Literature's invisible arbiters


We never get to read them, but reader's reports for publishers can make or break books - particularly so for translations. Esther Allen 'fesses up about her shadowy trade


Source: Guardian Unlimited


A silent trade ...

The reader's report is the most silent of literary genres, its existence publicly acknowledged only in attacks or parodies. In Umberto Eco's Misreadings, spectacularly obtuse flunkies advise publishers to reject the Divine Comedy and The Trial. ("Why is the protagonist on trial?" the report queries in exasperation, adding that if this and other issues could be clarified, the novel might eventually become publishable.) Few if any real reader's reports are ever published; they're written for an extremely limited audience: the editors and publishers who will decide whether to bring out the book in question. Hence the hostility the reader's report inevitably generates. The lowly minion who authors it can do something no after-the-fact reviewer, however powerful and unkind, can accomplish: stop the book from being published in the first place.


Reader, I confess: For more than a decade, I've been writing reader's reports. I evaluate books written in or translated into French or Spanish for editors who, for the most part, can't read those languages. Writing the reports is a time-consuming, often frustrating, and always financially unprofitable pastime, and there can't be many of us willing to do it; sometimes two or three different publishers in sequence will, unbeknownst to each other, send me the same book to evaluate. I often wonder - particularly when a deadline is looming - why I do reader's reports at all.

Certainly there is pleasure akin to idly spinning the radio dial; the books I receive offer random, occasionally enlightening glimpses into the international literary marketplace, and there's always the chance of stumbling across something really good I would never otherwise have read. But there's more to it than that.

There is, for example, the fact that only two real tests of a book's merit exist: time and translation. Both tests are essentially collective and impersonal, and neither is ever definitive - none of us knows which 20th century books the 22nd century will value most. Nor can either one help in making the old-fashioned distinction between high culture and low - Ulysses versus Winnie the Pooh. Nevertheless, the reader's report offers an opportunity to put a given book to the more immediate of these tests - that of translation. Will this piece of writing retain meaning and interest for a different set of readers in a different linguistic context? As a translator by profession, I find this question one of the most interesting that can be asked of a book, and I'm always eager for an opportunity to try to answer it.

Coming up with an answer is often tough, and would be even if the question had to be decided on literary merit alone. But alas, literary merit usually ends up being a minor component of a decision that is also inescapably political, and, most of all, economic. For of course what most editors really want to know is whether the book will sell in the US marketplace.



Sometimes the question is easy, though; so easy that I wonder what mindless domino effect has sent a book into my hands. There were, for example, the memoirs of a Madrid cleaning lady, an immensely popular book in Spain which had catapulted its author into minor celebrity. I was startled that any agent would have submitted such a book to a US publisher: it was full of references to Spanish TV shows and their stars, soccer players and teams, Madrid neighbourhoods and local trends that were bound to baffle rather than amuse even the small subset of US readers who are fans of the films of Almodóvar. But then - it took me a while to realise - any number of books filled with local references to our own culture have been successful in translation around the world. The Nanny Diaries, to pick an example at random, has already been translated into four languages. Ours is an export culture, which means that a significant group of readers in Madrid, Tokyo, Bombay, and just about everywhere else are, after a lifetime of watching our TV shows and movies and reading our novels, either well acquainted with or very curious about our celebrities, domestic habits, and in-jokes. The agent who was shopping around the Madrid cleaning lady's book had just forgotten, momentarily, that it doesn't go both ways.

"Why," a German writer complained at a conference last year, "will people all over the world read about divorce in New Jersey, while almost no one in the English-speaking world seems to have the faintest interest in reading about divorce in Bonn or Haifa or Seville?" Several writers of English have proposed a facile, triumphalist answer to this question, happily attributing the global dominance of the English language to their own prowess - which is a bit like murdering your competitors to achieve a monopoly and then gloating over the vast superiority of your product.

The advantage of writing in English is obvious: Empires come and go, but the sun never sets on the English language. Access to English is access to power; it speaks louder than any other language in the world, and its juggernaut position as global lingua franca is further consolidated each day. At the same time, harder writers of other languages find it harder and harder to break in. The English book market is the world's largest and most transnational, but the elite group of writers across the globe who can feel sure that their books will be translated into English could all fit around a medium-sized conference table (and a very interesting meeting it would be).

Continues next post