Rarely do we see such a lambasted piece of book journalism as Liesl Schillinger's post-Nobel piece from the Oct 18 edition of the NY Times.
To say nothing of the bashing that's gone on in other quarters, I already dismantled it here, the editors and I just took it apart again in our editorial, and now noted translator Russell Valentino wants to take a few more slaps in celebration of our Translate This Book! extravaganza of literature that has still never been translated into English.
Literary Parochialism, and Proud of It
The problem is not merely that so little of world literature, especially the most recent, gets translated into English. It is also the enormous cultural blind spot that follows from that absence, the assumption of centrality that US readers make about their own way of reading and seeing the world when the foundation of such an assumption is so flimsy. The Bushisms of recent memory were embarrassing: how could he be so certain in his views of the rest world when he knew so little about it? An American president should know better, at the very least should know what he does not know. We should not expect any less of prominent literary institutions in the US.
The New York Times Book Review piece by Liesl Schillinger from October 18, “American Literature: Words Without Borders”, which, as its sub-title suggests, implicitly makes claims on the territory staked out by another publication, deploys an embarrassing riches of cultural Bushisms. I didn’t find the piece nearly so hilarious as Michael Orthofer did in his post in the Complete Review (even if his laughter there was clearly facetious); but I agree with his reading that the review appears to take up a stand in defense against the criticism of American literature as parochial made by Horace Engdahl of the Swedish Academy last fall, and that the stand is shaky.
The first mistake that Schillinger makes is to confuse American multiculturalism with the international. This is a blind spot that others have noted (see, for instance, Eliot Weinberger’s entertaining take in “Anonymous Sources”. It lauds an assimilationist model of cultural interaction, where isolated artifacts are ushered inside the borders of one country and then held up en masse as representative of the world’s great variety. It can only look this way through the eyes of a dominant group on the inside of the assimilating culture, and thus it isn’t just a problem in the contemporary United States. My idiom might make it sound more complex than it is, and therefore less embarrassing for a leading publication like the NYTBR not to notice it, so let me say it more baldly: a US-centric vision can only look normal to people who pay relatively little attention to the rest of the world’s literatures.
Which might also lead one to make a claim like this, from Schillinger’s essay: “Middle Eastern fiction at the current moment lacks a Jane Austen who could win over an American female readership.” This is as bizarre as it is embarrassing. The bizarre first: why Jane Austen? Which American women readers would really want to read about a Saudi Emma? An Egyptian Mr. Knightley? Tons of society novels exist in many different cultures from many different periods. They are not translated usually for a very good reason—because they resemble one another quite a bit. Then there is the problem that anyone who might fit this odd category would be unlikely to be published in the US. A Jane Austen of the Middle East does not accord with the American reading public’s ideas about the Middle East these days, so marketing would be a big problem—it would be like trying to publish a Balkan author who did not write about violent conflict. I am being only slightly sarcastic here: my point is that without a wide variety of books and authors being translated, published, purchased, and read, there isn’t likely to be much of a change from the current tendency to promote country profiles that then become publishing norms.
Now the embarrassing. In the absence of a large body of translated contemporary works, how would we know whether the Middle East currently has any women writers who might be appealing to American readers at all, women or men? The only way to know something like that would be to ask. The NYTBR obviously didn’t try this, or they would have found, very easily, that the Middle East is a place where women writers are still widely engaged with themes like pre-arranged marriages and the various counter schemes that attend them, with Austen-like multiple plot lines, plenty of humor, and sometimes even happy endings. They also would have found that there are many women writers in that part of the world who might not be like Jane Austen (which is probably good) but who have compelling stories to tell and the skills to tell them, and who might very well appeal to American readers of any gender: Chista Yasrebi from Iran, for instance, or Suzane Adam from Israel, the Lebanese authors Hanan al-Shaykh and Huda Barakat, or Elif Shafak from Turkey, Nadia al-Kowkabani from Yemen, or Salwa Al Neimi from Syria. There are certainly others as well. (Thanks to Aron Aji, Jamie Richards, and Shir Alon for their suggestions here).
The NYTBR piece is a short work of journalism, and I don’t want to give it more attention than it deserves. Some might think that I already have. But the kinds of generalizations made in it are, unfortunately, not uncommon. The notion, moreover, that there “just isn’t” something worth publishing out there seems to flow from a complacent self-satisfaction with the great variety and vibrancy of the US (and maybe the NY) publishing world. It is, of course, plenty various and vibrant, but it can only look like “words without borders” when one is not really looking beyond the borders of one’s own words. The claim is more embarrassing, in fact, than the Bushisms of recent history because we expect so much more from a major cultural institution like the NYTBR.
Fortunately, there are other places to go for our larger sense of literary place, this publication for instance, and the annual meeting of the The American Literary Translators Association, which took place in Pasadena a couple of weeks ago. Didn’t see anyone from the NYTBR there unfortunately.
Russell Scott Valentino is professor and chair in the Department of Cinema and Comparative Literature at the University of Iowa. He has published a monograph on nineteenth-century Russian literature and seven book-length literary translations from Italian, Croatian, and Russian. His essays, translated fiction, and poetry have appeared in The Iowa Review, Two Lines, POROI, Circumference, Asia, Modern Fiction Studies, Slavic Review, and 91st Meridian. He is the recipient of NEA Literature Fellowships in 2002 and 2010, a 2004 Howard Foundation fellowship for literary translation, and two Fulbright research awards to Croatia. He is the publisher of Autumn Hill Books and editor of The Iowa Review. He teaches in the Translation Workshop at the University of Iowa.