The Literature of Others
by Michael Barron
Font Antikvárium is a bookstore in Budapest with a cultist following, a Central European version of City Lights. Shelves of novels fill the ground floor, bookish memorabilia decorate the cashier stand. In a city of many bookstores, Font Antikvárium stand outs for its dedicated curation of Hungarian literature. And there is a lot of it. I don’t read, write, or speak Hungarian but I find pleasure in discovering bodies of literature in other languages.
It can be spell-binding to browse so many unrecognizable names and novels. Occasionally you stumble upon the works of a familiar writer—Krasznahorkai, Szabó, Kosztolányi—and find not just the books you have read, but others that remain untranslated. When I came across the books of László Krasznahorkai, I discovered a handful of his texts not yet translated into English, and being a fan of his work, I felt teased. A place like Font Antikvárium reveals an easy to forget literary truth, that while many writers have been translated into English, many more have not.
Fortunately, we are currently living in the golden age of literature-in-translation. MFA programs focused on translation are popping up in universities across the country. The National Book Award, the biggest literary prize in America, now has a translation category. Last year it was awarded to Krasznahorkai.
No single body of literature can tell every story; we owe it to translators to make English-language literature richer through the inclusion of foreign writers. A translator I knew working on a German translation of Sergio De La Pava’s A Naked Singularity (one of the best works encapsulating the speed and spirit of New York) had to shelve the project, leaving German-language readers waiting. Another example: One of the most original American novels to appear in the last twenty years—Helen DeWitt’s linguistically brilliant The Last Samurai—has not been translated into Hungarian. And that’s a shame, because unless there might be an analog to Helen DeWitt in Hungary (I don’t know), as long as it remains untranslated, a possibility of this literature doesn’t exist for Hungarian writers.
Walk into a bookstore in Cape Town or Melbourne and you’ll be struck by a variation of the Font Antikvárium truth: some English-language writers very familiar to Americans, never make it over, not even to other English-speaking countries. For every Nadine Gordimer, there is a K. Sello Duiker, a celebrated black South African writer who drew Bolaño comparisons before his untimely death. There are no American editions of his work.
A great period of embracing experimentation in American letters has been building in the last decade. It’s the embrace I saw when the Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2018. It put the kind of work once dismissed as postmodern back into celebration. Tokarczuk’s novel Flights, composed as a compilation of chaplets covering the narrator’s multifarious interests, catapulted her to international fame when it was published in English in 2016. The novel, however, was first published in Poland in 2007. Though other work by Tokarczuk had previously been translated into English, it was often by small university presses and not widely distributed. So, what changed with Flights?
Maybe we’ve recovered our curiosity for risk-taking works. The Mexican-American writer Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive, a major novel published in 2019 which also uses unconventional narration in compelling ways, felt like a reassuring sign that attention to form is coming back. Because for anyone paying attention, the style of Flights isn’t new. The Art Lover, a novel by the American writer Carole Maso about the slow death of a friend with AIDS, was published in 1990. It’s fragmented style is one readers of Tokarczuk will immediately recognize. But Maso is, sadly, not widely read in her own country, and editions of her work are either hard to find or out of print.
In the Best European Fiction anthologies published by Dalkey Archive, unique forms of writing, at least to me, appear again and again. Among their choice discoveries is the Lithuanian writer Giedra Radvilavičiūtė. In her story “The Allure of the Text” an academic literary paper is sneakily turned into a heartbreaking narrative. The allure for Radvilavičiūtė is when study turns personal. The allure for the reader then is two-fold—an impassioned treatise and a deeply moving lecture.
My bets are on the diversity of influence to lead us toward a multi-faceted future body of fiction. A literature that moves away from the traditional American canon and welcomes the overshadowed works that have been impactful abroad. I am thinking here of Malina, the single and singular novel by the Austrian poet Ingeborg Bachmann, published in the 1970s. It reads as both real-time monologue and narrative fiction that has not, at least to my knowledge, been replicated. (New Directions recently republished the novel since its original English debut in the ‘90s when it made much less of a stir.) Highly influential to German-language writers, imagine its influence on future generations of American writers. Perhaps it could be similar to the impact that Renata Adler’s Speedboat had when published in German (Rennboot). Not just the critical acclaim. Rather, had anything like it appeared before in German?
This leads back to my original observation, and to it I would add the question, what would happen if all works in all languages were universally readable? New forms of thinking, new colors for the literary palette, and ultimately, the possibility of atypical influences. To put an old trope on its head, everything has been invented, but not every invention has been discovered.
Which is why, on my own bookshelves, I keep a small collection of works from languages I do not read but works that I hope to read. I would like to see these and many others translated. In the meantime, I am inspired to know they exist.
Michael Barron is a writer and editor who lives in New York.
