And, as always, you can get by using NONFICTION at checkout.

I just got done talking with the legendary Howard Goldblatt as part of my “World Lit & Translation” class and he brought up the video above that Michael Henry Heim made on “Role of Motivation in Learning Languages.” In this 6 minute video he talks about four of the ten (yes, you read that right) languages that he spoke. And in French, German, Spanish, and Russian, he explains his motivation for learning that particular language.

I miss Mike so much. He was absolutely one of a kind. And so down to earth. So unassuming. He’s one of those people who youĚýknow, ľ±˛Ô˛őłŮ˛ą˛ÔłŮ±ô˛âĚýis a verifiable genius, and yet, he made you feel completely on the level, worth talking to, worth listening to. He treated everyone with such respect and in ways that were soĚýencouraging. I could go on and on, but I don’t have time to cry right now.

Mike’s impact on the world was incredible. His impact on the world of translation is beyond description. In sports—especially Tackle Ball—there’s often talk of a “coaching tree.” This head coach inspired these assistants who became head coaches who trained these assistants, on and on for ages.

Well, Mike’s “translation tree” is more like a translation forest. It’s virtually impossible to find anyone connected to the world of international lit during the time that he was alive whoĚý»ĺ´Ç±đ˛ő˛Ô’łŮĚýhave an anecdote or a story or something. Virtually impossible.

And I’m not even counting the dozens of translators who have receive PEN/Heim Translation Fund awards.

He was/is/will forever be a legend.

Which is all a prelude to saying thatĚýThe Man Between: Michael Henry Heim & A Life in TranslationĚýis one of the nonfiction titles we’ve published that you absolutely must own if you’re at all interested in words. Or books. Translation. Being inspired. Amazing people. Trust me—this is a book that you’ll definitely love.

The book is made up of three sections: “The Man,” which includes a long interview with MHH and his complete bibliography (over 60 publications), and his essay on “The Three Eras of Modern Translation” (excerpted below); “Community,” with pieces from Dubravka Ugreic, Andrei Codrescu, Rosanna Warren, and more about Mike as a person; and “Impact,” a collection of essays from people like Russell Scott Valentino (“New Frontiers for Translation in the Twenty-First Century: The Globe, The Market, The Field”), Sean Cotter (“The Un-X-able Y-ness of Z-ing (Q): A List with Notes”), Breon Mitchell (“The Lives of Translators”), and Esther Allen (“Michael Henry Heim: A Theory”), among others.

By the way, this book isĚý±č±đ°ů´Ú±đł¦łŮĚýfor teaching. Get (NONFICTION at checkout) and then use it for the next decade, inspiring hundreds of students along the way.

Here’s a taste. From Michael Henry Heim’s “The Three Eras of Modern Translation,” a talk he gave at the Center for the Art of Translation. (Side-note: If you want to know more about the Salzburg conference he referenced, just click here. I wrote a lot about that magical week.)

I’m terribly proud to be here because this is such a wonderful occasion. I first heard about this fantastic organization two years ago when I met Olivia [Sears, founder of the Center for the Art of Translation]in Salzburg, Austria. She is a powerhouse, as you all know. I’m so glad that things are working well here and you are moving forward in these times when nothing seems to be moving forward, everything seems to be moving back.

What I wanted to do, rather than give a reading, was to talk about the translator’s new visibility, from reactive to active to proactive. I’m going to try to be positive. We’re moving in a vector toward something that I think does exist, and we want to keep it existing. The ears of many of you will prick up when you hear that word “visibility,” if you’ve read Lawrence Venuti’s The Translator’s Invisibility, which came out in 1995.It was a revisionist history of translation. Instead of going through all kinds of technical innovations, he tried to show why translation has been swept under the carpet, basically. What I thought I would do here is talk about what I have seen translation do in the years I have been involved in it.

I start with the Cold War because that’s when I began thinking about translation. That is what I call the reactive period, in which basically—I’m exaggerating, of course—but basically a work was translated because there was an event that took place, and the work was either part of the event itself or was reacting to the event.

Let me give you two examples. First is Doctor Zhivago, by Boris Pasternak, which came out in 1958,3 and it was a sensation—twenty-six weeks on the New York Times best-seller list. I won’t go into the personal story, but I did meet Max Hayward, the book’s British translator, and he told me exactly how he was forced to work when he was translating that novel, which was a sensation because it was the first time a work had been exported, smuggled out of the Soviet Union, and by Isaiah Berlin, of all people. All of a sudden this novel was front-page news. It was extremely important for the translation to come out as fast as it possibly could because the publishers wanted to cash in on the publicity. Apparently what they did was lock Max Hayward in a hotel room with his collaborator, and they wouldn’t let them out. Literally, they would not let them out until the entire translation was done. That’s how important it was. But that certainly is reactive.

A few years later a similar work came out of the Soviet Union. This one was actually published officially, but it was published only once and then disappeared: Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, a work that mentioned the labor camps for the first time. Until that point, nobody was allowed to mention the fact that these camps existed. Millions of people who had been affected by the camps saw their lives justified for the first time because of this book. It was a big sensation and it was published as fast as it could be published in all the languages of the world, and in English—three times in three different translations. This is 1963. And, yes, best-seller lists again, but this time it’s even more interesting because there were three translations, which meant the reviewers did have to deal with the translation. So all of a sudden we’re getting a little bit closer to the next category that I’m talking about—the active period. All of a sudden, people began having to read about translation in the daily press, and that made a big difference. Three translations came out at the time and later two more came out, so it was an ongoing kind of thing.

Now let’s move on to the active period. Once again we’re still political, but now semi-political. This next category I want to talk about is also connected with the Cold War, but the Cold War is now at a different stage. In 1974, Philip Roth inaugurated a series with Penguin Books called “Writers from the Other Europe.” He edited it and he gave his name to it; he gave his cachet to it. I laughed and said that his name was bigger than the author’s name on each book. But maybe that wasn’t so bad because people trusted his name, and that would make them trust a name they couldn’t pronounce, these foreign names, Central European names, like Kundera and Schulz, Tadeusz Borowski, and Danilo Kiš, and so on. These works introduced a whole new kind of mentality to the West, and Roth’s name made them perfectly acceptable. This went on from 1974 to—well, you can imagine what year: 1989. After that things moved into a different vein and we’ll be talking about that.

But first I wanted to move onto the next phase of this period; now we’re getting a little bit closer to proactive. There was a movement away from political reasons to be translating, and that was the Latin American Boom, which took place at more or less the same time, except that it wasn’t political. Or rather, I’m sure it was very political for the Latin Americans, but we didn’t view it that way. We viewed it simply as fine literature. Not only that, but we started to have what I would call, though I hate to use the word, “superstar” translators. You had writers from various countries, and that was important, too, not just one country, but various countries: Cortázar from Argentina, García Márquez from Colombia, Fuentes from Mexico, Vargas Llosa from Peru. And enter star translator Gregory Rabassa. He translated most of these authors, not all of each one, of course. And he also made a kind of headline news. García Márquez made a very big push in his favor, saying that Rabassa’s translation was better than the original. And what does that mean? You can interpret it however you like. On the other hand, it did bring visibility to the translator.

I’d like to include in this active category something that is, let’s say, an anomaly, something completely sui generis, and that is a single author who became a worldwide best-seller: Umberto Eco. And he also had his Rabassa, who was William Weaver. His Name of the Rose was an absolute sensation. It came out in Italian in 1980 and was translated in 1983.5 Notice that there is a gap there, but it finally did come out.

There’s a wonderful writer—I’ve translated several of her novels—a very literary, clever, brilliant Croatian writer named Dubravka Ugrešić, and she once said that when she went to the nude beaches on the Dalmatian coast she could always tell the nationality of every person, even though they didn’t have a stitch of clothes on, because she could see what translation they were reading The Name of the Rose in. It was really something.

At about that time, or maybe a little later than that, I was asked to be on an Australian cultural program called Friday Night Live—I don’t know if they were playing on Saturday Night Live or if the title had anything to do with that. I had to stay up until three o’clock in the morning to talk to the presenter, who was interviewing me in Los Angeles and Weaver in Italy, where he was living. The interviewer asked me where I was sitting, and I said in my kitchen. Then he asked Weaver where he was, and he said, “In the echo chamber.” And what was the “echo chamber”? The Eco Chamber was the building he had built, a separate building, from the profits he had made basically from that one book (though of course he translated many other books as well). That’s how important that phenomenon was at the time. [. . .]

Want to read the rest? . (Or buy it from your favorite bookseller.)

Some of the titles mentioned on this podcast include:

by Witold Szablowski (trans. by Antonia)

Ěýby Remigiusz RyziĹ„ski (trans. by Sean)

by Ryszard Kapuscinski (trans. by ?? not on Penguin’s site or Amazon)

Ěýby Hannah Krall (trans. by Philip Boehm)

Roosters Crow, Dogs WhineĚýby Wojciech Tochman (Antonia is working on a sample)

by Filip Springer (trans. by Sean)

You can find Antonia , and Sean on the website.

The intro/outro music on this episode is from “” by Foals.

You can also follow and on Twitter and Instagram (, ) for book and baseball talk.

If you don’t already subscribe to the Three Percent Podcast you can find us on and other places. Or you can always subscribe by adding our feed directly into your favorite podcast app: http://threepercent.libsyn.com/rss

To be fair, there is a two-year period in which the nonfiction data is passableĚý(thanks to the funding of the Italian Trade Agency), but it’s never really been my focus. Not because I have anything against nonfiction (who hates facts? Oh. Yeah. Ugh. Don’t answer that), but because there are 24 hours in a day, 168 in a week, and I really want to do something else for a little while every day. (I just bought myself four books to read for “fun” and then realized they don’t fit into my reading schedule until August. That’s a bit of a bummer.)

Anyway, here you go. The graph charting my minor data gathering failure:

When I decided to do a month of reading and writing on nonfiction in translation, I had some seriously aspirational ideas for posts. A breakdown of which languages were most popular in terms of nonfiction works. The types of nonfiction that made their way into English. A sort of reverse analysis of what kinds of books we’re missing as a culture.

Then I remembered that I haven’t done the work. I don’t have data that I can believe it. It’s like looking at baseball stats on April 9th. SMALL SAMPLE SIZE.

Which is where YOU come in. I’ll sacrifice my weekends and confirm every single nonfiction title you enter by the end of the month. And run a chart that’s more complete. I’ll do the work, but I could really use your help. If you’ve translated a nonfiction title, just . It’s easy! And fun!

*

The dumber result of my not trusting my data is that I’m going to totally Buzzfeed these nonfiction posts. In part because I’m working on a much longer—and more structured—piece that I have to finish this month, and in part, or, well, in most?, because I became obsessed with one silly idea while I was walking and talking at AWP. We’ll get there though. First I want to plug a couple good books.

Ěýby Julián Herbert, translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney (Graywolf)

Let’s get the negative of this article out of the way: YES, long-time readers, there are a few “friggings” in here, which I couldn’t help but notice. But I respect Christina MacSweeney’s choice! She’s a great translator, and although I personally could never use the word “frigging,” I also can’t translate, so what does my opinion matter? Besides, two “friggings” has virtually no impact on the rest of this very well-written, well-translated book.

And yes, this book is solid. It’s about a racist massacre in Mexico that Herbert unpacks in ways that meld fictional narrative ideas with non-fictional situations. I don’t know that in the end it’s as good as Tomb Song, but it’s definitely an important, interesting book. And hits at one of the types of narrative nonfiction thatĚýshouldĚýbe translated more frequently: historical-cultural journalism.

by Alva Noë (Oxford University Press)

Would it be OK if I put aside AnniversariesĚýand Marie-Claire Blais for two weeks to read this?

To be honest, I’m suspicious of this book to its core. “In this deeply entertaining book, philosopher and baseball fan Alva NoĂ« explores the many unexpected ways in which baseball is truly a philosophical kind of game.” Oh no. That’s not my baseball. But I’ll give it a try?

Some argue that baseball is fundamentally a game about numbers. NoĂ«’s wide-ranging, thoughtful observations show that, to the contrary, baseball is not only a window on language, culture, and the nature of human action, but is intertwined with deep and fundamental human truths.

Did I just spend $24 on a joke for a future column? MAYBE. I need to put aside some other books and find out.

by Jane Alison (Catapult)

Can I be 100% honest? IĚýloveĚýbooks about narrative structures. It’s the only sort of academic-adjacent book I’ll spend money on.

And yet, when I realized this was a Catapult book, I had to pause for a moment. I don’t want to give money to the Koch Brothers! That’s worse than buying a book from Amazon!ĚýBut then again, publishing books that reference Marie Redonnet is one of theĚýleastĚýevil things that can be done with Koch Money. And Catapult employs a lot of people I like! And it’s 2019, the Year of Being Chill and Positive!

This might be my most anticipated book of the spring. And will hopefully help me work out the little book I want to write this July . . .

by Hannes RĂĄstam, translated from the Swedish by Elizabeth Day (Canongate)

When I did that two-year study of nonfiction books back in 2013 or so, I found this. A book about a convicted serial killer who was a straight liar. Who used drugs + newspapers + suggestion + cognitive dissonance to lie like no one has ever lied before. Lies that made him the first and only and most intense “serial killer” of Sweden.

It’s pretty fascinating to see how this one guy conned the system, and was convicted of several murders that he clearly didn’t commit. It all fits together with my obsession with how our brains fill in gaps to help us believe what we already want to believe.

The problem with this book? If you know the punchline—”Thomas Quick” didn’t actually kill 30+ people—this book is, like, 300 pages too long.

Also: This cover is lazy AF.

Ěýby Meredith Broussard (MIT)

Because I want to tell Tom Roberge how all his AI loving friends are ridiculous.

*

Let’s talk about Chris Davis!

So, Chris Davis, who most certainly will not read this post, is a baseball player for the Baltimore Orioles who has been “struggling.” Which is the nicest way I can refer to his all-time record-setting hitless streak over his past 49 at bats. 0-49 is epically bad. Granted some of this is luck—I watch every one of his at bats because I’mĚýfascinated—and he has made some good contact! But right at a fielder. And so 49 times, dating back to last September, he’s come up to the plate and not gotten a hit.

Going 0 for 49 does some really wonky things to statistics like wRC+. wRC+ (or weighted runs created plus) is a measure of how effective a batter’s offense is. The + part is a statistical thing making sure that 100 is AVERAGE, so that you can compare players against one another in a fairly objective way. So, an average batter has a 100 wRC+ and Mike Trout has a 293 wRC+ as of April 10th.

Here’s the wRC+ for Chris Davis (who signed a contract in 2016 for $161 million over 7 years) over the past few seasons (again, 100 is AVERAGE AVERAGE NORMAL AVERAGE): 92 (8% below AVERAGE), 46 (64% below AVERAGE), and -76 (176% BELOW AVERAGE). NEGATIVE 76 so far this season. Oof.

Chris Davis has been the worst baseball player in baseball history for the past season+. Which sucks for him! I’m sure he’s a totally lovely person, but I kind of never want him to get a hit again. I want him to break statistical measurements. And I will continue to watch every at bat, hoping to see failure.

Which is weird. And reminds me of an AWP conversation . . .

*

Are there any cult “bad bad bad so bad they’re good” authors?

In terms of music, we have Nickelback. Worst band ever! And yet, Germans LOVE THEM. (Stop. No jokes about Germans. Just. No. No. I know they have no sense of humor. I know, I know. Just let it go.)

In movies?ĚýThe Room? That’s up there. I would watch that again right now, make fun of Tommy Wiseau’s awful sex scenes and then listen to How Did This Get Made?Ěýand laugh at all that all over again.

I mean,ĚýHow Did This Get Made? has uncovered dozens of terrible gems that people are willing to spend a lot of time and money on. There’s something compelling about things that are really bad. (Like Chris Davis’s statistics, or ““)

Is there a literary equivalent? Franzen? I mean, sure, he’s a pile of hot garbage as a writer—I hear you, Chapman—but he’s not bad enoughĚýto be “cult bad.” E. L. James? I guess? Maybe? But do people read her books to just laugh at them?

and his ? Maybe?

There must be “cult bad” writers, right? Not just “pot boilers” or “brain candy” sort of books, but books that are undeniably, patently absurd. Maybe written by Chris Davis-esque writers who were GOOD and then fell—no, ±č±ôłÜłľłľ±đłŮ±đ»ĺ—like Icarus. Someone who writes books compiled solely of sentences worthy of the Bulwer-Lytton prize? Who fits that? And it is weird if we don’t have this sort of sub-genre for books? I know that I’ve gotten a lot of valuable insight into narrative and storytelling from watching terrible movies, and it seems like there’s something similar to be gained from really bad, bad writers. Like how seeing the backside of the tapestry—the negative, inverse of what works and is awesome—could be useful.

Sure, it takes a lot longer to read a bad book than listen to basically anything from Blink-182, but for writers trying to hone their craft, I think they should stop trying to emulate the all time greats, and instead spend some time down in the dregs, figuring out howĚýnotĚýto write garbage.

If anyone has something so silly and bad that it’s worth reading (? I think maybe monster porn is it), please let me know. I need a break from the good-to-excellent books.

Among the small number of translated books published in the US each year, there is an even smaller subset: the number of those books that are nonfiction. This is a strange asymmetry, though it’s one of many in the area of translated books, an area subject to almost-tectonic market pressures that produce jagged imbalances, even if predictable ones—for instance, writers from Europe are generally better represented than writers from the rest of the world and male writers are generally better represented than female writers. But I’d venture to say that the percentages for both of the above are better than the percentage breakdown for fiction vs. nonfiction. It’s hard to know for sure because the invaluable translation database compiled by Three Percent—the sole record of how many and which translated books are published in the United States each year—only counts fiction and poetry.

It’s not an empty field: university presses bring out works by prominent international figures, like Umberto Eco, Liu Xiaobo, Pascal Bruckner, and Adam Michnik. Small presses will publish a respected author or an individual title: Open Letter Books publishes Dubravka Ugresic’s essays; two writers in the distinguished tradition of Polish reportage initiated by Ryszard KapuĹ›ciĹ„ski, Wojciech Jagielski and Wojciech Tochman, have had books published in the United States, by Seven Stories Press and Atlas & Co., respectively. Larger houses make the occasional foray: Geert Mak’s monumental In Europe: Travels in the Twentieth Century was published by Pantheon several years ago. A memoir of growing up in Siberia’s criminal gangs, Siberian Education, by Nikolai Lilin, is currently out from Norton. However, relatively little attention is paid to these books: Roberto Saviano’s Gomorrah (FSG, 2007) is the last translated nonfiction title that I can remember being widely reviewed.

If the percentage of trade nonfiction to fiction published in other countries is similar to U.S percentages, where the split is roughly 75/25 (based on Bowker’s 2002-2009 statistics, and excluding cookbooks, computing books, and other categories of how-to books), then we are missing out on memoirs, essays, reportage, histories, biographies, science and policy books in vast numbers. I think there are both honorable and dishonorable reasons as to why this is so. But I do find it disturbing that American publishers and readers seem to favor fiction as the way to see the rest of the world. Instead of thrashing through the reasons behind this phenomenon, I’d prefer to list a few examples of what exactly we’re missing, in the hope that that’s a more effective shock to the system. Here are some titles and authors that warrant greater attention, topped off with some pointed questions and comments:

1. AndrĂ©s Felipe Solano, Seis meses con el salario mĂ­nimo (Six Months on the Minimum Wage). In 2007, Solano spent six months living in MedellĂ­n, Colombia, and working in a clothing factory. An excerpt from his account of that time appeared on the website in January 2011, and it was exceptional. It conveyed the life of the factory—the work, monotonous or back-breaking or both; what the other employees are like, where they come from, how they make their jobs bearable; how management is alternately bullying and clumsily apologetic when the paychecks are days late—and it was also honest about the experience of this kind of experiment, where the participant knows that they are able to leave, and will leave, someday soon, while their fellow workers will stay: Solano crosses off the days of his stint on a pocket calendar and describes staring at it “like a soldier gazing at a photo of his fiancĂ©e beneath the roar of enemy planes.” He is observant and sympathetic, but not melodramatic. By the end of the WWB excerpt, you have a very clear sense of how difficult that life is and why it’s so difficult, because it’s physically demanding, boring, and humiliating. And yet money must be made somehow. “One afternoon,” Solano writes, “I counted 1,253 items of clothing; I wrote the number down on a piece of paper so I will never forget what a person will do for money.” (translations from Spanish by Samantha Schnee) The only alternative profession in MedellĂ­n is crime, which rewards and kills its employees with great dispatch.

An essay by Solano about traveling across the United States by Greyhound bus was published in the New York Times in June. And an excerpt from his novel The Cuervo Brothers was picked for Granta_’s “Best Young Spanish-Language Novelists” issue last spring. This recognition means that it’s likely that _The Cuervo Brothers or a future novel by Solano will find a U.S. publisher, but the fate of Seis meses con el salario mĂ­nimo is far more uncertain. And yet, it’s an excellent, skillful piece of writing and the subject is very much of interest to American readers, probably increasingly so since the recession. My pointed question here is: if there’s an audience for a book like William Vollmann’s Imperial or Poor People, why isn’t there one for Solano’s book? Why do we seem to depend on American authors to tell us about the rest of the world when its own inhabitants are also writing about it?

2. Arnon Grunberg. The Dutch writer Grunberg is primarily known as a novelist (Blue Mondays, Silent Extras, Phantom Pain, The Jewish Messiah), but over the years, he has pursued a parallel track in literary journalism. Usually published by NRC Handelsblad or other Dutch periodicals, Grunberg’s articles are about the many and varied situations in which he has immersed himself: he has been a chambermaid in a Bavarian hotel and a masseur in Romania, he has moved in with middle-class families in the Netherlands, he has gone to Montenegro to import miracle face cream produced in a nunnery, he has visited the Ukraine to find a bride, traveled to Mennonite communities in Paraguay and goldmines in Ghana. He has also traveled to and written about the prison camps at Guantánamo Bay and the military missions in Iraq and Afghanistan.

It’s impossible not to admire Grunberg’s willingness to experiment with his life and his desire to understand other people’s lives. I also like his confidence in the range of experiences he has chosen to pursue―no divide between “worthy” or “serious” undertakings, such reporting from Guantánamo, and larks like the Montenegrin miracle cream scheme. Grunberg treats both types of experiences seriously and comically at once; he sees how the two are wound around each other. For instance, on his first day in Guantánamo he observes that all questions are grouped by his army escort as either good or not-so-good: “Anyone who asks a good question is told: good question. Anyone who asks a not-so-good question is told nothing.” In Iraq, he accompanies American soldiers trying to “win hearts and minds” to the village of Ali Hamed:

First we pass out toys and chocolate to the children. The concept of toys is subject to broader interpretation here; from the box, the soldiers also produce paper-hole punches.

Once all the toys have been passed out, Lt. Kaness asks the sheik what his village needs. ‘Would you like us to pave the road, for a kilometer or so?’ the lieutenant suggests.

The sheik nods.

“Which side of the road, right or left?”

The sheik thinks about it for a moment. “The right side.”

(translation from Dutch by Sam Garrett)

Some of Grunberg’s pieces have appeared in English— Salon has published articles on Iraq and Israel— but this represents only a small proportion of his work. And in fact, his nonfiction has been collected and published in the Netherlands in 2009 as Kamermeisjes & Soldaten (Chambermaids & Soldiers). In other words, to speak very practically, much of the difficult work has been done, the book already exists. In Grunberg’s case, even the other familiar barriers for literature-in-translation have been surmounted: he has worked regularly with the translator Sam Garrett, obviating the difficulties in finding a translator and, particularly, the right translator for a specific book; the Dutch government provides generous subsidies for the translation and promotion of Dutch literature; and on top of all that, Grunberg lives in New York and speaks perfect English. And still no U.S. publisher has taken a chance on Kamermeisjes & Soldaten, though Grunberg’s fiction has been published by Other Press, Penguin, and FSG. To me, this situation is the most conclusive evidence yet that superb international nonfiction is being almost actively ignored.

3. Peter Fröberg Idling, Pol Pot’s Leende (Pol Pot’s Smile). in 2009, Idling’s book, originally published in Sweden in 2006, is about a fact-finding trip made by a group of Swedish observers to Cambodia in 1978. The observers reported nothing amiss at a time when 1,330,000 Cambodians had already been killed— purged, starved, died in the course of slave labor— and thousands more were dying daily. The Swedish delegation was sympathetic to what it thought was what happening in Cambodia: the liberation of the country from an U.S.-backed regime and the establishment of Democratic Kampuchea, a nation run by and for the Cambodian people. Idling, a journalist who has worked as a legal adviser to an aid organization in Cambodia, tries to understand this silence, this failure: did the Swedes choose not to report the less encouraging aspects of their trip, wanting not to weaken a cause they believed in, or did they actually not see signs of what was going on? Was the suffering and mass murder concealed from the foreigners or was it somehow not visible? How could mass murder be invisible in a country approximately the size of Oklahoma?

Idling interweaves the story of his research in Cambodia and in Sweden, where he tracks down and talks to the observers, with the story of Pol Pot’s rise to power. He chooses telling and unusual details from Pol Pot’s youth, focusing in one section on a memorable goal Pol Pot made in a soccer match in high school. Among his teammates that day were friends who later led the country with Pol Pot, friends who later still he would order to be executed. Idling also examines two artifacts the delegation produced, a book called Kampuchea Between the Wars and a documentary film made by one of the party, Jan Myrdal, a writer and public figure, prominent in Sweden since the 1950s, thinking that where human observers were fallible, surely photography and film might reveal something of the truth, “a glint in someone’s eye, when they think the camera is pointing in another direction.” But there’s nothing. Idling’s faith in his own knowledge is shaken:

During the years I have lived in Cambodia I have listened to countless witnesses of the terrible privations of Democratic Kampuchea. And despite these witnesses, despite everything I have been told, I find myself thinking that perhaps it wasn’t quite so bad after all.

That perhaps there has been some kind of misunderstanding.

(translation from Swedish by Silvester Mazzarella)

Pol Pot’s Leende has been shortlisted for the inaugural Ryszard KapuĹ›ciĹ„ski Award and sold to publishers throughout Europe. And like Seis meses con el salario mĂ­nimo, its subject― how we in the West understand and misunderstand political developments in the rest of the world― has only become more relevant since the book was first released, with the coming of the Arab Spring. There’s every reason to bring this book out in the U.S.― relevance, literary quality, original subject matter― and it just hasn’t happened.

The examples above are all literary reportage and reflect my personal interests, but nonfiction of other genres is equally under-represented in the English-language market. From experience, I know how challenging it can be to publish literature-in-translation in the U.S. And fiction may often “travel better” than nonfiction: a memoir by an Italian politician or a book of humorous essays by a Turkish author won’t have the appeal that a new Italian or Turkish novel might, and legitimately so. Readers and reviewers of translated nonfiction may feel less sure about how to evaluate it, or what traditions it comes out of. But this doesn’t mean good work shouldn’t be translated and published more consistently in the first place. Good books are often hard to find, publish, and market (not to mention to write). It takes focus, some daring, and confidence. I’m not fond of the scolding tone often taken towards American publishers and readers for their literary isolation: some of the time I just don’t think it’s accurate and it makes the publishing and reading of translated books into a moral, castor-oil sort of activity that doesn’t do well by either the books or the readers. But I want to read Solano’s, Grunberg’s, and Idling’s nonfiction, the books entire, I wish they were available, and I hope, after this article, I’m not the only one.