Transliteration

Mobylives points to this new essay by Robert Gray (of the Fresh Eyes bookseller blog) writing about why it’s vital for Americans — well, anyone really — to read books in translation:

Should

Americans read more world literature to rip away the blinders we so

often wear when it comes to those who are “not like us”? “Yes” is the

quick answer, the answer that salves our collective conscience, but it

is that word should that has begun to bother me. Should has not gathered as many dedicated readers of works in translation as, well, as it should have. The proof is in the numbers.

In the April 23 edition of the New York Times, an article

by Dinitia Smith on PEN World Voices: The New York Festival of

International Literature, revealed an unsurprising but nonetheless

distressing fact: “Andrew Grabois, the senior director of the R. R.

Bowker company, which keeps track of publishing industry figures, said

this week that of the 185,000 books printed in English in the United

States in 2004, only 874 were adult literature in translation. [Salman]

Rushdie called the low number of translated books ‘shocking.’“

Shocking? Yes again. And yet, what am I, as a bookseller who has long

conversations with American readers every day, doing about it? Not

enough, obviously, but what really interests me here is less an

offering of mea culpas than the suggestion that we move beyond the

concept of literature in translation being “good for you” to the much

more enticing prospect of literature in translation being an endless

series of great reads.

Hear hear. Gray goes on to offer up a list of great translated reads, and I’d like to start up a similar list on the crime fiction front here as well.

I’m a big fan of crime in translation. Not sure when that started, but

I made special note of what was happening in other countries when I

lived in London a couple of years ago, and could devour books published

by Harvill (now Harvill Secker) and by authors such as [Jean-Christophe

Grange]4 Karin Alvtegen (Sweden) Karin Fossum (Denmark) [Arnaldur

Indridason]6 Boris Akunin (Russia) Jose Carlos Somoza (Spain)

Luis Alfredo Garcia-Roza (Brazil) Leonardo Padura Fuentes (Cuba) [Carlo

Lucarelli]11 and many, many more. Two additional imprints, Arcadia

and Bitter Lemon Press,

have also sprung up to address this gap, translating additional great

authors into English like Chantal Pelletier (France) Tonino Benacquista

(France/Italy) Jorg Fauser (Sweden) and Fredrich Glauser (Germany).

Never mind some of the current kings of translated crime lit like

Henning Mankell and Arturo Perez-Reverte.

What makes books by foreign writers so appealing? The foreignness of

course; such writers are working within the constraints of their own

culture, morality and history and are not necessarily bound by the

strict edicts of “what sells” as too often dictates what will be

published in the US or the UK. Not that the bottom line isn’t a huge

factor, because it is, but the factors may be entirely different.

And so a police procedural as written by a French author or a

Scandinavian author has completely different pacing and structure and

character quirks than would one written by an American; what’s

considered to be noir across the pond is also quite different

as well. Which is a way of saying, perhaps, that the cynical,

world-weary protagonist is subverted and inverted a million different

ways by European writers in a manner than may not be seen in books

published originally in English. Then there’s Japanese crime fiction, most notably Natsuo Kirino’s OUT, which not only out-gored many American writers known for their squeamish plots, but was a phenomenal take on the working lives of Japanese women and how they endeavored to break free of this cycle, albeit in a rather drastic manner.

But perhaps most telling of all is how short so many of these books

are, especially on the darker side of the crime fiction spectrum.

Italian writers — Lucarelli, Massimo Carlotto, and Andrea Camilleri

for example — hardly ever seem to exceed 200 pages with their books,

but do they ever pack a lot of action, humor, philosophy and brutality.

Carlotto’s THE MASTER OF KNOTS, released in the UK a few months ago, is

perhaps 180 pages long and it’s soaked with all of the above. And yet

it never feels too rushed or jampacked, more that if the story had been

expanded to 300 pages, it would have been padded.

But even though I do think there’s been more of an effort to translate worthy crime writers into English, there’s still a serious lag and I wish I could read more. And since I’m not about to become fluent in 10 languages overnight, I have to play the waiting game just like anyone else.

So what do you like about crime in translation, or not like about it? The floor’s yours, as usual.