Are Euro Publishers Really All That?

As the debate continues to unfold over Horace Engdahl‘s contempt for American writers, a literary agent who’s worked for on the editorial side of things in the past questions one of Engdahl’s core assumptions—the idea that America’s literary culture is inferior because its publishers are “too isolated [and] too insular,” and don’t translate enough literature from other parts of the world.

“A few years back, I spoke in Istanbul at a conference on works in translation, and I was essentially hated for questioning this supposition that Europeans take as fact,” Michael Stearns emailed us. “The sad truth is that while Europe translates more books… they translate those books from English, and the lion’s share of those titles are British and American mainstream fiction. How much credit do we give European publishers for translating John Grisham and Harry Potter?”

“I haven’t been able to track down the numbers,” Stearns continued, “but I would wager that if you compared translations from other countries and other languages—Japanese literature, sat—you’d find that the number of titles are awfully similar.” He then pointed out to his audience that the American market for literary niches like, to pick one example, Turkish poetry is “mostly well-served by small presses (mostly nonprofit) and imports from England.” That didn’t go over too well with the Istanbul audience: “My Q&A consisted of wholly of comments such as ‘I can SEE the dollar signs in your eyes!’”

Anybody familiar enough with European publishing to confirm these impressions, or to set the record straight if need be? Your insights are much appreciated! (Our own experience in such matters is limited; when we went to Iceland last year, though, we noticed that the bookstore we visited simply carried a lot of British editions of novels by US and UK authors, because many readers didn’t need to have the stories translated.)

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