I spent last month following the lead of Louisa Cameron, patron of my local bookshop, Raven Books, who was making a concerted effort to read and promote the work of women writers in translation.
Cameron was taking part in Women in Translation month, an informal celebration of foreign fiction that was fuelled by a Twitter campaign launched by the blogger Biblibio (#womenintranslation). On every visit to the shop, in south Co Dublin, I came away with a new title by a writer I had barely heard of: Tove Jansson's The Summer Book, a beautiful but unsentimental portrait of a young girl's relationship with her grandmother; Muriel Barbery's hilarious tale of life as a concierge in Paris, The Elegance of the Hedgehog; the absurdist debut novel by the Norwegian writer Kjersti Skomsvold, The Faster I Walk, the Smaller I Am, which celebrates the longevity of its socially invisible narrator in a beautifully produced pocket-sized volume published by Dalkey Archive Press.
It is unlikely that any of these books would have made it on to my virtual bookshelf. They were personal recommendations too specific for any algorithm, and they stretched my literary interests rather than complemented them. But reading them as paperbacks got me thinking about translation issues raised by ebooks.
Last month, while looking into the topic of books that are unavailable in digital form, I noticed what appeared to be a consistent barrier to digital publication for people who write in a language other than English: translation costs. For foreign literature still in copyright, or new versions of old classics, the translator needs to be paid again. Dozens of sites offer free ebook versions of everything from Arnaud to Zola, but for the latest, most polished versions, sensitively translated for a modern reader – Lydia Davis's 2010 translation of Madame Bovary for Penguin, for example – readers are often penalised on price. Why pay €8 when you can read the book for free?
Where digital rights have not been agreed before publication, meanwhile, it is often too expensive to digitally publish at all. It wasn't until after his death, for example, that Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude was made available for Kindle.
New work by foreign authors, on the other hand, is just difficult to access in any format. The Women in Translation initiative was driven by startling statistics about the dearth of female translated voices (about 26 per cent), but the published number of literary translations from other languages into English is thought to be only 3 per cent, and in a market flooded with new titles it can be difficult for these books to gain visibility.
Cut publi
shing costs But digital publishing has been good for literary translation in a specific way: it has radically cut the cost of publishing, making it more financially viable to launch new books. Frisch & Co is a digital-only imprint that has provided an innovative model for literature in translation. Publishing
ebooks has allowed the company to minimise the tortuous process of traditional routes for literary translation, building relationships directly with big foreign-language publishing houses, which offer a selection of their best titles for publication. Frisch & Co organises the translation before offering a similarly curated selection to readers, who are invited to take up a subscription that provides them with four new random titles each month. Although books are available to buy as individual titles for £2.99-£4.99, there is something pleasingly arbitrary about the subscription approach, which bypasses literary preferences and instead indulges surprise.
My experience with the subscription model was entirely successful, broadening my cultural and literary horizons, as I read four books that differed in every way apart from format.
The first was by the Chinese writer Han Dong, whose first novel, Banished, was published in English in 2009 to critical acclaim. A Tabby-Cat's Tale, the brilliantly absurd story of a domestic dominion by a cat, is the only other title available in English from the writer, who is one of the major voices to emerge in modern Chinese literarature.
The next title was a contemporary Italian novel by the Argentinian writer Adrián N Bravi that also dabbles in the absurd. Its central character is a man trying to cope with baldness by styling a unique combover. Defeated by inclement weather, he takes refuge in a hermitage at the top of a mountain to deal with his hairy (or rather hairless) problem.
The Combover is Bravi's English-language debut; the next book, The Room, by Andreas Maier, is also a first publication in English. An autobiographical novel about 1960s Germany, it was a distinct change in tone and pace, and provided a fascinating insight into postwar German life as well as a gripping family drama.
The final book, Family Heirlooms, was a Brazilian classic, from Zulmira Ribeiro Tavares, about one woman's fight against bourgeois respectability. Although Family Heirlooms was published in 1990 to great acclaim, Frisch & Co has made Tavares's work available in English for the first time; it will publish a second title by her early next year.
Still, true to statistical form, Family Heirlooms was the only title of four by a woman in my list. Next August, for Women in Translation month, I will choose my own selection of ebooks and make sure that I celebrate it in digital as well as traditional form.
