American publishers take an isolationist stance

Do books travel across borders and leap oceans?

The Harvill Press in London publishes only foreign books that have been translated into English. Or nearly so. Some were originally written in American, and a very few books were by English authors. But page after page of Harvill's glossy catalogs list books that were translated from the Italian, the French, the Russian, the Swedish, the German. And on and on, a sort of atlas of the world's composition, mostly literary fiction.

There is no publishing company similar to Harvill in the United States. The book migrations apparently go one way, from the United States to elsewhere. Against that tide there is usually only the English mystery and thriller fiction, with only occasional exceptions. Richard Seaver, co-publisher of Arcade Publishing in New York, said that "Americans have become isolationist from a literary point of view compared to the `50s and `60s, when there were lots of translations here, of Sartre and Beckett and so forth." Arcade publishes only 45 or 50 books a year, with about a dozen foreign translations, mainly literary fiction. "When a foreign translation sells 50,000 or 60,000 copies, that's a huge exception," Seaver said. Five thousand is the more likely figure. "For many years we were only able to sell between 3,000 and 6,000 copies of Octavio Paz, and he was a Nobel Prize winner." (Paz, who died in April, is now selling better for his current American publisher, Harcourt Brace.) Arcade's co-publisher, Jeannette Seaver, says she believes that, simply put, Americans are culturally xenophobic. She cited the French novel Fields of Glory, by Jean Rouaud, which sold about 600,000 copies in Europe and at most 4,000 in translation here. Whether or not she is correct about why, it is true that when one gets beyond P.D. James, Jeffrey Archer, John le Carre and a few other English mystery and thriller writers, the sale of foreign translations in the United States is generally like a nearly empty can of shaving cream: a little air and a few bubbles. HarperCollins, for instance, has been trying mightily to make a big seller here out of the Brazilian novelist Paulo Coelho, whose books have been translated into 36 languages in 74 countries and have sold more than 20 million copies. But only one, The Alchemist, has been a best seller here. There are, of course, other exceptions to the craze for English mysteries. Bridget Jones' Diary (Viking), by Helen Fielding, a British book, will be No. 3 on The New York Times' hardcover fiction best-seller list on June 28. And in recent years, to name a few, Smilla's Sense of Snow (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), by the Danish writer Peter Hoeg, was a best seller here, as was Umberto Eco's Name of the Rose (Harcourt Brace). But Eco's latest novel, Island of the Day Before, quickly sank in the remainder sea. Farrar Straus, which distributes much of Harvill's list here and does joint publishing with the British house, and Alfred A. Knopf are among the few American publishers making a real effort to bring serious foreign books in translation to Americans. So, too, do Harcourt Brace and New Directions. The easiest answer, and perhaps the most superficial as well, as to why foreign books don't sell well here is to attribute literary dunderheadedness to Americans. That might not be exactly accurate, but it's certainly true that American education does not breed comfort with foreign languages and, therefore, foreign names and places. Thus, one very successful foreign-rights person for a major literary agency, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that "often Americans can't pronounce the author's name, have a lack of familiarity with the novel's setting and don't understand the European sensibility." "There's also a lack of review attention," she said. "That has a lot to do with it. Booksellers have a resistance to Vladimir Who, particularly when Who hasn't been reviewed." She added, "There's a booming business in books in Europe and Asia, and recently there's been a lot of interesting books from Europe." The mysteries and economics of American book publishing are in essence also anti-foreign book. Phillip Blom, an editor at Harvill, said that the constant repetition that foreign books seldom translate into cash in the United States perhaps helps to create "a self- enforcing principle." Nonetheless, a British publisher can make some money out of selling 3,000 copies, and a major American publisher cannot. This is supported by Seaver, who said that "if Arcade sells 5,000 or 6,000 copies we can at least break even when a bigger house, with its larger marketing and editing costs, cannot." Another problem is that book scouts now bring foreign novels to American publishers early on, in manuscript form, rather than as completed works; thus there is seldom a happy surprise for a house, the gee-whiz of something finished and solid, and its decision about whether to buy must be fast. And the easiest response is no.

Copyright 1998
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved.