I’m eating a translated burrito? Are you kidding me?

I am a subscriber to Wilson Quarterly, and before I begin my rant about a piece in the latest issue I want you to consider picking up a copy next time you’re at your local bookshop (Barnes and Noble often carries it, too). It’s a nonpartisan journal with accessible pieces that range from politics and culture to science and religion, and I enjoy every quarterly issue immensely. I think you will, too.

That said, an article on translation appears in the Winter 2009 issue titled “McCulture” by Aviya Kushner, who grew up in a Hebrew-speaking household in New York and teaches writing at Columbia College Chicago. I intend to rant about her article momentarily, but first you’ll need a summary of her article since it’s not available online yet:

Kushner writes that Americans are not willing to do the heavy lifting required to read truly international literature, saying that we prefer to read books by bilingual/bicultural Americans who can present the foreigness to us in a preprocessed format that is easier for us to understand. She believes this causes us to miss out the full richness and variety and resonance of other people’s souls as expressed through literature. This is especially true for the literatures of minority communities like the Kurds and the Roma, smaller and low-profile countries like most of Africa, and languages that plenty of English-language translators can’t handle, e.g. Mongolian.

I do agree with the main point I think she was trying to make: that America should publish more books in translation. I agree that books in languages of small diffusion (and I would add from countries that aren’t in the G8) face particularly steep challenges before being published in the U.S. I agree that it’s a shame that Americans are shielded from any unnecessary non-English interference in their daily lives. I agree that the Bible feels different in different languages. And I agree that books do occasionally change the course of history.

That said, it’s a big pet peeve of mine when people claim that Americans have no culture (I find Europeans are the worst about this). And Kushner pushes just about every peeve button I can think of. By the end of the article, I felt like slapping some sense into her (well, not really).

One thing I generally disliked about the structure of the article was that she devoted way too much space to universalizing her own experience—her childhood, her experiences with bilingualism, being an exchange student, etc., and blaming Americans for not being more like her. It was rambling, self-centered and fairly disjointed. But my main beef was with the thrust of her argument—that Americans are such timid and provincial readers that even in things “exotic” we allegedly aspire only to McCulture and not to an authentic experience of things foreign. Kushner writes:

[Americans] prefer to read of a Bosnian immigrant in New York instead of a Bosnian man in Sarajevo, written by a Bosnian. This way, at least we can recognize New York… We want someone to address us directly, to write something just for us. Bilingual writers can slip in locales that speak to us, or brand names we recognize, or concerns we have as Americans… That’s why they tend to fare better than writers whose work is translated, who focus on whether that new yurt was worth the cow-price… We want those concerns translated into familiar terms. We want to see our lives, our exact worries, already there on the page.

There are so many things wrong with this argument. When was the last time you read a book because you’d heard it had brand names in it you would recognize? Or because it was set in an American city? And does a Bosnian immigrant in New York really share your exact worries? And what on earth is wrong with reading about a Bosnian-American's experience, anyway? We are a nation of immigrants (has Kushner forgotten?), and almost all American writing in some way brings the author’s ethnic background to the table, from Norwegian-American Garrison Keillor’s humor and essays to Chinese-American Amy Tan’s masterful storytelling. The fact that we read hyphenated-American authors is not because we are afraid of translations of actual Norwegian (cf. Out Steeling Horses by Per Petterson) or Chinese (cf. Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie) novels; we read hyphenated-American authors because absolutely nothing is more American. I can’t help but be shocked that Kushner fails to realize this.

Of course, there is a kernel of truth hidden in Kushner’s criticism: Americans don’t publish that many foreign books in translation. Although it’s not for the reasons Kushner presumes. As a nation, she writes us off:

[Americans] don’t have much time, so we want a taste, some fast food to go. And so we read ethnic literature the way we down an ethnic meal. We can get a burrito almost anywhere, but it’s often mildly spiced, adjusted just for us, and wrapped for those in a rush. So we’re eating a translated burrito, and we’re reading a world prepared especially for us… we congratulate ourselves on our globalized worldview, our ethnic restaurants in every downtown.

First of all, where has this woman been eating? Is she seriously trying to suggest that anyone thinks a burrito from Taco Bell is “authentic” Mexican food? I mean, hello? The last burrito I had was a fabulous burrito con lengua from the little neighborhood place where I get my dad the tamales he requests every year for his birthday. And I am really not that adventurous of an eater. And mine isn’t that “ethnic” a neighborhood, either.

People who argue about the pervasiveness of McCulture, about the decay of Culture (note my capital C), often use this spurious argument: Americans eat fast food and watch crap on TV; ergo we are devoid of Culture. Yes, yes, yes, the U.S. does have low culture. We have low culture movies and TV shows and pulp fiction and music. We have citizens who love to gorge themselves on a nice heaping helping of low culture. But do you know what? So does every country. It’s not just that I have seen Europeans and Asians alike lining up to pay to see some of the cheesiest U.S. films you can imagine or to shovel American fast food into their mouths or raving about Baywatch and whatever their version of Biggest Loser is called. No, it’s also that I have seen them lining up to feast on their own countries’ versions of low culture, too. Low culture exists in all countries and there are plenty of people around the world who love it. And why shouldn’t they? If you want to eat at Taco Bell now and then, go for it. Eating at Taco Bell is obviously no replacement for spending a year in Mexico as an exchange student. And I think you’d be hard pressed to find anyone who is confused about this. Yet, like all other countries, Americans enjoy superb high Culture, too—which is readily available to any who seek it out. And many do.

Kushner actually writes, “as anyone who walks through a European airport bookstore can attest: 25% of books published in Spain in 2004 were translations… In Italy the figure was 22%, and in South Korea 29%” as if to argue that this makes the Spaniards, Italians, and South Koreans better, nobler, and more worldly than Americans. I’ve walked through plenty of European and Asian airports. Do you know what books they’re translating? Ken Follett, Stephen King, diet books, the Da Vinci Code, J.K. Rowling, the Secret, murder mysteries, Nicholas Sparks... Well, you get the picture. (Not to mention that the Secret, Follett, and Rowling aren’t even American—we import them just like the Spaniards.) Should the U.S. be importing and translating more books? Sure. Are we comparing apples to oranges when we compare our percentage (about 3%) of translated books to Spain’s? Not exactly.

The first thing she’s overlooking is that the U.S. is the largest book market in the world. 3% of the largest book market in the world is still quite a number. According to Bowker (www.bowker.com), the U.S. publishes about 300,000 books a year, so 3% is about 9,000 books. Spain publishes about 50,000 books a year, so the 25% that are translations is about 12,500 books. So, yes, we’re behind, but we already have most of the diet books and murder mysteries we need. We only need to translate Spanish ones if they’re really bringing something different to the table. Obviously I’m in favor of even more books being translated, I am a translator after all, but what the American publishing industry is accomplishing already is not exactly nothing.

The second thing she’s overlooking is that language accessibility impacts what directions things get translated. English is widely spoken throughout the world, so it’s quite easy for Albanian, Bosnian, and Latvian publishers to arrange for translations from English into their respective languages, and with America’s 300,000 titles a year there is ample selection to choose translation candidates from. By contrast, there just are not that many translators out there who can translate from Albanian, Bosnian, or Latvian into U.S. English with a level of linguistic artistry that can compete among 300,000 other titles for sale here.

The third thing she’s overlooking, then, is that publishing is a business, an industry. If a Bosnian-American wants to get his book published, chances are he’s going to get himself an agent. And if they are both really tenacious and really believe in his book, they may just manage to get it published. By contrast, if a Bosnian writer (or his publisher) wants to get a book published in the U.S., chances are they’ll try to do it without an agent (agents take a cut, right?) and without any real idea of how the U.S. book market works (it’s just like in Bosnia, right?) (Books really cannot get published in the U.S. without an agent being involved unless you go the self-publishing route.)

The next problem for the Bosnian book is that it’s not in a widely accessible language. So, is the American publisher supposed to buy the rights without being able to read the book first? Based on what? The plot summary? Sure, in part, but mostly based on a reader report. That’s how it’s usually done. It’s still not much to go on, so any decent publishing house is also going to want an English sample translation of some portion of the book.

So the next problem comes back to the translation issue: where are you going to get a Bosnian translator to do a sample translation at a level that makes the book stand out in a crowd of 300,000 books? Typically, as well, the foreign publisher will save some money and hire someone not quite qualified who will do a sample translation into British English, which is a super bad move if you want to get an American publisher on board—and it's not just because of the spelling. America and Britain are different countries, different cultures, after all. I don’t know why people outside the English-speaking world don’t get that.

Then there’s the last problem: sellability. The translation won’t sell more than 2,000 to 3,000 copies, as Kushner argues, because Americans only read McCulture books, right? Wrong. It won’t sell more than 3,000 copies because to sell more than that in the U.S. you need marketing and distribution and advertising and media hype. Not because we hate Bosnians. It’s because we’re the biggest book market in the world and our stores are already saturated with 300,000 things to read already (whose publishers/distributors are paying product placement and promotional fees to get their book on the center table at Barnes and Noble). Let’s say Kushner’s hypothetical Bosnian project is a great translation of a great book (sadly most books published lack at least one of these properties). How will Joe Schmoe—whose palate is broader than just Taco Bell, who does read literature, who does buy books, but who doesn’t really have any particular connection to Bosnia—how will Joe Schmoe find out about this book and why will he decide to read it? Good question. Kushner would rather criticize Americans’ “lack of culture” than answer these questions. Incidentally, Joe Schmoe is actually reading Garrison Keillor and Amy Tan and Per Petterson and Dai Sijie.

Kushner adds:

We need to look hard at why we love bilingual or bicultural writers so much, and why we are still afraid of translation. It is not that Americans lack curiosity of any kind—but that we seem to lack the right kind.

Hyperbole of the worst kind. You’re seriously telling me that millions of Americans lack “the right kind” of curiosity, but that Europeans and Asians all have it? You’ve got to be kidding me. It’s not, as she argues, that Americans prefer to read about a Bosnian immigrant in New York. It’s that the path that the bicultural author’s book has to take to end up on the café table in front of us requires only ten steps. By contrast, getting the translation of the Bosnian book onto our café table requires 25 perfectly choreographed steps. Blaming Americans for their timid palates, their coddled worldview, and provincial tastes is no way to fix this problem, and it’s no way to understand who Americans are and what American culture is.