See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A._F._Th._van_der_Heijden , looked up on 02-08-2011. 4 See http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthias_Zschokke , looked up on 02-08-2011.
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their long-time presence, from before the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989, more than two decades past, and a status of legitimacy usually labelled as a “dissident.” This label of moral nobility applies to authors as different as Péter Esterházy, Ismail Kadare, and Milan Kundera. Kundera, born in 1929 in Brno (then Czechoslovakia), was partly involved in the anti-socialist reform communist movement of 1968 but went into exile in Paris, becoming a French citizen and, since 1993, writing in French. Kadare, born in 1936 in Albania, was closely associated with the communist regime and held high-ranking government positions, yet has chosen to live predominantly in Paris since 1991. Esterházy, born in Hungary in 1950, was recognized at home and abroad as an independent, yet not openly political, voice even before 1989. In literary terms, these writers stand for three highly different literary styles and approaches. Kundera is part of a cosmopolitan elite; Esterházy has always embedded his writing in the immediate context of his native country and his family, yet with a baroque ironic distance. Kadare instead became famous for painting his rural Albania in exotic colors, far from any urban or modernist sense of irony. Each writer became a literary icon for his country, a status developed over decades of publishing works continually, with translations—for Kundera and Kadare in French, for Esterházy in German—playing arguably a more prominent role in the authors’ international status and impact than the original language publications in, respectively, Czech, Albanian, or Hungarian. Literary life seems to be entirely different for the new entrants to the market today. Among the three dozen least-translated authors, two categories from our selections are particularly strongly represented: Authors who, in 2009, had a strong presence on their respective national fiction best-seller charts and writers who, again in 2009, were picked by their national authors, publishers, and booksellers associations for the European Union Prize for Literature (EUPL). The groups seem to reflect the same basic pattern: The authors high up on domestic national charts are clearly the favorites of domestic readerships, and of course, fiction charts in most countries incorporate a significant portion of local talent, which is usually distributed between truly local literature, often enough in the sense of telling their stories to their local choir, and authors who are strongly appreciated by their domestic readership, yet write absolutely in sync with broader fancies. This last quality is taken up, in programmatic ways, by the selections for the newly created European Union Prize for Literature (EUPL), as juries from the relevant professional associations tend to pick a writer who, in their view, could have a future on the more prominent European stage.
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Awards EULitPrize 2009 Bestseller2009 Bestseller2009 EULitPrize 2009 EULitPrize 2009 EULitPrize 2009 Bestseller2009 EULitPrize 2009 Bestseller2009 Deutscher Buchpreis 2010 EULitPrize 2009 Büchnerpreis 2009 Femina 2009 Bestseller2009 Bestseller2009 EULitPrize 2009 Femina étranger 2009 EULitPrize 2009
Language
Author’s Name
CRO PL NL PL NOR HU CZ PT SLO PL
Mila Pavićević Monika Szawaja A. F. Th. Van der Heijden Bernard Nowaczyk Carl Frode Tille Csernus Imre Dana Čermáková Dulce Maria Cardoso Goran Vojnović Jacek Dukaj
CZ PL LIT CZ PL CZ CH HU NL CZ AT PL FR PL PL NL IRL PL SP/CAT SP SRB DE HU PL NL FR
Jaroslav Kmenta Krzysztof Daukszewicz Laura Sintija Cerniauskaité Lenka Lanczová Małgorzata Kalicińska Marie Poledňáková Melinda Nadj Abonji Noémi Szécsi Suzanne Vermeer Vlastimil Vondruška Walter Kappacher Wojciech Cejrowski Gwenaëlle Aubry Jacek Hugo-Bader Jan M. Ciechanowski Jeroen Smit Karen Gillece Malgorzata Musierowicz Manuel de Pedrolo María Dueñas Marija Jovanovic Matthias Zschokke Moldova György Wiktor Suworow Cees Noteboom Emmanuelle Pagano
Table 1: The 36 least translated authors from the ‘author list’ of this report.
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Note that Melinda Nadj Abonji and María Dueñas were debut novelists in 2010 whose works hardly could have been translated in time for this survey, but since they are a winner of the German Book Price (Nadj Abonji) and a top best-selling author in Spain (Dueñas), it will be relevant to track their future development. Obviously, as our data show, neither the strong presence of an author on the best-seller charts of a less represented market nor the well-intentioned promotion of such authors by the awards is much appreciated by the gatekeepers of the translation market—with a few yet powerful exceptions, as we shall see. For a more in-depth understanding of these patterns, and the various shaping forces, we must therefore develop a more systematic approach to a set of drivers and parameters.
Author role models
The most translated, the newly translated, the ‘non-translated,’ and the establishment forming the ‘middle class.’ As has already been specified in chapter 2 on the methodology of this report, we identified and tracked authors as they correspond to a variety of parameters, by being awarded prizes with specifically broad and transnational recognition and visibility, or by having had an outstanding presence recently on fiction best-seller lists in several countries and languages, or, notably for authors from less represented languages and literature, by having a title with outstanding success in their domestic market, yet with no further dissemination through translations into other languages. In an effort to screen in detail to what degree authors from this total corpus of almost 200 names are strongly or less prominently represented in translations across Europe, we identified at least four different patterns, or role models, that can be applied to the mapped authors: Group A: Branded authors with a paramount and long-term presence of many books. The first group can be reasonably formed with authors having more than five translated titles in more than five book markets, plus a significant presence in additional markets. These authors have each grown to their current status as ‘big’ authors, with a lasting and paramount presence in usually all of Europe’s markets for at least two or, more frequently, even several decades.
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Group B: Branded authors with fewer titles, yet paramount presence and impact. In the second group, we find authors who have published five or fewer titles in their original market, and from this initial appearance, succeed at once, by leveraging all sorts of market drivers and opportunities for getting status and presence, from winning awards to getting on best-seller lists and developing a presence in cultural media and at significant festivals, to quickly and dynamically grow their impact on markets and readers in the majority of the European book markets. Group C: The ‘middle class,’ well represented, but of limited impact on markets and readers. For this third group, we identified authors who had published more than five titles, have more than five translations published in at least one market, and are present with at least one published work in the majority of the analyzed markets. This group accounts for the largest number of members on our list, forming a kind of a well-established ‘middle class’ among the analyzed contemporary fiction writers, who are certainly recognized by the avid European reader, yet lacking the status of group A and the dynamism of group B. Group D: Locally successful authors, limited internationally to only a few or hardly any translations at all. In the fourth group are authors who are predominantly present in their home market, with only a few translations available thus far, and only slowly, if at all, present abroad. The authors belonging to this group are probably thus-far unrecognized talent with realistic potential for successful translations into more languages.
Close-up on authors and author role models. A more in-depth analysis of our data shows how, in addition to the number of available translations, each highlighted group of authors is characterized by additional cultural as well as social traits that its members have in common. The authors with the highest number of translations and the longest presence in the market share two striking biographical elements: They were born before 1950 (with Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk, born in 1952, the only exception), and they all received important prizes. 78
Most are winners of the Nobel Prize (Lessing, Grass, Coetzee, Kertesz, Pamuk, and Saramago), followed by the Prince of Asturias and Man Booker award winners (Coetzee, Atwood, Rushdie, and McEwan). The moment in their respective careers when these writers are awarded with such a prominent prize underlines a clear pattern: While the Man Booker often boosts a writing career at the relatively early stages, when an author has published only a few titles, the Nobel Prize and the Prince of Asturias materialize only once a significant opus has evolved, establishing and sharply profiling—and thereby branding—a writer in sustainable ways, at least within the literary community that he or she caters to. The role of the Man Booker as the main force in triggering translations is even more obvious for those younger authors who, born in the 1960s and 1970s, saw their work spread quickly throughout Europe after they received the award. Impressive examples of this mechanism are Yann Martell (*1963), Aravind Adiga (*1974), DBC Pierre (*1962), and Kiran Desai (*1971). Additionally interesting patterns can be observed with regard to the languages these authors write in, and the national backgrounds of the most-translated authors. The oldest and most translated authors write in the language that they grew up in, and most reside, for the better part of their careers and so to this present day, in the country of their parents. Günter Grass and Bernhard Schlink write in German and were born in Germany, Ian McEwan was born in Great Britain and writes in English, Haruki Murakami was born in Japan and writes in Japanese, Imre Kertesz was born in Hungary and writes in Hungarian, and Jose Saramago was born in Portugal and wrote in Portuguese. Only two look back at biographies that have seen major transcultural changes: Salman Rushdie and J. M. Coetzee, who both moved between cultures, yet within the geographical and cultural realm of the former British Empire; both write in English. J. M. Coetzee was born in South Africa and lives in Australia, and Rushdie, born in India, migrated first to London yet spends much of his time now in New York City. Only Milan Kundera set out initially to write in Czech, and switched to French as the language of his new country of residence, France. This is all different when it comes to the younger authors of group B, with the highest number of translations. Among these authors, hardly anyone lives and writes in the country and language of his or her birth.
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Only a few developed largely straight-forward biographies, in the sense of a continuity of working language as well as country of origin and residence: Ildefonso Falcones, Roberto Saviano, Lars Kepler (a Swedish couple writes under this pseudonym), and the late Stieg Larsson wrote their works in their mother tongue and live(d) in their country of birth. In the wider and transnational context of global English, we find DBC Pierre (an Australian living in Ireland and writing in English) and Yann Martell (a Canadian born in Spain writing in English and living in Canada). More and more often, living patterns and working routines seem to form complex and multifaceted puzzles for authors who emerged only recently, in the past decade or less, and who—as defined for group B—have managed to project themselves on high-speed and important international, or even truly global, literary trajectories. Muriel Barbery is French, writing in French, yet was born in Morocco and currently lives in Japan. Carlos Ruiz Zafón is of Spanish origin and writes in Spanish, but has lived in Los Angeles for the past twenty years. Aravind Adiga and Kiran Desai are continuing the tradition of writers born in India, writing in English, and finding success in the West, as had been the case earlier with Salman Rushdie and Arundathi Roy. Atiq Rahimi is an Afghan who writes in French and resides in France, while Chinese Dai Sijie writes and lives in France. English-born Charlotte Roche writes in German. Clearly the most translated Man Booker winners are cultural migrants such as Aravind Adiga, Yann Martell, and Kiran Desai, while Atiq Rahimi is the most translated winner of the French Goncourt. Among the recently rising-star authors, Sofi Oksanen, of Finnish-Estonian origin, writing in Finnish and living in Finland, is one of the rare exceptions to this pattern. In short, while the first group of the most translated authors consists largely of “cultural residents,” in the second, “cultural migrants” are prevalent, as they move from one culture to another. They are, or become over time, largely bilingual, or have even given up on writing in their mother tongue altogether. Günter Grass, Imre Kertész, and Jose Saramago had the opportunity to patiently build their reputations step-by-step, winning a broad readership and a following of readers, and critics, in their own country first, and then, slowly, finding their way into other cultures with the help of translations. Atiq Rahimi, Dai Sijie, and Aravind Adiga did not have such leisure. On the move from one culture to another, following in the tracks prepared by the international elites of business and academia, these 80
authors found themselves instantly in those global circuits, with their first or second book already translated abundantly. The number of cultural migrants is particularly significant not only in group B but also in group C, which, for the purpose of this study, we labeled the ‘middle class.’ Twenty-two out of the 65 analyzed authors could be considered cultural migrants as far as they commute between different cultures and languages due to a variety of biographical, political, or cultural reasons. Agota Kristof (*1935), for example, is a Hungarian-born author writing in French and living in Switzerland; Amin Maalouf (*1949) is a Lebanese-born author writing in French and living in Paris; Antonio Munoz Molina (*1956) is a Spanish-born and Spanish-writing author living in New York; Boris Pahor (*1913) is a member of the Slovene minority in Italy; Feridun Zaimoglu (*1964) is the son of Turkish labor emigrants to Germany and writes in German; Colleen McCullough (*1937) was born in New Zealand but spent her life in the UK and the USA, and now resides in Australia; Elif Shafak (*1971) is an author of Turkish background, born in France, writing in Turkish and English; Harry Mulisch (1927-2010) was Jewish, living in the Netherlands and writing in Dutch; Hertha Müller (*1953) grew up in the German minority in Romania, writing in German and now residing in Germany; and Hugo Hamilton (*1953), an Irish writer of German-Irish origin, grew up in three languages (Irish, German, and English) and now writes in English. Ismail Kadare (*1936), as already mentioned, is an Albanian author living in France; Jamaica Kincaid (*1949) is an American writer born in Antigua and Barbuda; Jean-Marie Gustave le Clezio (*1940) is a French writer and has French and Mauritian citizenship; Juan Goytisolo (*1931) is a Catalan writer living in Marrakech; Lisa Marklund (*1962) is a Swedish writer living in Spain; Marie NDiaye (*1967) is a French writer of Senegalese descent; Michel Houellebecq (*1958) is a French writer, born in Réunion and living in Spain; Nancy Huston (*1958) is a Canadian-born writer living in Paris, writing in French, and translating her works into English (she is married to Bulgarian Tzvetan Todorov); Peter Carey (*1943) is an Australian novelist living in the USA; Jonathan Littell (*1967) is a dual American and French citizen, living in Barcelona and writing in French and English; Katherine Pancol (*1954) is a Morrocan-born French novelist who spent more than a decade living in New York; Mathias Zschokke (*1954) is a SwissGerman writer living in Berlin; Nuala O’Faolain (1940-2008) was an Irish writer who lived in New York for the last decade of her life; Paul Nizon (*1929) is a Swiss-German writer living in Paris; and V.S. Naipaul (*1932) is a British-Caribbean writer originally from Trinidad. In this group of cultural migrants, a generation gap becomes apparent: Most authors from the older 81
generation (born before 1955) moved between cultures and countries mostly because they were members of minorities (such as Hertha Müller and Boris Pahor) or because they (or their parents, as is the case for Harry Mulisch) had to leave their homelands due to political discrimination or persecution (Kadare, Kundera, and Dai Sijie). Meanwhile, those of the younger generation followed a more personal liberty in their decision to become cultural migrants and chose their preferences and orientations among a globally mobile elite: Carlos Ruiz Zafon, Jonathan Littell, Muriel Barbery, Nancy Huston, Lisa Marklund, Antonio Munoz Molina, and others seem to have opted for cultures and an environment mostly out of their free will, and out of personal or creative preferences. Taking note specifically of the significant number of cultural migrants among the winners of top awards, notably the French Goncourt and the British Man Booker, one can reasonably see this as a reflex of juries favoring either this type of globally traveling authors or the stories that the authors’ movements and whereabouts allow these authors to tell. This taste may also be shared by a reading audience used to such panoramic cultural views from other culture and media content that the readers routinely consume.
Publishers and translation
The role of transnationals and of independent publishing houses. Our research has shown that, in Western Europe, fiction publishing is dominated by two basic types of publishing organizations, large groups—often transnational conglomerates with holdings not only in books but in other media as well—and ‘independents,’ that is, small- and medium-sized companies, specializing in book publishing and occasionally in retail, and remarkably often family owned. Lacking respective detailed information for Central and Southeast Europe, we had to focus here on EUWest. The biggest players in the field are undoubtedly publishing conglomerates such as Hachette, Random House/Bertelsmann, RCS, Editis, Bonnier, Grupo Planeta, Mondadori, and Holtzbrinck, which are all well represented in the “Global Ranking” of the 50 largest publishing groups worldwide.5 All own a variety of publishing houses and imprints all around Europe, or even beyond, in the USA, even as some—such as Editis and Holtzbrinck—sail mostly under the brands of their imprints, and not that of the group. These conglomerates can be divided into two groups according to the markets in which the companies operate: in the first group are the ones operating either in their domestic markets only or in regions of a similar linguistic and cultural background (for example, Bonnier is important player in Scandinavia and Germany, and RCS in Italy and France). 5 “The Global Ranking of the Publishing Industry.” See www.wischenbart.com/publishing .
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The second group consists of organizations that became truly global players over the past decade or so, with holdings and activities in a variety of different languages and continents, such as Random House/Bertelsmann (primarily in Germany, the UK, and the USA, plus related activities in France, Spain et al.) and Hachette Livre (France, the UK, the USA). Planeta has been by far the market leader in the Spanish-language world, operating in Spain and in Latin America, and recently expanded further by acquiring Editis in France. As for the ‘independents,’ we can identify again two generic types, that is, those with a long history and track record as prestigious platforms for literature and writers in their original national culture and a few newcomers that were founded only recently, and most often in direct response to the recent dynamics of the changing book and media market. Among the houses of long tradition, Gallimard is probably the defining example, deeply anchored in its founding family for a century, as a treasure passed on from one generation to the next. The current president of the company (and of the French Publishers Association), Antoine Gallimard, is the grandson of the founder of the company that in past decades published more Nobel and Goncourt winners than any other French publishing house. Among the more recently established mid-sized houses, French Actes Sud and British Quercus (with the recently added MacLehose imprint) are probably best qualified to serve as examples of ventures that saw new opportunities between the traditional players and the recently consolidated corporations. In a slightly different variation, La Martinière re-invigorated its ambitions and acquired the old and wellestablished quality brand of Le Seuil, probably driven by similar strategic considerations that drive the new houses. Each new challenger succeeded particularly well in grooming trademark authors in original editions and in translation, for a highly volatile, yet novelty-hungry, book market. For our specific context, it must be noted that Swedish Stieg Larsson, as the most successful author by far globally in the past decade, has had a huge impact on the lucky development of Actes Sud and Quercus/MacLehose—in similar ways as the seven volumes of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series did for its original publisher, Bloomsbury, which also falls nicely into this category of fairly new houses. We find similar ventures in a number of countries, notably Sellerio, the original publisher of Andrea Camillieri in Italy, Dilletante with Anna Gavalda in France, and the Swedish Piratförlaget, the home of several current Nordic crime writers, including Liza Marklund.
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The literary masters and some oddities of the Long Tail. Oddly enough, in some cases even highly reputed books in translation, in some parts of Europe, just tend to disappear. More than five-year-old books of Nobel Prize winners are most commonly still available in bookshops in West European markets, but in some smaller book cultures such as Slovenia, translations of such books can be found only in public libraries, while the books have disappeared from online and brickand-mortar bookshops. Quite obviously, this is at first a technical book industry issue, yet with broader cultural implications: It is very likely that Slovenian book publishers will not keep such titles in print because there is little or no economic reason for reprinting them or even keeping unsold copies in stock for four or five years after publication. Due to the low sales of backlist titles, the cost of keeping books in print seems to be higher than the cost of eliminating the unsold stock—a reasonable consequence of the fact that backlist sales in a market of two million inhabitants are by definition drastically smaller than in a market of many more millions of consumers. While in Germany and France translations of Nobel Prize winners qualify as backlist, in some parts of CSEE they do not, and go out of print. The question is, however, if a decrease in backlist titles can occur in larger markets, such as Germany or France, or if, in reverse, digital stock management—as eBooks or print on demand—will detour such developments in the future, and eventually open new windows of opportunity.
Who publishes whom in translation? At least in the EUWest markets, it was quite common that, when an author had reached a level of significant international recognition, this usually resulted in a long-term business relationship with the publisher not only in the original language edition but also for the translations, and often cooperation far beyond business, in order to grow the author’s place in the public sphere with the readers. In return, the publisher of such a ‘major’ author would be committed to publishing each major new work of the writer, to grow the writer’s impact as a strategic asset of the house. While such continuity may still be the case, at least for a short period of two to three titles and a few years, publishers readily discontinue their involvement with an author if his or her book(s) do not find a good readership imminently. However, such ‘mid-list’ authors, with uncertain perspectives, are being dealt with much more nervously, and those at the top of the list have become items of an entirely different kind altogether. 84
Times and patterns seem to have changed significantly. Most recently, the rumor of 2010 Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa’s new novel “El sueño del celta” not being prepared for the German translation by the author’s long-time ally, Suhrkamp, but at Rowohlt (which ultimately seems to have resulted in a quagmire for all parties involved, including the author’s high-betting agent), caused a considerable stir in German literary pages.6 This as well as many similar anecdotes, usually referring to authors of lesser media attention than the latest Nobel Prize winner, tend to be interpreted as proof of the role of literary agents in raising the bar for those authors in the headlines and at the top of the charts. Beyond any doubt, agents have shaped the markets of literary translations—or, more precisely, that of a number of ‘top authors’—radically over the past two decades. However, the impact of agents is primarily driving the market presence of authors of either Anglo-Saxon origins or those who write in English, plus probably a number of the newly successful authors of ‘Nordic crime’ who are also often represented by Scandinavian agencies. Furthermore, we have witnessed the emergence of a number of thriving agencies in continental Europe, notably in Germany, that foster, in addition their domestic top writers, some of the top Central European names. However, it seems to us that the majority of those well-translated authors writing in languages other than English act without the management support of a professional intermediary, such as an agency.7 With accelerated dynamics in the money involved in rights auctions in general and the prices paid for the top of the (assumed) rank, the presence of agents may broaden beyond the current scope. However, it is still much too easy to single out ‘the agent factor’ when it comes to explaining the current tides, and how they seem to change. Anyone familiar with the—much hyped, for being so ‘secretive’—workings in the “literary agent’s centers” at the Frankfurt and London book fairs, at the closely tied-in ‘hotel bar trades,’ and, perhaps more and more significantly, with the auctions behind such sumptuous scenery knows that a strange competition takes place, over and over again, confronting highly unequal parties. However, this inequality does not at all refer to a showdown between almighty agents and roughly similar bidders. 6 See “Der Verlag als Lebensabschnittaspartner”. In: Die Welt, November 11, 2010. (http://www.welt.de/print/die_welt/kultur/ article10744291/Der-Verlag-als-Lebensabschnittspartner.html ). The confusion regarding the German translation rights for Vargas Llosa’s new book even widened when, in early 2011, a new turnabout was rumored, so that at the moment of the writing of this report, it is still unclear which publisher will in fact release the German translation and when. 7 Two prominent examples of authors who also figure prominently in this report are Muriel Barbery and Tatiana de Rosnay. However, it is beyond the reach of our research to systematically track authors and their eventual agents, which again illustrates how scarce precise market information is in this field.
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Quite the opposite is the case. In the bidding, opponents of hugely different weights stand up, at least for the rights of translation into the few main languages—aside from English, this is mostly German and French, and, albeit to a lesser degree, to Italian, Spanish, and Swedish. Particularly for a freshly launched ‘big debut manuscript,’ the stakes are really high. The envoys of the handful of global corporations in trade publishing—the likes of Random House/Bertelsmann, Hachette, Simon & Schuster, and Penguin/Pearson (each with supposedly deep pockets as if without a bottom)— bid against medium-sized houses—such as Actes Sud, Bloomsbury, and Hanser, and even much smaller new entrants with a taste for risk—and in the realistic anticipation that only a very few top titles will occupy the lion’s share of what can be won in the next book season. The stakes are high, given the critical time span of just a few months to decide whether a book becomes big or not. The market share of the new titles and, among them, the few real top sellers is constantly increasing. In a typical EUWest market such as Austria, the combined fiction and non-fiction titles in hardcover, which reflect most new releases, have a market share of 70 percent of all retail sales.8 In theory, the conglomerates would win every single battle, not only because of their available funds but also by offering their synergies in releasing and promoting a title in all the territories where the companies have holdings or strategic partnerships. In principle, such a tendency toward globalization can be seen, when book releases, more and more often, are synchronized to the effect that the original and strategically valuable translations are published at the same time. This is the case for authors who are, by themselves or through their agents, successfully developing their brands, such as Paulo Coelho, or for the publication of translations in languages with a readership that has a particularly strong appreciation for reading in English, like those in the Netherlands or Scandinavia, so that ideally a domestic translation can even anticipate the English edition of a book. However, such transnational and multilingual strategizing does not necessarily go along the lines of corporate publishing organizations. An overview of three recently and newly successful authors and their international publishers illustrates the case well: Hardly any conglomerate publishing group orchestrated its potentially far reach, and a few ‘independent’ or strong local players were decisive in developing major markets for a specific new author: 8 Buchhandelspanel Dezember 2010. A monthly survey of key market parameters, researched by ‘media control GfK, on behalf of Hauptverband des österreichischen Buchhandels, or the Austrian publishers and booksellers association.
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Author
Country
Publisher (Mother company)
Imprint
Stieg Larsson
Spain
Grupo Planeta
Destino
NL
A.W.Bruna
Signatuur
Italy
RCS Libri
Marsilio
France
Actes Sud
Actes Sud
UK
Quercus
MacLehose
German
Bertelsmann
Heyne
Sweden
Nordstedts
Norstedts
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Spain
Grupo Planeta
Planeta
NL
A.W.Bruna
Signatuur
Italy
Mondadori
Mondadori
France
Editis
Robert Laffont
UK
Hachette Livre
Weidenfeld
German
Holtzbrinck
S.Fischer
Sweden
Bonnier
Albert Bonniers Förlag
Muriel Barbery
Spain
Grupo Planeta
Seix Barral
Italy
Independent
E/O
France
Groupe Gallimard
Gallimard
German
Independent
dtv premium
Sweden
Independent
Sekwa förlag
Table 2: Three recently highly successful authors in major EUWest markets and their publishers in translations.
The unlikely success story has been covered so often that, for our purposes here, it is enough to mention that Larsson’s three crime novels focusing on journalist Mikael Kalle Blomquist and the computer hacker punk girl Lisbeth Salander at first enthused an extraordinarily wide readership in Sweden and were sold for translation into several languages, but only the French translation at independent publisher Actes Sud triggered a frenzy that had been unanticipated. The third step in the saga of the trilogy going globally through the roof came with the launch of the UK edition by Quercus, another independent publisher.
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trilogy going globally through the roof came with the launch of the UK edition by Quercus, another independent publisher. The following chart illustrates this process over the past five years, between 2006 and 2010: The following chart illustrates this process over the past five years, between 2006 and 2010:
Average rank on top 10
0
5
10
15
2006 Austria
France
2007 German
2008 Italy
NL
2009 Spain
Sweden
Qtr1
Qtr4
Qtr3
Qtr2
Qtr1
Qtr4
Qtr3
Qtr2
Qtr1
Qtr4
Qtr3
Qtr1
Qtr4
Qtr3
Qtr2
Qtr1
20
2010 UK
Figure 7: The presence of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium on international best-seller lists, in various
Figure 7: The presence of Stieg Larsson’s on international best-seller lists, in various countries and countries and translations, 2007 toMillennium 2010. translations, 2007 to 2010.
The really stunning—and reasonably telling—thing about Stieg Larsson’s global Thesuccess really stunning—and telling—thing aboutsome Stieg time, Larsson’s global success curve, which curve, whichreasonably we have followed for quite is twofold: It originates in a really small language, Swedish, with some 10 million speakers, does not succeed we have followed for quite some time, is twofold: It originates in a really small language, Swedish, terribly well with the German translation (with only one appearance in hardcover on with 10 million speakers, does notgoes succeed terribly well with the German thesome Spiegel Top 10 list), but then crazy in France, a terra almosttranslation incognita (with for only Nordic crime (as opposed to Mankell savoring Germany). This French frenzy is first one appearance in hardcover on the Spiegel Top 10 list), but then goes crazy in France, a terra almost picked up in Italy and Spain, and then—most unlikely—picked up by a British house incognita for Nordic crime (as opposed to Mankell savoring Germany). This French frenzy is first picked for ‘global English,’ which in this case includes even the USA.
upSecond, in Italy and Spain, up bysmall, a British house for ‘global English,’ which most of and thisthen—most success is unlikely—picked driven by relatively independent publishers (Actes Sud, Quercus/MacLehose), yet by those who make their killing routinely in this case includes even the USA. among the best-seller (author) prey, followed—to maintain the metaphor—by prominent scavengers in Italy (Marsilio/RCS Libri) and Spain (Destino/Planeta), and Second, most of this is driven by relatively small, independent publishers (Actes Sud, Quercus/ outsmarting theirsuccess corporate challengers. In a broader looking a larger sample of authors, as presented in prey, MacLehose), yet perspective, by those whoand make their atkilling routinely among the best-seller (author) the complete table from which we draw these data (for details, see the Annex and our followed—to maintain the 9metaphor—by prominent scavengers in Italy (Marsilio/RCS Libri) and Spain source tables online), the analysis will visualize a clearer pattern within a basically chaotic environment. While this goes beyondchallengers. the scope of this report, we can already (Destino/Planeta), and outsmarting their corporate formulate our first assumptions with regard to the overall panel.
In a broader perspective, and looking at a larger sample of authors, as presented in the complete table 9 9 See the complete authors theirsee publishers in translation in our sources, at the analysis from which we draw table theseofdata (for and details, the Annex and our source tables online),
www.wischenbart.com/DiversityReport2010
will visualize a clearer pattern within a basically chaotic environment. While this goes beyond the scope Diversity Report 2010 – page 28
of this report, we can already formulate our first assumptions with regard to the overall panel. 9 See the complete table of authors and their publishers in translation in our sources, at www.wischenbart.com/ DiversityReport2010
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What we tend to see is the outcome of a predatory scheme, with agents offering authors—and especially debut authors, who ideally don’t have a track record for checking assumptions—in private auctions, with only tightly controlled information on the targets available to the bidders, and under a tightly controlled time frame available for bidding. This setting requires that ideally one side, the agents, have all of the information in their hands, while the bidding side is basically reacting to what is offered by the tenderer. It is remarkable though that, in such a closed setup, the bidders do not tend to reduce their risk, notably by increasing their level of information. Obviously in the past, getting hold of more decisive information was assumed to have been too complex, too volatile, and hence too costly and not viable. Scouts, hired by one publisher for one specific market, were a custom solution that could at least prove its efficiency by the number of acquired rights from that territory, and the resulting sales. In the present, and ever more in the near future, much more dynamic forces seem to take over, resulting in a shakeup of the entire situation. Certain books can suddenly and literally take off, like a rocket, with little warning. Authors or their—first, or second, or late—books are born, or made, at once, when leveraged with a powerful stick. But not every stick is good enough to make a magic flying broom.
The impact (and the limits) of awards Introduction and general remarks
Cultural awards have already been mentioned in this report as dynamic, yet complex, drivers, and for good reason. Cultural awards have performed a particularly vigorous expansion over the course of the late 20th century. The primary purpose of prizes and awards in the arts is often assumed to reside in recognizing merit and conferring prestige, but awards also have a range of other impacts, including, notably, increasing promotional opportunities and heightening the visibility of winners and short listees in the media sphere. The field of literature has also been a fertile ground for awards. This ‘wild proliferation,’ as one prize expert has phrased it, has surpassed the production of literature itself.
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For this study, we will look at three national awards—The Man Booker (UK), the Prix Goncourt (France), and Deutscher Buchpreis (“German Book Prize”)—and one multinational award, the European Union Prize for Literature (EUPL). Among the many existing literature awards, the ones chosen serve the purpose of this study best for the following reasons: • The Man Booker and the Prix Goncourt are two of the highest-profile literary prizes in the world. The decisions reverberate well beyond their national boundaries • Deutscher Buchpreis, established only in 2005, has set out to replicate for Germany what the Man Booker and the Prix Goncourt have accomplished over decades, i.e., bringing the maximum media attention and market exposure to the winners • The EUPL, launched in 2009, aims to reach beyond national literary scenes by getting young talents from the EU member states off the shelves and across European book markets We did not include the Nobel in these close ups as it is highlighting the life time achievement of a writer, and normally not meant launch a literary career that has not, at least in some respect, found recognition among the literati in one way or another.
The Man Booker The Man Booker was successful, over the decades of its existence, in establishing a particularly high impact, in terms of commercial success, promotional appeal, and as a signifier of cultural merit. University courses are based on the Booker Prize and its prize winners, and these authors are given long-term career boosts. The name ‘Booker’ has become synonymous with success for its winners as well as for success for literary prizes. Tracking translations of Man Booker winners in all the surveyed markets for the past 10 years, we recognize that all are significantly well represented in translations, in EUWest and in the usually less represented markets of Central and Southeast Europe. The winners’ books widely differ in genre and style, as does their representation in the region. To take just two of the more extreme examples, we see Aravind Adiga as the most successful, followed by Hilary Mantel and her novel “Wolf Hall.” Adiga’s “White Tiger” meanwhile was a debut novel, allowing a witty glimpse of the minds of people in India and China who struggle to find their place in the currently most challenging and innovative societies on this planet. The contrast could hardly be sharper with “Wolf Hall,” the extraordinary account 90
of Henry VIII’s long battle against Rome in order to marry Anne Boleyn and his right-hand man Thomas Cromwell. Mantel is a well-known novelist in the UK, and her 11th book, a best seller at home, is available in seven of the 12 observed foreign markets. The label “Man Booker” seems to work as an effective identifier for enhancing the impact for a writer’s perception as the number of available translations demonstrate for Peter Carey, Margaret Atwood, Yann Martell, Aravind Adiga, Hilary Mantel, and Kiran Desai. (The 2010 winner, Howard Jacobson, cannot be taken as a valid example since it is too early to have data on the translations available.)
Le Prix Goncourt Regarding the Prix Goncourt in the past decade (2000 to 2010), the picture is only slightly different. Michel Houellebec was widely recognized and published before winning the prize. Since the publication of his debut novel “Les particules élémentaires” (“The Elementary Particles”) in 1998, he has been solidly grounded in the big EUWest markets, as well as in CSEE (as was the case with Margaret Atwood, when she was awarded the Man Booker in 2000). Most of the Goncourt winners are regularly and successfully introduced to big Western European markets. Atiq Rahimi and Marie NDiaye perform successfully in Western Europe, and each has had editions published in three Central European markets. However, we cannot find an author whose career was instantly kick-started all over Europe, as was the case with Aravind Adiga and his “White Tiger” and Yann Martel and his novel “Life of Pi” after winning the Man Booker.
Der Deutsche Buchpreis The German Book Prize (Deutscher Buchpreis), launched in 2005 based on the Man Booker, has not yet helped one of the German winners gain recognition on an international scale. However, the intention of the award’s founder, the Association of German Publishers and Booksellers, to create an award reaching beyond literary elitist circles to the broader readership of the public has met the task for Germany. Awarded for the seventh time in 2011, the German Book Prize is accepted as a hallmark of quality, and is of high significance for domestic sales and publicity. Observing and comparing various European best-seller charts and their top 10 over a period of 36
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months (January 2008–December 2010) well illustrates the significant impact of the prize on the authors’ performance in the German market. By contrast, the same data reflect the authors’ absence in the broader European market. Measuring with tracking points the presence of an author’s work in the top 10 ranking of best-seller lists in EUWest for the winners between 2007 and 2009 produces the following picture: Author.Name
Title_local
Ergebnis
Uwe Tellkamp
Der Turm
378
Julia Franck
Die Mittagsfrau
160
Kathrin Schmidt
Du stirbst nicht
88
Table 3: Three winners of the German Book Prize and their domestic performance on the top 10 best-seller charts in Germany (2007 to 2010)
A comparison with the impact of selected other best-selling authors in Germany for the same period shows that at least Uwe Tellkamp had a presence that jump-started him into the top segment of quality fiction (yet well behind the segment of superstars).
Author Name
Title_local
Points
Cornelia Funke
Reckless. Steinernes Fleisch
187
Tintenblut
287
Tintenherz
238
Tintenherz. Tintenwelt 01
78
Tintentod
126
Tintentod. Tintenwelt 03
83
Jussi Adler-Olsen
Erbarmen
669
Schändung
188
Charlotte Roche
Feuchtgebiete
791
Martin Suter
Der Koch
221
Der letzte Weynfeldt
211
Henning Mankell
Daisy Sisters
42
Der Chinese
165
Der Feind im Schatten
138
Die italienischen Schuhe
69
Daniel Kehlmann
Ruhm
300
Table 4: Selected authors and their performance in Germany on the top 10 best-seller charts (2007 to 2010)
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Not one of the winners of the German Book Prize found similar appreciation internationally. Looking at all the translations and the number of translations for the six winners, the same conclusion must be drawn: The German Book Prize is still far from having the international appeal of the prize’s British and French equivalents. The total number of translations account for 29 for 12 book markets (all surveyed markets), falling clearly short of the respective marks for the Man Booker and the Goncourt. Julia Franck (with seven translations) has the most translations in the EUWest markets, but the overall picture for her and her fellow winners is that of a minor representation, and only a very limited presence for CSEE countries. The Czech Republic (with three titles translated) and Hungary (with four titles translated) are the exceptions.
The European Union Prize for Literature (EUPL) The European Union Prize for Literature is awarded to promote locally well-known authors of fine literature beyond their domestic realm. In 2009, a concerted effort by the European Union and professional writers, publishers, and booksellers associations10 resulted in a new and ambitious literary award that aims to help the winners to receive recognition across Europe because of their outstanding talent. To date, 23 authors have received the prize, after being selected by national committees, consisting of experts and professionals from the book industry and the literary sector. An examination of the twelve 2009 winners demonstrates that one can speak indeed of a very diverse range in the field of fiction, starting with the authors’ age differences. Ranging from 23-year-old Croatian Mila Pavičević to Swedish Helena Henschen, who recently, after having received the prize, died at the age of 71, and more than 50 percent well into their forties and older, a high degree of diversity exists among the authors labeled “emerging talents in contemporary writing.” Likewise varying are the topics of the 12 books. The list includes Irish Karen Gillece’s “Longhore Drift,” a book promoted by her German publisher with a comparison to the hugely popular Irish best-selling author Maeve Binchy, as well as Croatian Mila Pavičević’s “Djevojcica od leda i druge bajke” (“Ice Girl and Other Fairy Tales”) and Polish Jacek Dukaj’s “LÓD” (“ICE”), who experiment with the supernatural and virtual reality, respectively. Furthermore, we find three novels centered on political and historical events, notably Slovak writer Pavel Rankov, who uses his three protagonists—a Hungarian, a Jew, and 10 The European Booksellers Federation (EBF), the European Writers’ Council (EWC), and the Federation of European Publishers (FEP).
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a Czech—to depict the history of Central Europe between 1938 and 1969 in his novel “Stalo sa prvého septembra alebo inokedy” (“It Happened on September the First—or whenever”). Besides being a historical novel and a saga of a family, Noemi Sceczi’s “Communist Monte Cristo” is an artistic interpretation of the history of a communist idea in Hungary, ironically turning upside down the elements of the original Monte Cristo story only to reveal the impact of blunt political stupidity as a driving force behind the unfolding events. In the book “I skuggan av ett brott” (“The Shadow of a Crime”), Helena Henschen not only has displayed a family scandal that shook Swedish society in 1932 but also has coped with her own tragic family background. Hjalmar von Sydow, chairman of the Swedish Employers’ Federation, and two maids of the household were brutally murdered by his son Frederic, the brother of Helena Henschen’s mother. When the police came to arrest him, Frederic shot himself and his young wife. However, Henschen’s book can also be seen as a psychoanalytical plot with additional elements of a thriller, like the novels of Paulus Hochgatterer. A writer and child therapist, Hochgatterer in his work unveils what lies behind so-called normality: trauma, violence, and disturbed individuals. Emmanuelle Pagano from France and Laura Sintija Černiauskaite from Lithuania follow a similar path. Černiauskaite tells the story of a young family and their adopted child who turns into a murderer because of his inability to put down roots in his foster family. Pagano’s narrator and protagonist Adèle was born with a male body but subsequently underwent surgery to become the woman she now is. Not surprisingly, most of these winners of the EUPL had already won praise in their home countries, where they have each received a multitude of national awards. Those still young enough are described as being among the most innovative and promising new voices of their country. Where the label “young” is no longer appropriate, the writers are lauded for being an extraordinary debutant, as was the case for Helena Henschen, who was in her early sixties when she published her book about the Sydow murderer that became a best seller in Sweden. However, behind such shared qualities and similarities in domestic recognition, a set of distinctions can be found. All the winning authors had books, narratives, plays, or essays published well before the award-winning year of 2009, but the number of translations is low for all of these authors. The EUWest authors have at least managed a few translations in other Western European markets. However, the Central and Southeast European colleagues have so far barely been received beyond their home market.
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Of course, since the award was launched only in 2009, it is far too early for a conclusive assessment of the EUPL’s long-term impact on encouraging translation. Many of the Central and Southeast European winners are regularly invited to theatre/literary festivals, regional and international, to read from their award-winning novels extracts in English. And in the case of Hungarian writer Noemi Sceczi, even one of the most influential literary agents, Andrew Nuremberg, throws himself as an ardent advocate into the battle, when he describes Sceczi, as can be seen on his Hungarian homepage, as one of the most talented writers of the 21st century. What consequences such promotion will have remains to be seen over the coming years, provided the prize is continued after the initial financed and secured three-year period.
Translations and best sellers Translations occupy not only a major part of what are generally called ‘mid-list’ authors, as they are represented strongly in our basic corpus of tracked authors, but also in the top-selling segment as reflected in fiction best-seller lists. While these charts have a reputation of offering mostly much of the same, namely, populist fiction written by Anglo-Saxon authors specialized in this genre, and supposedly crafting one best seller after the other, the realities of hugely popular authors and their books are much more complex and need to be differentiated. As the Diversity Report 2009 and related research have shown, best-selling authors are much more diverse in their literary styles and their biographical backgrounds than one may expect, as particularly the top rankings in best-seller charts highlight only the most popular reading. To analyze best-seller lists to identify and understand the inherent patterns, developments, and trends that they reflect, a long-term view turned out to be the best approach. Normally, a work first appears in the original language that the author used, and only in subsequent steps is the work then offered in the rights and licenses markets in order to be translated into additional languages for an international readership. Only then, ideally, the work eventually turns out to be successful with the new, expanded readership just as the work was domestically. This process takes at least a few years to evolve. In the best case, subsequent translations create feedback loops so that every new translation and its readership open wider circles of dissemination, re-enforcing the reputation of a book and its author
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where it has already an audience. Then, a movie adaptation can create additional impact, and again cross-fertilize the number of book copies sold. One of the most staggering examples of such a buildup, which was not foreseen by the book’s initial success in its domestic market, is the already broadly quoted “Millennium” trilogy of the late Swedish author Stieg Larsson. Yet applying this same methodology of tracking the presence of a number of authors on various bestseller lists over time and attributing points to represent the overall impact of a writer11 provides an opportunity for a bird’s-eye perspective on the segment.
Basic patterns of distribution by best-selling authors and languages Mapping the respective top 10 fiction best sellers of eight main book markets of EUWest (Austria, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, and the UK) on a monthly basis over three years, from January 2008 to December 2010, we identified 451 different authors who have had a presence at one point among the top 10 on one of these charts. The leading 20 authors, those with the highest score in impact points, come with a pattern already very familiar from similar surveys that we did earlier:
Language
Author
Points
% of Top 20
1
Swedish
Stieg Larsson
7767
24%
2
English
Stephenie Meyer
4394
13%
3
English
Khaled Hosseini
3053
9%
4
English
Dan Brown
2222
7%
5
Spanish
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
1759
5%
6
French
Muriel Barbery
1497
5%
7
Italian
Paolo Giordano
1324
4%
8
English
Ken Follett
1109
3%
9
Italian
Roberto Saviano
1107
3%
10
Swedish
Henning Mankell
916
3%
11 This analysis is a computation from authors’ performances over the past 11 months, between January and November 2010, based on monthly compilations of the top 10 best-seller lists (fiction) of The Bookseller, buchreport/Spiegel Bestsellerliste, El Cultural, Livres Hebdo/Ipsos, Svensk Bokhandel, and a combined top 20 fiction and non-fiction list for Italy provided by Informazioni Editoriali, and of the Netherlands by GfK/CPNB De Bestseller. To assess and compare the impact of an author’s books, we attributed points for each month that a book stays in a given market in the top 10 (with 50 points for a #1 rank, 49 for a #2, etc.). This system allows realistic calibration of larger and smaller countries and book markets across Europe.
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11
Italian
Andrea Camilleri
890
3%
12
French
Anna Gavalda
874
3%
13
German
Charlotte Roche
846
3%
14
Swedish
Camilla Läckberg
822
3%
15
English
John Grisham
778
2%
16
English
Cecilia Ahern
773
2%
17
English
John Boyne
718
2%
18
English
James Patterson
654
2%
19
Dutch
Jeroen Smit
613
2%
20
French
Marc Levy
611
2%
Table 5: The strongest-performing fiction authors across the top 10 best-seller lists in Austria, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, and the UK for the 36-month period of January 2008 to December 2010.
Only eight out of the strongest 20 titles were written in English, and 12 in other languages, which is a significant deviation from the overall distribution of original languages in translated books. As a rule of thumb, two out of three translated books are from English originals, with German and French well behind at 7 or 8 percent each, and all other languages falling far behind. English
8
13701
42%
Other
12
19026
58%
Total top 10
25148
Total top 20
32727
Top 10 of top 20
77%
Table 6: Breakdown of authors in table 5 by original language of the surveyed works.
In our best-sellers segment, we find a clearly different distribution in languages, with English, of course, in the lead, but totaling less than half, followed by Swedish, Italian, and French. Language
%
English
8
13701
42%
Swedish
3
9505
29%
Italian
3
3321
10%
French
3
2982
9%
Other
3
3218
10%
Table 7: Representation of languages among the 20 best-performing authors (as in table 6)
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Italian French Other
3 3 3
3321 2982 3218
10% 9% 10%
Table 7: Representation of languages among the 20 best-performing authors (as in table 6)
Distribution among the 20 best performing authors by languages in % 10% 9%
English 42%
Swedish
10%
Italian French Other 29%
Figure 8: Representation of languages among the 20 best-performing authors (as in table 7) Figure 8: Representation of languages among the 20 best-performing authors (as in table 7)
Remarkably, the respective breakdown by languages for all 451 authors represented on the top 10 charts for the surveyed 36 months (2008 to 2010) brings up a more charts for the surveyed 36 months (2008 to 2010) brings up a more balanced of languages, balanced distribution of languages, with English at the origindistribution of only one out of three translations, and the other main original languages represented more evenly. with English at the origin of only one out of three translations, and the other main original languages Remarkably, the respective breakdown by languages for all 451 authors represented on the top 10
represented more evenly. Diversity Report 2010 – page 36
Language
Number of authors
EN
159
Other
61
SE
60
FR
52
IT
46
DE
42
SP
31
Table 8: Original language of all surveyed 451 authors from top 10 charts (2008-2010)
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SP
31
Table 8: Original language of all surveyed 451 authors from top 10 charts (2008-2010)
Original language of all survey 451 authors from top 10 charts (2008-2010) 31
EN
42
Other
159
SE
46
FR IT
52
DE SP
61
60
Figure 9: language Originalof alllanguage all from surveyed authors from Figure 9: Original surveyed 451ofauthors the top 10451 charts (2008-2010) (2008-2010)
the
top
10
charts
A second key aspect is the uneven distribution of the top authors.
A second key aspect is the uneven distribution of the top authors.
The distribution of impact points among the 20 best performing authors in %
24%
Stieg Larsson Stephenie Meyer
41%
Diversity Report 2010 – page 37
Khaled Hosseini Dan Brown
13%
Carlos Ruiz ZafĂłn Rest of top 20
5%
7%
9%
Figure 10: Selected their impact the 20 best-performing authors Figure 10: Selected authorsauthors and theirand impact from the 20from best-performing authors (2008 to 2010) (2008 to 2010)
Stieg Larsson alone collected almost one fourth of all impact points for his extraordinary predominance on best-seller lists in the surveyed three-year period, 99 and together with the second- to the fifth-ranked authors, almost 60 percent of the top 20 scores are consolidated. This high and potent group of the top of the top authors realistically hints at the enormous market share that a few authors hold in today’s book markets.
Stieg Larsson alone collected almost one fourth of all impact points for his extraordinary predominance on best-seller lists in the surveyed three-year period, and together with the second- to the fifth-ranked authors, almost 60 percent of the top 20 scores are consolidated. This high and potent group of the top of the top authors realistically hints at the enormous market share that a few authors hold in today’s book markets. As a third characteristic pattern, among the top-performing authors, only a very few succeed in having a presence in the top 10 charts of more than just two or three markets. Altogether, a mere 29 of the 452 authors represented in the top 10 in 2008 to 2010 have such a presence in three or more markets. Thirteen of those write in English, and the remaining 16 in other languages.
Authors with presence in 3 or more markets
29
Of which EN
13
SE
3
Other
3
FR
3
SP
3
DE
2
IT
2
Table 9: Breakdown of 29 authors with a presence in the top 10 in three or more markets, by original language of their works.
As one direct consequence from the fact that only a few authors produce such an overwhelmingly powerful impact (and thus predominant visibility and market share), the “long tail” consisting of the many less prevalent authors and their titles is in a very fragile balance to the top segment. The ‘mid-list’ authors on whom the main attention of this study is focused are caught in the delicate middle position of the sky-rocketing top and the long tail.
Best sellers in translation, and the ‘Long Tail’ In the initial group of 187 authors whose works and translations we surveyed for the wider range of more than a dozen languages in both EUWest and Central and Southeast Europe, these ‘mid-list authors’ have a great majority, as they still represent what generally is understood as the diversity in books and literature, and form the core of the publishers’ programs. The authors’ names—as brands—and reputation give a profile to their publishing companies, and the cost of the rights to these writers’ 100
works, while of course much lower than for the very few at the very top, are still significant for a publisher’s budget. Thus, for most publishers, and notably for ‘independent’ houses, those not part of a transnational and multi-media group, these authors’ relative success, or failure, with their audiences is critical. of the 187 authors in our group, 107 have been at one moment or another, and as far as we overlook the relevant data, on a national best-seller list.12 Sixty of these have been listed only in their country of original appearance. A mere 25 have been listed in at least three countries, including the authors’ domestic market. This distribution is largely consistent with related research that we conducted earlier, showing that only a tiny number of writers succeed in occupying best-seller positions in more than just a few countries, while most have a genuinely strong readership in just their domestic market, plus eventually one or two additional languages. However, here, regional specificities emerge. Twenty-three of the 60 authors listed in their own countries alone are writers born in CSEE, including seven each from Poland and the Czech Republic, four Hungarians, and two writers each from Serbia and Slovenia. In comparison, we found 12 French authors who had been listed at the very top in France alone and five Italians. Overall, certain countries seem to have a stronger tendency to foster such ‘local heroes,’ notably Austria, Czech Republic, France, Hungary, the Netherlands, and Poland, which could point to works characteristically catering primarily to these countries’ domestic audiences, which are then less appreciated abroad. In the case of Austria, the popularity of works catering to a domestic audience can be understood as a factor highlighting the cultural difference with Germany. By contrast, the UK and Sweden produced a variety of authors with multiple authors having bestselling titles in a larger number of countries and languages, followed to a lesser degree by Italy, Spain, and to a certain extent France—which, most interestingly, and forming hereby a unique position, can apparently foster strictly local writers and others whose works travel well.
12 Again, we must underline the limits of our data when it comes to authors’ representation on best-seller lists beyond the solid core of the EUWest markets of Austria, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, and the UK. For 2009, we conducted some exemplary research for Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Slovenia, and Romania, focusing on either representative market data (in the Czech Republic) or charts from major book chains (for all the other markets – see the Diversity Report 2009 for more details). However, for those CSEE markets, we lack the continuity of observation that we have for EUWest.
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Close-up of selected author and market profiles The data and analysis developed for this report allow us to examine a wide variety of topics in depth. The following case studies are meant to provide some examples of such enhanced usage of our findings.
France: Dynamics and complexities of a premier translation market As already mentioned, France has recently shown a particularly strong performance with regard to best sellers and translations, as a receiving market fond of its status as a key environment for the international launch of authors and with particularly strong performances of its own authors in translations internationally. Over the past decade, France witnessed continuous growth in the number of incoming translations, to the point of catching up with Germany as Europe’s most active and attractive market for translations. While the absolute number of translations in France (9088 in 2009) is still lower than that for Germany (11.800 in 2009), their share of 14,3 percent of the overall production has overtaken the German ratio of 12,7 percent.13 More specifically, France arguably outmatched Germany as the key transfer market where Nordic crime writers are groomed for a wider international career. In the past, this part used to be played by German publishers that, with Swedish Henning Mankell in the 1990s, provided the first harbor with a large readership for the cruel, yet psychologically wellmade, pieces from Scandinavia. The ground had been well prepared long before, by appreciation for the specifics of Nordic ambiance, be it through Astrid Lindgren’s anarchic children’s books or Ingmar Bergman’s psychologically dense movies since the 1960s. With apartments full of bookshelves and beds in clear pine wood from Ikea, a few decades on, German readers were ready to form real-life and virtual communities (such as www.schwedenkrimi.de) specializing in Scandinavian style and folklore. However, the roles and role models were radically reversed with the advent of Stieg Larsson, who had a relatively poor initial start at his Munich-based publisher Heyne, an imprint of Random House, with only a short stay on the Spiegel best-seller list (which, in the meantime, surely has changed, with the paperback edition going wild, and inspired the French boost in the meantime). Now, the French publisher of Larsson, Actes Sud, has successfully managed to place Swedish Camilla 13 The number of new and reprinted editions, with Germany producing 93.124 new titles in 2009 and France 66.595.
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Läckberg to follow in Stieg’s oversized footsteps. In our 36-month ranking, Läckberg is placed 14th, across thethe eight surveyed European markets, one rank ahead of successfully John Grisham.managed to place Now, French publisher of Larsson, Actes Sud, has Swedish Camilla Läckberg to follow in Stieg’s oversized footsteps. In our 36-month ranking, Läckberg is placed 14th,Anna across the eight surveyed European markets, Two places ahead of Läckberg is French Galvada, a domestic French author whose booksone do really rank ahead of John Grisham. well, aside from France, in Spain, Germany—and Sweden. Two places ahead of Läckberg is French Anna Galvada, a domestic French author whose books do really well, aside from France, in Spain, Germany—and Sweden. The most powerful French export of recent years, however, was Muriel Barbery, ranked sixth in our The most powerful French export of recent years, however, was Muriel Barbery, tracking across With “Leacross Gourmet” 2000 by Gallimard), she already ranked sixththe in board. our tracking the(initially board. published With “Le in Gourmet” (initially published inhad 2000 by Gallimard), she already had an internationally recognized book. However, an internationally recognized book. However, with “L’élégance du hérisson” (2006), it was all different. By with “L’élégance du hérisson” (2006), it was all different. By February 2007, the book February 2007, book was on the French best-seller list,later nine in months in Italy. German and Spanish was on thethe French best-seller list, nine months Italy. later German and Spanish versions had smashing launches in 2008, and in 2009, Swedish and Czech versions had smashing launches in 2008, and in 2009, Swedish and Czech translations were available. translations were available.
Average rank on top10
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10
15
2007
2008
2009
France - LIVRES HEBDO / Ipsos
German - Buchreport
Italy - Informazioni Editoriali
Spain - El Cultural
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2010
Sweden - Svensk Bokhandel Figure 11: The performance of Muriel Barbery’s “L’élégance du hérisson” on the top 10 fiction best-
Figure 11:charts The performance Muriel Barbery’s du hérisson” on the top 10 fiction best-seller charts in seller in selectedofmarkets, 2006 to“L’élégance 2010. selected markets, 2006 to 2010.
Most significantly, the book was discovered and ‘made’ in most markets, with the Most significantly, the book was discovered ‘made’ in mostmedium-sized markets, with the exception Grupo exception of Grupo Planeta in Spain, and by independent, houses, andofnot by some of the dominant corporate groups. Planeta in Spain, by independent, medium-sized houses, and not by some of the dominant corporate
groups.
Author
Country
Title_(local)
Publisher
Diversity Report 2010 – page 41
Publisher
Year
Points 103
Author
Country
Title_(local)
Publisher (Group)
Publisher (imprint)
Year
Points
Muriel Barbery
Austria
Die Eleganz des Igels
Independent dtv premium
2008
168
Czech
S elegancí ježka
Host
2009
98
France
L’élégance du hérisson
Groupe Gallimard
Gallimard
2009
175
2008
449
2007
426
German
Die Eleganz des Igels
Independent
dtv premium
2009
93
2008
292
Italy
Estasi culinarie
Independent
E/O
2008
80
L’eleganza del riccio
Independent
E/O
2009
560
2008
1094
2007
178
2010
408
Serbia
Otmenost ježa
2009
32
Spain
La elegancia del erizo
Grupo Planeta
Seix Barral
2008
138
Sweden
Igelkottens elegans
Independent
Sekwa förlag
2009
182
Table 10: Muriel Barbery’s “L’élégance du hérisson” and its publishers in selected markets.
Yet in the surveyed period since 2006, Muriel Barbery was not the only stunning French export in fiction. At least two more (female) writers, Tatiana de Rosnay and Katherine Pancol, saw their international recognition go up and up, and both fit well into the more general patterns we have already identified in this report. Tatiana de Rosnay, born in 1961 in Paris, is—in her own words—of “English, French, and Russian descent,” and grew up in several countries, following her father’s moves in international academia. She worked as a journalist for French magazines, started her writing career in French, and had her works published by major Paris houses such as Plon and Fayard. However, with her first novel that she decided to write in English, “Sarah’s Key,” which brought her international fame, translations in 38 countries, and four million copies sold, she moved to a tiny independent publisher, Héloïse d’Ormesson, which, since its creation in 2005, has released a mere 20 104
titles per year. To our knowledge, Tatiana de Rosnay is not represented by an agent, but by her French publisher. Her English-language books are published by St. Martin’s Press of the Holtzbrinck Group. Katherine Pancol is certainly at an earlier stage of her international career. She was born in Morocco in 1954, lived for some time in New York City, and taught creative writing at Columbia University before going back to France, where she worked mostly as a magazine journalist, just like de Rosnay. Pancol has a long track record in book publishing, as she started publishing books in 1979; her debut “Moi d’abord” was a significant success and translated into several languages, including German, published mostly by Lübbe. However, the publishing relationship seems to have been discontinued around 2000. Pancol moved to New York and taught creative writing at Columbia University. In 2006, her novel “Les Yeux jaunes des crocodiles” (“The Yellow Eyes of Crocodiles”), according to the author a “novel full of laughter and tears,” was a big surprise, selling more than a million copies in France alone, and was quickly followed by “The Turtles’ Slow Waltz” in 2008, and “Central Park’s Squirrels Are Sad on Mondays” in 2010. These recent books were translated into several languages, according to correspondence with the author in March 2010, “from China to Iceland,” but not into English and German.14 Her former German publisher Lübbe, when approached in February 2011 for this report, had no plans for a translation. In 2010, the Spanish translation of her “Crocodiles” got on the top 10 charts, and in January 2011, “The Turtles’ Slow Waltz” entered the Spanish charts ranked fifth. Author
Country
Local title
Publisher (Mother company)
Imprint
Year
Points
Katherine Pancol
France
La valse lente des tortues
Albin Michel
Albin Michel
2009
22
2008
310
Les écureuils de Central Park sont tristes le lundi
Albin Michel
Albin Michel
2010
287
Les yeux jaunes des crocodiles
Albin Michel
Albin Michel
2006
41
Spain
Los ojos amarillos de los cocodrilos
RCS Libri
Esfera de los Libros
2010
403
Table 11: Katherine Pancol on selected top 10 best-seller charts. 14 E-mail from Katherine Pancol, March 3, 2010.
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Best sellers and translations from Central and Southeast Europe Overall, a marked imbalance has to be noted in the representation of younger authors writing in the languages of Central and Southeast Europe in the EUWest markets. Of course, there was an initial surge of interest in the decade after the Iron Curtain came down in 1989. Since the turn of the millennium, and with the exception of those writers from our “group A,” who biographically have their roots clearly in the era before the political transition in the region, the attention paid to literary developments in Central and Southeast Europe seems to have somewhat faded. The distinction gets even sharper when looking at the sales statistics reflected by the best-seller lists that we surveyed notably in EUWest. Over the past four years, only one writer from CSEE has had a presence on one of these charts, Boris Pahor in Italy from March to May 2008. However, Pahor, writing in Slovenian, is in fact an Italian citizen, yet from the tiny Slovenian minority in and around Trieste. The Nobel Prize nominee was born in 1913 in Trieste where he spent all of his life. A concentration camp survivor, he is most noted for “Nekropola” (Pilgrim Among the Shadows), a novel in which he remembers his internment. After 1990, Pahor gained recognition in Slovenia and Italy. In the last decade, his works has been translated into other languages with “Nekropola” leading the way. From a younger or middle-aged generation of authors whose literary careers did not take full shape before 1989, we can identify many writers who, in their own country of origin, look back on a prolific working biography, often well recognized by cultural institutions such as prize committees in their countries, and embraced by their domestic reading audiences. Yet in translation, in other languages of CSEE as well in EUWest, these authors are largely underrepresented. This barrier seems to work not only against the dissemination of the exponents of fine literature, such as Romanian Mircea Cărtărescu or Polish Andrzej Stasiuk. They often find their books welcomed at least in a few markets such as Germany or France. The linguistic and market barrier is tighter for other writers whose work aims less at literary recognition than entertainment, as is the case for Czech Michal Viewegh. Being represented prominently on the writers’ respective domestic charts, these writers face tough competition, or more bluntly, sheer ignorance abroad. To be fair, such indifference from the translation rights market regularly greets comparable authors from EUWest languages and backgrounds as well, with the hugely successful Dutch Susanne Vermeer, an entertainment author with high qualifications, a good example, just as the above-mentioned lack of a German or English translation of the recent books of French Katherine Pancol.
106
Sometimes, an author expected to get stuck in this pattern suddenly overcomes this rule, such as Austrian Daniel Glattauer, whose e-mail novel “Gut gegen Nordwind” (“Good Against Northwind”, 2006) was at first considered basically ineligible for translation, and yet sold in the end in 30 languages, very much unexpectedly.
Conclusions Obviously, the international markets for translation rights, notably in fiction, do not obey any simple set of rules or forces. Governed mostly by anecdotal evidence and the professional experience of the actors, with little empirical data openly available, and many assumptions shaping a business culture of great sophistication but also secrecy, the decisions about which authors and works get translated, and into which languages, are driven by factors of remarkable complexity, and sometimes obscurity. And yet, as our analysis clearly indicates, these markets develop patterns and preferred channels, in which the literary transfers flow with relative ease, while other possible routes in the European reading landscape confront substantial barriers that are difficult to overcome. Digging up and modeling data as the starting point for our assessment allowed us to identify a number of general patterns and orientation, and to put question marks on what seems to be dearly disseminated myths with regard to books—as an industry and as a culture. As we have already illustrated in the Diversity Reports 2008 and 2009, translated books reflect a broad diversity of authors and styles, languages, and career paths. We have confirmed, as a trend with great momentum, that the few authors and books at the very top, in terms of sales and recognition, expand their share of the overall reading markets with remarkable vigor. Not only are the real global stars counted on not very many fingers. Even those strongly represented in more than just one or two languages are few in number. Those at the top who write in English however, amount altogether to roughly one third, far below the expected threshold, if the outcries about a globally homogenized best-seller literature flatly dominated by Anglo-Saxon serial authors truthfully corresponded to the facts of the markets. However, the group of strong languages from which an international career can reasonably be started is limited to mostly half a dozen West European idioms, including notably English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Swedish. All Asian or African languages, or even those of Central and Southeast Europe, are significantly underrepresented. However, below the sales statistics, and by looking at which authors are translated really broadly, even if
107
their books are hardly ever found on the best-seller charts, we seem to find a much more diverse choice, yet again with some complexities hinting at a structural shift in the markets. We could model four groups of authors who follow different ‘role models’: First, the great old names of world literature, the banner carriers of an elitist cultural spirit that ignores borders and barriers, born before 1960, looking back at a broad opus that can be found in most (European) languages that we surveyed. Not only by their age are these branded authors an echo of a past that may be hard to prolong into the future. The paramount and long-term presence of their many books was fostered by a type of publisher that would not buy just one title but committed itself to following a writer with continuity for decades, regardless of short-term expectations for sales. This group contrasts radically with a younger and more volatile type of author who, often with a biography that in itself is global, or at least multi-cultural, hit the international scenery with great fanfare of one smashing hit book, sometimes additionally propelled by one of the very few awards with impact on the international rights markets, namely the Man Booker, or, to a slightly lesser degree, the Prix Goncourt. These authors represent a much more modern kind of a brand, and these authors do not wait to patiently build a broad opus. They tend to rise to stardom quickly. But it is doubtful if a publisher would accompany their work beyond the curve of the initial success. The third group is what we called the “middle class,” a highly diverse reservoir out of which one star or another for the second group might coincidentally emerge. However, many will not develop a readership beyond passionate readers, and so in just a few languages, making it again unlikely these writers will find publishers in all languages for every new work. The fourth group is made up of authors well known only in their domestic environment. With the exception of the first group, we see how the often aggressive volatility of markets, and hence of trends and completion, more than the patient continuity of cultural evolution are shaping the translation markets stronger than just a decade ago. Oddly enough, this does not mean that most of the success stories among the younger generation of authors are driven by those transnational groups of corporate publishing that emerged in this same period, and based on the same economic and social trends of globalization and consolidation. The opposite is the case.
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Comparably smaller, or even newly founded, or re-oriented publishing houses seem to have by far more clout, and a more precise grasp on identifying authors who could eventually ‘work internationally.’ Agents do play an important role, but we found strong evidence that their impact, aside from the English language, may be overstated, as many authors from other linguistic and cultural backgrounds find their initial access to the international stage not with agents but with the authors’ original (small- to medium-sized) publisher, and through the early mouth-to-ear appreciation of their readership. Together, these characteristics open powerful perspectives in a radically changing environment of future publishing, with more flexible, more dynamic, and certainly also faster, reader-driven authors and their helping hands. In this context, we also recognize the tight limits of influencing these dynamics, and the rights markets, with the well-intentioned tools of cultural promotion, by providing grants and ever-new awards, whose reach turns out to be limited at best to a domestic arena of media and local readership. Perhaps the most fascinating finding is the confirmed assumption that the spheres of new talent for a potentially wider international readership are clearly underexplored. The conventional gospel has it that whether an author ‘works’ in a country, or not, and that most ‘good books’ will find their way into this arena, is quite unpredictable. However, this gospel is strictly tautological, assuming that everything that is relevant would be known, and the unknown is only exceptionally of relevance. The long catalogues of authors from—in our classification—the third and fourth groups, the broad and diverse ‘middle class’ and the barely translated ‘local heros,’ notably of less represented languages hardly ever attract the attention, and then the enthusiasm, that is necessary to be adopted for the second group of upstart international stars. Tools for identifying talent early on and across many different markets and linguistic and thematic backgrounds, as we have introduced for this report, may help to open the gates. The fact that authors from languages other than English have more modest expectations in terms of up-front royalty payments may be a further incentive to test the waters in the perspective of more diversity in the authors and the stories for a growingly internationally oriented readership. The third factor may come from the digital revolution that has started to shape and thoroughly change books and reading, as books can travel seamlessly across any distance. With many more people than ever before reading in English, in addition to their domestic vernacular, the perspectives of translation and the play between languages will certainly change as well. 109
Annex
Acknowledgements This report would not have been possible without the support and input from many sides, from individuals and institutions alike. The City of Ljubljana through its idealistic and financial commitment for organising the World Book Summit 2011 provided the funding for our work and set the stage for the presentation of our findings. Our approach to analysing translations and their relationship with regard to other cultural as well as market parameters would not have been possible without a wide network of colleagues and friends willing to always respond to our queries, critically discuss our assumptions and give input in various ways. These helping minds include notably Alexandra Buchler, Yana Genova, Péter Inkei, Dana Kalinová, Albrecht Lempp, Sandrine Paccher, Claire Squires, Carles Torner, and Marius Tukaj. In our team, and in addition to the co-authors of this report, Julia Coufal added valuable painstaking fact checking, and Philipp Minarik, as so often, had the intuition and the technical skills to organize our data. We owe them all, and many others, our gratefulness in finding our ways around the many challenges that we had to confront.
Sources and data As the tables with all the detailed information about authors and their translations which we could track and identify would hardly fit in a reasonably layout format for print, we opted for a digital archive, and made all data and additional resources freely accessible at www.wischenbart.com/ DiversityReport2010 , and we will add further material and resources at this page in the future. The previous Diversity Reports 2008 and 2009 are freely accessible for download at www.wischenbart. com/translation .
Surveyed markets and authors At the core of this report is, of course, the selection of authors which we checked for translations in the following markets and their (main) languages: • Croatia • Czech Republic • France 110
• Germany • Hungary • Italy
• • • •
• • • •
Netherlands Poland Romania Slovakia
Slovenia Spain Sweden United Kingdom
The author list Language
Name
Awards
ALB
Ismail Kadare
Prinz Asturien Preis 2009
AT
Arno Geiger
Deutscher Buchpreis 2005
AT
Daniel Glattauer
AT
Elfriede Jelinek
Nobel
AT
Josef Winkler
Büchnerpreis 2008
AT
Michael Köhlmeier
AT
Paulus Hochgatterer
AT
Thomas Glavinic
AT
Walter Kappacher
Büchnerpreis 2009
AUS
DBC Pierre
ManBooker 2003
AUS
Peter Carey
ManBooker 2001
BG/DE BiH/CRO BR
EULitPrize 2009
Ilija Trojanow Miljenko Jergović Nélida Piñón
Prinz Asturien Preis 2005
CAN
Margaret Atwood
Prinz Asturien Preis 2008
CAN
Yann Martel
ManBooker 2002
CAN/FR
Jonathan Littell
CH
Melinda Nadj Abonji
CH
Thomas Hürlimann
CRO
Mila Pavičević
CZ
Dana Čermáková
CZ
Jáchym Topol
CZ
Jaroslav Kmenta
CZ
Lenka Lanczová
CZ
Marie Poledňáková
CZ
Michal Ajvaz
CZ
Michal Viewegh
CZ
Vlastimil Vondruška
CZ
Zdeněk Svěrák
CZ/FR
Milan Kundera
DE
Deutscher Buchpreis 2010 EULitPrize 2009
Bestseller2009
Bernhard Schlink 111
112
DE
Charlotte Roche
DE
Feridun Zaimoglu
DE
Günter Grass
DE
Ingo Schulze
DE
John von Düffel
DE
Julia Franck
Deutscher Buchpreis 2007
DE
Katharina Hacker
Deutscher Buchpreis 2006
DE
Kathrin Schmidt
Deutscher Buchpreis 2009
DE
Martin Mosebach
Büchnerpreis 2007
DE
Matthias Zschokke
Femina etranger 2009
DE
Reinhard Jirgl
Büchnerpreis 2010
DE
Uwe Tellkamp
Deutscher Buchpreis 2008
DE
Uwe Timm
DE/AT
Daniel Kehlmann
Nobel
DE/FR
Paul Nizon
DE/HU
Terézia Mora
Gr Österr Staatspreis Europ Lit
DE/RO
Herta Müller
Nobel
DK
Per Olov Enquist
Gr Österr Staatspreis Europ Lit Femina etranger 2010
FI
Sofi Oksanen
FR
Anna Gavalda
FR
Atiq Rahimi
Goncourt 2008
FR
Camille Laurens
Femina 2000
FR
Chantal Thomas
Femina 2002
FR
Dai Sijie
Femina 2003
FR
Emmanuelle Pagano
EULitPrize 2009
FR
Éric Fottorino
Femina 2007
FR
François Weyergans
Goncourt 2005
FR
Gilles Leroy
Goncourt 2007
FR
Gwenaëlle Aubry
Femina 2009
FR
Jacques-Pierre Amette
Goncourt 2003
FR
Jean-Christophe Rufin
Goncourt 2001
FR
Jean-Jacques Schuhl
Goncourt 2000
FR
Jean-Louis Fournier
Femina 2008
FR
Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio
Nobel
FR
Jean-Paul Dubois
Femina 2004
FR
Katherine Pancol
FR
Laurent Gaudé
Goncourt 2004
FR
Marie Ndiaye
Femina 2001
FR
Michel Houellebecq
Goncourt 2010
FR
Muriel Barbery
FR
Nancy Huston
Femina 2006
FR
Pascal Quignard
Goncourt 2002
FR
Patrick Lapeyre
Femina 2010
FR
Régis Jauffret
Femina 2005
FR/LEB
Amin Maalouf
Prinz Asturien Preis 2010
GT
Augusto Monterroso
Prinz Asturien Preis 2000
HU
Agota Kristof
Gr Österr Staatspreis Europ Lit
HU
Csernus Imre
HU
György Dalos
HU
Imre Kertész
HU
Lőrincz L. László (Leslie Lawrence)
HU
Magda Szabó
HU
Moldova György
HU
Noémi Szécsi
HU
Peter Esterházy
HU
Peter Nadás
HU
Spiró György
IND
Aravind Adiga
ManBooker 2008
IND
Kiran Desai
ManBooker 2006
IRE
Anne Enright
ManBooker 2007
IRE
Hugo Hamilton
Femina etranger 2004
IRE
John Banville
ManBooker 2005
IRE
Keith Ridgway
Femina etranger 2001
IRE
Nuala O’Faolain
Femina etranger 2006
IRL
Karen Gillece
EULitPrize 2009
ISR
Amos Oz
Prinz Asturien Preis 2007
IT
Alessandro Baricco
IT
Andrea Camilleri
IT
Antonio Pennacchi
Premio Strega 2010
IT
Claudio Magris
Prinz Asturien Preis 2004
IT
Dacia Maraini
Premio Strega 1999
IT
Daniele Del Giudice
EULitPrize 2009
IT
Niccolò Ammaniti
Premio Strega 2007
IT
Paolo Giordano
Premio Strega 2008
IT
Roberto Saviano
IT
Sandro Veronesi
Femina etranger 2008
IT
Tiziano Scarpa
Premio Strega 2009
ITA
Erri De Luca
Femina etranger 2002
Nobel Femina etranger 2003 EULitPrize 2009
113
114
JP
Haruki Murakami
LIT
Laura Sintija Cerniauskaité
EULitPrize 2009
MA
Fatima Mernissi
Prinz Asturien Preis 2003
NL
A.F.Th. Van der Heijden
NL
Cees Noteboom
NL
Harry Mulisch
NL
Herman Koch
NL
Hugo Claus
NL
Jeroen Smit
NL
Leon de Winter
NL
Raymond Kluun
NL
Suzanne Vermeer
NOR
Carl Frode Tille
EULitPrize 2009
PL
Andrzej Stasiuk
PL
Bernard Nowaczyk
Bestseller2009
PL
Jacek Dukaj
EULitPrize 2009
PL
Jacek Hugo-Bader
Bestseller2009
PL
Jan M. Ciechanowski
Bestseller2009
PL
Katarzyna Grochola
PL
Krzysztof Daukszewicz
Bestseller2009
PL
Leszek Kołakowski
Bestseller2009
PL
Małgorzata Kalicińska
Bestseller2009
PL
Malgorzata Musierowicz
PL
Marek Krajewski
PL
Monika Szawaja
PL
Wiktor Suworow
Bestseller2009
PL
Wojciech Cejrowski
PT
Dulce Maria Cardoso
EULitPrize 2009
PT
José Saramago
Nobel
RO
Andrei Plesu
RO
Mircea Cartarescu
RO
Mircea Dinescu
RO
Norman Manea
SA
J. M. Coetzee
SE
Åsa Larsson
SE
Camilla Läckberg
SE
Helena Henschen
SE
Lars Kepler
SE
Liza Marklund
Nobel
EULitPrize 2009
SE
Stieg Larsson
SK
Pavol Rankov
SLO
Boris Pahor
SLO
Brina Svit
SLO
Drago Jančar
SLO
Goran Vojnović
SLO
Tone Pavček
SP
Antonio Munoz Molina
SP
Arturo Pérez-Reverte
SP
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
SP
Ildefonso Falcones
SP
Javier Marías
SP
Jorge Semprún
SP
Juan Goytisolo
SP
María Dueñas
EULitPrize 2009
Gr Österr Staatspreis Europ Lit
SP/CAT
Eduardo Mendoza
Premio Fundacion Lara
SP/CAT
Enrique Vila-Matas
Premio Fundacion Lara
SP/CAT
Manuel de Pedrolo
SP/CAT
Mercè Rodoreda
SRB
Marija Jovanović
SRB
Vladimir Pištalo
TR
Elif Shafak
TR
Orhan Pamuk
Nobel
UK
Alan Hollinghurst
ManBooker 2004
UK
Doris Lessing
Nobel
UK
Edward St Aubyn
Femina etranger 2007
UK
Emma Donoghue
RWCC BoMonth
UK
Hilary Mantel
ManBooker 2009
UK
Howard Jacobson
ManBooker 2010
UK
Ian McEwan
UK
Salman Rushdie
UK
V.S. Naipaul
UK
Zadie Smith
US
Arthur Miller
US
Barbara Delinsky
US
Colleen McCullough
US
Joyce Carol Oates
Femina etranger 2005
US
Paul Auster
Prinz Asturien Preis 2006
Jamaïca Kincaid
Femina etranger 2000
US/AG
Nobel Prinz Asturien Preis 2002
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The Ljubljana Resolution on Books 116
Ljubljana, the UNESCO World Book Capital 2010 and organiser of the World Book Summit 2011, hereby announces The Ljubljana Resolution on Books, which stresses, in accordance with the guiding principles of the UNESCO Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions, the importance of books as key vehicles of human development, cultural pluralism and sustainable diversity. The Ljubljana Resolution on Books combines the viewpoints held by UNESCO and key national and international organisations operating in the field of books, ranging from authors, publishers, libraries and bookshops to institutions that deal with the development of reading literacy and reading culture. The Ljubljana Resolution on Books proposes fundamental directives for bearers of public book-related policies and professional associations that operate in this field. These directives are derived from specific good practices in different countries and good practices that have been derived from the implemented Ljubljana World Book Capital 2010 programme. These directives will facilitate the setting up of strong foundations for the long-term development of the entire book chain and thus provide friendly access to books, facilitate high quality and diverse book and magazine production and increase the level of reading literacy. These directives consider the special characteristics of individual language-determined book markets and strive to increase access to books and the diversity of book production and thus facilitate creativity, strengthen knowledge, increase reading literacy, develop language, increase the level of intercultural dialogue, enhance cultural diversity, provide better social cohesion and higher quality leisure time. The Ljubljana Resolution on Books thus derives from the comprehension of books as the foundation for the development of individuals and society. The responsibilities and functions of national and local authorities, as well as of the professional associations and civil society organizations that operate in the field of books, cover different areas, while The Ljubljana Resolution on Books stresses and recommends those responsibilities and functions that are related to books as public goods: 1. In planning public policies on books, the complex nature of books needs to be considered and cultural, educational, scientific, economic and social policies need to be harmonised. The development of books depends on the optimum operation of the entire book chain, from authors, publishers, libraries and bookshops to the readers. Public policies should therefore prepare their measures concerning books in harmony with the operation of all these links. 2. Due to its importance and its special and complex nature, the book market requires attention regardless of whether it is operating on the principle of fixed prices for books and regardless of its size, as books are a medium that is part of human activity in one way or another and thus 117
predominantly a matter of public interest. Considering the specific nature of books as cultural goods that convey values and meaning, state authorities and professional associations should encourage the players on the book market to determine the best possible model that will connect authors, publishers, bookshops and libraries, thus achieving optimum results in the operation of the book market and the best possible access to books. 3. State authorities should pay attention to the operation of the book market from the viewpoint of tax arrangements, both in terms of the taxation of books as well as taxation of royalties and paper. State authorities should see to the proper enforcement of copyright legislation. Furthermore, in order for the field of books to develop harmoniously, they should continually search for the optimum relationship between favourable book tax rates and a system of direct state subsidies in support of the production and dissemination of books. For the great majority of book markets, this relationship is the fundamental factor of development and above all the decisive factor regarding quality, diversity and access to book production. 4. In direct support of publishing and authors, state authorities should pay special attention to translations of literary works from different world languages, especially if underrepresented on the world book market, as in this way, the readers will be able to access the production of different language environments, which is the best way to facilitate intercultural dialogue, multilingualism and cultural diversity, while such translations also facilitate the development of the national language. 5. National and local authorities should systematically take care of the development of a library network of the high quality and should especially facilitate those public service programmes that are in harmony with the development of book markets. Libraries are an indispensible part of the book chain and, in addition to the schooling system, they are a long-term decisive factor in the formation of reading habits. The network of general interest libraries has the ability to meet the needs of the local environment with regard to book culture in a complex manner, so libraries should be motivated to search for innovative ways to reach readers that are not necessarily connected to lending library material. 6. The occurrence of new sales channels for books opens new possibilities for them to be more accessible to readers, but the market of bookshops remains the foundation of each book market and the decisive factor in its economic success. The operating conditions for the bookshop network are thus of public interest and the network’s quality and development should be the goal of the national and local authorities. 118
7. As regards increased access to books and information in books, state authorities should facilitate the development of information support for book markets, as this represents the infrastructural basis used by publishers, librarians, booksellers and readers alike and is therefore in the public interest. At the same time, such a system represents the basis for collecting the relevant data on the operation of individual book markets and such data represent the basis for preparing concrete measures aimed at development issues. 8. Electronic books and electronic book readers do not pose a threat to printed books, instead increasing access to books and enhancing reading while they are also important in acquiring new readership. State authorities and professional associations should pay attention to the positive impacts on the development of publishing activities brought about by the new book medium and should contribute to creating favourable conditions for the harmonious, balanced and diverse development of publishing in this area. 9. International and national professional associations operating in the field of books are among the key actors that can contribute to the coherent functioning of the book market. The Ljubljana Resolution on Books recommends that professional associations lead an active policy in promoting and implementing cultural policies in the book sector, in line with the objectives of the Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions; that they implement concrete projects such as campaigns promoting books and reading; and that they continue operating as a connecting platform gathering the views and interests of all the book chain components. It is imperative that individual professional associations operating in the field of books cooperate and give recognition to the distinctive nature of thus strengthen the awareness of books as complex cultural goods, provide opportunities and create conditions for the long-term and sustainable development of a creative, rich and diverse book industry.
Ljubljana, March 2011
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CIP - Kataložni zapis o publikaciji Narodna in univerzitetna knjižnica, Ljubljana 002.2:930.85(082) 028(082) WORLD Book Summit (2011 ; Ljubljana) Book: the bearer of human development : [congress papers] / World Book Summit 2011 - WBS, [Ljubljana, March 31 - April 1, 2011] ; [edited by Andrej Blatnik and Miha Kovač]. - 1st ed. - Ljubljana : Cankarjev dom, Cultural and Congress Centre, 2011 ISBN 978-961-6157-45-2 1. Gl. stv. nasl. 2. Blatnik, Andrej, 22.5.1963255207424
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Svetovni vrh knjige – World Book Summit Congress papers Ljubljana, March 31 – April 1, 2011 © Cankarjev dom First edition Edited by Andrej Blatnik and Miha Kovač Technical editor Mitja Zupančič Layout and design Brane Žalar Published by Cankarjev dom, Cultural and Congress Centre Director General Dimitrij Rotovnik Printed by Littera Picta Printrun 700 copies Ljubljana, March 2011
Published within the framework of The Ljubljana World Book Capital 2010.
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