{"id":395386,"date":"2018-04-19T17:00:00","date_gmt":"2018-04-19T17:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2018\/04\/19\/spanish-literature-is-our-favorite-scene\/"},"modified":"2018-07-21T10:47:08","modified_gmt":"2018-07-21T14:47:08","slug":"spanish-literature-is-our-favorite-scene","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2018\/04\/19\/spanish-literature-is-our-favorite-scene\/","title":{"rendered":"Spanish Literature Is Our Favorite Scene"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last week, the 2018 longlists for the Best Translated Book Award were released and were loaded<\/em> with books translated from the Spanish. Eight works of fiction and one poetry collection. Nine titles total out of the thirty-seven on the combined longlists. That\u2019s just a smidge under 25%. Twenty-five percent! One-quarter of the best books published in 2017 were originally written in Spanish.<\/p>\n

As much as I love<\/em> Spanish language literature\u2014and always have, probably since reading Cort\u00e1zar in college\u2014this seems kind of incredible. Outsized. Statistically significant. I\u2019m tentatively planning on writing about the regions that tend to be overlooked by the BTBA<\/span> (Africa, Asia, India), and some of the reasons why (lack of eligible books being the biggest), but given the fact that I was already going to write about two Spanish books this week, we might as well take the time to dig into this situation and see if the prevalence of Spanish books on the BTBA<\/span> lists is in line with current publishing trends, or if something else is going on.<\/p>\n

Before moving on to other forms of analysis, let\u2019s see if the dominance<\/em> of Spanish books in the 2018 Best Translated Book Awards is unusual or just run of the mill. It\u2019s probably going to turn out to be recency bias, but I have the sense that Spanish always<\/em> represents on the BTBA<\/span>. And wins. Like with Yuri Herrera and Diorama<\/em> and other books. Like, hmm. Maybe I\u2019m wrong.<\/p>\n

As you may have noticed\u2014and if not, take this post as a sort of public announcment\u2014you can now search the Translation Database<\/a> for all previous BTBA<\/span> titles. You can get the longlist or shortlist for any given year, find out which books from which presses have made it, or, as befits this post, see how often various languages have been represented.<\/p>\n

Of the 249 longlisted fiction titles in the database,1<\/a><\/sup> 56 are translated from the Spanish. That would be an incredible 22.5%. Or 5.6 a year. Not that far removed from this year in fact. To put those numbers into perspective, here\u2019s a chart detailing the ten languages with the most titles to have made the longlists.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Unsurprisingly (?), French doesn\u2019t lag that far behind Spanish in BTBA<\/span> representation. But that\u2019s for the longlists. Let\u2019s see what happens when we narrow this down to the finalists.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The gap widens! I guess. But really, there\u2019s not that<\/em> much of a difference between Spanish and French on here, and when you think about the overall number of speakers\u2014220 million French vs. 500 million Spanish\u2014French seems like a bit of an underdog, despite their long history at the top of the European publishing scene.<\/p>\n

I think we need to dig a bit deeper before making any sort of conclusion. Up to now we\u2019ve only been looking at raw numbers devoid of context. Is it really that surprising that no Hindi titles have made the longlists? What if I told you that there have only been five<\/em> eligible Hindi titles over the eleven years of the award? Compare that with the fact that only three<\/em> Japanese books have made it\u2014out of 221. I\u2019m no where near smart enough figure out those probabilities, but I can totally crank out some charts looking at how likely it is for one of the three most-translated languages\u2014Spanish, German, French\u2014to make it to the BTBA<\/span> fiction longlist.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s start with the three-year averages for the number of titles published from these languages:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Two observations:<\/p>\n

1) I don\u2019t think I can explain the dominance of French fiction. I don\u2019t feel like I can name very many French authors, and yet, it\u2019s almost always the most translated language. I don\u2019t think that I\u2019ve included a French book as the impetus for one of these weekly rambles for all of 2018.2<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

2) What the fuck, German literature? If this chart was a year-by-year thing, I would write off that decline as a small sample, but theoretically, by looking at three-year averages, we should be filtering out most of the noise. Given the cultural investments, the raw number of German books written every year, the promotional publications, the Frankfurt Book Fair, the je ne sais quoi<\/em> of German lit (sorry), this is surprising. Disconcerting. A trend to watch.<\/p>\n

Now, given that baseline, here are the three-year rolling averages for the percentage of books from those same languages to make the BTBA<\/span> longlist:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

LOOK<\/span> AT THOSE<\/span> SPANISH<\/span> BOOKS<\/span>! I CALLED<\/span> IT!<\/p>\n

There\u2019s probably a hot take to be written about 2013\u2014the moment when Spanish surpassed French as the \u201cmost literary language.\u201d It probably involves statements about \u201cBola\u00f1o\u2019s lasting influence\u201d and the Granta<\/em> special issue and some U.S. demographics. I\u2019ll bet you could unpack that shit into a PhD thesis with the right advisor.<\/p>\n

OR, you could write a thesis about the ways in which the increase in the number of languages with at least one<\/em> translation has impacted the Big Three and their stranglehold on the marketplace.<\/p>\n

OR, you could check publication against proliferation (sales) and try and figure out if the Spanish trend was predictive\u2014there were more books, then more sales\u2014or responsive\u2014way more sales for Spanish titles around 2007-2009, so let\u2019s double-down on the trend\u2014or random\u2014there is no correlation and this situation just developed.<\/p>\n

OR, is there something about the makeup of the BTBA<\/span> jury\u2014especially among the booksellers and translators\u2014that tilts things in favor of Spanish titles.<\/p>\n

There are so many options . . . This narrative doesn\u2019t feel very fulfilling at all. Numbers are frustrating that way.<\/p>\n

One more thing: At the top of this, I made an off-handed remark about Spanish books always winning the BTBA<\/span>. Not true! Only three Spanish titles have won the Best Translated Book Award\u2014Signs Preceding the End of the World<\/i> by Yuri Herrera was the only work of fiction, with both Diorama<\/em> by Rocio Ceron and Extracting the Stone of Madness<\/em> by Alejandra Pizarnik winning for poetry. Perceptions, man. Perceptions and biases. It doesn\u2019t matter what\u2019s factual, it matters what you remember and believe.<\/p>\n

*<\/center> <\/p>\n

I just had a text exchange with the \u201cBeer Reporter\u201d for our local newspaper. Which has zero relevance, except in the way that proliferation and quality aren\u2019t always in sync.<\/p>\n

Thanks to middle-age and trends, we have like 42 new breweries here in Rochester\u2014all fine, none spectacular. They support each other and make sure that an excessive proportion of paychecks are spent on beer instead of other forms of cultural entertainment.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s totally fine, I think. But when it comes to our biggest brewery\u2014Genesee\u2014I\u2019m a bit of a hard ass. Everyone knows that I\u2019m a contrarian for life, but I honestly don\u2019t care for or against Genny or Genny Light. It\u2019s beer in the way most books are books. It\u2019s functional.<\/em> (Sorta.) If you drink a few pitchers, you\u2019ll definitely feel it, like how if you read all five hundred John Grisham books, you\u2019ll know words.<\/p>\n

Here were the Rochester-centric jokes I came up with in our texting to describe Genny:<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s like a Xerox of Bud Light!\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI Kodak, and never will, see what you see in that beer.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cSomething, something, Wegmans!\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cGenny is great. My parents and uncles love it, which is heartwarming, since old people also deserve beer.\u201d<\/p>\n

*<\/center>Let\u2019s talk about poetry!<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u201cLetters So That Happiness<\/em>\u201d: by Arnaldo Calveyra, translated from the Spanish by Elizabeth Zuba (Argentina, Ugly Duckling Presse)<\/b><\/p>\n

This is a very different collection from Stormwarning<\/em>, the poetry book I tried to write about last week. (I do a thing with my kids where I pretend that I can\u2019t remember the name of anything<\/em> and invent word combinations like a living Queneau poem. Every object and location has about fourteen different names in the Post Vernacular, which is both semi-amusing and fairly confusing. If I were writing this for them\u2014which I wouldn\u2019t, unless the poems were on YouTube\u2014I would\u2019ve called last week\u2019s collection \u201cStormblaster\u201d or \u201cStorm Soldier\u201d or \u201cSnow Warning\u201d or some other dumb ass shit like \u201cWinter Wonder Times.\u201d I have done this bit for so long<\/em> that I have literally torn apart my own memory and feel like most of my days are just highlights from the inevitable onslaught of early-onset dementia. Never buy into your jokes too much, kids, they\u2019ll bite you in the \u201cBlizzard Blaster\u201d in the end.)<\/p>\n

I still don\u2019t feel like I have the terminology to talk about poetry. I set about this self-challenge with the simplest of ideas\u2014if you read enough, and try hard enough, you\u2019ll figure out a way to say more than uhhhh, that poem is funny!<\/em> I\u2019m only to weeks in, but I feel like poetry is all barrier.<\/em> And I\u2019m not even looking at poems that are confined by form, that are playing with some Alexandrine rhyme scheme or particular pentameter. (Not the right terms, I\u2019m sure. Alliteration. Assonance. Enjambment.)<\/p>\n

Without someone\u2014or some piece\u2014to unlock the key, I feel like I\u2019m all surface when it comes to evaluating these collections. Like week I wrote about joy, this week I want to talk about unsettled language\u2014the aspect of Calveyra\u2019s poetry that\u2019s so salient<\/em> that\u2019s it\u2019s cited in the afterword as the singular reason for why these poems appealed to Borges:<\/p>\n

What captivated Borges and Mastronardi in 1959 was Calveyra\u2019s singular use of syntax and language. It is often said that Calveyra invented a new grammar that could release time and place from the stasis and confinement that words inescapably mark.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

 <\/p>\n

Yep. That. Which I completely agree with, and which can be found throughout. Here are a couple samples:<\/p>\n

The boy came back by the mettle of the night. The military had taught him to steal and whistle for anything. Now whistling he forgot stealing. Feathered casuarina trees quieted to his step. But because they\u2019d never met the winds that travel from a sadness to a happiness, there was no breeze to wake the nests sleeping in their fist: for them, he was returning, one of so many from the village.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

 <\/p>\n

And, from a different poem:<\/p>\n

As if it were ever almost here this forever company in the cave of a shiverer\u2019s winter, together with the dog we found your day, I jump up on the hill that hurries to take me back to bring you happy daisies.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

 <\/p>\n

This is all off-kilter and not pretentious\u2014two qualities I gravitate toward. But where to go from there?<\/p>\n

Setting aside any deeper analysis of the style of the poems, or the technical tricks Calveyra employs as being beyond my paygrade, I instead am drawn to the ways in which these feel like poems of childhood, of a sort of pre-linguistic way of encountering the world that allows for a possibility of happiness. The twists of his language seem a bit different than the Russian formalist conception of enstrangement to me, and are more like smudges of one\u2019s worldview\u2014a way of seeing and saying before everything is codified and has a \u201ccorrect\u201d way of being described.<\/p>\n

Which sort of connects with the title, Letters So That Happiness.<\/em> \u201cLetters\u201d is ambiguous\u2014these aren\u2019t proper letters, but some of this \u201csmudging\u201d of the world involves a few slipped letters\u2014and \u201cso that happiness\u201d can what? Exist? Be recaptured?<\/p>\n

The afterword talks about how Calveyra was trying to capture the language of Entre R\u00edos, his hometown, but I feel like it\u2019s capturing that language through the lens of youth, of play. Here\u2019s an example that\u2019s probably a bit too on the nose, but demonstrates what I mean:3<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

Hopscotch singing rounds with one foot on the ground and the other without anywhere.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Coming! Coming! and already in the marrow sky, grace wobbling, life long. And let\u2019s pick a square with all our names to stand one little afternoon minute resting flamingo gentle foot.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That afternoon when we all win, we\u2019ll be watching each other from our resting squares and not stepping on the lines.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

When the soles of your feet aren\u2019t named anymore, named pebble anymore, named all back at the beginning anymore, the only foot of the little late afternoon will go on begging entry and already all back at the beginning-ginning again.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

 <\/p>\n

So pleasant, so much twist in the expected words. This collection has the feel of nursery rhymes reimagined through a rural landscape. I like the voice. The simplicity of the happiness. There is warmth here and I dig it. Also, there are exclamation points!<\/p>\n

*<\/center> <\/p>\n

I want to give a quick nod to The Desert and Its Seed<\/em> by Jorge Bar\u00f3n Biza, translated from the Spanish (duh and or obviously) by Camilio Ramirez for New Directions. Cool book! It\u2019s like Tomb Song<\/em> but with more acid and alcoholism. I think? I read a third and had to stop, but for you plotsters out there, it\u2019s an autobiographical novel (I should end with \u201cfull stop\u201d since that\u2019s all anyone reads these days when they\u2019re not reading YA) about a young man who takes care of his mom after his dad throws acid over her face. It\u2019s legit fucked up, and although it\u2019s now a cult classic, it was originally self-published, and that\u2019s saying something. What it\u2019s saying about art and commerce and originality and telling one\u2019s life, I\u2019m not sure, but something. Something for sure.<\/p>\n

In November (I think), I\u2019ll try and write a gigantic post\u2014one that involves me drinking a plethora<\/em> of whiskeys\u2014about the position of auto-fiction, fictionalized autobiographies, non-fiction tinged fiction in today\u2019s literary scene. There\u2019s so much of it now (see Ben Lerner, see Knausgaard, who will obviously [and or duh] be the occasion for this post) that some readers see it as some new, hipster trend. There is a long history there, there are differences, there are\u2014and this is what interests me\u2014ways in which the approach ends up highlighting form more than content. There\u2019s a lot to say. And Tomb Song<\/em> and The Desert and Its Seed<\/em> can be captured into that conversation.<\/p>\n

Two other quick things, left unexplored:<\/p>\n

1) Books about damaged faces. Kobo Abe\u2019s The Face of Another<\/em>. Lucy Grealy\u2019s Autobiography of a Face<\/em>. Others. The writing of skin. On skin. Skin-like. Replacement and reconstruction. The self as the image portrayed.<\/p>\n

2) Self-published literary successes. There is the one? Sergio de la Pava? Who is literally not of this time and makes words fun by unconventionalizing the under-workings of words. Biza is different, yet the self is throwing its work into the ether. The cojones of standing by your works in relation to the gratitude, the admiration<\/em> achieved in later years.<\/p>\n

\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014-<\/center><\/p>\n

1<\/sup> For the curious, there was a book that made the longlist one year, but wasn\u2019t technically eligible. (It was a reprint.) We\u2019re not going to repeal the BTBA<\/span> designation\u2014I mean shit, we\u2019re not the NCAA<\/span> or anything\u2014but the title isn\u2019t actually listed in the database. I\u2019m sure you can sleuth it out if you\u2019re really interested.<\/p>\n

2<\/sup> Actually, I have: The Perfect Nanny<\/em>!<\/p>\n

3<\/sup> There\u2019s not an assertion I can make about poetry that I can\u2019t equivocate a sentence later. I know this breakdown is childish, simplistic, easy to dismiss. I don\u2019t have this sort of public anxiety when it comes to fiction\u2014I\u2019m more versed, the hours with the form have been logged\u2014although it may all come down to a famous poet telling me that my favorite poems from a particular collection were the \u201ceasy\u201d ones. I\u2019m gun shy. But trying!<\/p>\n

Click here for all articles on 2018 Translations.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last week, the 2018 longlists for the Best Translated Book Award were released and were loaded with books translated from the Spanish. Eight works of fiction and one poetry collection. Nine titles total out of the thirty-seven on the combined longlists. That\u2019s just a smidge under 25%. Twenty-five percent! One-quarter of the best books published […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":292,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67486],"tags":[66836,67646,67666,67656,67626,67636,56,67616,28616],"class_list":["post-395386","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","tag-2018-translations","tag-arnaldo-calveyra","tag-camilio-ramirez","tag-elizabeth-zuba","tag-jorge-baron-biza","tag-letters-so-that-happiness","tag-new-directions","tag-the-desert-and-its-seed","tag-ugly-duckling-presse"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/395386","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/292"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=395386"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/395386\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":395946,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/395386\/revisions\/395946"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=395386"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=395386"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=395386"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}