tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-52080192024-02-28T18:44:16.299-05:00StickFingerSowing the dragon’s teeth since 1964Alex Z.http://www.blogger.com/profile/15635561148523957099noreply@blogger.comBlogger362125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5208019.post-18619618120112489412023-07-02T09:13:00.003-04:002023-07-02T11:36:05.722-04:00Department of Cherchez l’Argent<div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;">So, in order not to lose the information that I shared yesterday in <a href="https://twitter.com/alexjzucker/status/1675266978133471239" target="_blank">a thread of tweets on the bird site</a>, in response to <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/28/books/review/literary-translator-roundtable-discussion.html?unlocked_article_code=lPi7eBSafgf9RuEqZcOnTP1Thg_TxrYMrTB96B-8kU2uvsfvi6j7yipkkbGCUEWkzEqcsxM2O8LqI2DVIqd8wqF9brstHOB8yiBD-SBp38fvqyHbFGlBk_OA4hhKCcXe9Z96ts5qPmbRmMqH1oBFu1H5ZF0UbuYFbRiGlAGto7y0Z59QNKazBH6LxSd90VpgSQGEO4kTSwlQD5sJO01u5pd2VjEL_MlM-3hFz9PICULRrR4Rg20WEjFCV04JHlncJZsbxVs4AEazIxVAaN6mIrFaAt7_UXtKIGN8JownXuiZPlTbQK0VryVWIE8NT1DBlFvxC8W1VlpU2PPn-4L9GFfNTb2RCsMdL45XPL-usVQdDKLTcSJG5w&smid=url-share" target="_blank">a provocatively wide-ranging <i>New York Times</i> roundtable</a> by Juliana Barbassa (“‘Building Something Together’: Translators on Their Art”) with Samantha Schnee, Allison Markin Powell, Jeremy Tiang, Mui Poopaksakul, and Bruna Dantas Lobato, I am putting it here in a blog post, for perpetuity, so to speak. </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">The subject, to be clear, is how state funding influences the translation of literary works into English, and specifically how a few European languages, with heavy state backing, dominate. I will leave it to others to expound on this (including the ways in which this represents legacies of colonialism, imperialism, the Cold War, etc.) and in fact look forward to that! </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">To recapitulate, then, reading the roundtable, I had many thoughts—so many that I got overwhelmed, because everyone in the interview said things I thought were important and worthy of commenting on. Writing a thread on Twitter takes a long time, though, and I was conscious of not wanting to spend too much (unpaid) time on that, given my current work obligations, so I limited myself to commenting on just one point one of the participants made with a fairly bare-bones thread of data on just one language to illustrate the point. </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">That point was to uplift what Jeremy Tiang said about translation in English not being a level playing field: </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><blockquote style="text-align: left;"><p class="css-at9mc1 evys1bk0" style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: var(--color-content-secondary,#363636); font-family: nyt-imperial, georgia, "times new roman", times, serif; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-alternates: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; line-height: 1.875rem; margin: 0px 0px 0.9375rem; max-width: 100%; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; text-size-adjust: 100%; vertical-align: baseline; width: 600px;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span class="css-8qgvsz ebyp5n10" style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-size-adjust: 100%; vertical-align: baseline;">JEREMY:</span> I want to mention the unevenness of the playing field, which might not be apparent to people outside of the translation world. <span style="background-color: transparent;"> </span></span></p></blockquote><blockquote style="text-align: left;"><p class="css-at9mc1 evys1bk0" style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: var(--color-content-secondary,#363636); font-family: nyt-imperial, georgia, "times new roman", times, serif; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-alternates: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; line-height: 1.875rem; margin: 0px 0px 0.9375rem; max-width: 100%; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; text-size-adjust: 100%; vertical-align: baseline; width: 600px;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span color="var(--color-content-secondary,#363636)">Someone working from, say, German could quite feasibly, if they were sufficiently established, make a living simply by waiting for publishers to come to them with German books to translate. Whereas with less represented languages or regions, the translator often has to advocate for the book or it doesn’t get translated at all. Thai literature in English translation pretty much wouldn’t exist if Mui weren’t finding these books and putting them in front of publishers.</span><span style="background-color: transparent;"> </span></span></p></blockquote><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><a href="https://twitter.com/alexjzucker/status/1675266978133471239" target="_blank">What I wrote in my Twitter thread was</a> that to say the playing field is uneven is an understatement. As I noted there, I don’t have the data at hand on the amounts of the funding, but to illustrate beyond the example that Jeremy gives, which is about German, the dominance of translations from French is in large part a result of the French state's funding to subsidize translations. </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">To give readers a sense of the extent of this funding, I shared <a href="http://rochester.edu/College/translation/threepercent/2008/02/25/to-be-translated-or-not-to-be-case-studies-france/" target="_blank">this post from Three Percent</a>, the blog by Chad Post, publisher of Open Letter, who has written consistently about these matters over the years and who remains a great source of information on data concerning publishing of fiction translation in the United States. As I noted <a href="https://twitter.com/alexjzucker/status/1675266979253432320" target="_blank">in my tweet</a>, that post is from 2008, so the information isn’t current, but it serves to give an idea of the extent of French state funding to support the translation of French fiction into English in the U.S. market. </div><div style="text-align: left;"><div><br /></div><div>Again, as I noted on Twitter, the dominance of French fiction of course also has to do with US (and UK) editors’ familiarity with French language and culture, which in turn similarly results from funding (for example, of French departments and teacher training). But state financial support of translations, in all the ways noted in Chad’s blog post, is still the biggest factor (or at least so I believe; perhaps impossible to prove).</div><div><br /></div><div>Here note that I put UK in parentheses above. This is because the market for fiction translated into English is not only in the United States, but also in the United Kingdom, and in fact elsewhere around the world—these days more than ever, including not only India (English translations of most of the literature written in the many languages of that country are published in India itself, since US and UK publishers have been slow/reluctant to acquire them), but also many other, smaller countries whose fiction, for many reasons (again, possibly ranging from the subject matter or style not being considered interesting by US or UK publishers, to the lack of state subsidies for translated works) has not been published in large numbers in the US or UK. </div><div><br /></div><div><div>Below I present some recent data to illustrate just how dominant French is in the US market for fiction translated into English. Note that these are <i>US data only</i>, and do not include books published in the UK or elsewhere. The data come from <a href="https://publishersweekly.com/pw/translation/home/index.html" target="_blank">the Translation Database</a>, “founded in 2008 by Three Percent and Open Letter Books at the University of Rochester to track all original publications of fiction and poetry published in the U.S. in English translation.” (<a href="https://twitter.com/alexjzucker/status/1675266981711302657" target="_blank">Note my caveat</a> that not all the books translated from French are from France, so not all of them are eligible for the funding I refer to above.) </div></div><div><br /></div><div>2022 70</div><div>2021 100</div><div>2020 134 </div><div>2019 145</div><div>2018 133</div><div><br /></div><div>To give readers an idea of just how dominant these figures are, I offered a comparison with the other members of FIGS (French, Italian, German, Spanish, <a href="https://aaww.org/translation-column-want-to-die-translate-korean-literature/" target="_blank">borrowing a usage from</a> <a href="https://aaww.org/translation-column-want-to-die-translate-korean-literature/" target="_blank">Anton Hur</a>): </div><div><br /></div><div>Italian</div><div>2022 32</div><div>2021 34</div><div>2020 41</div><div>2019 46</div><div>2018 48 </div><div><br /></div><div>German</div><div>2022 29</div><div>2021 40</div><div>2020 70</div><div>2019 73</div><div>2018 74</div><div><br /></div><div>Spanish</div><div>2022 70</div><div>2021 90</div><div>2020 86</div><div>2019 101</div><div>2018 123</div><div><br /></div><div>Then I offered, for further comparison, a few other languages:</div><div><br /></div><div>Chinese </div><div>2022 17</div><div>2021 23 </div><div>2020 22 </div><div>2019 28</div><div>2018 33</div><div><br /></div><div>Japanese</div><div>2022 29</div><div>2021 23 </div><div>2020 33 </div><div>2019 47</div><div>2018 64</div><div><br /></div><div>Korean </div><div>2022 12</div><div>2021 11 </div><div>2020 15 </div><div>2019 17</div><div>2018 11</div><div><br /></div><div>(Here, a Slavic section . . .) </div><div><br /></div><div>Russian </div><div>2022 13</div><div>2021 10 </div><div>2020 18 </div><div>2019 28</div><div>2018 25</div><div><br /></div><div>Ukrainian </div><div>2022 3</div><div>2021 4</div><div>2020 5</div><div>2019 5</div><div>2018 4</div><div><br /></div><div>Polish</div><div>2022 5</div><div>2021 13</div><div>2020 10 </div><div>2019 9</div><div>2018 16</div><div><br /></div><div>Czech</div><div>2022 1</div><div>2021 7</div><div>2020 3</div><div>2019 4</div><div>2018 9</div><div><br /></div><div>And, finally (though, as I pleaded on Twitter, fearing in advance that people would complain I left out other important examples, please don’t harsh on me for not being exhaustive), I offered the six biggest languages of India (in my thread I mistakenly said five)—and though I neglected to mention it on Twitter, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of_native_speakers_in_India" target="_blank">these all have over 55 million speakers</a>(!), and that’s only counting people who speak them as their first language, which means they are <a href="https://www.worldometers.info/population/countries-in-europe-by-population/" target="_blank">larger than every country in Europe except Germany, the UK, France, and Italy</a>: </div><div><br /></div><div>Hindi</div><div>2022 0</div><div>2021 0</div><div>2020 0 </div><div>2019 1 </div><div>2018 1</div><div> </div><div>Bengali </div><div>2022 0</div><div>2021 1</div><div>2020 2</div><div>2019 3</div><div>2018 4</div><div><br /></div><div>Marathi</div><div>2022 0</div><div>2021 0</div><div>2020 0</div><div>2019 0</div><div>2018 0</div><div><br /></div><div>Telugu (no entries)</div><div><br /></div><div>Tamil</div><div>2022 1</div><div>2021 0</div><div>2020 0</div><div>2019 2</div><div>2018 2</div><div><br /></div><div>Gujarati</div><div>2022 1</div><div>2021 0</div><div>2020 0</div><div>2019 0</div><div>2018 0</div><div><br /></div><div>In my Twitter thread, I repeated my caveat that I was aware of the limitations of the data I was sharing and that my goal was just to give an idea of the disproportion to people who may have never thought about it before. (In other words, not a thread for the hardcore!)</div><div><br /></div><div>As of this writing, there have been two replies I want to include, one from the <a href="https://tracepress.org/" target="_blank">new not-for-profit publishing house trace</a>, who <a href="https://twitter.com/tracepress/status/1675281350436192257" target="_blank">noted that “US comp lit programs rooted in postwar & cold war politics” were another reason for the unequal distribution of literature in English translation</a> and that that was a motivation for their launching the press (“despite the HUGE challenges in funding”) and the other from translator Shaun Whiteside, <a href="https://twitter.com/shauntranslates/status/1675453318179454976" target="_blank">who noted, absolutely correctly, that Germany also offers “v[ery] generous” funding to support translation into English of fiction written in German</a>. </div><div><br /></div><div>So, there you have it. Now, if you want, you can bookmark this blog post, and the info won’t be lost on Twitter. 😊</div></div>Alex Z.http://www.blogger.com/profile/15635561148523957099noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5208019.post-70785094140135177342018-06-14T15:00:00.000-04:002018-06-15T10:20:42.423-04:00Petra Hůlová on “women’s” and “men’s” writing<span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Panel on Vaculík, Mácha and Hakl</span></span><br />
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Petra <span style="mso-font-kerning: 18.0pt;">Hůlová<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 14.0pt;">Originally
published June 1, 2018, at iLiteratura.cz: <a href="http://www.iliteratura.cz/Clanek/39993/">http://www.iliteratura.cz/Clanek/39993/</a>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNiE6VeJrEUdHw86SV_BijPlmmPKx5fYIzVEqmeaaImfAHVny2MZqhWoIHgGypncWE607NiqOxLkErtDZi_OJ5PGZdiezsW4hjLIZyjh14sjKmsl67CnKtGj00TCYKZueKXmd-/s1600/petra+h+men+panel.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><img border="0" data-original-height="585" data-original-width="1600" height="145" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNiE6VeJrEUdHw86SV_BijPlmmPKx5fYIzVEqmeaaImfAHVny2MZqhWoIHgGypncWE607NiqOxLkErtDZi_OJ5PGZdiezsW4hjLIZyjh14sjKmsl67CnKtGj00TCYKZueKXmd-/s400/petra+h+men+panel.png" width="400" /></span></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%;">“I’ll agree to take part in discussions about ‘women’s
writing’ just as soon we start talking about ‘men’s writing,’” Slovak novelist
Svetlana Žuchová told me.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%;">“They said 300 euros was the fixed fee for author appearances,
and they were sorry but they couldn’t raise it. After the event, though, I
found out in talking with two of the male participants that, unlike me, they got
400 euros,” German writer Tanja Dückers shared with me.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%;">“None of the most famous translators of Czech to
English—[Michael Henry] Heim, [Peter] Kussi, or Paul Wilson—has translated a
single book by a Czech woman,” said US translator of Czech literature Alex
Zucker, adding, “We see the same huge disparity in women writers translated by women
as we do by men.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Three days, three quotes, three conversations with people
close to me about women and literature week before last. All three demonstrate that
the situation is more complicated than it’s usually presented: either as a matter
of chauvinism or as a problem that doesn’t really exist. With regard to these
three quotes, that means:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%;">1. This isn’t necessarily about objecting to the term “women’s
writing,” but the fact that it has no conceptual parallel. Yet all kinds of questions
spring to my mind on the subject of “men’s writing.” For instance: female
characters in male writing who generate ideas rather than relationships or
libido. I’m burning with curiosity.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%;">2. Why it is that women get on average 25% less than
men for the same work has always been a mystery to me. It really never occurred
to me that lower pay might sometimes be “just” a result of the fact that women have
less self-confidence and tend to accept whatever they’re offered. This became
clear after Tanja Dückers publicly shared her experience of being paid a lower
fee for her appearance in Berlin, and then other women authors spoke out about similar
experiences. We’re familiar with the shibboleth of fixed fees in the Czech
literary world, too. Here, though, it’s often a gender-equal fee of nothing,
spiced up with the quip that it’s “good for your PR.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%;">3. It isn’t men who are to blame, but a way of
thinking on the part of everyone involved — ergo Zucker’s observation that women
translators, too, often translate primarily men, entirely of their own choice. Zucker,
on the other hand, is aiming to focus on translating women. The interest in
translating women authors in the U.S. was unleashed by author and translator
Alison Anderson’s text “<a href="https://www.wordswithoutborders.org/dispatches/article/where-are-the-women-in-translation">Where
Are the Women in Translation?</a>”, published in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Words Without Borders</i> in May 2013, leading to the <a href="https://biblibio.blogspot.com/p/witmonth-faq-updated-august-2016.html">Women
in Translation Month</a> initiative and a series of “<a href="https://lithub.com/11-german-books-by-women-wed-love-to-see-in-english/">books
by women we’d love to see in English</a>.” It’s great to have women authors being
prioritized, especially when it comes to <a href="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/11-Nyd_wA4xOrxsAAvj8BiYkNBXEIrm4zY7nlIWCFljM/edit#gid=449738640">English
translations of Czech literature</a>, where the percentage of women comes nowhere
near the percentage of works being published by women in Czech every year.
Still, at its core, I don’t think this disparity is a result of the widely held
view that women write worse. The problem is that women are still often seen as
a group with a particular outlook, based on their shared “femininity,” whereas men
are considered individuals, representing only themselves, their fictional
worlds reflecting gender-neutral, universal human themes. Male authors are just
people writing about the world, which logically is going to appeal to people
the most.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%;">It’s similar to when you
ask someone to draw you a person. They’re probably not going to draw a woman. That
would be too specific. So, what if instead of focusing on discrimination
against women’s literature, we were to think about what’s typical for the
category of “men’s writing”? Just as an exercise. On a panel where women would
be assertive enough to push for a higher “fixed” fee, we could analyze the specifics
of the masculine vision for some random trio of authors—say, [Ludvík] Vaculík, [Karel Hynek] Mácha and [Emil] Hakl. From a purely literary point of view, no emotions involved.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><i>Translated from the Czech by Alex Zucker</i></span></div>
<br />Alex Z.http://www.blogger.com/profile/15635561148523957099noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5208019.post-38415417265201756112017-06-01T10:06:00.001-04:002017-06-01T10:06:44.342-04:00Translators, Rates, Money, and Unions[Note: Not long ago, PEN America migrated its website to a new platform, and a few articles and features of the site were lost in the shuffle. Since currently the PEN site is the only place <a href="https://pen.org/transcript-of-three-percent-podcast-no-91-translators-rates-money-and-unions/" target="_blank">this transcript</a> is posted, I am reposting it here, for safekeeping.]<br />
<br />
<h1 class="post-title" style="border-bottom-color: rgb(153, 153, 153); border-bottom-style: solid; border-image: initial; border-left-color: initial; border-left-style: initial; border-right-color: initial; border-right-style: initial; border-top-color: initial; border-top-style: initial; border-width: 0px 0px 1px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #d6001c; font-family: Neutraface, HelveticaNeueLight, HelveticaNeue-Light, "Helvetica Neue Light", HelveticaNeue, "Helvetica Neue", TeXGyreHerosRegular, Helvetica, Tahoma, Geneva, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 1.5rem; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1; margin: 0px 0px 1rem; padding: 0px; text-transform: uppercase; vertical-align: baseline;">
TRANSCRIPT OF THREE PERCENT PODCAST NO. 91: “TRANSLATORS, RATES, MONEY, AND UNIONS”</h1>
<div class="post-meta" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #6e6e6e; font-family: Neutraface, HelveticaNeueLight, HelveticaNeue-Light, "Helvetica Neue Light", HelveticaNeue, "Helvetica Neue", TeXGyreHerosRegular, Helvetica, Tahoma, Geneva, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 1.5rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span class="date" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; clear: both; display: block; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">April 2, 2015</span><span class="date" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; clear: both; display: block; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><br /></span><span class="date" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; clear: both; display: block; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.6; margin-bottom: 1rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<em style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Czech translator and PEN Translation Committee cochair Alex Zucker sits down with</em> Three Percent <em style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">to discuss the business side of international literature in English. They break down pay rates for translators, the funding of small presses, and ways to keep literary translation alive and thriving. Listen to the original podcast (recorded Jan. 26, 2015) <a href="https://rochester.edu/College/translation/threepercent/index.php?id=13512" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #d6001c; cursor: pointer; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.5s, background-color 0.5s; vertical-align: baseline;">here</a>.</em></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhf_tZTQoOWoE536-D0iNU3FxaGWpP_jVRZHfRojt7yVuNPBkVHJf19T0CGoTUblsxyS_VOxrMreYZfK79sAd9_uLvL6qoNc3e82ODY6de-7KTaTVG12oJpx1q0MAjox8O6xy3W/s1600/ThreePercentPodcast-300x300.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="300" data-original-width="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhf_tZTQoOWoE536-D0iNU3FxaGWpP_jVRZHfRojt7yVuNPBkVHJf19T0CGoTUblsxyS_VOxrMreYZfK79sAd9_uLvL6qoNc3e82ODY6de-7KTaTVG12oJpx1q0MAjox8O6xy3W/s1600/ThreePercentPodcast-300x300.png" /></a></div>
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[30-second intro]</div>
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<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Chad Post</span>: Hey, welcome to the Three Percent podcast. This is Chad Post from <a href="http://www.openletterbooks.org/" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #d6001c; cursor: pointer; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.5s, background-color 0.5s; vertical-align: baseline;">Open Letter</a>, and I’m here with Tom Roberge from <a href="http://albertine.com/" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #d6001c; cursor: pointer; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.5s, background-color 0.5s; vertical-align: baseline;">Albertine</a> and <a href="http://www.ndbooks.com/" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #d6001c; cursor: pointer; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.5s, background-color 0.5s; vertical-align: baseline;">New Directions</a>, and our special guest this week is Alex Zucker, translator from the Czech and the cochair of the Translation Committee at PEN. Alex, I’ll let you talk in a second and explain a bit about the Translation Committee, but in brief, this is in reference to one of our episodes three or four ago, in which we talked about translators not being dockworkers. Do you want to take it from there, Alex? Tell us about the PEN Translation Committee and tell us about your grand plan for reviving and revitalizing the way that translators are treated and paid in America.</div>
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<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Alex Zucker</span>: Sure, that’s very well said. My cochair, first of all, on the PEN America Translation Committee, is Margaret Carson, and we’ve been serving together since June. I’m just going to read you what it says here from the <a href="https://pen.org/translation" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #d6001c; cursor: pointer; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.5s, background-color 0.5s; vertical-align: baseline;">pen.org/translation</a> site, which is where people can go to find out more about our work. “The PEN America Translation Committee advocates on behalf of literary translators, working to foster a wider understanding of their art and offering professional resources for translators, publishers, critics, bloggers, and others with an interest in international literature.” One of the most important and unique things that the Translation Committee does is that we have a model contract on the website. It’s <a href="https://pen.org/model-contract" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #d6001c; cursor: pointer; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.5s, background-color 0.5s; vertical-align: baseline;">pen.org/model-contract</a>. It’s also linked to off the <a href="https://pen.org/translation" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #d6001c; cursor: pointer; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.5s, background-color 0.5s; vertical-align: baseline;">pen.org/translation</a> page. The model contract is a project that originated back in 1971. I’m sorry, 1981.</div>
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<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">CP</span>: We don’t have a lot of abiding by facts on this podcast, so you can make that year whatever you want it to be.</div>
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<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">AZ</span>: [laughs] Yes, but the fact checkers—I used to work at magazines and I know the fact checkers are out there right now, Googling as I speak. 1981 was the first model contract that the Translation Committee put together, which is our idea of what a contract should look like for literary translators. Some of the things that we consider most important are that the copyright belongs to the translator; that the translator’s name appears on the title page, on the cover; that translators receive the royalties that they’re due; that there’s a reversion clause on the copyright so if the book goes out of print the copyright reverts to the translator. This is important: A lot of us are discovering authors earlier in their career and they may not be big the first time a book is published, but then they get rediscovered and their later books come out, but the first book can end up dead with a small publisher that doesn’t exist anymore because the rights didn’t revert to the translator. These are details, but these are the kinds of things that are important to us as translators.</div>
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The podcast that I commented on—I was trying to be sort of a provocateur, but I just thought it was funny that the two of you were responding to <a href="http://www.bookbrunch.co.uk/article_free.asp?pid=don_t_blame_the_readers_for_lack_of_interest_in_translations_the_fault_is_institutional" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #d6001c; cursor: pointer; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.5s, background-color 0.5s; vertical-align: baseline;">this article</a>, or this comment by John O’Brien in an article, and Tom was saying how it wasn’t right to compare us to dockworkers; translators weren’t dockworkers. And I said, Well, maybe we should be, because they get paid more than we do. So I just, as a little example, did <a href="http://stickfinger.blogspot.com/2014/12/did-someone-say-union.html" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #d6001c; cursor: pointer; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.5s, background-color 0.5s; vertical-align: baseline;">a blog post</a> where I said if I figured out what my hourly rate would be for a typical project that my pay would end up being less than a dockworker’s. And what is the difference between translators and dockworkers, and that’s that dockworkers have a union and we don’t.</div>
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Again, I was just trying to be sort of a provocateur. We have a couple of associations that we can belong to as literary translators. There’s the <a href="http://www.literarytranslators.org/" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #d6001c; cursor: pointer; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.5s, background-color 0.5s; vertical-align: baseline;">American Literary Translators Association</a>; there’s the <a href="http://www.atanet.org/" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #d6001c; cursor: pointer; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.5s, background-color 0.5s; vertical-align: baseline;">American Translators Association</a>, which has a <a href="http://www.ata-ld.org/" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #d6001c; cursor: pointer; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.5s, background-color 0.5s; vertical-align: baseline;">Literary Division</a>; and there’s the <a href="https://www.authorsguild.org/" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #d6001c; cursor: pointer; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.5s, background-color 0.5s; vertical-align: baseline;">Authors Guild</a>. And then there is PEN, of course, although PEN was founded in defense of free expression—in 1921, I believe—so it’s initially a human rights organization, but in this country the defense of translators’ contract rights up until now has so far fallen mainly to the PEN Translation Committee. But—we don’t have lawyers at our disposal. The Authors Guild does, so if you want a contract to be reviewed in advance of signing it to see whether it works in your favor or not, if you’re a member of the Authors Guild they’ll do that for you for free. PEN doesn’t offer that service to any of its members, whether you’re a translator or other type of author.</div>
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There was one other point that came up on the podcast that I thought was important to address, because it’s become sort of an urban legend in the world of literary translation, and that’s this idea that we can’t discuss rates with each other. This dates back to a case in the early ’90s. The American Translators Association was actually <a href="http://www.atanet.org/chronicle/antitrust_may2005.pdf" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #d6001c; cursor: pointer; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.5s, background-color 0.5s; vertical-align: baseline;">investigated by the Federal Trade Commission</a> because of discussions on their listserv about translation rates. The investigation went on from December 1990 to sometime in 1994. There was never a finding in the investigation, but it cost the ATA an arm and a leg—or maybe a couple arms and an eyeball—in legal fees. It was apparently about a quarter of a million dollars.</div>
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<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">CP</span>: It cost them like seven translators.</div>
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<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">AZ</span>: [laughs] I mean I don’t know what the ATA’s budget is, but I can imagine that must have been pretty crippling. So as a result the ATA became very conscientious and they <a href="https://www.atanet.org/governance/governance_policystatement.php" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #d6001c; cursor: pointer; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.5s, background-color 0.5s; vertical-align: baseline;">issued a policy statement</a>, and all the members were warned against talking about rates on their listserv, but of course there’s a difference between mentioning rates and fixing prices: Fixing prices is illegal; talking about rates is not illegal. You know, I’ve heard people at ALTA conferences on a panel and somebody says, “Well, I make this much.” “Oh, you can’t talk about that.” Of course <a href="https://www.atanet.org/business_practices/smarts_2009_january.php" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #d6001c; cursor: pointer; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.5s, background-color 0.5s; vertical-align: baseline;">we can talk about that</a>. There are many translators out there who post their rates on their websites. The FTC is not out there snooping around trying to find translators sitting in a coffee shop at an ALTA conference talking about how much they make. So I think it’s really important for translators not to be paranoid. But, to me, the main protection of a guild is not so much in the rates but in the types of contracts that are offered to us initially. A lot of publishing houses have a really basic contract that they come out with, and often the editor is bringing it out and doesn’t even know that there are other versions of it. The editor is not a legal person. But the main thing is, as a translator, I want other translators to know that these are negotiable documents and we have a right to negotiate them. There are other issues besides the amount of money. There’s the issue of royalties; there’s the issue of whether the copyright is registered in our name; there’s the issue of whether our name is on the cover, whether it’s on the title page. Is it mentioned in the copy that goes along with a book when it’s publicized? These are all contract issues.</div>
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<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">CP</span>: I’m going to interrupt you for two seconds just to read my favorite part of this. This is from the PEN model contract: “The translator’s name shall appear on the cover and title page of all editions of the book and in all publicity and advertising copy released by the Publisher, wherever the author’s name appears.” That all is what you just said, which is fine. This is the part that I like: “In a type size not smaller than sixty (60%) percent of that of the author’s name.”[laughs] How did you get to 60 exactly?</div>
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<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">AZ</span>: I wasn’t around when that was negotiated, but I have sent it to publishers, and they have agreed.</div>
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<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">CP</span>: I’m just trying to look at a book here to see if I can even judge if it’s 60 percent. I would say no.</div>
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<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">AZ</span>: I don’t know what I would use to measure that with.</div>
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<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">CP</span>: Yeah, I’m grabbing random books around my desk. I’m just curious about that. Anyways, go on. So you’re talking more about rights and less about money.</div>
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AZ: But there is one example I want to give of how an organization working on behalf of translators—whether it’s the PEN Translation Committee, whether it’s an author’s guild, whatever form it takes—can influence rates in a totally legal way. The way it’s being done right now, for instance, in the UK is that the <a href="http://www.societyofauthors.org/translators-association" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #d6001c; cursor: pointer; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.5s, background-color 0.5s; vertical-align: baseline;">Translators Association</a>, which is a group within the Society of Authors, which is the equivalent of the Authors Guild in the United States. The Translators Association—let me read you the language. This is what they say: “The negotiation of fees is a matter for the individual translator and client to resolve. In the Society’s experience of reviewing contracts, we have found that UK publishers are prepared to pay in the region of £88.5 per 1,000 words. Translators may also find it useful to note the payment model used by independent publishing house And Other Stories.” They also use the publishing house <a href="http://www.andotherstories.org/" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #d6001c; cursor: pointer; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.5s, background-color 0.5s; vertical-align: baseline;">And Other Stories</a> as a model, in general, of their practices. So what they’re doing is saying, “We have found that publishers are prepared to pay this,” sort of a suggested best practice that’s coming from the Society of Authors, which includes the Translators Association, and there’s no reason that an organization here couldn’t also do that. The way that this is put into practice is that the <a href="http://www.englishpen.org/grants/writers-in-translation/" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #d6001c; cursor: pointer; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.5s, background-color 0.5s; vertical-align: baseline;">English PEN Writing in Translation Awards</a>, when they are given out, publishers apply for those and they are—I don’t know if they’re bound, but when they apply it says, “This is the rate that we recommend,” so it’s like a lever saying, “If you want to get a grant from English PEN, you better be prepared to pay this rate.” So that’s just one example of how having a recommended rate can influence, in a positive way, how much translators are paid.</div>
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<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">CP</span>: I’m trying to think of how that could work in the US. Because we don’t have grants really, except for <a href="http://arts.gov/grants-organizations/art-works/literature" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #d6001c; cursor: pointer; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.5s, background-color 0.5s; vertical-align: baseline;">NEA</a>. That impacts a large number, but not everyone.</div>
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<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">AZ</span>: The NEA, for instance, when it makes a <a href="https://www.rochester.edu/newscenter/open-letter-books-awarded-national-endowment-for-the-arts-grant-81872/" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #d6001c; cursor: pointer; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.5s, background-color 0.5s; vertical-align: baseline;">grant to Open Letter</a>, could attach, either as a recommendation or a stipulation, that if you want to get a grant to support publishing of translations you have to pay your translators a minimum of 12 cents a word.</div>
<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.6; margin-bottom: 1rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">CP</span>: Which is crazy! I would actually be offended by that one.</div>
<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.6; margin-bottom: 1rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">AZ</span>: Why?</div>
<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.6; margin-bottom: 1rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">CP</span>: A good number of translations are being published by nonprofits, but there’s also a lot of publishers that are not nonprofits and that don’t get grants from the NEA. So there would be regulations against us—the lowest branch, the least capitalized, in general, of the publishing tiers—but not against anyone else.</div>
<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.6; margin-bottom: 1rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">AZ</span>: Why is that against you, though? It would be coming from the money that you’re getting from the NEA.</div>
<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.6; margin-bottom: 1rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">CP</span>: Yeah, but it would be a regulation that would be dictating what we have to do, which someone else wouldn’t have to do. And that money from the NEA goes to all costs related to those books, not just the translators. That money doesn’t go to just the translators.</div>
<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.6; margin-bottom: 1rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">AZ</span>: Well, you have to weigh the question of what is in the publisher’s best interest financially versus what is in the interest of the long-term sustainability of literature and literary translation. Because if translators can’t make a living translating, then fewer of us are going to do it. If we’re not translating as much, we’re not going to be as good. You know, in the United States most translators have other jobs—because the rates are relatively low here. That has an impact on what kind of translator you get. A writer who’s writing full time is generally going to be a better writer than somebody who’s working a day job and just squeezing it in in their free time. I’m not saying there have never been any writers who have been good who squeeze it in in their free time, but it’s a question of priorities.</div>
<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.6; margin-bottom: 1rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Tom Roberge</span>: I think Chad’s dislike of regulation is exactly that: It’s a dislike of regulations in general. You know, capitalism largely works without them, unless you’re talking tax and that sort of thing, but how business is conducted, apart from very basic equality safeguards, is largely unfettered. What I’m trying to say is they’re more geared towards the consumer: We get fair prices—you know, Time Warner can’t charge us an arm and a leg for capped internet and that sort of thing—and hiring practices. I guess this translation thing would fall under a hiring practice, but the laws that exist, the regulations that exist, are largely about, you know, “You have to treat all employees fairly: You can’t discriminate against handicapped, you can’t discriminate against minorities, etc, etc.” The rates you pay, even though it’s a nonprofit, it just seems—I agree with Chad—a little harsh to impose and insist on something when the truth is these are the people most likely to already be meeting this minimum standard to begin with. I don’t like the implication that they don’t know how to handle this sort of thing, or they don’t know what their own mission is, or they don’t know what’s good for the rest of their business. I understand, the NEA’s giving out a lot of money and it comes with strings. It’s just the strings can be a little insulting, I think.</div>
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<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">CP</span>: I had a thought experiment for a second, I’m not sure where it would go, but how much money would result from a book in translation and how that money would get split to people, to see where this rate works and doesn’t work, which I would be curious to know. But, Alex, since you and I talked about this, what is your going rate?</div>
<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.6; margin-bottom: 1rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">AZ</span>: My going rate? [laughs] I’ll take as much as I can get! You know, look, I’m not an absolutist. I work for different rates depending on who’s hiring me. I will say the most that I’ve been paid by a publisher up to now has been 15 cents a word.</div>
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<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">CP</span>: So one fifty a thousand [$150 per 1,000 words].</div>
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<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">AZ</span>: Yeah. When I work for an individual, I generally ask for more than that, and generally get it, because an individual’s not publishing a book, they’re asking me to translate a work and then they’re doing something with it. I’m doing a book right now for a publishing house in Prague for next to nothing. But contracts, one of the things that you look at when you negotiate is how long do you have to do it. So I’m translating this novella and I said, “I want a year and a half to do it,” rather than the three or four months that it would take me if I just did it straight through. And I got a residency and worked on it in Banff, Canada, for three weeks last summer, so that was a type of compensation that I wasn’t getting from the publishing house. And it’s a book that I really believe in—from the mid-1950s, an era where there’s only been one other book translated from Czech into English before. The writing is exceptional. I mean it depends, you know? There may be some people at the very top who simply refuse to work for less than a certain amount of money under any circumstances.</div>
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<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">CP</span>: So the rate for the UK is £90 per 1,000 words, which at the moment is approximately $135 per 1,000 words. I just wondered where you sit within that. If there was going to be a guideline like, “We have found that US publishers are prepared to pay in the region of $135 per 1,000 words,” does that seem true to you, or off base? This is a question for you too, Tom.</div>
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<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">TR</span>: I know what we paid at Penguin was around $140. I think that was what we generally offered translators. It might have changed. I haven’t been there for six or seven years; maybe five. Anyway, in my experience I never had anyone balk at it, so I guess in retrospect it was a pretty good rate. From what Alex was saying, I guess it is. At least a little higher than average. I mean it was Penguin, after all. And the Penguin contracts do, by default, stipulate for royalties—which is good. The classics, at least, your name will always be on the cover. What I’m wondering about is, what did <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lydia_Davis#Translations" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #d6001c; cursor: pointer; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.5s, background-color 0.5s; vertical-align: baseline;">Lydia Davis</a> get? I wonder if it’s not even a rate, it’s like a straight-up—</div>
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<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">AZ</span>: Well, that’s the other thing. There are publishers that do that. I’ve signed contracts where it wasn’t a rate per word, it was just a fixed amount.</div>
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CP: We’ve been doing that with some things at times, recently in particular, but we usually do the rate, and usually it falls between $100 and $125. Usually don’t do $140—seems high. So for the benefit of our listeners, though, what does that mean then? So for your rate, Alex, if it’s $135 per 1,000 words, we’ll say. What does that translate into for a book and for the amount of time that you put into that book? And granted there are different types of books. Let’s say something that’s not extremely obtuse and is going to require you to spend two years hunting down information, and not something that you can toss out in an afternoon, but your average book.</div>
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<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">AZ</span>: Well, I’m going to back up for just a second, because in addition to the model contract from the PEN Translation Committee, we also have <a href="https://pen.org/faqs" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #d6001c; cursor: pointer; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.5s, background-color 0.5s; vertical-align: baseline;">a set of FAQs</a>, and one of them is, “I’ve been asked by a publisher to do a translation. What sort of compensation should I ask for?” And we cite here that English PEN suggests this fee of no less than £88.5 per 1,000 words—as you just said, they’ve recently raised it to £90—and what we write is, “This falls in the middle of the range of rates reported by our members.” That’s how we worded it there. So if we’re saying that’s about 13.5 cents a word, our members at PEN—and to be a member of PEN you have to have translated at least one book—</div>
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<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">CP</span>: I really love that it was £88 per 1,000 words, which in 2014 was $148, which now is only $135. Go, America!</div>
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<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">AZ</span>: I have to update that. So in the middle of the range of rates reported by our members—that means our members are reporting from 9 to 18 cents a word or so, which is, when I talk to my friends and colleagues, that’s about what people are getting. Personally I would say I could not afford to work for even 10 cents a word. I would really balk at that. Although, again, I took this job translating this novella for Charles University Press, but that was an exceptional project. Again, contracts, it always depends: How much time do I have to do it? How difficult is it? Et cetera, et cetera.</div>
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CP: That’s why I want to try to make this as concrete as possible for people, so we have as full of an understanding of what happens in this business as possible. We’ll stick with the $135 for right now. What does that end up meaning? How long does it take to make a normal book? How many months is it going to take you? What does that actually end up being in dollars?</div>
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<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">AZ</span>: In dollars? Well, in that blog post I wrote, I figured out my rate was about $15 an hour—</div>
<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.6; margin-bottom: 1rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">CP</span>: But before we get to hours—</div>
<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.6; margin-bottom: 1rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">AZ</span>: —the total amount of money for a book? Well, if I get 15 cents . . . A long novel’s 100,000 words, maybe a normal one is 80,000, so if I’m getting 15 cents a word and the novel’s 80,000 words, then I’m getting $12,000, right?</div>
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<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">CP</span>: Right. For that normal novel, 80,000 words, how many pages is that, just to give people a sense. 300?</div>
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<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">AZ</span>: Yeah, I’ve got a book here that I did which was exactly that, which is where I pulled that from. Yeah, maybe more like 250, it depends of course—</div>
<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.6; margin-bottom: 1rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">CP</span>: So 250-to-300-page book. You’ll get $12,000 to translate that, approximately. How long does that usually take you to do?</div>
<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.6; margin-bottom: 1rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">AZ</span>: 80,000 words is definitely going to take me at least six months.</div>
<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.6; margin-bottom: 1rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">CP</span>: And how much time are you going to be working on it during those six months?</div>
<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.6; margin-bottom: 1rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">AZ</span>: Well, I’m talking about more or less a full-time—</div>
<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.6; margin-bottom: 1rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">CP</span>: Full-time: 40 hours a week?</div>
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<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">AZ</span>: Yeah.</div>
<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.6; margin-bottom: 1rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">CP</span>: Wow, that’s a significant amount of time.</div>
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<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">AZ</span>: There are people who work faster than I do. The fastest I’ve ever done a book—I did the <a href="http://www.dalkeyarchive.com/?s=Ouredn%C3%ADk+Patrik" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #d6001c; cursor: pointer; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.5s, background-color 0.5s; vertical-align: baseline;">Patrik Ouředník</a> books for Dalkey Archive Press, which were pretty short, and I think I did one of those in like three months, and those were somewhere between 30,000 and 40,000 words.</div>
<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.6; margin-bottom: 1rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">CP</span>: Perfect. So it took to you six months to do this, which is approximately 960 hours of work, which adds up to $12.50 an hour. And if it took you six months full-time, you could reasonably assume to do two books a year—if you had the demand for that—which would get you $24,000 a year.</div>
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<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">AZ</span>: Yeah. Although I do think it’s also important to say that as the translator I’m not just translating the book, right? There’s also all the time that I spend editing it with the editor, and then I’m going through it with the copy editor, and then I’m going through it with the proofreader. And I’m not being paid for any of <span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">that</span> time.</div>
<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.6; margin-bottom: 1rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">CP</span>: Right. Exactly. So doing two books a year is pretty much the maximum you could be expected to do, and even that would be strained in certain ways, because you’d be spending a lot of time, depending on what it is, with the editor, with marketing, with other things—well, I’m just going to group it all together to point out that this is a fairly dismal scenario [laughs] for people who are just getting into translating and might be listening and going like, “Oh, here’s one of the top Czech translators in the country, and this is what their pay rate is. They work for $24,000 a year.”</div>
<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.6; margin-bottom: 1rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">AZ</span>: Yes.</div>
<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.6; margin-bottom: 1rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">TR</span>: Wait, can we also point out that authors don’t make money?</div>
<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.6; margin-bottom: 1rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">AZ</span>: Oh, absolutely.</div>
<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.6; margin-bottom: 1rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">TR</span>: If your book is being published as a paperback original from New Directions—granted, we’re doing it in translation, so [the author has] in theory gotten paid from [their] native country’s publisher. László [Krasznahorkai] is able to write full time, be a professional writer, but largely based on his German publications, not <a href="http://www.ndbooks.com/author/laszlo-krasznahorkai" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #d6001c; cursor: pointer; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.5s, background-color 0.5s; vertical-align: baseline;">his New Directions publications</a>. I’m not going to give out the amounts, but it’s pretty minor. It’s about what you’re talking about for the one project. That’s the high end of what we pay. So if you’re an American and you’re published by, let’s say, <a href="http://www.twodollarradio.com/" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #d6001c; cursor: pointer; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.5s, background-color 0.5s; vertical-align: baseline;">Two Dollar Radio</a>, you’re lucky to get that much money as well. And you could’ve spent years working on that. And then you’re going on a tour, and you’re giving readings, and again, you’re going through the editing process and marketing process, and giving interviews, and all of your time that takes up. And it’s very self-promotional, and that shouldn’t necessarily mean that you should be compensated for it. The point being, to make, let’s say, $10,000 or $15,000, you’re giving up a lot of time and effort. But this is what art is, right? You could toil away for decades and not get recognized, then all of a sudden all the hard work pays off. I mean it is what it is, it’s what we choose—those of us who choose it. To complain about the financial aspects only when you’re neck-deep in it just seems wrong. We’re all aware of it going in. It’s just the way the situation is, I think.</div>
<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.6; margin-bottom: 1rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">AZ</span>: Yeah. To the extent that everybody is aware of it going in, I agree. And I think the reason that the work of the PEN Translation Committee is important is that actually not everybody <span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">is</span> aware of it going in. I’ll speak for myself, it took me a long time to get savvy to what I needed to look for in a contract, and to the extent that we talk about it, people know. Again, I’m not going to speak for authors—and I agree that authors are very much in the same boat, Tom, no doubt about it—but a lot of translators really are very unaware, uneducated going into their first book, and have no idea about what a contract should have, does have, what are the kinds of issues that are at stake. My main point is that it’s important to talk about it. I mean I also have personal opinions about sustainability of culture in the United States, and there are obviously much larger issues here. Chad talks about these things all the time in articles he writes and blog posts he does and panels he’s on, and we see this debate being played out on the world stage with Amazon at the center—and other arts too, it’s not just literature. What is sustainable? Is it sustainable for artists to be dependent on corporate sponsorship? Is it sustainable for artists to be supported only on grants? Do artists have the right to earn a living wage like doctors, lawyers, and web designers? These kinds of issues.</div>
<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.6; margin-bottom: 1rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">TR</span>: [pauses] Those are all complex issues.</div>
<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.6; margin-bottom: 1rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">AZ</span>: [laughs]</div>
<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.6; margin-bottom: 1rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">CP</span>: Yeah, also the people working in publishing aren’t making a ton of money either. [laughs] Which was going to be my next question, to continue to contextualize this for our listeners: With one of these books, how much money are we really talking about? We’re looking at it from the individual perspective of the author and of the translator, and even of the employees who are involved with it, you could get into that. But if we’re talking about, say, a Czech book that’s 300 pages, that’s relatively well-reviewed, what is our range of copies that we’re actually going to sell of this?</div>
<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.6; margin-bottom: 1rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">TR</span>: Twenty-five hundred?</div>
<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.6; margin-bottom: 1rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">AZ</span>: That’s how many would get printed maybe.</div>
<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.6; margin-bottom: 1rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">TR</span>: You can expect to sell those over a five-year period, let’s say.</div>
<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.6; margin-bottom: 1rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">AZ</span>: If the publisher’s doing a good job of it, yeah. It depends.</div>
<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.6; margin-bottom: 1rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">CP</span>: We’ll qualify that statement by saying not all publishers will be able to sell 2,500 copies with all books they do. But we’re just going to use this number for fun here. How much is that book going to cost? How much are you list-pricing it at, Tom? Are you saying it’s a paperback?</div>
<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.6; margin-bottom: 1rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">TR</span>: Yeah, how many pages did you say? Three hundred? That’d be $16.95, I guess.</div>
<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.6; margin-bottom: 1rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">CP</span>: You want to go up to $16.95? Okay.</div>
<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.6; margin-bottom: 1rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">TR</span>: I think that’s the trend.</div>
<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.6; margin-bottom: 1rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">CP</span>: That’s fine. That works for me. If it ends up with decimals I’m rounding it. So, with that, if we sold 2,500 copies of that book at $16.95, that is $42,375 before anything. But wait. That 42,000 is a bullshit number, because half of that goes away in the discount—at least half—to booksellers. I’ll just keep doing it as half, just because that’s easy, Tom. That brings it down to $21,187.50.</div>
<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.6; margin-bottom: 1rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">AZ</span>: Give it to me. [laughs]</div>
<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.6; margin-bottom: 1rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">CP</span>: So as the translator, you’re going to get $12,000, right? So your $12,000 brings us down to $9,187.50. Tom, how much would it cost to print 2,500 copies of this book, do you think?</div>
<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.6; margin-bottom: 1rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">TR</span>: About $6,000? $7,000?</div>
<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.6; margin-bottom: 1rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">CP</span>: We’ll say $6,000. Just say we got a good deal. That’s $3,187.50 that’s leftover, and we haven’t paid the author, our distributor, or our employees yet.</div>
<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.6; margin-bottom: 1rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">TR</span>: Yeah, it’s a losing proposition.</div>
<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.6; margin-bottom: 1rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">CP</span>: Yeah. I just want to bring that one home really hard for anyone listening. Then you end up paying your distributor in the range of 20+ percent of your net receipts, so that automatically takes out a chunk. Your author is going to get some thousands of dollars. And then if we do get a grant—you generally get grants if you’re a nonprofit—[but] you guys, New Directions, would be screwed under this as a losing proposition. You could get a grant from the Czech government, say, to offset some of Alex’s costs, but that’s usually like half of it. So, say, you get $6,000 back—you’re still having to pay for your office, your employees, your everything. The point that I was thinking about is that it is dismal, and I think it’s important to have the work that the PEN Translation Committee is doing with the contracts, the awareness of it. But I get the feeling sometimes that there’s this underlying, unspoken thing that someone’s making off with a lot of money. And no one is making off with a lot of money here.</div>
<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.6; margin-bottom: 1rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">AZ</span>: Oh, it’s not my belief that somebody’s making off with a lot of money. I’ll just speak for myself personally, but to me the numbers that you just cited, the numbers that Tom is talking about, this is important because it shows you cannot treat culture the way that you treat refrigerators. A lot of the things that we as human beings in this society really need to feel like human beings—we need culture—cannot be supported solely on the basis of supply-and-demand and the market. There needs to be some kind of support for it. It’s not enough just to say, “Well, if it didn’t make money it’s not worth doing.”</div>
<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.6; margin-bottom: 1rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">CP</span>: And this is the motivation in some sense behind one of the more negative aspects of this. As the publisher I could look at these numbers and just be like, “You know what, Alex? No. I’m going to pay you $2,000. If you can’t translate it, I’ll find a student who will do it for me.” And I’ve saved $10,000.</div>
<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.6; margin-bottom: 1rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">AZ</span>: Yeah, or all the publishers will just have to shut down, right? We all know that there are publishing houses that are being run at a loss, on an ongoing basis, simply because the person or people behind it have decided they want to keep it going—the culture is that important to them. But I think it’s important for us to know that it’s going on. There is increasing pressure on all sorts of cultural projects—artists and writers are working for less and less money all the time; it’s happening to journalists because of the internet; more and more people are being expected to work for free—in return for exposure. What is that exposure supposed to get you? It’s supposed to get you work, but if the work isn’t paying your living, then what’s the point? There are a lot of big issues at stake here.</div>
<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.6; margin-bottom: 1rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">CP</span>: Yeah. [laughs] I don’t know where to go from there.</div>
<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.6; margin-bottom: 1rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">AZ</span>: I certainly don’t walk around thinking that publishers are getting rich off of my labor.</div>
<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.6; margin-bottom: 1rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">CP</span>: I’m not accusing you of thinking that either. I don’t want it to come across that way, but in some discussions about this—when we start talking about rates and the underpayment of translators, there should be an asterisk that the whole system is a little bit jacked. Nothing’s quite right, and I don’t know how we make that right.</div>
<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.6; margin-bottom: 1rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">AZ</span>: Right. That’s why I like to connect it to the larger world of culture and other arts—it’s not just translators; it’s not just literature. I agree.</div>
<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.6; margin-bottom: 1rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">CP</span>: If we’re selling 10,000 copies of every book of these, all these numbers become a lot more doable.</div>
<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.6; margin-bottom: 1rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">TR</span>: Can I just point out: How many people live in this country? 300 million?</div>
<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.6; margin-bottom: 1rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">CP</span>: I think it’s like 380, isn’t it? It’s over 300 million now.</div>
<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.6; margin-bottom: 1rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">TR</span>: Let’s say half of those are adults, or read in English.</div>
<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.6; margin-bottom: 1rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">AZ</span>: 322 million.</div>
<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.6; margin-bottom: 1rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">TR</span>: So let’s roughly say 150 million people who are potential readers of a book like this—we’re selling 2,500 copies.</div>
<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.6; margin-bottom: 1rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">CP</span>: [laughs]</div>
<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.6; margin-bottom: 1rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">TR</span>: I mean the numbers are staggering. In the last podcast we were talking about [Mark] Zuckerberg’s <a href="https://www.facebook.com/ayearofbooks" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #d6001c; cursor: pointer; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.5s, background-color 0.5s; vertical-align: baseline;">book club</a> and how many copies it sold, and we were like, “Yeah, that puts you on the bestseller list.” Even the <span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">New York Times</span> bestseller list requires sales of about 2,000 or 3,000 copies a week. If you do that for a year, you’re still only selling 100,000 copies. This is a country of hundreds of millions of people, and that’s how many copies of books we’re selling.</div>
<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.6; margin-bottom: 1rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">CP</span>: This is why it would be better to just make apps.</div>
<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.6; margin-bottom: 1rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">AZ</span>: How many people go through, I don’t know, the Museum of Modern Art in a week?</div>
<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.6; margin-bottom: 1rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">CP</span>: Hold on, I’m going to drive this home real quick for you, Tom, with those numbers. 150 million people—to sell 2,500 copies, you have to sell one book to every 60,000 people.</div>
<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.6; margin-bottom: 1rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">TR</span>: [laughs] That’s like a whole city.</div>
<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.6; margin-bottom: 1rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">CP</span>: Yeah, literally one book to every 60,000 people, you will sell 2,500 copies.</div>
<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.6; margin-bottom: 1rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">TR</span>: You want to know how many people go to MoMA?</div>
<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.6; margin-bottom: 1rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">AZ</span>: I think this stuff is fascinating, no?</div>
<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.6; margin-bottom: 1rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">TR</span>: Just as somebody who works in New York, literally across the street from the Met.</div>
<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.6; margin-bottom: 1rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">AZ</span>: Or the Met. But the Met is more like <a href="http://www.penguinclassics.com/" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #d6001c; cursor: pointer; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.5s, background-color 0.5s; vertical-align: baseline;">Penguin Classics</a>, and I chose MoMA because it’s more like contemporary literature.</div>
<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.6; margin-bottom: 1rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">TR</span>: 2.5 million people a year.</div>
<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.6; margin-bottom: 1rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">CP</span>: Damn.</div>
<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.6; margin-bottom: 1rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">AZ</span>: Do they all pay?</div>
<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.6; margin-bottom: 1rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">CP</span>: If they don’t, doesn’t it get underwritten? It gets underwritten in some way.</div>
<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.6; margin-bottom: 1rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">TR</span>: It’s $25 to go to MoMA.</div>
<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.6; margin-bottom: 1rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">CP</span>: Yeah, and it’s free Friday from 4 till 8 p.m.</div>
<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.6; margin-bottom: 1rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">TR</span>: I don’t think most people plan their visits that way.</div>
<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.6; margin-bottom: 1rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">CP</span>: No, and UNIQLO probably is sponsored by them, so that money probably still gets factored into there. That’s like 48,000 people a week going there.</div>
<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.6; margin-bottom: 1rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">TR</span>: Yeah, it’s ridiculous. I mean the number of people going in and out of the Met every day, it’s mind-boggling. If all those people just bought a book, in addition to doing that.</div>
<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.6; margin-bottom: 1rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">AZ</span>: It’s cheaper than the admission.</div>
<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.6; margin-bottom: 1rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">CP</span>: It is, and it would take you longer to read it.</div>
<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.6; margin-bottom: 1rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">TR</span>: I was going to point this out. Going to MoMA, going to the Met—you don’t really need to know all that much about art. You can just walk in and there are placards on the wall that will explain things. You can just stand in front of a painting, and it might be one of the most valuable, most important pieces of art in the world, but you can look at it and say “Yeah, I don’t like it,” and walk away. It’s not forcing you to engage in the way that literature does. It can be difficult to engage in a book, especially if you have no knowledge of the cultural, historical context. And you know, translated stuff tends to be like that. So I can understand why people go for the easy option. There’s no shortage of people going to see <span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">The Avengers</span>. Or buying comic books. It’s an easier form of art to consume.</div>
<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.6; margin-bottom: 1rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">AZ</span>: So, here’s the devil’s advocate argument: Actually, we have too many books in translation in English, and publishers can’t make any money on them, so publishers should limit themselves to publishing only those books that they can actually make money on, and there should be much more effort, time, financial backing put into getting those books to the people who really want and will appreciate them.</div>
<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.6; margin-bottom: 1rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">CP</span>: Isn’t that what happens, though, in a practical way?</div>
<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.6; margin-bottom: 1rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">TR</span>: No, because there’s a lot of chaff published on the side. New Directions publishes 30-some-odd books a year, and you ask a dedicated reader by the end, they’re going to know five of them. So what if we only spent our time and money publishing those five? This is not unlike <a href="http://twelvebooks.com/" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #d6001c; cursor: pointer; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.5s, background-color 0.5s; vertical-align: baseline;">Twelve Books</a>, where they publish one a month and they put literally all their efforts into one book at a time—which is not true because on the back end it’s more complicated—but in terms of marketing and publicity, everything gearing up for one month, everything goes into this one book. But not every book is a hit.</div>
<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.6; margin-bottom: 1rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">AZ</span>: Maybe most publishers are too big.</div>
<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.6; margin-bottom: 1rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">CP</span>: I’m thinking of it in somewhat of a different light than what you’re saying—what you’re saying I completely agree with—but on a practical level, as a book starts doing better, you tend to put more time and effort into it. So on a structural level, at a larger publisher, some of the lower books that aren’t selling as well aren’t going to get quite as much attention a month onwards as the <a href="http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674430006" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #d6001c; cursor: pointer; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.5s, background-color 0.5s; vertical-align: baseline;">Thomas Piketty book</a> or whatever. So, in some ways, the market does end up forcing your hand a bit, but I don’t think that doing books that aren’t in translation are that much cheaper.</div>
<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.6; margin-bottom: 1rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">TR</span>: Also agree. But to finish up this point: Alex, what you were talking about—doing a book that costs next to nothing and you’re getting paid next to nothing because you really believe in the book—this ties into what you were saying about the rights reverting to the translator, because three books later, three translations later, that author becomes popular and the backlist starts selling. This is also the mission of New Directions. We stick with authors. We did three books with László before <a href="http://www.ndbooks.com/book/satantango" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #d6001c; cursor: pointer; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.5s, background-color 0.5s; vertical-align: baseline;">Satantango</a> really caught on and attracted attention. You have to be committed. You’re going to take a loss on those three early books and you have to stay committed. That’s why you publish not just the five that you know you can sell right then and there, in that fiscal year. That’s why you publish the other ones on the side. You’re aware of the limitations in the market, but you do it anyway. It’s a much longer-term process that you have to stay committed to. Otherwise—I mean, there are a lot of publishers and I’m not going to name them because they do some good books—but this is the one-and-done model of publishing, not just with translations, but everything. The focus on new culture and debut novelists, and they’re just trying to get the fast buck.</div>
<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.6; margin-bottom: 1rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">CP</span>: To bring that home, didn’t the first László book come out from Harcourt Brace?</div>
<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.6; margin-bottom: 1rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">TR</span>: It did?</div>
<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.6; margin-bottom: 1rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">CP</span>: I might be wrong. I might be thinking of <a href="http://www.ndbooks.com/author/javier-marias" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #d6001c; cursor: pointer; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.5s, background-color 0.5s; vertical-align: baseline;">Marías</a>.</div>
<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.6; margin-bottom: 1rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">TR</span>: Yes, Marías. We were the second.</div>
<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.6; margin-bottom: 1rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">AZ</span>: Well, New Directions is a fantastic publisher. When I’ve heard Barbara Epler speak, I’ve heard her say—you can correct me if I’m wrong, Tom—but she talks about the fact that it’s got this strong backlist, which enables the publishing house to be able to bring out five Krasznahorkai books at a loss before one that makes up for the others. That’s a great position to be in. But I really like that idea, and right now, for instance, there’s an author, Petra Hůlová, whose first novel I did for <a href="http://www.nupress.northwestern.edu/titles/all-belongs-me" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #d6001c; cursor: pointer; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.5s, background-color 0.5s; vertical-align: baseline;">Northwestern University Press</a> back in 2009. It won the <a href="https://www.utdallas.edu/news/2010/10/26-6551_ALTA-Honors-Translations-of-Czech-Chinese-Works_article.html" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #d6001c; cursor: pointer; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.5s, background-color 0.5s; vertical-align: baseline;">National Translation Award</a> in 2010. I haven’t been able to sell another book of hers since, and she’s written eight novels now and she’s 35 years old. But when I go to publishers now, what I’m saying is, “I would really like to find a publishing house that is committed to publishing this author, not just this book.” I think that’s one way that a publishing house can be more successful, both financially and culturally. Of course different literatures have different standing. Czech literature is at a disadvantage to, say, French literature, where people don’t grow up knowing much about it. I think part of the reason people are more likely to buy a book that’s translated from French or Spanish or German is that it seems less foreign to them, relative to Czech, and if you only ever get one book by each author—one book by Petra Hůlová and one book by Josef Jedlička and one book by Magdaléna Platzová—there’s no idea of who these authors are, but when you get several books coming out, people begin to form an idea of the author and how they fit into the culture, and I think a lot of people do connect to literature that way. I really like that—I don’t want to call it a model of publishing, but that approach, I guess.</div>
<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.6; margin-bottom: 1rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">CP</span>: I have three statements: One is, Tom, I was thinking of the Quartet version, which apparently came out in 1999 for Krasznahorkai. But that was only the UK version, so that one doesn’t count. The Marías is the one that was published and then dropped and that you guys obviously made a success out of. Two things I was thinking of. Alex, do you still run into publishers that don’t give you back the rights to your translation if it goes out of print, that they copyright it in their name and retain that? And secondly, this is much broader and more complicated: According to our database, we have more and more publishers every year doing fiction and poetry in translation. However, a greater number of them are smaller presses. Do you get the sense that it’s easier to find a place for books because there’s this resurgence? We say that things are growing, and more books are being made available, there’s more interest generally in translation. But do you have a problem that, yes, there are more people doing this, however that hasn’t changed your specific authors that you’re working on? That these are presses that are starting out on a shoestring and can’t afford your going rate, so it’s not really helping you financially?</div>
<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.6; margin-bottom: 1rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">AZ</span>: Yes. [laughs] It’s not helping me. The first question—yes, I have come across contracts recently that don’t have a reversion of rights clause in them. I don’t usually assume that it’s not there because they want to screw me over. I assume it’s not there because they just don’t know about it. I had a contract sent to me by a publishing house, and just to see what they would say, I sent it to an Authors Guild lawyer to review, and when I wrote back to him I said, “At PEN we really advocate for there being a reversion of rights clause,” and this is why, you know, for the reason we were saying before, and he said, “Oh, I didn’t think of that. Maybe we’ll start saying that to translators when they send us contracts from now on.” So I think it’s one of those issues that just hasn’t been on people’s radar. And again, I think maybe publishing houses and their lawyers—it’s not the editors who are drawing up the contracts normally—they probably just don’t even think about the reversion of rights issue.</div>
<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.6; margin-bottom: 1rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">CP</span>: Then, to clarify the question, make it a bit more direct, have you ever asked anyone? For example said, “You don’t have a reversion of rights clause, it’s the normal thing.” Are there presses that you’re running into that are saying, “Hell no, we’re not giving that to you”?</div>
<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.6; margin-bottom: 1rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">AZ</span>: No, they’ve all said okay. As to the second question, I think it really does matter which language you’re translating. The translation landscape, market, definitely needs to be disaggregated for those of us who work in smaller languages. It’s not the same for me as it is for somebody who translates from—not even just a language that’s spoken by more people and whose literature is more familiar to readers—but that gets more support from the state institutions. I think one of the main reasons, if not the main reason, that French literature is perennially the one that’s translated the most is because of the backing for it from French cultural institutions. Ditto for German. And Spanish, of course, is coming from so many different countries, that there are multiple routes to take. Russian is actually getting a lot of support. And then we’ve seen from your databases that, in any given year, if a country decides to put a lot of money into grants for translations, then all of a sudden the number of books being translated from that language spikes. So the general increase in visibility of translations and popularity of translated literature has <span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">not</span> made a big difference to me as a Czech translator. For me personally it’s a question of meeting editors and them getting to know me and my work. I’ve noticed that the translators who publish the most often are the ones who have standing relationships with editors and publishing houses—where they’ve found a publishing house with an editor whose taste is similar and they know that that translator is not only an excellent translator but also good to work with: turns things in on time, turns them in clean, isn’t going to freak out, if they miss a deadline they let them know in advance—all of those things that make somebody a pleasure to work with as opposed to a pain in the ass. You know, I’m not complaining, but Czech is definitely an underdog compared to, again, French or Spanish or German. There are definitely languages that are underdogs compared to Czech too. I’m very aware of that.</div>
<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.6; margin-bottom: 1rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">TR</span>: The French take a lot of bashing on this front, and I would just like to point out that the reason the French put so much money and effort and resources into the promotion of their culture is that they value that culture. They value the arts. We should all applaud them!</div>
<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.6; margin-bottom: 1rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">AZ</span>: Who’s bashing? I’m not bashing!</div>
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<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">TR</span>: This whole underdog thing, that the French have more translations—they’re doing what they believe in. It’s a wonderful thing.</div>
<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.6; margin-bottom: 1rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">AZ</span>: I hope I’m not coming across as bashing. [laughs] I’m definitely not bashing the French. I’m just pointing out that it’s difficult to talk about translation writ large, because the situation’s different for different languages. If I say Czech is an underdog, that doesn’t mean I’m angry or resentful of French-language stuff. I’m just saying it’s a different landscape, different situation.</div>
<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.6; margin-bottom: 1rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">TR</span>: Wait, can I take the opportunity to bring up this email I got from, once again, Doug Singleton from McNally Jackson. Do you remember this one?</div>
<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.6; margin-bottom: 1rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">CP</span>: The one that I remember is the one about not giving away spoilers.</div>
<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.6; margin-bottom: 1rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">TR</span>: No, no. You actually replied to this, so you should remember. Doug writes in about Javier Molea.</div>
<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.6; margin-bottom: 1rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">CP</span>: Oh yeah, I know exactly what you’re talking about</div>
<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.6; margin-bottom: 1rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">TR</span>: So Javier Molea is the Spanish-language buyer and events coordinator, as well as just a general bookseller, at <a href="http://mcnallyjackson.com/" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #d6001c; cursor: pointer; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.5s, background-color 0.5s; vertical-align: baseline;">McNally Jackson</a>. And he was looking at these data from <a href="http://www.typographicalera.com/" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #d6001c; cursor: pointer; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.5s, background-color 0.5s; vertical-align: baseline;">Typographical Era</a>, “that there are many more French-language translations than Spanish-language translations, so the author pool and reading audience must surely be far, far greater for Spanish-language books. I’m not being facetious. I actually figure there must be a rational reason as regards French government subsidies or Spanish translations being sold through other channels than this group of publishers.” I replied and said, “We’ve talked about this before, and it has something to do with subsidies and the sheer aggression with which the French get their books into American editors’ hands, but it is still baffling.” And Chad, you wrote, What is your explanation of this bizarre phenomenon? And Alex, you feel like the French and the Spanish are the heavyweights, but the French are ahead even of the Spanish.</div>
<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.6; margin-bottom: 1rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">CP</span>: There were two main points that I had, the main one being that there are a lot of Spanish books being published but they’re not being professionally represented by agents or publishers. Frequently, if there’s a small press in Nicaragua that’s publishing really interesting books from Nicaraguan writers, they aren’t the people who are sending out catalogs to American editors or meeting with them at Frankfurt for drinks talking about their new hot Nicaraguan author. Whereas French, since it’s been such a hub for literature and language and art for such an extraordinarily long time, has a really professionalized and systematic way of representing their books. There’s all the promotions that they do with the grants—the <a href="http://frenchculture.org/books/grants-and-programs/publishing-grants-prizes/publishers" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #d6001c; cursor: pointer; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.5s, background-color 0.5s; vertical-align: baseline;">Hemingway Grants</a>, the <a href="http://www.centrenationaldulivre.fr/en/auteur-traducteur/aide_a_la_traduction/" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #d6001c; cursor: pointer; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.5s, background-color 0.5s; vertical-align: baseline;">grants from the CNL</a>—and the different things they do to promote the authors, bringing them on tours, all that kind of stuff. And that all does help, but there’s also the sense of certain editors, bigger editors, being connected to each other at these sort of places. I think the French are particularly good, as are the Germans, at representing their countries’ literature in a form that’s digestible and makes sense to editors who are considering it for translation. Spanish is a crazy one because there’s just so many books, and so many areas and so many locations. Everyone runs a little bit differently. There’s a lot of Argentine books we’ve done that are by very small presses, versus a big agent like <a href="http://publishingperspectives.com/2014/05/agenting-mega-merger-as-carmen-balcells-joins-andrew-wylie/" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #d6001c; cursor: pointer; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.5s, background-color 0.5s; vertical-align: baseline;">Carmen Balcells</a>, who’s representing the big-name authors from the Spanish-language world. If you think about places like China or Japan or South Korea that have a different way of dealing with things that doesn’t always line up with what an editor wants here, it’s going to restrict them in a way. It’s a structural problem.</div>
<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.6; margin-bottom: 1rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">AZ</span>: I agree. That’s all. [laughs]</div>
<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.6; margin-bottom: 1rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">CP</span>: Speaking of Czech, we don’t get approached by very many Czech publishers. There’s one publisher and one agent that I meet with on a regular basis. I think that might be it.</div>
<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.6; margin-bottom: 1rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">AZ</span>: Edgar?</div>
<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.6; margin-bottom: 1rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">CP</span>: No.</div>
<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.6; margin-bottom: 1rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">AZ</span>: Dana. Dana Blatná.</div>
<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.6; margin-bottom: 1rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">CP</span>: Yeah.</div>
<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.6; margin-bottom: 1rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">AZ</span>: There’s only two. There’s <a href="http://www.dbagency.cz/" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #d6001c; cursor: pointer; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.5s, background-color 0.5s; vertical-align: baseline;">Dana Blatná</a>, who’s Czech from the Czech Republic, and there’s <a href="http://www.pluh.org/" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #d6001c; cursor: pointer; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.5s, background-color 0.5s; vertical-align: baseline;">Edgar de Bruin</a>, who is Dutch and translates from Czech into Dutch, but he is the other person who represents a significant number of Czech authors’ foreign rights. He goes to Frankfurt. I think Dana does too.</div>
<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.6; margin-bottom: 1rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">TR</span>: Alex, along these lines, what if anything does PEN do to level this playing field a little bit?</div>
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<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">AZ</span>: We have limited levers at our disposal. The thing that Margaret and I are working toward right now is to get better outreach on the application process for the <a href="https://pen.org/content/penheim-translation-fund-grants-2000-4000" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #d6001c; cursor: pointer; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.5s, background-color 0.5s; vertical-align: baseline;">PEN/Heim Translation Fund grants</a>, which is a really important way to promote translations, both by up-and-coming translators but also from languages or cultures that have not typically been as widely exposed. We haven’t figured out exactly how to do it yet. But what’s valuable about those grants is that the amount of support is from $2,000 to $4,000, so based on what we just said, that’s not usually going to cover the full cost of translating a book—and the grants are made to individual translators, rather than the publishers—but the prestige of the grants, and the fact that there are publishers on the advisory panel that awards the grants means that, the last time they ran statistics, something like 60 percent of the translations that won PEN/Heim Fund grants did find a publisher. So I think to the extent that we can get more [translators] from Arabic applying for those grants, from Indonesian, or whatever languages are out there that have strong and valuable literature but typically have been overlooked, if they apply for and get a PEN grant, it astronomically increases the chance that they’ll be published. New Directions recently did a book from Indonesian, right?</div>
<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.6; margin-bottom: 1rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">TR</span>: No, it comes out in the fall.</div>
<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.6; margin-bottom: 1rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">AZ</span>: Do you know if that one won a PEN/Heim Fund grant?</div>
<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.6; margin-bottom: 1rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">TR</span>: I think it did. I don’t think she’s on it anymore, but I think Barbara [Epler] did it for three years and now she’s done.</div>
<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.6; margin-bottom: 1rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">AZ</span>: Since we’re all volunteers, the PEN American Center doesn’t have paid staff working on translation—that’s not something that they have the resources to work on—but that’s our main lever, to work on that issue.</div>
<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.6; margin-bottom: 1rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">CP</span>: Interesting. I always thought you guys got tons and tons of applications for that.</div>
<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.6; margin-bottom: 1rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">TR</span>: That was my impression too.</div>
<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.6; margin-bottom: 1rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">AZ</span>: This year I’ll be on the panel, so I’ll get to see where the applications are coming from. But I don’t know up to now. The other thing we’d like to do is have more of that data published. Our biggest obstacle is people power—having enough people to put all of this information together and get it published and out there. It’s a question of having the people to do it.</div>
<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.6; margin-bottom: 1rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">TR</span>: I don’t mean this to be too critical but, yes, PEN would do better to update their website more often, especially as regards these kinds of things.</div>
<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.6; margin-bottom: 1rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">AZ</span>: Yep, I agree [laughs]. We’re doing the best we can. We’ve updated it a lot in the past six months. There’s been a lot of work on the pen.org/translation page. I can’t speak for the rest of the site. I have no influence over that.</div>
<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.6; margin-bottom: 1rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">TR</span>: Well, I think in general they need to hire a couple more people.</div>
<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.6; margin-bottom: 1rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">AZ</span>: They have. They just got a new editorial assistant. They’re aware.</div>
<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.6; margin-bottom: 1rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">TR</span>: Well, I hope we’ve provided our listeners with a somewhat better understanding of the crazy mess, financially and ideologically, that is translating and publishing translated works.</div>
<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.6; margin-bottom: 1rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">CP</span>: We may have depressed everyone.</div>
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[End of discussion with Alex Zucker]</div>
</span></div>
Alex Z.http://www.blogger.com/profile/15635561148523957099noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5208019.post-27895634892516296322016-12-15T11:25:00.000-05:002017-03-06T09:11:05.959-05:00Department of Translator Advocacy, Part 2After publishing <a href="http://stickfinger.blogspot.com/2016/12/beyond-name-the-translator.html" target="_blank">my previous post</a>, I shared it in the Literary Translation group on Facebook, where Margaret Carson made some comments that I thought warranted a follow-up. Carson served as PEN America Translation Committee cochair in 2014–15 and has been involved in the committee’s work for years. Here’s what she wrote:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
This is great-- thanks for providing a transcript of the panel and sorry I couldn't make it to ALTA this year (ironically, a question of money; I'm only covered up to $450/year in travel reimbursements). Quickly: I don't believe it's an either/or question, though #namethetranslator is a much more straightforward advocacy: 1/ most reviews are online, many reviewers have Twitter accounts. Tweet the reviewer, tweet the publication, email the publication. Pick egregious lapses (the translator is not mentioned in the bibliographic headnote, there are quotes from the translation and the translator is not mentioned), not non-mentions in puff pieces about translations or publishers of translations in general. No attack mode while doing this. I've had some success with this. 2/ the underlying contract. I also mentioned to you in an email before the panel that there was a subsequent step by the PEN Translation Committee after the Watchdog Committee. In that iteration we thought translators would stand a better chance at being mentioned if the publisher's press materials named the translator, if the translator had an intro or note in the book, if the translator's name were required to be on the cover b/c that clause was in the contract, etc. And we collected a few "model" reviews in which the translator was named and the work praised in an interesting and non-formulaic way, with the idea of creating a Reviewer's "Hall of Fame" (as opposed to a Watchdog-like Wall of Shame). Lots more to be said on this, lots more to be done, yes, time-consuming, and one is tempted to let it go when yet another review fails to mention the translator. But it seems to me that if you're a full-time freelancer, you'd benefit the most from having your name mentioned whenever you work is reviewed because it's a selling point to publishers for future projects. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
On the issue of money, I noticed that no one actually said how much they were paid for specific projects or how much (as a publisher) they paid translators. An elephant in the room for sure. There's a misperception that translators cannot talk about rates, because of <a href="http://www.atanet.org/governance/governance_policystatement.php" target="_blank">that FTC investigation of the ATA</a> in the 1990s, which enjoined the ATA, as a professional organization, from posting suggested rates. Translators can definitely talk to one another about fees, past, present and future. [Editor’s Note: See the ATA’s own <a href="https://www.atanet.org/business_practices/smarts_2009_january.php" target="_blank">explanation of why it’s OK</a> for individual translators to discuss their rates. For more background and documentation, see <a href="http://www.linguabase.com/ftc.asp" target="_blank">here</a>, <a href="https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/sci.lang.translation/RyRiQ174TkE" target="_blank">here</a> and <a href="http://translorial.com/2005/05/01/the-taboo-of-rate-discussion/" target="_blank">here</a>.] Marcia Lynx Qualey talked about sharing information-- yes. But I also think this is not a traditional supply/demand kind of market. There are different kinds of publishers (for-profit, public corporations; private corporations; non-profits). Has anyone had any luck in getting a business model from any publisher about a translation they've published? It would be useful to know what the numbers are like. I used to be under the impression that translations were costly for publishers. But then I also heard that publishers liked translations because they didn't have to pay authors; they only had to pay for the rights and then pay the translator, a cheaper proposition. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
One more point about money: as cochair of the PEN TC I contacted the NEA Literature Director about tying a base rate to translators to subsidies received by non-profit publishers. Non-profit publishers who are awarded subsidies have to provide financials to the NEA. They could be required to provide as a line item their fees to translators and the rate they paid. They could be held accountable. There was no resolution of this at the time. If we had some data on translator compensation, I believe a case could be made for making sure translators got a minimally acceptable rate. Follow-up is needed, but now with the change in administration, who knows what will be left of the NEA? But any government agency (federal, state, local) that provides subsidies to non-profits can require that a minimally acceptable compensation be provided to those who are hired to carry out the projects that are funded.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Much more that could be said. There's always a lot of tiptoeing around this issue. Literary translation is a genteel business and there's always a danger that raising issues like this in a sustained way will get you sidelined. Thanks again, Alex, for making this available and for keeping the conversation going.</blockquote>
<br />
A few notes and additional comments from me in response:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
1) Re: publishers’ business models: <a href="https://pen.org/conversation/transcript-three-percent-podcast-no-91-translators-rates-money-and-unions" target="_blank">Here is the transcript of an interview I did</a>, in January 2015, with Chad Post of Open Letter Books and Tom Roberge of Albertine bookstore and New Directions press, in which Post goes into detail on the numbers for Open Letter. <a href="http://www.centerforfiction.org/calendar/the-bridge-series-contracts/" target="_blank">Here is the video of a panel discussion</a> on translator contracts, in April 2016, in which two translators, a publisher, and a literary agent talk numbers on both rates and royalties. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
2) Re: data on translator compensation: Over the past six months, <a href="http://www.thehebrewtranslator.com/" target="_blank">Jessica Cohen</a> and I have been working with the Authors Guild on a survey to collect data on compensation and contractual terms for literary translators in the United States. We hope the survey will be going out in January 2017.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
3) Re: the October roundtable at ALTA: In fact there was some discussion of rates, but it wasn’t reflected in my original blog post, because what I shared wasn’t a transcript of the discussion, but just the notes sent to me by my fellow participants, which they fleshed out during their comments. Deborah Smith, for example, stated that her press, Tilted Axis, pays the TA rate. The TA (Translators Association) is a group within the Society of Authors, and <a href="http://www.societyofauthors.org/Groups/Translators" target="_blank">on their web page</a> it states: “In the SoA’s experience, we have found that UK publishers are prepared to pay in the region of £90 per 1,000 words.” So I edited my initial blog post to reflect that. In addition, though she didn’t specify the royalty, saying only that it was “small,” I went back to Deborah and she verified that it is 1%, which in my experience is a fairly standard translator royalty for small presses in the UK. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
There was also other rate-related talk during the Q+A, after we’d each said our bit. I mentioned Margaret’s contact with the NEA, for example, and Meg brought up the FTC investigation (though we didn’t go into it, since I was afraid it would swallow up what little time we had left), and I shared one translator’s suggestion for a way around that, namely, for individual translators to post their rates on their websites, which, again, is totally legal. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
One reason we didn’t dwell on the question of pay itself was that the roundtable, as indicated by its title, was aimed more at presenting new forms of translator advocacy, especially since the question of pay has been discussed in detail at previous ALTA panels—for example, one I was on in 2014, “Professional Literary Translators: Do They Exist and Can They Pay the Bills?” With Jessica Cohen, Ezra Fitz, Edward Gauvin, and Anna Rosenwong, moderated by Katie Silver (the answers to those questions, by the way, were yes and no). The starting point for our discussion was the 2008 CEATL report, “<a href="https://www.ceatl.eu/current-situation/working-conditions" target="_blank">Comparative Income of Literary Translators in Europe</a>,” which I highly recommend. Lisa Carter, as usual, is also worth a read on the topic; see for instance <a href="https://intralingo.com/3-questions-from-aspiring-literary-translators/" target="_blank">this</a>. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
One of the issues that keeps coming up repeatedly as an obstacle to translator organizing for better pay in the United States is the fact that, under U.S. labor law, as independent contractors, translators cannot engage in <a href="http://www.jwj.org/collective-bargaining-101" target="_blank">collective bargaining</a>. There are challenges to this idea now, particularly in light of the “<a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=gig+economy&oq=gig+economy" target="_blank">gig economy</a>,” but leaving that aside here as a complicated can of worms involving legal issues beyond my ken, both Meg Berkobien’s <a href="https://translatorscollective.org/" target="_blank">Emerging Translators Collective</a> and the <a href="http://www.cedilla.company/" target="_blank">Cedilla & Co.</a> agency, presented in Oakland by Sean Bye, offer original thinking about how translators can <i>organize themselves</i> to do their work and be paid what they consider a fair wage for it. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Marcia Lynx Qualey conducted interviews for her blog, post-roundtable, <a href="http://bit.ly/2gYsmaO" target="_blank">with Meg</a>, about the Emerging Translators Collective, and <a href="http://bit.ly/2gYtQC7" target="_blank">with Sean, Julia Sanches, and Jeremy Tiang</a>, about Cedilla & Co. I recommend everyone read them. </blockquote>
<div>
Not the end of the story, by any means, but that’s all for now. </div>
Alex Z.http://www.blogger.com/profile/15635561148523957099noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5208019.post-77440647614529852462016-12-02T22:43:00.000-05:002018-06-08T10:22:50.679-04:00Department of Translator AdvocacySunday, October 18, at the <a href="http://www.literarytranslators.org/alta39" target="_blank">39th annual conference</a> of the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA), held in Oakland, CA, I moderated a roundtable titled “Beyond #namethetranslator: New Forms of Translator Advocacy,” with (in alphabetical order) Megan Berkobien, Sean Bye, Marcia Lynx Qualey, and Deborah Smith.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjiwZi5H80eG96jd4g7EdML-Tmy-_X7ywosnZ5Q7QyjmCXk6rmy2-klzbd5QaEq_NR4mzZID2Wffp8TU3KFa_T3vaci85g2YD72vym1FtumkCWkIrzLjBoEZ1B2w06KXfXOtNCh/s1600/ALTA39.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="196" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjiwZi5H80eG96jd4g7EdML-Tmy-_X7ywosnZ5Q7QyjmCXk6rmy2-klzbd5QaEq_NR4mzZID2Wffp8TU3KFa_T3vaci85g2YD72vym1FtumkCWkIrzLjBoEZ1B2w06KXfXOtNCh/s320/ALTA39.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<br />
What follows here is 1) a description of the genesis of the roundtable, to explain the ideas behind it, which may be useful in understanding the discussion we ended up having; and 2) the contributions to the roundtable from each of us, in some cases with additional material based on the notes we prepared in advance, plus e-mails between us, plus notes I jotted down during the event.
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<br />
Although several of us participating in this roundtable belong to organizations, none of our statements should be taken to imply endorsement of our ideas by the organizations we belong to. We all appeared here as individual translators, speaking on behalf of no one but ourselves. This post is intended solely to share with a wider audience the ideas, questions, and concerns that were raised.<br />
<br />
<b>Where It Came From</b><br />
<br />
The idea for the roundtable came initially from Deborah, who emailed me in April 2016 to say that she’d be attending this year’s ALTA conference and asking if I’d like to take part in a panel on the name-the-translator movement, similar to one she moderated at this year’s “LBF -1,” the gathering of the UK Translators Association that takes place every year on the day before the London Book Fair opens. <a href="https://drive.google.com/open?id=0Bw8p_lsZfov7WkZVaEhSOHNlQ2FDVHlFSFNVTWtJbzhVVUhR" target="_blank">That discussion</a> focused on the use of the hashtag <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/namethetranslator" target="_blank">#namethetranslator</a> to call out (or call in) publications and reviewers who fail to name the translator in their reviews of translated works: Has it been effective in bringing about an increase of translator mentions, thereby raising recognition of the art of translation, boosting the “visibility” of translators, and beyond that, helping translators earn more pay?<br />
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After a week of heavy correspondence between me and Deborah about how best to frame the discussion, we decided to place the emphasis of the ALTA roundtable more on the question of pay and other material conditions, precisely because so many people, including translators themselves, tend to tiptoe around them. Along the way our description from the roundtable evolved from<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
#namethetranslator: Is That the Best We Can Do?<br />
Translators have sought for years to have their names mentioned in reviews. Twitter’s <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/namethetranslator" target="_blank">#namethetranslator</a> hashtag is just the latest version of this advocacy. But does it work? Or is it just sounding off? In general, are social media helping translators make progress on the issues that matter most to us? To what extent can and should publishers be engaging on our behalf? </blockquote>
to<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
#namethetranslator: Is That the Best We Can Do?<br />
Translators have sought for years to have their names mentioned in reviews. Twitter’s <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/namethetranslator" target="_blank">#namethetranslator</a> hashtag is just the latest version of this advocacy. But does it work? Or is it just sounding off? To what extent can and should publishers be engaging on our behalf? In general, are social media helping translators make progress on the issues that matter most to us? Is it time for us to start talking about the elephant in the room: how much we are paid? How do we do so, given that we don’t have a union? </blockquote>
These issues have taken up a lot of my time and headspace during the two and a half years I’ve served as cochair of the <a href="https://pen.org/translation" target="_blank">PEN America Translation Committee</a>, and it was important to me for the discussion to be forward-looking, not just about what has been done, but what else can be done that no one has tried yet, so I suggested we invite Marcia Lynx Qualey, who is currently one of the most outspoken advocates for translation and translators, via <a href="https://arablit.org/" target="_blank">her blog</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/arablit" target="_blank">Twitter</a>, and in her dozens upon dozens of <a href="https://arablit.org/about/selected-clips/" target="_blank">articles for other publications</a>.<br />
<br />
I also emailed a few other translators who are active on Twitter, but none of them was able to attend ALTA, and at that point we needed to submit the proposal, so we went with what we had, knowing we could add more participants in the time between submission and finalization. In February I had learned that Julia Sanches and Sean Bye were starting a translators collective in New York City, modeled after actors’ collectives in London, which offer budding actors a way to find work without needing to belong to an established actors’ agency. (One of their main motivations was the fact that, unlike authors, who have little chance of publishing a book unless they have an agent, very few translators are represented by agents, since the money we make is generally too little to be “worth it.”) So we invited one of them to take part, and Sean accepted. Meanwhile Meg Berkobien, a Ph.D. student in Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan and a translator of Catalan, saw on the ALTA website that our roundtable was still seeking participants, and she wrote to say that she had started an emerging translators collective with the aim of developing a collaborative publication model—and one that keeps in mind the many unpaid labors associated with the craft of translation—for emerging translators.<br />
<br />
That gave us a full lineup with lots of exciting ideas, and then, in the course of another few weeks of correspondence among the five of us, we agreed on our final roundtable description:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Beyond #namethetranslator: New Forms of Translator Advocacy<br />
For decades translators have sought to have reviewers mention their names. Twitter’s <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/namethetranslator" target="_blank">#namethetranslator</a> hashtag is just the latest version of this advocacy. But does it work? Or is it just sounding off? To what extent should publishers be engaging on our behalf? In general, are social media helping translators make progress on the issues that matter most to us? Is it time for us to start talking about the elephant in the room: how much we are paid? How do we do so, given that we don’t have a union? </blockquote>
<br />
<b>How It Went</b><br />
<br />
We spoke in the order Alex, Marcia (via Skype), Sean, Meg, Deborah, followed by a discussion among the roundtablists and then questions from the translators in the audience.<br />
<br />
<b>Alex: </b><br />
<br />
Thank you all for coming.<br />
<br />
In our roundtable today we’re going to start by taking a look back at some of the origins of the advocacy we have now, and then move on to examples of new ways to advance the interests of translators, specifically literary translators.<br />
<br />
I also want to emphasize that advocating for translators is not the same thing as advocating for translation. In fact I would urge you to keep this in mind whenever you hear someone say they are advocates for translation. Stop for a moment and ask yourself: How does this benefit translators? Does it help us materially? Does it contribute to our earning a living, or at least a fair wage?<br />
<br />
This suggests that when I say “advocacy” I have in mind money. Which both is and isn’t true. I like talking about money because most people don’t like to talk about it. I mean, I actually don’t like to, but as an advocate I feel I need to, since almost nobody else does.<br />
<br />
One of the words you hear a lot in connection with translator advocacy is “visibility.” This suggests our efforts should be aimed mainly at ensuring people—especially readers and reviewers—know that we exist; understand our work, appreciate it, recognize its importance, and our essential, in fact irreplaceable role in creating and shaping what is known as “international literature.” It is an outward-aimed advocacy—that is, aimed outside of the publishing industry, which is interesting, given that if we want to be paid more, you would think we’d be aiming our efforts at publishers (and, possibly, agents and/or acquiring editors—and, we can come back to this, authors).<br />
<br />
Let’s start in the present and work backwards: The <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/namethetranslator" target="_blank">#namethetranslator hashtag</a> is used on Twitter to draw attention to publications and reviewers who fail to name or mention the translator in their reviews of translations. As it says on the <a href="http://www.societyofauthors.org/Where-We-Stand/Credit/Name-the-Translator" target="_blank">website of the Society of Authors in the UK</a>: “An author’s name is their brand, and failure to properly credit any author lessens their ability to make a living from their work.” Before I go on, note that this language suggests the underlying issue here is pay—more specifically, the ability to earn one’s living.<br />
<br />
The Society of Authors site <a href="https://www.societyofauthors.org/Where-We-Stand/Credit" target="_blank">names Helen Wang</a> of the Translators Association as originator of the hashtag. In fact advocacy on this issue dates back over 50 years! I’m not going to give a full history, but there are a few key moments I’d like to share.<br />
<br />
PEN America’s Translation Committee was founded in 1959,* at the initiative of novelist and short-story writer <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/1987/09/15/obituaries/beatrice-chute-writer-dies.html" target="_blank">Beatrice Chute</a>, then president of PEN American Center (she preferred to be called by her middle name, Joy, and went by the pen name “B. J. Chute”). She served as president from 1959 to 1961, and, as she said in her contribution to the May 1970 conference on literary translation organized by the PEN American Center in New York, she got the idea to form a committee on translation after hearing a report from Theodore Purdy on the <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/25776238" target="_blank">First International Meeting of Translators of Literary Works</a>, held in Warsaw & Krakow, Poland, July 2–8, 1958.<br />
<br />
* ALTA was founded <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20131215141152/http://www.utdallas.edu/alta/about/alta" target="_blank">in 1978</a>; the ATA <a href="https://www.atanet.org/aboutus/history.php" target="_blank">in 1959</a>, its Literary Division <a href="http://www.ata-divisions.org/LD/index.php/about-us/" target="_blank">in 1985</a>; the Translators Association was established <a href="http://www.societyofauthors.org/Groups/Translators" target="_blank">in 1958</a>.<br />
<br />
At the outset of the <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/25776238" target="_blank">1958 meeting in Poland</a>, there was a resolution put forward, stating:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Literary translators and their organizations in all countries shall immediately launch a widespread campaign—by way of articles in the press, discussions and so on—to inculcate an appreciation among the general public of the importance and cultural value of the translator’s work. Literary translators and their organizations shall insist that publishers give clear and proper indication of the translator’s name in every book published in all catalogues, advertisements and so on. Literary translators and their organizations shall further, by all available means, strive to induce literary critics to include in their review an assessment of the work of the translator as co-author of the book presented by him to the public in his native language. In the event of a critic omitting reference to the translator, the translator himself or his organization shall without delay demand that the editor of the journal concerned accord him his right by publishing a notice, article or letter. </blockquote>
Notice the focus here is on “visibility.”<br />
<br />
Chute decided to ask Purdy to be the first chair of the committee. Purdy was one of two reps of American PEN to that 1958 meeting in Poland (and also one of the founders of the American Translators Association). According to <a href="http://history.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/%C3%89rico%20Ver%C3%ADssimo%20A%20Brazilian%20Cultural%20Ambassador.pdf" target="_blank">one article</a>, he was “competent in eight languages” and worked for Macmillan, where he was responsible for acquiring the first novel by a Latin American author to go into multiple printings in the US (<i>Crossroads</i>, L. C. Kaplan’s 1943 translation from Portuguese of <i>Caminhos Cruzados</i> by Brazilian author Érico Veríssimo).<br />
<br />
In May 1970, the PEN American Center organized a conference on literary translation in New York. The proceedings were later published under the title <i><a href="https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/007116895" target="_blank">The World of Translation</a></i>, and in her remarks, “The Necessity of Translation,” B. J. Chute said/wrote:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
If I were asked to sum up in one word my reason for feeling that a Translation Committee was essential to the American Center of P.E.N.—quite apart from the obvious fact that P.E.N. is an international organization and therefore exists through <i>translated</i> relationships—I think that the word I would use is “climate.” For translation to flourish in this or any other country as it should (as it must), an ideal climate would supply certain basic necessities: <b>recognition of the fact that the translator is indispensable; appreciation of the difficulty of his role (that it is an art as well as a craft); proper financial return for his labors, and credit given where credit is due.</b> [boldface emphasis added] </blockquote>
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Note that here, along with recognition and visibility, Chute refers to money: “proper financial return for his labors.” In its first 10 years, the PEN American Center’s Translation Committee established the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PEN_Translation_Prize" target="_blank">Translation Prize</a> (1963), issued a <a href="https://archive.li/7aPc9" target="_blank">Manifesto on Translation</a> (1969, under Robert Payne’s tenure as Translation Committee chair), and began work on a Minimum Basic Contract. Then, in 1970, it put together “this conference of distinguished translators from many countries”—which I am quoting from here.<br />
<br />
Still from her comments at the 1970 conference, B. J. Chute says/writes:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Since 1960, I have pursued a small but vigorous personal project, which is represented in my files by a folder marked “Editors and Publishers, Harassment of.” This file is concerned with matters of translation, and most of it consists of correspondence—sometimes brief and sometimes lengthy—which has taken place between a publisher or editor and myself on those numerous occasions when the name of the translator has been omitted from either the book jacket or the advertising—carrying the invisible profession to its logical conclusion. </blockquote>
Chute goes on to describe some of the letters she wrote, and responses, noting that she had general success. (I won’t go into it here, so as not to dwell on the past, but one interesting side note: In those days, the Translation Committee didn’t consist of just translators, but also publishers and editors—who, as Chute points out, have their problems too—and she notes that the committee owes a great deal of its success to their being involved. Maybe this is something we can come back to.)<br />
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The effort Chute began in 1960 eventually died out, though I wasn’t able to verify how many years she carried it on beyond 1970, when she made the comments I quote above. In 1983, during <a href="http://peterglassgold.com/" target="_blank">Peter Glassgold</a>’s term as Translation Committee cochair, the effort was reborn with the <a href="https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=110&dat=19910323&id=Qw5QAAAAIBAJ&sjid=5lUDAAAAIBAJ&pg=6697,6315720&hl=en" target="_blank">formation of the Watchdog Subcommittee</a>, and carried through until 2012, when it disbanded, mainly due to its limited effectiveness (also, at a certain point the name was dropped because of its aggressive connotations). <a href="http://faculty.bmcc.cuny.edu/faculty/fp.jsp?f=mcarson" target="_blank">Margaret Carson</a>, who served as Translation Committee cochair with me in 2014–15, shared with me this mission statement for the Watchdog Subcommittee, created during her involvement with it in 2008:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
When a translator’s work is ignored in a review, when a translator’s name does not appear on a book cover, or when an advertisement or catalogue makes no mention of a translator, translators everywhere have been ignored. No less than authors, translators deserve to be accorded the notice their creative work merits. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The PEN Translation Committee’s Watchdog Campaign monitors book reviews and publishers’ promotional material to see if translators have been given sufficient acknowledgement. It will contact book reviewers, editors and publishers when a translator’s contribution to a creative work has been ignored. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Its goals are to increase the visibility of translators and to encourage publishers and editors to acknowledge the act and the art of translation in the promotion of titles and in reviews. </blockquote>
Apparently, then, a reversion to emphasizing visibility over pay or the ability to earn a living.<br />
<br />
<b>THESIS:</b> Although its goal is to help ensure translators can earn a living from their work, the question is whether naming the translator is enough. Or, more specifically, given the low number of translators devoted to advocacy and the limited amount of time and energy we all have, is it the best place to focus our efforts? Since not everyone has equal amounts of time, maybe some of us should focus on that, but what else can be done, especially on the issue that is so often the elephant in the room—namely, how much, or how little, we are paid?<br />
<br />
Especially now, in the age of the internet, when so many publications exist also, or even solely online, it has come to be taken for granted that a certain amount of work should be done for free: for “exposure,” or because the publication itself pleads poverty. This is a whole topic in itself, pay and labor, but I think that sets the stage well for the issues we want to look at today.<br />
<br />
• <b><a href="https://twitter.com/arablit" target="_blank">Marcia Lynx Qualey</a>,</b> dynamic force behind the blog <a href="https://arablit.org/" target="_blank">Arabic Literature (in English)</a> and an all-around champion of translation, joining us today via Skype<br />
<br />
• <b><a href="https://twitter.com/sgbye" target="_blank">Sean Bye</a>,</b> <a href="http://www.restlessbooks.com/sean-gasper-bye/" target="_blank">translator of Polish</a>, <a href="http://www.polishculture-nyc.org/indexNew.cfm?itemCategory=30564&siteid=217&priorId=0" target="_blank">program director of literature and humanities</a> at the Polish Cultural Institute, <a href="http://www.cedilla.company/about/" target="_blank">cofounder</a> of the Cedilla & Co. translators’ collective<br />
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• <b><a href="https://twitter.com/mmberkobien" target="_blank">Meg Berkobien</a>,</b> <a href="https://megberkobien.com/resume/" target="_blank">translator</a> of Catalan and Spanish, <a href="https://lsa.umich.edu/complit/people/graduate-students/mmberkob.html" target="_blank">doctoral student</a> in Comp Lit at U of Michigan, founder of the <a href="https://translatorscollective.org/" target="_blank">Emerging Translators Collective</a><br />
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• <b><a href="https://twitter.com/londonkoreanist" target="_blank">Deborah Smith</a>,</b> Man Booker International <a href="http://themanbookerprize.com/international/news/weekly-round-vegetarian-meaty-winner" target="_blank">Prize-winning translator</a> of Korean, <a href="http://www.tiltedaxispress.com/" target="_blank">founder</a> of Tilted Axis Press<br />
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<b>Marcia:</b><br />
<br />
Taking Alex’s lead, I’m going to talk very practically about what I do, not through the lens of advocacy for translation, but how it relates to advocacy for translators. And by this I mean making a living, and here there’s also how translation is valued (or not valued) in academia as to whether “counts” as a publication, but also less tangible aspects of translator community, collaboration, connections, and standing up for one another.<br />
<br />
To start, I want to address a few of the particular <b>challenges</b> for translators outside academia by paraphrasing something translator <a href="https://twitter.com/kareemios" target="_blank">Karim Traboulsi</a> wrote on <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Translation_Day" target="_blank">International Translation Day</a>. The profession is <b>dominated by women,</b> which is almost certainly one of the reasons why it’s currently <b>undercompensated;</b> as we know, undercompensation follows women. (But on the positive side, Karim said, it also tends to be very collaborative.) The profession has <b>few gatekeepers</b> and an open door to <b>amateurs,</b> which means it can be a more <b>diverse, global, and passionate</b> field, but also can have the effect of <b>driving down payment,</b> and sometimes <b>quality.</b><br />
<br />
So these are some of the challenges & possibilities that I wanted to address.<br />
<br />
What I wanted to focus on is what online spaces can and might be able to do to <b>change working conditions for translators.</b> As Alex already mentioned, I edit a website called <b><a href="https://arablit.org/" target="_blank">ArabLit</a>,</b> which is one of a number of translation-focused online spaces. Not talking literary magazines, like <a href="http://www.asymptotejournal.com/" target="_blank">Asymptote</a> or <a href="http://www.wordswithoutborders.org/" target="_blank">Words Without Borders</a>, but spaces for commentary & discussion. Some of these are generalized, like Lisa Carter’s very helpful <a href="https://intralingo.com/posts/" target="_blank">Intralingo</a>, one of the few spaces that openly discusses money. Others are <b>language-focused,</b> like Katy Derbyshire’s <a href="https://lovegermanbooks.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">Love German Books</a>, or <a href="https://arablit.org/" target="_blank">ArabLit</a>, or <a href="https://paper-republic.org/" target="_blank">Paper Republic</a>. Still others are <b>semi-private spaces</b> on Facebook, or are <b>campaigns</b> like <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/namethetranslator" target="_blank">#namethetranslator</a> or <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/WiTMonth" target="_blank">#WiTMonth</a> or <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/WorldKidLit" target="_blank">#WorldKidLit</a>.<br />
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So to <b>my particular project.</b> When I opened ArabLit in 2009, I would never have thought it would be a daily occupation for the next seven years, which sometimes seems like a form of insanity. But a day or two after I opened it, translator <a href="https://www.northeastern.edu/cssh/faculty/shakir-mustafa" target="_blank">Shakir Mustafa</a> emailed about how glad he was to see it. And it’s the feedback from translators (about needing a place to gather) that has kept it going for so long.
What does ArabLit do? Certainly, a website can <b>transmit information.</b> But a few years ago, in a talk for Cairo’s <a href="http://schools.aucegypt.edu/research/cts/Pages/Home.aspx" target="_blank">Center for Translation Studies</a>, I said I saw the site less as a magazine, and more as a literary salon, with translators at the core.<br />
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<b>Things an online space can or might be able to do:</b><br />
<ul>
<li><i>Share information.</i></li>
<li><i>Foster community, discussion, and debate.</i> This is not just to feel good, but also, in a practical sense, to create transparency. One of the difficult aspects of working as a freelancer, situation of many translators, is that you don’t often meet your co-workers, and so it becomes difficult to know if you’re being taken advantage of, if someone else is already working on A, B, C; how others are being compensated; how other people are dealing with rights; how invasive or helpful other publishers are; is it useful to go to the conference in X, Y, Z. Sometimes you don’t know the questions you could be asking until you hear from others. </li>
<li><i>Give specific warnings.</i> About treated unfairly by an agency or publisher.</li>
<li><i>Answer specific questions.</i> There’s a great closed Facebook group called Arabic↔English Literary Translators (arrows in both directions—very important). Mostly what it’s used for is to ask others’ opinions about the nuance of a phrase. Could expand to other questions.</li>
<li><i>Direct attention to problems,</i> as <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/namethetranslator" target="_blank">#namethetranslator</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/WiTMonth" target="_blank">#WiTMonth</a> have.</li>
<li><i>Be more specific & transparent about money.</i> Something that Intralingo has done in posting generally about money, talk more specifically in closed spaces, because a core part of being able to negotiate better is having more information. I think we overestimate information available to many emerging translators. Got a question – the author’s agent says the publisher won’t want to spend much on translation, so how little should I propose to do it for? Translators need more advocates.</li>
<li><i>Making connections with other target-language translators.</i> There is a lot we can learn here, in how our texts are translated and received in different target languages, and also in how different translators work.</li>
<li><i>Foster more collective spaces,</i> which is one of the things I think Meg is going to focus on. </li>
</ul>
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<b>Sean: </b><br />
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Cedilla & Co. came out of a discussion between me and Julia Sanches about why translators don’t have agents and why that model doesn’t seem to work—essentially, it seems like translators’ fees are so low that a commission model wouldn’t function. Our idea was, could a collective-style model work, where we would act as one another’s agents and in turn receive services, contacts, support, and representation instead of a commission?<br />
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Cedilla currently has nine members: <a href="http://www.japaneseliteratureinenglish.com/about-japanese-book-database/" target="_blank">Allison Markin Powell</a>, <a href="https://www.authorsguild.net/services/members/1052" target="_blank">Alta Price</a>, <a href="https://heathercleary.org/" target="_blank">Heather Cleary</a>, <a href="https://pen.org/jeffrey-zuckerman" target="_blank">Jeffrey Zuckerman</a>, <a href="http://www.jeremytiang.com/" target="_blank">Jeremy Tiang</a>, <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/julia-sanches-00674351/en" target="_blank">Julia Sanches</a>, <a href="http://jaquette.weebly.com/" target="_blank">Lissie Jaquette</a>, <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/marshall-yarbrough-74526433" target="_blank">Marshall Yarbrough</a>, and <a href="http://www.restlessbooks.com/sean-gasper-bye/" target="_blank">myself</a>. We cover ten languages: Arabic, Catalan, Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, and Spanish. We are all based in New York and meet in person once every two weeks. We come from many different backgrounds, including publishing, agenting, editing, arts administration, and full-time translation.<br />
<br />
For publishers, we offer translation services, readers’ reports, and “market intelligence”—all the commercially valuable info we gather about book markets, funding, promotion, audiences, etc. Our goal is to be a one-stop-shop for publishers wanting to do work in translation.<br />
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To our members, we offer intelligence and contact sharing, support in developing and making pitches, support in reviewing and negotiating contracts, a web presence, business cards, and branding/identity. We also pitch work on one another’s behalf. Our goal is for everyone to receive concrete services and support they would not have had working on their own.<br />
<br />
<a href="https://arablit.org/2016/11/19/pooling-resources-the-literary-translators-collective-cedilla-co/" target="_blank">Our goal</a> is to work within the publishing industry to give ourselves more leverage in negotiation, expand our range of income sources, and provide a model of successful collaboration for other translators to replicate.
More information about Cedilla & Co. is available on our website: <a href="http://www.cedilla.company/" target="_blank">www.cedilla.company</a>. I encourage folks to check it out!<br />
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<b>Meg:</b><br />
<br />
I’m going to talk about the Emerging Translators Collective. We’re <a href="https://arablit.org/2016/11/04/megan-berkobien-on-establishing-the-emerging-translators-collective/" target="_blank">just getting under way</a>, but we imagine the ETC as a small “maker space” for translation in Ann Arbor, MI. I know the “craft” movement catches a lot of flak—all those hipsters making artisanal beer!—but I’m really fascinated by the more important questions of access and community that maker culture brings up. And there’s no question that translation is a craft in almost every respect. So, our answer to the question posed by this roundtable (what more can we do?) is: we want to think big & work small: more limited-edition short story chapbooks & broadsides, more paid translators. Our imagined hashtag is <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/translatorslabor" target="_blank">#translatorslabor</a>.<br />
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Maybe it’s best if I just read off our website’s “<a href="https://translatorscollective.org/about/" target="_blank">About</a>” page to start off. <i>Ahem</i>: “The Emerging Translators Collective is a growing workshop and DIY micro-press dedicated to transforming the literary translator’s task through the use of alternative and collaborative publication models. Our members are, in general, early career translators who are interested in engaging translation as a literary, editorial, design, and production process. Instead of following the more traditional hierarchies involved with publishing a translation, we believe our texts will be best served through horizontal editorial and production processes. As a collective, we bring together a host of professional skills associated with the publishing sector, and we wish to develop this knowledge further by putting our hands to good work. By working together to create limited-edition, small-batch broadsides, folios, chapbooks, pamphlets, recorded performances, and other ephemera, and by offering decent honoraria for this labor, we advocate not only for translation in the abstract, but for the <i>translators</i> and the necessary cultural exchange they make possible.”<br />
<br />
In summary, we don’t see a huge divide between readers & makers because translators are intimately both. Also, and this is big, translators are customers. I’m pretty sure that my translator friends and I buy more books than the average bookstore-goer.<br />
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A big part of our effort is thinking about how to change the economic model to account for small translation projects (short stories, poem-prints, etc.) instead of the few big, paid projects (novels), but I’m still working that part out. I think this will be a really important question as more & more PhD programs ask students to plan on adjuncting & freelancing (editing/translating). For me, the plight of the adjunct and the translator (at least the emerging translator) share more similarities than differences at this point. You can probably guess that I’m super fun to be around when I get going on this subject . . .<br />
<br />
Although the professors and translators here at UMichigan are generally progressive, I’ve had a few less-than-inspiring conversations about how much agency translators should have when discussing the economic side of things (“Be grateful!!”). What I realize more and more every day is that the whole “pay the writer” rhetoric affects different waves of translators (and grant-makers) in myriad ways. Whereas I find it refreshing to hear about labor-related topics, others might see it as, well, “whiny.” And maybe that’s because they’ve heard it before and haven’t seen any concrete change. For some it has gotten worse, I think. Listen, I personally don’t want to come across as whiny, nor do I want to offend potential allies, but I think there’s certainly room enough in our discourse about translation to be enthusiastic for conversations about labor and payment. I will not be made to feel bad for pursuing a profession that I’ve trained for. Sorry.<br />
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I know historically there has been a divide between academic and professional (or “commercial”) translators, but newer PhDs are much more invested in tearing this barrier down. Theory is important, but it has its limits. Ours is a project very much interested in getting translators paid, so it’s “commercial” in that way. We’ll be in limbo for the first couple of years, though, since it’s hard to apply for grants without three years of programming under your belt. We’re teaming up with the university because it provides funding and because we think that academia should support its younger translators more. The catch-22, though, is that we can’t pay our translators or sell our work. So, for the first year or so we’ll be doing more training than anything else.<br />
<br />
When I first spoke to Alex about the Emerging Translators Collective, he brought up the fact that the general focus on translation can obscure the often difficult & precarious professional obstacles that translators face. I totally agree. While advocating for translation is an important part of raising awareness on behalf of translators, it might not change anything for translators in the material sense, and if it does, then not all that many translators. The goal isn’t to call anyone out or to minimize the stresses that traditional/indie publishers face, of course, but we have to broach the subject somehow.<br />
<br />
When my translator pals & I have discussed the subject, most of us wonder how to make literary translation a more viable profession. When I think about the Emerging Translators Collective, the question becomes, How can a small operation support this kind of occupational support? My general answer is that it offers a small payment ($100) for short PRINT works (stories & poems) that might otherwise might just go up online for free (compensating us for our labor with nothing but “exposure”). It also offers training in DIY publishing & printing (letterpress, screen printing, etc.) and will work through a horizontal editing schema (made up of translators themselves). Unlike being a one-man show (which publishing can often be), the works we take on will be dictated by the member-translators themselves. I’d also like us to avoid the one-person decision-making model. Really, <a href="http://www.uglyducklingpresse.org/" target="_blank">Ugly Duckling Presse</a> & <a href="http://www.uglyducklingpresse.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/Yankelevich_Brooklyn-Rail_Mar-2011.pdf" target="_blank">Matvei Yankelevich</a> have been a real inspiration for me.<br />
<br />
As founder of the ETC, I’ve spent a lot of time in the past year “researching” (buying & enjoying the work of!) almost every little press I can spot. When I bring back those publications to the group, it feels like I’m sharing treasure. There are so many wonderful publishing projects out there for English-language prose & poetry, and provocative models from abroad, like the presses involved in <a href="http://www.theestablishment.co/2016/09/23/how-yes-cardboard-is-revolutionizing-the-latin-american-book-industry/" target="_blank">editoriales cartoneras</a>, we want to contribute by doing that for literature in translation. If we’re doing anything novel (which might really not be the case), it’s creating small editions/chapbooks/chaplets/broadsides of texts and paying translators for that work. You might think of <i><a href="http://www.one-story.com/" target="_blank">One Story</a></i> mag, the <a href="http://www.belladonnaseries.org/" target="_blank">Belladonna Series</a>, <a href="http://www.birdsoflace.org/" target="_blank">Birds of Lace</a>, <a href="http://www.goodmorningmenagerie.com/" target="_blank">Goodmorning Menagerie</a>, and <a href="http://www.greyingghost.com/" target="_blank">Greying Ghost</a> press as some of the more adventurous ventures who’ve established these alternative models. We feature these presses and more on the “<a href="https://translatorscollective.org/projects-we-love/" target="_blank">Inspiration</a>” page of our website, and we’ll be doing a <a href="https://twitter.com/ETC_Press" target="_blank">series of Twitter posts</a> soon about the work we love, for members of the translation community who might not know the projects yet.<br />
<br />
I hesitate to speak too much about the publishing world, especially because I’ve worked in the sphere of lit mags and have only gotten a glance at the independent publishing scene from within. On the other hand, both of my parents started their own stores, so I’ve been around “business” all of my life. Anyway, I think it’s safe to say that while traditional publishing has the capacity to facilitate translation in important ways, it also forecloses many of its radical possibilities. Even though editors and translators might work together on a translation, it ultimately has to shape up to certain expectations (I mean, apart from being quality writing). We can lament a lack of readers or money, sure, but I’m not sure how much of an immediate, material effect that will have. (And that’s not to say readerships aren’t important, but the best way to go about it is by educating students about translation from a young age.) Since the ETC emerged, in part, from the grad workshop in translation I cofounded with <a href="https://umich.academia.edu/EmilyGoedde/CurriculumVitae" target="_blank">Emily Goedde</a> at the University of Michigan, we already had a well-oiled system for collaboration in place. So we thought, since so many of us have editing and design skills, since so many of us are interested in presswork, since so many of us are voracious readers in a wide range of languages, and since so many of us are working with quality mentors (like <a href="https://lsa.umich.edu/complit/people/faculty/antons.html" target="_blank">Anton Shammas</a>, for example), why don’t we take a chance and put out some of our own stuff? We’re all wearing a bunch of different hats, and we’re capitalizing on our shared skill sets. And, most importantly, we’re thinking about how to make translation more visible on/in the publication itself.<br />
<br />
As for the magazines that publish translations but don’t pay the translators, it’s a really tough subject! Let me first acknowledge that so much important work comes out of these publications. They provide important visibility and CV lines. And even those that pay aren’t supplying a living wage (but who is??). That said, when I see big projects holding multiple $20,000 Kickstarter campaigns for their magazines while knowing that none of that money goes back to contributors or editors, I get a little miffed. And I’m not really sure that publishers are keeping tabs on what’s being put out, anyway. At a certain point, a CV line might not count for all that much. In any case, we really need to move past visibility for visibility’s sake because, let’s be honest, those who can really afford to translate on spec are few. For the rest of us, that means we’re driving ourselves bonkers trying to work a day job and get that work done in the hope that we’ll break through. But, break through to what? How can we make translation a sustainable profession and a diverse one? And falling back on that whole “well, translation is a labor of love” doesn’t solve all that much. It’s actually harmful rhetoric, as Miya Tokumitsu writes in her brilliant book <i><a href="http://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Do-What-You-Love/Miya-Tokumitsu/9781941393475" target="_blank">Do What You Love and Other Lies About Success and Happiness</a></i>.<br />
<br />
Anyway, at the center of it all is the idea of coming together and working with communities and projects that are already in place, I think. The thing that most inspires me, I think, is how many people were already interested in the various aspects of DIY publishing in Ann Arbor. And plenty of artists are willing to lend a helping hand with our training along the way.<br />
<br />
<b>Deborah:</b><br />
<br />
Translator advocacy<br />
<br />
• As a <a href="http://www.tiltedaxispress.com/about/" target="_blank">publisher</a>: At Tilted Axis Press we pay <a href="http://societyofauthors.org/Groups/Translators" target="_blank">the Society of Authors rate</a> + royalty as standard, put the translator’s name on the front cover, list them alongside authors on our website, do our best to arrange publicity for the translator as well, promote whatever else they’re doing. (Plus, putting the translator’s name on the cover suggests that they’re a great writer.) Publicising the translator, giving them opportunities but not demanding that they do certain work for free. The royalty, though small, you hope acts as an incentive. Translators are central to what we do in that we source most of our titles through translators, are always open to suggestions from them. Publicising: say it loud, and people will assume that you’re saying it proud, that translation is something to shout about, a badge of quality, and that the translator themselves. Translation cult.<br />
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• Working with <a href="https://emergingtranslatorsnetwork.wordpress.com/" target="_blank">emerging translators</a>, and building continuous relationships. Guaranteeing a reliable, if not enormous, income, and steady work to keep the name on people’s radars.<br />
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• UK scene: The Translators Association, as a group within the Society of Authors, <a href="http://www.societyofauthors.org/Groups/Translators" target="_blank">advises</a> but cannot prescribe a minimum rate: “In the SoA’s experience, we have found that UK publishers are prepared to pay in the region of £90 per 1,000 words.” Also advocates for royalties, no copyright rustling, reversion, plus certain other terms, which their lawyers explain when vetting contracts. Majority of UK reviewers, or at least more than previously, will at least <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/namethetranslator" target="_blank">#namethetranslator</a>. Debate among translators themselves is whether recognition/visibility will do anything for remuneration. My view is that these things will be more or less important to different translators at different stages of their careers, and why not fight for both? Realistically I think definitely it’s not enough to go for visibility alone and expect that to have an automatic knock-on effect on rates, though I do think it could have an effect on the amount of work a given translator is able to get.<br />
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• <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/namethetranslator" target="_blank">#namethetranslator</a> vs <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/translationtalk" target="_blank">#translationtalk</a> – useful effect on tone of conversation; widens scope of conversation so its not only translators advocating for ourselves, but writers, reviewers, booksellers, publishers, readers; important of work in translation to a country’s literature and culture, Brexit and cultural exchange, talked about as decades ago in the UK. Make for more interesting and intelligent reviews of our work, but explaining why and offering models for how a reviewer should <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/mentionthetranslation" target="_blank">#mentionthetranslation</a>; ensure that when translated works do have success, translators are properly compensated, and share in both the recognition and the remuneration; make it more likely for translated works to have success, through promoting translations as important and interesting; encourage translations to take up a larger percentage of the overall market, through sales figures and reader demand, leading to more jobs to go around.<br />
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• As publisher at a nonprofit press which focuses on translations, I’m aware that for the most part, publishing the kind of highly literary, idiosyncratic, difficult translations that are the passion projects, the reasons why most of us became literary translations, no one is getting rich. In the majority of cases that cluster towards this end of the scale, the translator makes more money than the author or publisher. Of course this is only right as theirs is by far the most labour-intensive job. I absolutely agree that any publisher that can afford it should pay their translators more. But we should all be aware that these kinds of books are usually not commercially self-sustaining, and therefore it’s a choice the translator has to make, if they’re not lucky enough to have private funds, between balancing translating the work they love for not very much pay, and doing other, better-paid jobs, some of which could be commercial translation, or teaching, or waitressing. And how far they’re willing and able to take the risk of unpaid promotional work. I think it might help if we were all, especially publishers, more open about exactly what money is going where.<br />
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• Literary translation is never going to be a well-paid profession until literary translations sell much better than they currently do, in more instances than they currently do. And that’s why I think it’s crucial for us to advocating for translation and translator simultaneously.Alex Z.http://www.blogger.com/profile/15635561148523957099noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5208019.post-33262773262799712512015-11-07T00:25:00.000-05:002015-11-07T01:26:09.394-05:00Embarrassment of Riches DepartmentIt’s been almost a full year since I last posted on this blog, but I have some news that I think rates more than a Facebook post: I’m going to have three translations published in 2016, all in the spring: in March, <a href="http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/book.asp?isbn=9780300186970" target="_blank">Tomáš Zmeškal’s <i>Love Letter in Cuneiform</i></a>, for the Margellos World Republic of Letters at Yale University Press; in April, <a href="http://ucp-qa.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/M/bo23356066.html" target="_blank">Josef Jedlička’s <i>Midway Upon the Journey of Our Life</i></a>, for Karolinum Press (ignore the mistaken title; I changed it after this web page was made); and in May, <a href="http://blpress.org/books/the-attempt/" target="_blank">Magdaléna Platzová’s <i>The Attempt</i></a>, for Bellevue Literary Press. More news to come, obviously, but I wanted to get word out as soon as possible. It’s going to be a busy year. Sláva!<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgInA6GM2KZRdvEafoFdwx3eXKaSmoxH2t3t_je9qjgCgoIcIemxNkdq6zJnjCNUPHNrOjiHiECtJ_0LEJKsKjZ9jJssVmuIkbICnFGY09YZlulomR1CEJyEKzWMeaAopTvcLOy/s1600/ATTEMPT-by-Magdalena-Platzova-9781942658085.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgInA6GM2KZRdvEafoFdwx3eXKaSmoxH2t3t_je9qjgCgoIcIemxNkdq6zJnjCNUPHNrOjiHiECtJ_0LEJKsKjZ9jJssVmuIkbICnFGY09YZlulomR1CEJyEKzWMeaAopTvcLOy/s200/ATTEMPT-by-Magdalena-Platzova-9781942658085.jpg" width="133" /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgrZHuNfiNXl7jy1cHKepQP6kOHKOg1WhgK0Cj1hR0SjJ5Qn318vd-rj7l-qo0uQqI_Sd9xdRntrEu4CJdjDTS-orSzGL6WUx6VfEg1g2cF7_liq5W_1IbAMnZ7ZQwka8wKsYGC/s1600/tz.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgrZHuNfiNXl7jy1cHKepQP6kOHKOg1WhgK0Cj1hR0SjJ5Qn318vd-rj7l-qo0uQqI_Sd9xdRntrEu4CJdjDTS-orSzGL6WUx6VfEg1g2cF7_liq5W_1IbAMnZ7ZQwka8wKsYGC/s200/tz.jpg" width="127" /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8USMsTcdj9FvKzYyMwK4_wvgc3hxrNqZRwCKSB81Dn0unwz9c9xcS8Ru-laORmCkggfXNxihd0A50PGXLBzy53UE_UUE0jZKg1LJ-RNjZeb8hIHjFyp4JhzcHuVtoxIJr-G3o/s1600/jj.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8USMsTcdj9FvKzYyMwK4_wvgc3hxrNqZRwCKSB81Dn0unwz9c9xcS8Ru-laORmCkggfXNxihd0A50PGXLBzy53UE_UUE0jZKg1LJ-RNjZeb8hIHjFyp4JhzcHuVtoxIJr-G3o/s200/jj.jpg" width="135" /></a></div>
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Note: Since I currently serve as cochair of the PEN America Translation Committee, and in this capacity promote to both translators and publishers the <a href="http://www.pen.org/model-contract-literary-translations" target="_blank">model contract for literary translation</a>, which among other things states that “the translator’s name shall appear on the cover,” no doubt some inquiring minds are wondering why my name is absent from two of the three covers above. In the case of the Karolinum book, the answer is that it should be there and the fact that it is not is an oversight on the part of the designer, which I have pointed out to the publisher. In the case of the Bellevue book, the answer is that my name will appear on the back cover, but not the front. This was the agreement I reached in the course of my negotiations with the publisher, in which we each met the other halfway on a variety of points where we started from different positions. It was the longest negotiation I have ever had, and to be honest, probably also the most satisfying one, because of the obvious respect and understanding we had for each other throughout. Every contract is a negotiation. That is the first and most important thing to know for a translator entering into a contract with a publisher.Alex Z.http://www.blogger.com/profile/15635561148523957099noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5208019.post-89569037324660830652014-12-10T00:23:00.000-05:002014-12-10T00:32:12.472-05:00Did Someone Say Union? DepartmentIn the <a href="https://www.rochester.edu/College/translation/threepercent/index.php?id=13102" target="_blank">latest Three Percent podcast</a>, Tom Roberge of New Directions, at 25:24, says translators shouldn’t be treated like dockworkers. But actually, maybe we should, since they <a href="http://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/dock-worker-salary-SRCH_KO0,11.htm" target="_blank">earn more than we do</a>.<br />
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At 15 cents per word, the highest rate I’ve ever received from a publishing house (individuals tend to pay more), I’d be paid $7,500 for a 50,000-word book that I’ll say, for the sake of argument, is likely to take three months (though even that may be an optimistic estimate, depending on the text). If three months is twelve weeks, at 40 hours a week my wage would come to $15.62 per hour.<br />
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Now tell me: What’s the biggest difference between dockworkers and literary translators? Dockworkers <a href="http://www.ilwu.org/" target="_blank">have a union</a>.<br />
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<br />Alex Z.http://www.blogger.com/profile/15635561148523957099noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5208019.post-46056183986120283312014-11-18T13:51:00.000-05:002014-11-18T13:51:37.296-05:00Velvet Disillusion Department<br />
Last week 120 Czechs, including signatories of the famous Charter 77 declaration (<a href="http://libpro.cts.cuni.cz/charta/docs/prohlaseni_charty_77.pdf" target="_blank">Czech original</a>; <a href="http://libpro.cts.cuni.cz/charta/docs/declaration_of_charter_77.pdf" target="_blank">English translation</a>), issued a statement titled “Slovo k listopadu,” presenting a critique of the state of affairs in the Czech Republic 25 years after the fall of communism. It was published online Nov. 14 by <i>Parlamentní listy</i> (<a href="http://www.parlamentnilisty.cz/arena/nazory-a-petice/Slovo-k-listopadu-O-svobodu-je-treba-usilovat-345889" target="_blank">Czech original, with a partial list of signatories</a>). A friend asked me to translate it, and I agreed, as a public service.<br />
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<div style="text-align: center;">
<b>A Word on the Occasion of November</b></div>
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In the days when the Communist Party had a constitutionally guaranteed monopoly on power and employed it for the bullying and criminal prosecution of its critics, we did not hide our views but tried to share them with the public. Those who held power wrote that we were unelected washouts and self-appointed leaders, poisoners of wells and traitors of the people.<br />
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Authorized only by our own conscience, as free citizens, we also speak up today.<br />
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Through twelve years of work by Charter 77 and other civic groups, we were able to find, develop, and defend a common denominator for all our often very different political views: the defense of fundamental human rights and freedoms—inherent, inalienable, nonprescriptible, and irrepealable. We knew that without respect for human rights there is no freedom, and without freedom there is no prosperity. November 1989 brought a unique chance to transform a totalitarian regime into a democratic one without violence. We sought then to ensure that the civil liberties and fundamental human rights denied to citizens by the communist regime would become the foundation of the constitutional order in a free Czechoslovakia.<br />
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Yet respect for the Constitution has not become the basis of politics and public life. On the contrary, many active citizens who had hoped the new regime would establish justice and recognize equality for all have instead had to learn to live with their disillusion and create values outside of politics. Many have given up completely. Twenty-five years after November ’89, the concept of human rights in our country is being watered down and abandoned. None of the politicians has had the courage to tell voters before elections that they reject human rights. They swear on the Constitution, but they fraudulently and underhandedly dismantle its substance. In doing so, they render the very notion of a free Czech state meaningless.<br />
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Measured by its military or the size of its economy, the Czech Republic will never be a great power. Which makes it all the more important to be trustworthy, loyal to humanistic ideals, and consistent. We remember with gratitude the politicians of the free world who, on their visits behind the barbed wire to communist Czechoslovakia, made clear their interest in the fate of political prisoners. We saw this as a reflection of the fact that freedom brings with it an obligation for solidarity with the unfree. We saw the emphasis placed on respect for human rights in international relations after November ’89 by President Václav Havel as a historically correct response to our own experiences with an oppressive regime.<br />
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We therefore find it unacceptable that the current president of the Czech Republic on a visit to the People’s Republic of China—a country with hundreds of political prisoners—declared that he did not want to lecture about human rights, but to “learn how to stabilize society.” He is abandoning the principles of the November revolt and the democratic changes it brought. Using a stuffed cartoon mole from a children’s cartoon as a symbol of the country instead of the presidential standard with the motto “Truth Prevails” is not only embarrassing but in conflict with Czech interests.<br />
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Some business circles welcome the servile attitude of Czech politicians toward those who hold power in China. Yet only three percent of our exports go to China, while more than eighty percent goes to the countries of the European Union. It is in the Czech interest to expand and enhance relations above all with the European Union.<br />
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The main reason for the present state of affairs, as we see it, is the failure of the political parties that were to have been the fundamental building block of parliamentary democracy. The Civic Democratic Party (ODS) and the Social Democrats (ČSSD) in particular quickly transformed into instruments of oligarchy, placing the benefit of post-communist regional cliques ahead of both the laws and the welfare of the state. The personal responsibility and guilt of Václav Klaus and Miloš Zeman in this are beyond doubt.<br />
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Almost all that is left of democracy, which should give all citizens equal opportunity to develop their material and spiritual wealth, is the formal ritual of elections. Contempt for law and morality resulted in unnecessary losses already during the period of the so-called economic transformation. Equality of opportunity and equality before the law, the prerequisites of a market economy, were cast aside.<br />
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Instead of protecting the rights and freedoms of all citizens, the state has become largely the obedient servant of privileged oligarchs, who now control a large part of the judiciary, as well as owning the media—in theory the watchdog of democracy, though in fact the media are failing to fulfill this public service function.<br />
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We are unable to change living conditions in communities that are excluded from the majority population, and the presence of racial and nationalist prejudice has a significant impact on the results of our elections. We are disturbed by the fact that more than seventy thousand pensioners in this country are at risk of having their assets seized to pay their bills, and their number is still growing. Our educational system lacks clearly defined priorities and a stable long-term vision. Churches are losing the trust of society. In twenty-five years of freedom we have not managed to come to terms with the crimes of our past or even to admit our mistakes. If politics is supposed to be a space for discussion of all these topics, then truly it has failed.<br />
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The arrogant and ignorant policies of our officials, whose alleged right- and left-wing orientations are in fact meaningless, have discredited and damaged the trustworthiness of politics and the system of political parties as such. The system has become so enclosed on itself that voters have started to look to parties with charismatic leaders, who are likely to deepen the crisis of parliamentarism still further.<br />
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A quarter-century after the end of communist rule, we as a society stand on feet of clay, unprepared to deal with the crisis, a society without memory or ideals.<br />
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This only makes us more convinced that the idea of human rights is still relevant. In our view human rights is not a list of demands for the state to fulfill, but a call to all people to watch out for the rights and freedoms of their neighbors and honor the dignity of every human being. Without the persistent and shared defense of human rights, democracy becomes a dead letter and communal life turns into a struggle of all against all.<br />
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Twenty-five years after November ’89, we recall the ideals of Charter 77 mainly for the sake of the generation too young to be tainted by personal experience of the communist regime. They take a critical view of the mistakes and false interpretations of the past twenty-five years, and are seeking their own path. They are the first generation since the National Revival of the nineteenth century who have a chance of not living through a regime change, war, totalitarian ideologies, or nationalist intolerance. They are the first generation of Czechs who can live freely and be responsible for their own decisions. For the first time in modern history, we cannot make the excuse of foreign intervention and claim we could not act on our own.<br />
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We know from experience that freedom is not given. It must be won, in a never-ending process. Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk and Václav Havel both, each in his own era, discussed the need for “nonpolitical politics,” that is, the active involvement of citizens in public affairs. Only with the personal engagement of citizens and under the constant scrutiny of civil society can parliamentary democracy have true meaning and elected politicians true responsibility.<br />
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A new generation is on its way in. We would like to pass on to them our belief in the indispensability of human rights. Increasingly these will be their rights—let us hope they can defend them fearlessly and advance them more effectively than we have been able to do.<br />
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Prague, November 2014<br />
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Luboš Dobrovský, Petr Placák, Miloš Rejchrt, Jan Ruml, Marta Smolíková, Petruška Šustrová, Jan Urban<br />
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Translated from the Czech by Alex ZuckerAlex Z.http://www.blogger.com/profile/15635561148523957099noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5208019.post-1230851984543868012014-05-11T23:52:00.001-04:002014-05-12T00:02:37.462-04:00Department of Dialogue<a href="http://www.pen.org/nonfiction/edge-grief" target="_blank">Anne Carson</a>: Why does tragedy exist?<br />
Alex Zucker: Every time I think about international politics I want to smash something.<br />
AC: Because you are full of rage.<br />
AZ: No shit, Sherlock.
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AC: Why are you full of rage?<br />
AZ: Why do you think?<br />
AC: Because you are full of grief.<br />
AZ: Oh. [thoughtful pause] Is that it? I thought it was because of my self-righteousness, grounded in what John Bradshaw refers to as toxic shame.<br />
AC: Ask a headhunter why he cuts off human heads. He’ll say that rage impels him and rage is born of grief. The act of severing and tossing away the victim’s head enables him to throw away all of his bereavements. Perhaps you think this does not apply to you.<br />
AZ: No, I can see pretty well how it would apply to me.<br />
AC: Yet you recall the day your wife, driving you to your mother’s funeral, turned left instead of right at the intersection and you had to scream at her so loud other drivers turned to look. When you tore her head off and threw it out the window they nodded, changed gears, drove away.<br />
AZ: Um, actually, Anne, I don't recall anything of the sort. Are you sure you've got the right Alex?<br />
AC: . . .<br />
AZ: That's what I thought.Alex Z.http://www.blogger.com/profile/15635561148523957099noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5208019.post-44681896167756680982013-12-30T16:00:00.002-05:002013-12-31T00:00:57.920-05:00Department of Czech Literary Yields, Continued<div style="text-align: center;">
<b>What We Saw in 2013 and What We’ll See in 2014</b></div>
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As I <a href="http://stickfinger.blogspot.com/2013/06/department-of-literary-yields.html" target="_blank">wrote in June</a>, I’ve started a database of Czech lit in translation — not going all the way back, mind you, but just to keep track of what’s come out since the end of communism (I may also include a few books from ’89 and before, just for the sake of reference). It’s mainly for myself, but I figured there must be at least a few other people out there who are interested.<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhqMpJHu64ijYmxH7Hl8iHZdPvVF2UjwM1Kfwj4ICcxHA-NtAyqiC5xkgcUKmgHoPia2X-Rzq5zzXU7i7GA47tSJfYgg8vL0FfTyKPO9sgdoKkt3E1BIBD77rAn8IGnIOKNJ4rH/s1600/stack+of+czech+books.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhqMpJHu64ijYmxH7Hl8iHZdPvVF2UjwM1Kfwj4ICcxHA-NtAyqiC5xkgcUKmgHoPia2X-Rzq5zzXU7i7GA47tSJfYgg8vL0FfTyKPO9sgdoKkt3E1BIBD77rAn8IGnIOKNJ4rH/s320/stack+of+czech+books.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Random stack of Czech books from librarything.com</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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Here’s what I’ve got so far: <a href="http://bit.ly/1dQfwDF">http://bit.ly/1dQfwDF</a>. Please do write and let me know if you’re aware of any books I’ve missed.<br />
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And as far as I can tell, here’s what we’ve got to look forward to in English translation from Czech over the next 12 months (pub dates based on bookstore websites, rather than publishers’ sites, which aren’t always updated as often):<br />
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<ul>
<li>February: <i><a href="http://blpress.org/books/aarons-leap/" target="_blank">Aaron’s Leap</a></i>, by Magdaléna Platzová, trans. Craig Cravens (Bellevue Literary Press), and <i><a href="http://www.twistedspoon.com/marketa-lazarova.html" target="_blank">Marketa Lazarová</a></i>, by Vladislav Vančura, trans. Carleton Bulkin (Twisted Spoon Press). [<i>N.B.</i> The latter has been pushed back several times from its original date of spring/March 2013, so whether or not the Feb. date will hold is anybody’s guess.]</li>
<li>March: <a href="http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/R/bo18115906.html" target="_blank"><i>Rambling On: An Apprentice</i><i>’s Guide to the Gift of the Gab</i></a>, by Bohumil Hrabal, trans. David Short, and <i><a href="http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/O/bo18115455.html" target="_blank">Of Mice and Mooshaber</a></i>, by Ladislav Fuks, trans. Mark Corner (both Karolinum Press).</li>
<li>May: <i><a href="http://archipelagobooks.org/book/harlequins-millions/" target="_blank">Harlequin’s Millions</a></i>, by Bohumil Hrabal, trans. Stacey Knecht (Archipelago Books), and <i><a href="http://portobellobooks.com/nightwork" target="_blank">Nightwork</a></i>, by Jáchym Topol, trans. Marek Tomin (Portobello Books). </li>
</ul>
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For those of you into statistics, note the expected yield for 2014 (six books) is 50 percent higher than it was this year (four books). </div>
Alex Z.http://www.blogger.com/profile/15635561148523957099noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5208019.post-49622460471921594802013-11-05T12:13:00.003-05:002013-11-05T12:13:56.463-05:00Czechs in New York Department<div style="text-align: center;">
<b>Němec, Klíma, Topol, Patočka — All in the Space of Eight Days</b></div>
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Czech it out. Czech list. Czeching in. Czech, please. Czech mate. Czech your head. Bouncing Czech. Time to bust out every stupid homophonic play on <i>Czech</i> you’ve ever heard, because starting this Friday, New Yorkers will be treated to a torrent of <i>česká kultura</i> the likes of which have seldom been seen. </div>
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<ol>
<li>November 8–14: “<a href="http://www.bam.org/film/2013/independent-of-reality-the-films-of-jan-nemec" target="_blank">Independent of Reality: The Films of Jan Němec</a>,” Brooklyn Academy of Music. The first full-career U.S. retrospective of Czechoslovak New Wave enfant terrible Jan Němec. Twelve films in seven days. Curated by Irena Kovarova and produced by her new independent venture, <a href="http://comebackcompany.com/" target="_blank">Comeback Company</a>. <br /><br /></li>
<li>November 11: Czech author <a href="http://new-york.czechcentres.cz/program/event-details/ivan-klima2/" target="_blank">Ivan Klíma</a> in conversation with László Jakab Orsós, director of the PEN World Voices Festival, discussing Klíma’s new memoir, <i><a href="http://www.groveatlantic.com/?title=My+Crazy+Century" target="_blank">My Crazy Century</a></i> (Grove Press, translated by Craig Cravens). Czech Center New York, 7 p.m.<br /><br /></li>
<li>November 14–16: Czech author Jáchym Topol at the <a href="http://www.newlitfromeurope.org/index.html" target="_blank">New Literature from Europe</a> festival, discussing his latest novel, <i><a href="http://the-devils-workshop-jachym-topol.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">The Devil’s Workshop</a> </i>(Portobello Books, translated by Alex Zucker). Nine authors, three days, three venues. <a href="http://www.newlitfromeurope.org/calendar/index.htm" target="_blank">Times and locations here</a>. <b style="font-style: italic;">NOTE:</b><i style="font-style: italic;"> Topol is confirmed only </i><i>for the Nov. 15 and 16 events.</i><br /><br /></li>
<li>November 15: “<a href="http://events.newschool.edu/event/nssr_philosophy_workshop_series_heretical_europe_a_workshop_on_jan_patockas_philosophy_of_history" target="_blank">Heretical Europe: A Workshop on Jan Patočka’s Philosophy of History</a>,” the New School, 10 a.m. to 6:15 p.m. A one-day workshop examining the legacy of Czech philosopher Jan Patočka, a giant of phenomenology and a co-founder of the <a href="http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB213/" target="_blank">Charter 77</a> human rights movement in communist Czechoslovakia. <a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bw8p_lsZfov7WHZHbEVQTk5ydEk/edit?usp=sharing" target="_blank">List of speakers here</a>. </li>
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See you there!Alex Z.http://www.blogger.com/profile/15635561148523957099noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5208019.post-24039699694148675572013-10-23T08:48:00.002-04:002013-10-23T08:55:33.933-04:00Czech Protest Department<div style="text-align: center;">
<b>Hanged-Man Figures Strung Up in Czech Cities Warn Against Dangers of Communist Party</b></div>
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A group calling itself <a href="http://dekomunizace.cz/" target="_blank">Dekomunizace</a> (Decommunization) strung hanged-man figures up on poles, bridges, and public buildings in cities around the Czech Republic Monday night to publicize the Communist Party's abuses in the past and warn against what might happen if it returns to power.<br />
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Czech voters go to the polls on Friday and Saturday, in <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-23770593" target="_blank">early elections called</a> as the result of a corruption scandal, and public opinion surveys <a href="http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/europe/czech-republic/131021/czech-republic-communist-party-parliametary-elections" target="_blank">show the Communists</a> likely to take second or third place, which would give them posts in government.
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The black figures were strung up with red-colored nooses in Hradec Králové, Jihlava, Tábor, and Prague. The inscription on their torso reads "Went against the KSČ(M)." [<a href="http://bit.ly/1639VZE" target="_blank">Photo gallery</a>]</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Protest figures hang above a campaign poster for the Communist Party that reads "With the people, for the people." Photo: František Vlček, MAFRA</td></tr>
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Though <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/november/24/newsid_2546000/2546883.stm" target="_blank">swept from power</a> in the Velvet Revolution of 1989, the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSČ) and its successor, the Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia (KSČM), remained a legal political party with members in Parliament, and<a href="http://www.pehe.cz/clanky/2005/2005-04-07-wallstreetjournal.htm" target="_blank"> never distanced itself</a> from the crimes and human rights abuses it committed during its 41 years in power.
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Governments in other states of the former Soviet bloc banned the Communist Party after 1989.
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In another protest action, artist David Černý, long known for his provocative work, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/22/world/europe/artist-makes-public-criticism-of-czech-politics.html" target="_blank">installed a floating middle finger</a> aimed at Prague Castle on the Vltava river on Monday.
Alex Z.http://www.blogger.com/profile/15635561148523957099noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5208019.post-48156745800843295332013-10-18T01:07:00.001-04:002013-10-18T08:41:11.508-04:00Department of the History of Czech Literature Abroad<div style="text-align: center;">
How Famous Czech Authors Got Famous: A Post on the Margins of ALTA 2013</div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #37404e; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px; line-height: 18px;">Česká literatura v cizině / Czech Literature Abroad was a lengthy, substantial discussion online in 2012</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #37404e; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px; line-height: 18px;">, and those who read Czech (or feel at home with Google Translate) will want to spend some time with it, but meanwhile here's an excerpt, in rough translation</span><span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #37404e; display: inline; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px; line-height: 18px;">, from one of Paul Wilson's contributions to the discussion that sheds a lot of light on how it was that famous Czech authors actually came to be famous. Lots of food for thought here, for every literary translator, or editor of literary translations: <a href="http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fbit.ly%2F1i0N2YU&h=FAQEVCQli&s=1" rel="nofollow nofollow" style="color: #3b5998; cursor: pointer; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">http://bit.ly/1i0N2YU</a></span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjEr-kEqGhe7zaI0UY1zY0ovs71CnTpdEGHUIfAFw41HhtEhnm_TVubgNAHXwH4bCn9RmZEilEOxglT7cT58mCcK-TJkrCAdHnnG0QZAJkqrBdTw1eYWzM0ubSnsCXEw_nXLjyJ/s1600/paul_wilson.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjEr-kEqGhe7zaI0UY1zY0ovs71CnTpdEGHUIfAFw41HhtEhnm_TVubgNAHXwH4bCn9RmZEilEOxglT7cT58mCcK-TJkrCAdHnnG0QZAJkqrBdTw1eYWzM0ubSnsCXEw_nXLjyJ/s1600/paul_wilson.png" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Paul Wilson</td></tr>
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<span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #37404e; display: inline; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px; line-height: 18px;">"It seems to me the primary question isn't whether readings or similar events, whomever they're sponsored by, are an effective way to promote Czech literature in the West or not, but how does today's book market work in the West, and whether it would even be possible for a new Kundera to appear in this situation. The old model, if that's the right word, was pretty clear. I don't know how it was with Kundera, but with all of 'my' authors there was someone in the West on their side, sometimes more than one person. Havel had the agent Klaus Juncker, then director Joe Papp in the U.S., Sam Walters in England, and I don't know who else he had in Austria or Germany. (Also don't forget the influence of his friendship with Stoppard. The first harbinger of Havel's fame was Kenneth Tynan's profile of Stoppard in the New Yorker in 1968, I believe, where almost half of it was about Havel.) These were all people who were fans of his, who believed in him and could give him support, help him, stage his plays, promote him, not just as a one-time thing, but for the long run. (Havel also had a 'court translator' in every language and they created his distinctive 'voice' abroad.) Ivan Klíma had, among others, Philip Roth, and then Bill Buford, when he was editor in chief of Granta, and they ushered him into the literary mainstream, situated him, found him a good publishing house that was willing to promote him, not just print his books, but 'publish' them and all that goes along with that, including proper editing and publicity, in short who devoted attention to him as one of 'their' authors who they intended to have a long-term relationship with — warm, friendly, deep relationships for the most part."</span></div>
Alex Z.http://www.blogger.com/profile/15635561148523957099noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5208019.post-63596282856181028722013-06-07T08:00:00.000-04:002013-06-07T10:59:04.984-04:00Department of Literary Yields<div style="text-align: center;">
<b>Czech Crop for English Readers in 2013</b></div>
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So far it looks like <i>The Devil's Workshop</i> (my translation of Jáchym Topol's most recent novel, <a href="http://bit.ly/11jL25e" target="_blank">published yesterday in the UK by Portobello Books</a>) and <i>Lord Mord</i> (by Miloš Urban, <a href="http://www.peterowen.com/pages/fiction/lordmord.html" target="_blank">translated by Gerald Turner for Peter Owen Publishers</a>) may be the only works of Czech fiction appearing in English translation this year.<br />
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<table> <tbody><tr><td><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjp93mUFfCgE9izDZsuYVYsdXQjC0o_D1-__rfdja8S9_t9lPdjpouRDrKeYbJCbAcetUcU6JiUudBHcFt3CvkG9_DwrxZRTCxmBbfAPoL1p6a8v395VuAfOc2rIwxh2Ol3mepp/s1600/the-devils-workshop-by-jachym-topol.jpg" border="0" width="212" /></a> </p></td> <td><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEii6pRB5kcMFVubWqnOkwiH0h3gH4kzizJNAc6cHXSHLTH2kwncDhiD56wtU-SpDUMLjFldrLxCcm6yLH65i6gDQBY0hciNVGfXkhalavTFPXtjkHaWn1W5cqj707U4efZ8a2d5/s1600/lord-mord.jpg" border="0" width="212" /></a> </td></tr> </tbody></table>
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Otherwise, according to the <a href="http://www.rochester.edu/College/translation/threepercent/index.php?s=file_download&id=212" target="_blank">latest database of translations</a> published by <a href="http://www.rochester.edu/news/experts/index.php?id=263" target="_blank">Chad Post</a> on the Three Percent blog yesterday, there are no other books translated into English from Czech scheduled to appear this year. (Before anybody objects, I of course realize there is a Czech author on the list — <a href="http://www.monikazgustova.com/" target="_blank">Monika Zgustová</a> — but she lives in Barcelona and wrote her novel <i>The Silent Woman</i>, <a href="http://bit.ly/12uOBNk" target="_blank">due out in November</a>, in Spanish.)<br />
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Major kudos to Mr. Post, by the way, for <a href="http://www.rochester.edu/College/translation/threepercent/index.php?s=database" target="_blank">having had the foresight</a> to start his lists. Without their existence, people like me would be less likely to do this kind of analysis, and the number of important debates and discussions they've given rise to is surely too many to count. Thank you, Chad! On the other hand, nobody's perfect, and there are a few Czech books missing from the list for 2013:<br />
<ul>
<li>Grove Atlantic is slated to publish Ivan Klíma's mammoth memoir, <i>My Crazy Century</i>, translated by Craig Cravens, <a href="http://bit.ly/1b9JgsN" target="_blank">in November</a>. (Although this is a memoir, not fiction.)</li>
<li>Twisted Spoon Press, in Prague, is supposed to bring out interwar giant Vladislav Vančura's classic novel <i>Markéta Lazarová</i>, in Carleton Bulkin's translation, although the originally scheduled pub date of <a href="http://www.twistedspoon.com/marketa-lazarova.html" target="_blank">spring</a> (or <a href="http://www.themodernnovel.com/czech/vancura/marketa.htm" target="_blank">March</a>) 2013 has since been reported as <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16007630-marketa-lazarov" target="_blank">May</a>, then <a href="http://www.pickabook.co.uk/9788086264431.aspx" target="_blank">June</a>, and it now seems to be due out in <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Marketa-Lazarova-Vladislav-Vancura/dp/8086264432" target="_blank">September</a>. So we'll see.</li>
<li>Finally, Jantar Publishing, in London, is <a href="http://www.jantarpublishing.com/publications.html" target="_blank">planning to bring out two works</a> this fall: <i>Kytice</i>, by Karel Jaromír Erben (bilingual edition, trans. <a href="http://from-my-pov.blogspot.com/2012/02/water-goblin.html" target="_blank">Susan Reynolds</a>), and <i>The History Teacher</i>, by Tereza Brdečková, trans. Elsa Morrison and <a href="http://blisty.cz/art/59080.html" target="_blank">Jan Čulík</a>.</li>
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For comparison's sake, here are the numbers of works of Czech literature translated into English in the past five years (again, <a href="http://www.rochester.edu/College/translation/threepercent/index.php?s=database" target="_blank">data from Three Percent</a>):<br />
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2012: 4 </blockquote>
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2011: 2 </blockquote>
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2010: 5 </blockquote>
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2009: 6</blockquote>
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2008: 5</blockquote>
I did some research and came up with a few more past publications:<br />
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2012: –1 + 5 + 2 </blockquote>
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<ul>
<li><i>Harlequin's Millions</i>, by Bohumil Hrabal, trans. Stacey Knecht, Archipelago Books, was slated for publication in April 2012 but is now listed as <a href="http://www.archipelagobooks.org/bk.php?id=66" target="_blank">due out in April 2014</a> </li>
</ul>
</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<ul>
<li>Václav Havel: <i>Leaving</i> and <i>The Memo</i>, trans. Paul Wilson; <i>The Increased Difficulty of Concentration</i>, trans. Štěpán Šimek; <i>The Vaněk Plays</i>, trans. Jan Novák; <i>The Pig, or Václav Havel's Hunt for a Pig</i>, trans. Edward Einhorn; all <a href="http://www.theater61press.com/books-2/the-havel-collection/" target="_blank">Theater 61 Press</a> </li>
</ul>
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<ul>
<li><i>A Bouquet of Czech Folktales</i>, by Karel Jaromír Erben, trans. Marcela Malek Sulak, <a href="http://www.twistedspoon.com/bouquet.html" target="_blank">Twisted Spoon Press</a> </li>
</ul>
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<ul>
<li> <i>On Flying Objects</i>, by Emil Hakl, trans. Petr Kopet and Karen Reppin, <a href="http://www.commapress.co.uk/?section=books&page=OnFlyingObjects" target="_blank">Comma Press</a></li>
</ul>
</blockquote>
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2011: +2 </blockquote>
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<ul>
<li><i>Prague, I see a city . . .</i>, by Daniela Hodrová, and <i>The Angel-maker</i>, by Michal Mareš, both trans. David Short, <a href="http://www.jantarpublishing.com/publications.html" target="_blank">Jantar Publishing</a></li>
</ul>
</blockquote>
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2010: +1 </blockquote>
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<ul>
<li><i>Gargling With Tar</i>, by Jáchym Topol, trans. David Short, <a href="http://portobellobooks.com/gargling-with-tar" target="_blank">Portobello Books</a> </li>
</ul>
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So the revised numbers would be:<br />
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2012: 10 </blockquote>
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2011: 4 </blockquote>
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2010: 6 </blockquote>
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2009: 6</blockquote>
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2008: 5</blockquote>
I did the best sleuthing I could, but if I've missed any books, I'll look forward to hearing about them! (P.S. I realize my labels are incomplete, but Blogger allows only a limited number of them.)Alex Z.http://www.blogger.com/profile/15635561148523957099noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5208019.post-30681582470626132662013-05-31T08:45:00.000-04:002013-05-31T08:45:23.206-04:00Rational Calculations Department<div style="text-align: center;">
<b>My Two Cents on Burma</b></div>
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"<a href="http://nyti.ms/10EabvN" target="_blank">Attacks on Muslims in Myanmar</a>" — nice of the Times to op-ed this. They are mistaken, though, in their invoking of the tired old bugbear of "old hatreds" (typically, when it comes to genocide, as in Rwanda and Yugoslavia, the favored variation is "<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2000/01/02/weekinreview/ideas-trends-if-only-the-problem-were-as-easy-as-old-hatreds.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm" target="_blank">ancient hatreds</a>").<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6v-IKW5eh2hc0eemIZS5Hbbz6VNBLV4JhnnAgP1dSrJUxF0k6T-8YTnE0IS9vYu2tr37vzaA6HqyS70pP4LjvpkPZKZW0X-UrKhYAt9wBT99w7jPy7wDEfHsp5reFyQ19Pm31/s1600/Map+of+Ethnic+Burma.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6v-IKW5eh2hc0eemIZS5Hbbz6VNBLV4JhnnAgP1dSrJUxF0k6T-8YTnE0IS9vYu2tr37vzaA6HqyS70pP4LjvpkPZKZW0X-UrKhYAt9wBT99w7jPy7wDEfHsp5reFyQ19Pm31/s320/Map+of+Ethnic+Burma.jpg" width="257" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Image: <a href="http://arakanindobhasaa.blogspot.com/2011/11/bbc-under-fire-on-rohingyas.html">http://arakanindobhasaa.blogspot.com/2011/11/bbc-under-fire-on-rohingyas.html</a></td></tr>
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One of the biggest obstacles to accurate understanding, and therefore effective prevention, of genocide is the failure to see it as a political phenomenon, i.e., a calculated decision on the part of a sector of society for the purpose of gaining (or regaining) power. The fact that "police and security officials," as the Times editorial board notes, "have been accused of failing to prevent attacks on minorities or being complicit in them," as well as the fact that the <a href="http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/spotlight/rohingya/" target="_blank">Rohingya Muslims</a> are not the only minority who have been targeted — the <a href="http://www.hrw.org/news/2013/01/17/burma-halt-indiscriminate-attacks-kachin-state" target="_blank">Kachin</a>, <a href="http://www.hrw.org/news/2005/06/09/burma-forced-displacement-burmese-army-continues-karen-state" target="_blank">Karen</a>, and <a href="http://www.hrw.org/news/2005/05/26/burma-army-and-proxies-attack-shan-civilians" target="_blank">Shan</a> peoples have all been on the receiving end of violence and human rights violations by the Burmese government — should make it obvious that the country's rulers see a benefit in doing so.<br />
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If it's true that <a href="http://bit.ly/11Gx5nv" target="_blank">sanctions didn't help</a>, it's also true that <a href="http://wapo.st/10jVm1i" target="_blank">praising president Thein Sein</a> for his progress on reforms while making no mention of the continuing massacres he's carrying out (<a href="http://bit.ly/18CfNea" target="_blank">described by Human Rights Watch last month</a> as crimes against humanity), as Obama did last week when <a href="http://bit.ly/16N0cIb" target="_blank">he welcomed him at the White House</a>, is nothing but shameful and helps no one except the regime and the <a href="http://bit.ly/19sJoFT" target="_blank">companies it does business with</a>.Alex Z.http://www.blogger.com/profile/15635561148523957099noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5208019.post-9408308855062243142013-05-22T10:43:00.000-04:002013-05-22T11:36:57.470-04:00Department of Say What?<b>Bad Translation Makes Mexicans Think Prague Has Special Subway Cars for People to Have Sex</b><br />
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A <a href="http://ow.ly/lhBNo" target="_blank">slew of Mexican news sites</a> reported over the weekend that a campaign to increase ridership on the <a href="http://www.dpp.cz/en/" target="_blank">Prague Metro</a> included designating a car on each train where passengers could knock boots.<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjYHxq3UzLpfBuzwJatRH_-Z7aJXyaosa0R6rHqn-9-_TGu5p_awOCIxZrxIHN0irVm7DsoMY4cVqVKi3nINR9iM1D491V0X1pDoDzO_AJnE-Dxjm-OmbzH0Evl2_ipBQSFBlHO/s1600/RAB4b55ed_metro_mexico.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="196" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjYHxq3UzLpfBuzwJatRH_-Z7aJXyaosa0R6rHqn-9-_TGu5p_awOCIxZrxIHN0irVm7DsoMY4cVqVKi3nINR9iM1D491V0X1pDoDzO_AJnE-Dxjm-OmbzH0Evl2_ipBQSFBlHO/s320/RAB4b55ed_metro_mexico.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Photo: <a href="http://www.vanguardia.com.mx/enpragatenersexoenelmetroestapermitido-1745346.html" target="_blank">vanguardia.com.mx</a></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
Metro.cz <a href="http://www.metro.cz/davejte-pozor-na-mexicany-v-metru-budou-s-vami-chtit-soulozit-pux-/metro-extra.aspx?c=A130521_111728_co-se-deje_nek" target="_blank">writes</a> that the campaign, <a href="http://www.upi.com/Odd_News/2013/05/17/Prague-to-dedicate-train-cars-to-singles-seeking-relationships/UPI-71661368827432/" target="_blank">described in English here</a>, will create a special car where singles can meet ("vagon, kde se budou moct lidé seznámit"), but that's as far as it's meant to go.<br />
<br />
Some of the Mexican sites, like the one above, illustrated their stories with photographs from New York City's annual <a href="http://improveverywhere.com/missions/the-no-pants-subway-ride/">No Pants Subway Ride</a>.<br />
<br />
Filip Drápal of Ropid, the Prague transport company, is quoted as saying that nobody who enters the car will be forced to make contact with their fellow riders.<br />
<br />
Other <a href="http://www.metro.cz/seznamka-pro-nezadane-a-pravidelne-koncerty-mhd-ma-byt-prijemnejsi-1de-/co-se-deje.aspx?c=A130516_153354_co-se-deje_row" target="_blank">features of the campaign</a> to induce Praguers to ride the Metro instead of driving their cars include concerts on the platforms and posters with quotes from <a href="http://www.viewegh.cz/en/aktuality.php" target="_blank">Michal Viewegh</a> novels and lyrics by pop rockers <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6cljH9cT6I" target="_blank">Mandrage</a>.Alex Z.http://www.blogger.com/profile/15635561148523957099noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5208019.post-4086720503711375472013-05-11T21:26:00.000-04:002013-05-11T21:26:49.879-04:00Hues and Cries DepartmentAdam Hochschild, <i><a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=vYo-DO4tr-gC&lpg=PP1&dq=isbn%3A0547525737&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false" target="_blank">King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa</a></i>, 280–3:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
An ancient English law made it a crime to witness a murder or discover a corpse and not raise a "<a href="http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-hue1.htm" target="_blank">hue and cry</a>." But we live in a world of corpses, and only about some of them is there a hue and cry. True, with a population loss <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=NZGHiVbm54wC&pg=PA12&dq=%22dropped+by+approximately+ten+million+people%22+king+leopold's+ghost&hl=en&sa=X&ei=JumOUd3TDNSt0AHPyIDgDQ&ved=0CDwQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q=%22dropped%20by%20approximately%20ten%20million%20people%22%20king%20leopold's%20ghost&f=false" target="_blank">estimated at ten million people</a>, what happened in the Congo could reasonably be called the most murderous part of the European <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scramble_for_Africa" target="_blank">Scramble for Africa</a>. But that is so only if you look at sub-Saharan Africa as the arbitrary checkerboard formed by colonial boundaries. If you draw boundaries differently — to surround, say, all African equatorial rain forest land rich in wild rubber — then what happened in the Congo is, unfortunately, no worse than what happened in neighboring colonies [. . .]</blockquote>
</blockquote>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYA9GL-mPaSlyjSZSoVnGHJqjQKyv_pKAfnMfkyOsvWc8WNWJO9Udq2r3lM5VUvnUxLzS3ZzjLTxA5eks-IQCHSnQh7_Hnn_vwk3SZApOdlLoBMLj4SqKm88KrLRySu1llgMMZ/s1600/Photos+from+King+Leopold's+Ghost.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="249" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYA9GL-mPaSlyjSZSoVnGHJqjQKyv_pKAfnMfkyOsvWc8WNWJO9Udq2r3lM5VUvnUxLzS3ZzjLTxA5eks-IQCHSnQh7_Hnn_vwk3SZApOdlLoBMLj4SqKm88KrLRySu1llgMMZ/s320/Photos+from+King+Leopold's+Ghost.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Photos from <i>King Leopold's Ghost</i></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Around the time the <a href="http://www.pambazuka.org/en/issue/577" target="_blank">Germans were slaughtering Hereros</a>, the world also was largely ignoring <a href="http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/58/" target="_blank">America's brutal counterguerrilla war in the Philippines</a>, in which U.S. troops tortured prisoners, burned villages, killed 20,000 rebels, and saw <a href="http://history.state.gov/milestones/1899-1913/War" target="_blank">200,000 Filipinos die</a> of war-related hunger or disease. Britain came in for no international criticism of its <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_massacres_of_Indigenous_Australians" target="_blank">killings of aborigines in Australia</a>, in accordance with extermination orders as ruthless as von Trotha's. And, of course, in neither Europe nor the United States was there major protest against the <a href="http://www.enotes.com/native-americans-reference/native-americans" target="_blank">decimation of the American Indians</a>.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
When these other mass murders went largely unnoticed except by their victims, why, in England and the United States, was there such a storm of righteous protest about the Congo? The politics of empathy are fickle. Certainly one reason Britons and Americans focused on the Congo was that it was a safe target. Outrage over the Congo did not involve British or American misdeeds, nor did it entail the diplomatic, trade, or military consequences of taking on a major power like France or Germany. [. . .]</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
What happened in the Congo was indeed mass murder on a vast scale, but the sad truth is that the men who carried it out for Leopold were no more murderous than many Europeans then at work or at war elsewhere in Africa. Conrad said it best: "All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz."</blockquote>
</blockquote>
Alex Z.http://www.blogger.com/profile/15635561148523957099noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5208019.post-47749876421749811792013-05-03T14:04:00.002-04:002013-11-16T11:26:33.606-05:00Department of Free SpeechIs it brave to tell someone to shut the fuck up when you're a celebrity standing on a stage and they're a nameless person sitting in the audience?<br />
<br />
Or, more to the point: Is it wrong for the head of a free speech organization, a <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/05/on-censorship-salman-rushdie.html" target="_blank">man who gives lectures on censorship</a>, to tell a protester to shut the fuck up at a public event?<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdmwZZAzInhZ-jbkMY8YxJ2cj8IxQLGB5p-WLtrrz2iGuTWOMgJXGOYq4YUv9p4wMPAni6Zni1qGCraLKK9z0OlG0v9Sff0zZLxGmyEO9mvGr-qlH0-a8IGcBNneVualP6WQKd/s1600/noname.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdmwZZAzInhZ-jbkMY8YxJ2cj8IxQLGB5p-WLtrrz2iGuTWOMgJXGOYq4YUv9p4wMPAni6Zni1qGCraLKK9z0OlG0v9Sff0zZLxGmyEO9mvGr-qlH0-a8IGcBNneVualP6WQKd/s320/noname.jpg" width="240" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Photo: Anonymous</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
This was the question on my mind as I read about what happened at <a href="http://worldvoices.pen.org/event/2013/02/27/opening-night-reading-bravery" target="_blank">the opening event</a> of this year's PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature, whose main theme is bravery.<br />
<br />
According to the <a href="http://penlive.tumblr.com/post/49375560110/shut-the-fuck-up-its-opening-night" target="_blank">account on the PEN Live Tumblr</a>:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
This is how the Opening Night Reading to PEN’s World Voices Festival of International Literature in The Great Hall of The Cooper Union started on Monday: Salman Rushdie walked on stage and said super eloquent things like, “The other meaning of courage is real artistic risk ... When we try and find new ways of saying things.”</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Then, a belligerent man with an anti-government sign yelled out, “You were for the war in Iraq!” He holds up his smartphone, “I have it right here in front of me! A war based on lies that killed a million people!” This guy was annoying everyone at the event.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Rushdie’s calm, English-accented response: “The only lies being told here are by you, sir. As president of this organization, I led this organization against that war, so you can shut the fuck up. It doesn’t matter how you shout, sir. It doesn’t make what you say correct. That is the technique of the bully throughout history—to try and shout other people down.”</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
With those words, and Rushdie’s cold-eyed stare hardened by assassination attempts and emboldened with knighthood, the man shut the fuck up. We continued on with the reading. It was an intense night, but in a good way.</blockquote>
</blockquote>
The protester was wrong—if by "you" he meant Rushdie. <a href="http://iranian.com/Opinion/2002/November/Lib/index.html" target="_blank">Writing in the <i>Washington Post</i></a> in November 2002, Rushdie questioned the reluctance of "antiwar liberals" to recognize that "Saddam Hussein and his ruthless gang of cronies from his home village of Tikrit are homicidal criminals, and their Iraq is a living hell." But he cited several reasons why the U.S. war on Iraq was <i>not</i> justified and why he "remained unconvinced by President Bush's Iraqi grand design." He restated this position in a <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/jul/09/iraq.usa" target="_blank">letter to the <i>Guardian</i></a> in 2007, adding that "as president of PEN American Center, I led that organisation in a number of campaigns against the Bush administration's policies."<br />
<br />
If by "you" the protester meant PEN, the answer's a little murkier. A search of the word "Iraq" on the PEN American Center website turns up <a href="http://www.pen.org/search/node/iraq/page/16/0" target="_blank">16 pages of results</a>—including "<a href="http://www.pen.org/press-clip/2004/08/09/rushdie-mobilizes-american-writers-against-bush" target="_blank">Rushdie mobilizes American writers against Bush</a>," "<a href="http://www.pen.org/press-clip/2006/04/27/pamuk-iraq-war-shame-us-and-west" target="_blank">Pamuk: Iraq war is the shame of US and West</a>," "<a href="http://www.pen.org/nonfiction/resolution-united-states-america" target="_blank">Resolution on the United States of America</a>" (from the 2003 International PEN Assembly, censuring U.S. crackdowns on freedom of the press in connection with the war in Iraq), and "<a href="http://www.pen.org/nonfiction-essay/sara-paretsky-refusing-allow-pressure-silence-critical-voice" target="_blank">Sara Paretsky: Refusing to allow pressure to silence a critical voice</a>"—but a search of <a href="http://www.pen.org/press-releases?field_category_tid=All&created=2001-09-11&created_1=2003-03-19" target="_blank">press releases from Sept. 11, 2001, to March 19, 2003</a> (the date the U.S. invaded Iraq) returns no statement on the subject by the organization as such. Extending the search to Dec. 31, 2003, reveals "<a href="http://www.pen.org/press-release/2003/09/19/pen-protests-ashcroft-comments-librarians-urges-repeal-patriot-act" target="_blank">PEN protests Ashcroft comments on librarians, urges repeal of Patriot Act</a>." That's it.<br />
<br />
Of course there's a difference between being <i>for</i> a war and <i>not being against it</i>, but it seems to me both Rushdie and the protester could be found guilty of exaggerating their claims. (And again, there's the issue of power differential: Can an ordinary person speaking from the floor to the president of a national organization standing on stage honestly be accused of "bullying"?)<br />
<br />
What I suspect, although the author of the PEN Live dispatch doesn't mention it, is the protester probably meant to direct his condemnation at neither Rushdie nor PEN, but a woman named <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suzanne_Nossel" target="_blank">Suzanne Nossel</a>. [<i>Note: At the time I wrote this, I had not yet received the photograph above. Now that I have it, it's clear the protester was referring to Nossel, not Rushdie. AZ, 5/4/13</i>]<br />
<br />
*****<br />
In January the PEN American Center <a href="http://www.pen.org/press-release/2013/01/16/pen-american-center-names-suzanne-nossel-executive-director" target="_blank">named Nossel</a> as its new executive director. She comes to the job with some baggage, having lasted barely a year as executive director at Amnesty International USA, <a href="http://www.amnestyusa.org/about-us/who-we-are/aiusa-board-of-directors-begin-search-for-new-executive-director" target="_blank">resigning</a> in the wake of barbed accusations that Amnesty was guilty of "<a href="http://consortiumnews.com/2012/06/18/amnestys-shilling-for-us-wars/" target="_blank">shilling for US wars</a>."<br />
<br />
These charges stemmed primarily from an incident during Nossel's tenure last spring, when Amnesty placed <a href="http://blog.amnestyusa.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/afghan-bus-shelter-ad.jpg" target="_blank">ads on bus shelters</a> in Chicago during the May 20–21 <a href="http://www.chicagonato.org/" target="_blank">NATO Summit</a> there, congratulating the military alliance for its contribution to human rights for women and girls in Afghanistan:<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://blog.amnestyusa.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/afghan-bus-shelter-ad.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://blog.amnestyusa.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/afghan-bus-shelter-ad.jpg" width="240" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Photo: <a href="http://blog.amnestyusa.org/asia/we-get-it/">http://blog.amnestyusa.org/asia/we-get-it/</a></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
Simultaneous with the NATO event, Amnesty USA held a "<a href="http://www.amnestyusa.org/events/shadow-summit-for-afghan-women-s-rights" target="_blank">Shadow Summit for Afghan Women's Rights</a>," featuring former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and speakers from the Afghan Women's Network and Women for Afghan Women, among others.<br />
<br />
The outcry—both over the poster and at the inclusion of Albright, an <a href="http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Madeleine_Albright" target="_blank">advocate for the use of U.S. military force</a> to stop atrocities and advance democracy—was loud enough that Amnesty felt obliged to respond. In a blog post titled "<a href="http://blog.amnestyusa.org/asia/we-get-it/" target="_blank">We Get It</a>," AI USA's director of policy admitted that the poster was "confusing," but defended it, explaining:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The shadow summit — and the poster — is directed at NATO, not to praise it, but to remind the leaders who will be discussing Afghanistan’s future this weekend about what is really at stake if women’s rights to security, political participation and justice are traded away or compromised.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
We were thinking about the hard won gains Afghan women have made since the fall of the Taliban. Ten years ago, Afghanistan had one of the worst human rights records in the world in terms of women’s and girls’ rights. The Taliban banned women from working, going to school or even leaving home without a male relative.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Today, three million girls go to school, compared to virtually none under the Taliban. Women make up 20 percent of university graduates. Maternal mortality and infant mortality have declined. Ten percent of all prosecutors and judges are women, compared to none under the Taliban regime. <b>This is what we meant by progress: the gains Afghan women have struggled to achieve over the past decade.</b> [. . .] </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
As a matter of policy, Amnesty doesn’t take a position for or against NATO. We didn’t call for the bombing of Afghanistan — in fact, readers who were members or following our work when the bombing started in 2001 will remember that our message was “justice not revenge” and that we went into crisis response mode out of concern for the impact on civilians.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
And <b>we’re not calling for NATO to remain in the country.</b> [emphasis in original]</blockquote>
Sahar Saba, former spokesperson for the <a href="http://www.rawa.org/rawa.html" target="_blank">Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan</a> (RAWA), founded in 1977 and <a href="http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/asset/ASA33/005/1999/en/0c57aae8-e291-11dd-abce-695d390cceae/asa330051999en.html" target="_blank">supported by Amnesty</a> in the past, <a href="http://www.viewpointonline.net/for-amnesty-international-occupation-is-women-liberation.html" target="_blank">argued that Amnesty</a> was overstating the gains achieved by Afghan women since NATO entered the country in 2001 and that it was misleading to compare the current status of women with the situation under the Taliban.<br />
<br />
Jodie Evans, a cofounder of <a href="http://www.codepink4peace.org/" target="_blank">Code Pink: Women for Peace</a>, led a <a href="http://went2thebridge.blogspot.com/2012/07/letter-to-board-of-directors-amnesty.html" target="_blank">campaign</a> asking the Amnesty board for Nossel's resignation. She attended the Shadow Summit in Chicago and during a Q&A session asked Nossel about the posters, as well as about reports that Nossel had let go staff from Amnesty's campaign to end the U.S. use of torture and close the detention camp at Guantánamo Bay. <a href="http://www.alternet.org/story/156303/why_i_had_to_challenge_amnesty_international-usa%27s_claim_that_nato%27s_presence_benefits_afghan_women?paging=off" target="_blank">According to Evans</a>,<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Nossel said the signs [about NATO in Afghanistan] were a mistake but the intent was to talk about how the women were better off and to tell NATO they needed to keep the women safe. I replied that her messaging was still off, and that telling the audience of supporters of Amnesty that war is good for women was a horrible lie. </blockquote>
*****<br />
I'm conscious of the need not to go too far astray here, but it's
important to acknowledge that the debate about whether it's possible
to promote human rights by military means—a matter of life and
death most of all for the people on the receiving end of U.S.
firepower—is as current now as ever, and Nossel, because of the
jobs she has held and the statements she's made, both in print and in person, is right in the
thick of it.
<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjXDcS46XOJFyqyxmi1R5iZZCE8O7Ju8rhLEkHhAHJvdNnX4Lyp_K7LbJFm5JrliufNYovQupYYARy7HuVFHxXcL4ciJ8CJza4Q36kmDz6cM0siCu9_Y4OeDHaZenEAa42Sypie5w/s1600/Nossel+pen.org.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjXDcS46XOJFyqyxmi1R5iZZCE8O7Ju8rhLEkHhAHJvdNnX4Lyp_K7LbJFm5JrliufNYovQupYYARy7HuVFHxXcL4ciJ8CJza4Q36kmDz6cM0siCu9_Y4OeDHaZenEAa42Sypie5w/s320/Nossel+pen.org.jpg" width="313" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Photo: <a href="http://www.pen.org/suzanne-nossel">http://www.pen.org/suzanne-nossel</a></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
Nossel <a href="http://humanrightsinvestigations.org/2012/09/30/suzanne-nossel-executive-director-of-amnesty-international-usa/" target="_blank">became
a target for antiwar activists</a> already in 2012, <a href="http://www.amnestyusa.org/news/press-releases/amnesty-international-usa-announces-leadership-transition-suzanne-nossel-selected-as-new-executive-d" target="_blank">when
she was hired</a> as head of Amnesty USA. In contrast to her
predecessor, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Cox_(Amnesty_International)" target="_blank">Larry
Cox</a>—a lifelong activist with deep grassroots connections, whose
involvement with Amnesty <a href="http://www.amnestyusa.org/news/news-item/the-heart-of-an-activist" target="_blank">dated
back to 1976</a>—Nossel came to the job with <a href="http://www.linkedin.com/pub/suzanne-nossel/1b/801/11" target="_blank">a
management background</a> in both human rights (COO at Human
Rights Watch) and corporate media (Dow Jones/<i>Wall
Street Journal</i> and
Bertelsmann), as well as a two-year stint in the State Department
under Hillary Clinton, serving as deputy assistant secretary of state
for international organizations.<br />
<br />
The
most trenchant criticism of Nossel has centered on her statements
concerning U.S. foreign policy, beginning with an article she wrote
for the establishment journal <i>Foreign
Affairs</i> while
at Bertelsmann, in 2004, titled "<a href="http://www.scribd.com/doc/94904590/Smart-Power-Suzanne-Nossel" target="_blank">Smart
Power</a>." There is nothing terribly new about her argument,
which can be boiled down to the idea that the United States, since
the end of the Cold War, can no longer rely on military might alone
to ensure its preeminent global standing: "trade, diplomacy,
foreign aid, and the spread of American values" are equally
valuable tools.<br />
<br />
(The
first person to put forward this position in U.S. policy circles was
actually <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Nye" target="_blank">Joseph
Nye</a>, a political scientist at Harvard University, in a 1990 book
titled <i><a href="http://books.google.com/books/about/Bound_to_lead.html?id=dMfArUL7hycC" target="_blank">Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power</a></i> [his
main argument is also summarized in <a href="http://www.polsci.wvu.edu/faculty/hauser/PS293/NyeSoftPowerForPol1990.pdf" target="_blank">this
1990 article</a> for <i>Foreign
Policy</i>]. The term Nye used was "soft power," not "smart power,"
but Nye, notably, was less interested in propping up U.S. hegemony
than in "<a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=dMfArUL7hycC&lpg=PA231&pg=PA260#v=onepage&q&f=false" target="_blank">meet[ing]
the challenges of transnational interdependence</a>.")<br />
<br />
Nossel
casts herself as a Democrat, a "progressive" who wishes to
"wrest . . . back from Republican policymakers" the
tarnished doctrine of liberal internationalism, which argues that
liberal states should intervene in other states to pursue liberal
objectives. "Progressives," she writes in <i>Foreign Affairs</i>,<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
must
therefore advance a foreign policy that renders more effective the
fight against terrorism but that also goes well beyond it—focusing
on the smart use of power to promote U.S. interests through a stable
grid of allies, institutions, and norms. They must define an agenda
that marshals all available sources of power and then apply it in
bold yet practical ways to counter threats and capture opportunities.
Such an approach would reassure an uneasy American public, unite a
fractious government bureaucracy, and rally the world behind U.S.
goals.</blockquote>
For
Nossel, human rights are more of an instrument than an end, a means
to advancing U.S. interests: "Policymakers must pragmatically
seek out opportunities for action where idealism and realism
intersect and pursue their goals in ways that reinforce, rather
than deplete, U.S. power."<br />
<br />
Most
other criticism of Nossel at the time of her appointment as executive
director of AI USA focused on her <a href="http://www.state.gov/p/io/rm/2011/166802.htm" target="_blank">statements</a> <a href="http://tlhrc.house.gov/docs/transcripts/2011_10_25_Human%20Rights%20Council/25oct11_hearing_Suzanne%20Nossel%20-%20Oral%20Testimony.pdf" target="_blank">regarding</a> <a href="http://www.jbi-humanrights.org/jacob-blaustein-institute/su.html" target="_blank">Israel</a> (which
she was accused of defending at the expense of Palestinians' rights)
and her stance vis-à-vis <a href="http://207.97.238.133/article/?article=731" target="_blank">Iran</a> (which <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/suzanne-nossel/preemptive-war-in-iran_b_13881.html" target="_blank">she
has argued</a> Israel should attack preemptively).
<br />
<br />
This
is not an exhaustive account of Nossel's credentials—far from
it—and to be fair, Nossel has taken positions on other issues,
and other countries, that are not at all controversial and have
therefore gone unremarked. She's also the founder of a blog
called <a href="http://www.democracyarsenal.org/" target="_blank">Democracy
Arsenal</a>, a solidly liberal-Democrat forum that is entirely
unexceptional in the range of opinion of its contributors.
<br />
<br />
The
truth is, Nossel is squarely in the mainstream of present-day
Democratic foreign policy thinking.<br />
<br />
*****<br />
Journalist
and author Chris Hedges, who until recently most people knew mainly
from <a href="http://query.nytimes.com/search/sitesearch/#/chris+hedges" target="_blank">his
bylines in the <i>New
York Times</i></a>,
sprang more openly into the public eye in 2011, thanks to <a href="http://www.truthdig.com/avbooth/item/chris_hedges_occupies_wall_street_20110926/" target="_blank">his
engagement in Occupy Wall Street</a>. Since then, he's become one of
the go-to talking heads of the left, with a <a href="http://www.truthdig.com/chris_hedges/" target="_blank">weekly
column on Truthdig</a> and regular <a href="https://www.google.com/#output=search&sclient=psy-ab&q=chris+hedges+site:youtube.com&oq=chris+hedges+site:youtube.com&gs_l=hp.3...1079.7085.1.7450.33.28.2.3.3.0.229.2669.22j5j1.28.0...0.0...1c.1.12.hp.TTVDZTOkve0&psj=1&bav=on.2,or.r_qf.&bvm=bv.45960087,d.dmg&fp=8816f04a4b0e66a5&biw=1241&bih=584" target="_blank">appearances
in the media and at public events</a>. <br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhYSvNFyB9-vVePBrr7C8D5QCDjTVOK0mTIhVOb1VHCM1ZZXUGJbGay6gh47Mi3DyUZ2dlAUh_478viOrEA9cq9lzLJ4YuVp9hMd5IMO5fMlqfphWZ_BVWNwSw5Y7spwHhEjxvO4Q/s1600/Chris+Hedges.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhYSvNFyB9-vVePBrr7C8D5QCDjTVOK0mTIhVOb1VHCM1ZZXUGJbGay6gh47Mi3DyUZ2dlAUh_478viOrEA9cq9lzLJ4YuVp9hMd5IMO5fMlqfphWZ_BVWNwSw5Y7spwHhEjxvO4Q/s1600/Chris+Hedges.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Photo: <a href="http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=10019">therealnews.com</a></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
In
protest against the PEN American Center's hiring of Nossel, in
April <a href="http://www.truthdig.com/eartotheground/item/chris_hedges_resigns_from_human_rights_organization_pen_20130401/" target="_blank">Hedges
announced</a> he was "resigning" from PEN and had turned down the organization's invitation to
appear in this year's edition of the PEN World Voices Festival. In a
follow-up to his announcement, "<a href="http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_hijacking_of_human_rights_20130407/" target="_blank">The
Hijacking of Human Rights</a>," he bludgeons Nossel, the U.S.
government, and most of this country's largest human rights
organizations for "buying into the false creed that U.S.
military force can be deployed to promote human rights."
<br />
<br />
Nossel <a href="http://nationalinterest.org/article/retail-diplomacy-at-the-united-nations-2268?page=show" target="_blank">supported
the U.S. invasion of Iraq</a> in 2003: It's true. Hedges goes
too far, though, in <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mnVuDz1pBGA" target="_blank">calling
her</a> "one of the most fervent cheerleaders for the Iraq
War," claiming she "embraced the administration's policy,
whether that's drone attacks, the assassination of U.S. citizens, the
curtailment of civil liberties, had not spoken out against torture."
Given that she was in the State Department for only two
years (2009–11), and in a relatively low-profile position, I think
his rhetoric is overblown.
<br />
<br />
The
growing convergence of human rights and humanitarian aims with those
of U.S. foreign policy—as documented and scrutinized in David
Rieff's must-read <a href="http://books.google.com/books/about/A_Bed_for_the_Night.html?id=e8zLUi1W7lMC" target="_blank"><i>A
Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis</i></a>—is
cause for great concern, and in Nossel these tendencies collide, but
she, personally, is not responsible for them. The rising pitch of
invective against her ("<a href="http://azvsas.blogspot.com/2013/04/feminists-for-imperialism-susan-nossel.html" target="_blank">feminist
for imperialism</a>," "<a href="http://www.conspiracyplanet.com/channel.cfm/channel.cfm?channelid=67&contentid=10579" target="_blank">US
imperial lackey</a>," "<a href="http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/15589-when-war-hawks-become-human-rights-officials" target="_blank">war
hawk</a>") is out of proportion to her role in the matter.
<br />
<br />
But
it is right to ask whether Nossel is an appropriate person to run the
second-oldest human rights organization in the United States. (The
PEN American Center was <a href="http://www.pen.org/faq" target="_blank">founded
in 1922</a>. The American Civil Liberties Union was <a href="http://www.aclu.org/aclu-history" target="_blank">founded
in 1920</a>. By the way, the PEN American Center <a href="http://www.pen.org/faq" target="_blank">claims
that</a> PEN International, founded in 1921, is the
world's oldest
human rights organization, but some quick web research reveals that
that distinction rightly belongs to <a href="http://www.antislavery.org/english/what_we_do/our_history.aspx">Anti-Slavery
International</a>, founded as the Anti-Slavery Society in 1839. PEN
International itself, interestingly, <a href="http://www.pen-international.org/our-history/" target="_blank">does
not make that claim</a>.)<br />
<br />
And
it is right to point out, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mnVuDz1pBGA&feature=youtu.be&t=1m55s" target="_blank">as
Chris Hedges does</a>, that on the U.S. government's treatment of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bradley_Manning" target="_blank">whistleblower
Bradley Manning</a>, the PEN American Center, whose <a href="http://www.pen.org/pen-charter">charter declares</a> "that the necessary advance of the world toward a more highly organized political and economic order renders free criticism of governments, administrations, and institutions imperative," has <a href="http://www.pen.org/search/node/bradley%20manning" target="_blank">remained silent</a> (as has <a href="http://www.pen-international.org/?s=bradley+manning&lang=en" target="_blank">PEN
International</a>).<br />
<br />
*****<br />
Should
Suzanne Nossel be replaced? I think so. I'm a member of PEN, and I believe we can do better. I also think the PEN American Center should join
the <a href="http://ccrjustice.org/search/node/bradley+manning" target="_blank">Center
for Constitutional Rights</a> and the <a href="http://www.aclu.org/search/bradley%20manning?show_aff=1" target="_blank">American
Civil Liberties Union</a> in standing up for Bradley Manning's constitutional rights.<br />
<br />
According to a source who was at the Monday event, when the protester shouted "What about Bradley Manning?" Rushdie replied that PEN was working on it. Maybe. There's no evidence of it yet. Until there is, Salman Rushdie should watch his
mouth.Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5208019.post-6229872196145811402011-12-04T00:26:00.001-05:002011-12-04T00:26:46.820-05:00Department of Realizations Arrived at Lying in Bed, Waiting to Fall Asleep<p style="margin-bottom: 0in">There is a part of me that does not believe another world is possible. But another part of me knows it's important for me to work with people who do. </p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5208019.post-75475757172509061702010-03-08T10:19:00.007-05:002011-12-04T21:19:20.324-05:00Bookslut Smackdown Department<a href="http://www.thesmartset.com/files/Images/Daily/Bookslut/ID_BS_CRISP_TRANS_AP_001.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 125px; height: 185px;" src="http://www.thesmartset.com/files/Images/Daily/Bookslut/ID_BS_CRISP_TRANS_AP_001.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br />Jessa Crispin, aka Bookslut, who once upon a time ran <a href="http://www.bookslut.com/fiction/2004_02_001521.php">a review of CSS</a>, <a href="http://www.thesmartset.com/article/article03041001.aspx">picks apart</a> a new book by Spanish --> English translator <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edith_Grossman">Edith Grossman</a>.Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5208019.post-24764171012416052362009-08-12T21:56:00.002-04:002013-05-13T13:39:21.576-04:00Department of Falling Walls<a href="http://davidbaptistechirot.blogspot.com/2009/11/wall-in-my-head-words-images-from-fall.html" target="_blank">My death-defying contribution</a> to the blog promoting the forthcoming Words Without Borders/Open Letter anthology <span style="font-style: italic;">The Wall in My Head</span>. [<i>Note: Original site no longer exists; link updated 5/13/13. Following is the text in full.</i>]<br />
<br />
<br />
08.05.09 | Quo Vadebas or "The Rubble in Our Heads"<br />
by Alex Zucker<br />
<br />
Martin M. Šimečka, primarily a journalist but known to most English speakers as author of the 1993 Pegasus Prize-winning novel <i><a href="http://www.loc.gov/today/pr/1993/93-114.html" target="_blank">The Year of the Frog</a></i>, published a biting article last May on the Vienna-based site Eurozine titled "<a href="http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2009-05-29-simecka-en.html" target="_blank">Still not free: Why post-'89 history must go beyond self-diagnosis</a>." He begins:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"Some of you may recall the western hopes in the aftermath of the Velvet Revolution that central Europe could enrich the western political world with fresh new ideas, values or insights that it lacked; that perhaps central Europeans might come up with a vision of a 'third way' between capitalism and socialism. These hopes rested on the assumption that central Europeans' experience of suffering under communism had made us better human beings, more inquisitive, sensitive and intellectual. Today, that hope looks pathetic, and it has become clear that western perceptions of central Europe were truly naive."</blockquote>
Šimečka, a Slovak who lives in the Czech Republic, argues that what at the time looked to many in the West like the fall of communism in Central Europe—a liberating event; the apotheosis of, depending on your background and point of view, Reagan's arms buildup and Star Wars missile defense shield or Gorbachev's glasnost or the grass roots stick-to-itiveness of the citizens on the far side of the Curtain (underestimated in nearly every account I've ever read), who, rather than try to break through the wall of Commie officialdom, simply stopped, turned heel, and walked away from it to form their own civil society—was actually no fall at all but a rise: the rise of globalization cum laissez-faire capitalism.<br />
<br />
By 1989, Šimečka writes, Adam Smith's invisible hand had "withered into a crippled stump." In Šimečka's homeland, Czechoslovakia (and its successors, Slovakia and the Czech Republic), the installation of capitalism through the 1990s—which is to say, the privatization of businesses, both large and small—was a frantic rush job, jury-rigged in such a way that it inevitably favored the powers that were, leaving most economic power in the hands of the <i>nomenklatura</i>, the "old structures," as they were colloquially known; or, hard to say for Slovaks and Czechs if this was worse or better, transferring it into the hands of foreigners, including the dreaded and envied Germans.<br />
<br />
Meanwhile "the West" (whoever that means these days) had lost its moral mirror. No longer could opinion makers dwelling in democracy hold up the Havels and Michniks and Konráds as long-awaited proof of the kinder, gentler society that would necessarily bloom once intellectuals were finally lent the ear that they deserved.<br />
<br />
Yet it is not Western naïveté that Šimečka is concerned with. It is the failure of Czechs and Slovaks and Poles and Hungarians themselves to be free, and to be free where it matters most: in their minds. As Šimečka puts it:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"All of us who lived at least part of our adult lives under communism have been marked by the past to the extent that we may never be able to discuss it in the language of a natural, free world. We may be able to distinguish between the courageous from the cowardly and victims from culprits, but not between those who are free and those who are not. The category of a free human being simply did not exist under the communist regime. Defiance, resistance or attempts to live a parallel life outside the system may have represented signs of longing for freedom but they did not represent freedom itself. This is why we can and we should bear witness and many deserve admiration and respect for their courage. Yet this does not entitle us to claim that we can interpret this part of history in a free and unbiased way. We are all like patients who self-diagnose and prescribe their own treatment."</blockquote>
And Šimečka believes that the first place freedom can happen (for it has not happened yet) will be in the rewriting of this part of Europe's history. It is up to the generations with no experience of communism to interpret the past free of personal anger, bitterness, and resentment, as well as of deserved if at times excessive respect and deference toward the members of the generations who swam in it—who sank or swam in it—from the day they were born. In other words, the first freedom will come from the ones with no Wall in their heads, the ones with their heads free of rubble.<br />
<br />
I saw this for myself during the five years I lived in Prague, from 1990 to 1995. During a night of drinking with Czech friends my age or older (that is, born prior to, say, 1965) at some point the conversation would invariably come around to what things used to be like in the bad old days. Not that it necessarily turned into a bitch-and-moan session; sometimes it got heavy; some of them had, after all, done time in prison. But as often as not there were laughs to be had in the reminiscing, a welcome relief from the pressure cooker of keeping up with the neck-snapping pace of life after the explosion of time (as Jáchym Topol referred to it). Whereas spending time with Czech friends who were younger than I was (born, say, 1970 or later), I rarely heard any discussion of the old times, unless it was about TV shows or bad pop music. Not that they were any less informed or intelligent than my older friends; they just weren't nearly as influenced by the past, as weighted down by it, for obvious and understandable reasons.<br />
<br />
Of course, unfreedom comes in many guises. Many in "the West," including probably most of the people I know, would say that consumerism, marketing, and advertising are the main threats to a free-thinking mind nowadays. I myself have come to believe that whether or not I'm "free"—by which I mean free to make decisions in my own best interest, unharmful to myself or to others, based in love, not in fear—is less a question of my rights, or my exposure to manipulation by advertisers, or the scaremongering of government propaganda, or the diminishment of public space as corporations assume the functions of government (not to dismiss the significance of these things) than of my willingness to take responsibility for myself.<br />
<br />
In other words, maybe for us—at least those of us in the United States, a country with a long and, to put it mildly, checkered tradition of seeking to "bring freedom" to other parts of the world—the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall is a good time for us to ask not how free or unfree are the people of Central Europe but how much freer or unfreer since then have we become?<br />
<div>
<br /></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5208019.post-42867844413812824612009-06-16T11:56:00.007-04:002009-06-19T08:53:17.746-04:00New Czech Drama Department<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjAGvpH5jn8epnzrMDyXPcLXi-As0pgJYVzzkmdpyK4tsp15mWZeHgA3Wq7_r_BC7WA2jyUjD_dV-MJqgPWYKzzRLxrjMCZabs2ij9RJl6rrCOsY2Rgw4cVvJINvQSrVPeo_xRnSA/s1600-h/51F7JF0-yhL._SS500_.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjAGvpH5jn8epnzrMDyXPcLXi-As0pgJYVzzkmdpyK4tsp15mWZeHgA3Wq7_r_BC7WA2jyUjD_dV-MJqgPWYKzzRLxrjMCZabs2ij9RJl6rrCOsY2Rgw4cVvJINvQSrVPeo_xRnSA/s320/51F7JF0-yhL._SS500_.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5347957914332625682" /></a><br />Last night marked the <a href="http://web.gc.cuny.edu/mestc/events/s09/czech_plays.html">release </a>of <span style="font-style:italic;">Czech Plays: Seven New Works</span>, published by the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center of CUNY. Buy it <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Czech-Plays-Seven-New-Works/dp/097905706X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1245168302&sr=1-1">here</a>.<br /><br />It contains a play by <a href="http://www.aura-pont.cz/en/Klestilova--Volankova--Iva-P1716.html">Iva Klestilová Volánková</a>, called <span style="font-style:italic;">Minach</span>, that <a href="http://stickfinger.blogspot.com/2003/12/department-of-things-you-find-out-when.html">I originally translated </a> for the Czech Center New York's staged reading series in 2002. (Not to too blatantly hype myself, but you can also <a href="http://institute.theatre.cz/publikace_newczechplay.asp">buy a copy</a> of <span style="font-style:italic;">Minach</span> separately from the Theatre Institute in Prague.)Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5208019.post-1132377132705429572005-11-18T23:59:00.000-05:002005-11-19T00:12:12.716-05:00Department of Unexpected PoignancyA couple weeks ago, I was revisiting Jim Jarmusch's first film, <span style="font-style:italic;"><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088184/">Stranger Than Paradise</a></span>. My father wandered into the room, as he is wont to do whenever someone is watching a movie and he comes upstairs from his study to take a break from work, and so he watched for a while, and was asking about it. So I was explaining who Jim Jarmusch is, and said that I thought his best film, and one I am sure my dad would like, is <span style="font-style:italic;"><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0090967/">Down by Law</a></span>. <br /><br />And so the other day, when I was in the library, I noticed they had <span style="font-style:italic;">Down by Law</span> on DVD, so I checked it out and brought it home for my dad to watch if he wanted. Well, who knows if he'll watch it or not, but *I* decided to watch it (I'm watching it at this moment in fact) on this, my last night in Ann Arbor. <br /><br />But this is my point. When the opening sequence came up, it suddenly dawned on me that this is a *New Orleans* film; and especially the opening sequence. It's long been one of my favorite openings -- for the cinematography (black & white, slow-mo, and wide angle) as well as for the music ("Jockey Full of Bourbon," by Tom Waits) -- but the poignant moment for me came as it suddenly dawned on me that everything in that sequence must now be gone. Forever. In effect the film has been transformed from feature to documentary (as, no doubt, many others have as well; in this, of course, <span style="font-style:italic;">Down by Law</span> is not unique). And, well, I found that <a href="http://www.m-w.com/dictionary/poignant">poignant</a>.Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5208019.post-1131912061362792122005-11-13T14:54:00.000-05:002005-11-13T15:31:27.873-05:00Department of Waiting for Comment from Charles BarronHere are links to three other stories (<a href="http://www.globalblacknews.com/Lamb9.html">one</a>, <a href="http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0241,hentoff,38996,6.html">two</a>, <a href="http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0242,hentoff,39174,6.html">three</a>) that illuminate the title of this posting. <br /><br />For more information about Zimbabwe, visit <a href="http://www.sokwanele.com/thisiszimbabwe/">this site</a>. Please note, however, that the one I present here (chosen entirely at random, using a Google search) is hardly the only one. There are many other sources that document just as well the horrors of present-day Zimbabwe and the vicious, lying rule of its president, Robert Mugabe. <br /><br />November 13, 2005<br />In Zimbabwe, Homeless Belie Leader's Claim<br />By MICHAEL WINES<br /><br />BULAWAYO, Zimbabwe - President Robert G. Mugabe has one word for reports that Operation Drive Out Trash, the urban-demolition campaign aimed at slum dwellers that his government describes as a civic beautification program, has rendered thousands of his impoverished citizens homeless.<br /><br />"Nonsense," he told ABC News in an interview broadcast on Nov. 3. "Thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands. Where are the thousands? You go there now and see whether those thousands are there. Where are they? A figment of their imagination."<br /><br />Clearly, Mr. Mugabe has not been to Bulawayo.<br /><br />Just three miles west of the center of Bulawayo, Zimbabwe's second-largest city, Robson Tembo and his wife, Ticole, live in the open air in a small pen, 12 feet by 12 feet, built of deadwood and scrap. Rows of plastic grocery sacks hold the assets they have collected over 72 years.<br /><br />Five miles north, Nokuthula Dube, 22, her two daughters and two orphaned relatives are squatting in an unfinished two-room house of cinder blocks. During a reporter's recent visit, an unidentified woman lay curled up on the concrete floor of the house's only closet, sleeping.<br /><br />On the other side of town, Gertrude Moyo, 28, lives with her four children and seven other families in tents, pitched in the bush.<br /><br />More than simple homelessness binds the three families. Until a few months ago, they all lived in Killarney, a shantytown with an improbable name that had housed Bulawayo's less fortunate citizens since the early 1980's.<br /><br />Today, Killarney is a moonscape of sunbaked dirt, scrub and burned-out rubble. Last May and June, police officers reduced its huts to wreckage, burned their remains and routed the area's more than 800 residents as part of Operation Drive Out Trash.<br /><br />"They had iron bars as long as this," Mr. Tembo said of the police, stretching his arms wide. "They demolished part of every hut, and then they told us to destroy the rest."<br /><br />Mr. Tembo said he refused, and so the police finished the job, leveling his two-room home built of wooden poles and metal walls.<br /><br />More than five months after the demolitions began, Zimbabwe's government continues to insist that the destruction of 133,000 households, by its own count, was a long-overdue slum-clearance effort that has caused its citizens only temporary inconvenience.<br /><br />The government contends that most of those made homeless have been relocated to the rural villages where they lived before migrating to the cities, mostly to look for work. Others, it says, will be placed in thousands of new homes being built to replace the illegal huts that have been razed.<br /><br />Mr. Mugabe has rejected the United Nations' attempt to raise $30 million to aid the victims of Operation Drive Out Trash on the ground that Zimbabwe has no crisis. Despite a public appeal by Secretary General Kofi Annan on Oct. 31, the government so far has rejected any assistance that implies that its evicted citizens are in distress.<br /><br />Yet many are in great distress. Relying on the estimates of Zimbabwe's government, the United Nations says 700,000 people were displaced by the May and June demolitions and a later campaign, Operation Going Forward, No Turning Back, in which police officers routed those who tried to return to the cities and rebuild.<br /><br />An August survey of more than 23,000 Zimbabwean households by the South Africa-based advocacy group ActionAid International places the number of those made homeless as high as 1.2 million - more than 1 in 10 Zimbabweans.<br /><br />Where many have gone is a mystery. The government carted thousands to holding camps that were later disbanded, and transported thousands more by trucks into the countryside and left them there, ostensibly near their rural homes. Those people are registered with local officials, but almost certainly, they are but a fraction of the total.<br /><br />In the Nkayi district, a vast expanse of bush terrain north of Bulawayo with 110,000 people, fewer than 700 families are known to have been relocated, according to church officials involved in assisting them.<br /><br />Similarly, the government's home-building plan has fallen far short of its promises and of the demand. Mr. Mugabe pledged three trillion Zimbabwe dollars for construction in July - about $30 million in American dollars, and dropping steadily given Zimbabwe's 400 percent inflation rate. But the national treasury is all but bare, and in Bulawayo, where 1,000 homes were promised in short order, fewer than 100 are being built.<br /><br />So where are the homeless?<br /><br />"This remains what I'd call an invisible humanitarian crisis - invisible to international eyes, the reason being that those who were displaced have been dispersed," said David Mwaniki, who oversees ActionAid's work in Zimbabwe.<br /><br />Many are probably with relatives; a few have fled the country. Others are in the bush, surviving off the kindness of neighbors. Many more have vanished into hovels and tents and half-built houses.<br /><br />The United Nations says 32,000 of Bulawayo's 675,000 residents lost their homes and were ordered to leave the city during the demolition campaign; city officials put the number at 45,000. Torden Moyo, who directs an alliance of local civic groups called Bulawayo Agenda, says there is no doubt where they have gone.<br /><br />"Ninety-five percent are now back," he said. "They're still struggling, still homeless, still penniless, still shelterless. They've been made refugees in their own country."<br /><br />Killarney is proof of that. Before the demolitions, it was dirt-poor but thriving, subdivided into three villages with stores and services. All that has been razed and burned. Northeast of town, not far off the road to Bulawayo's airport, Nokuthula Dube, her own children and an orphaned niece and nephew share the two rooms of a half-finished home. Ten stunted cornstalks and some greens grow in a makeshift plot outside, but the five live on donated cornmeal from a nearby church.<br /><br />Ms. Dube returned from her niece's school in June to find her home in Killarney's Village One wrecked and on fire. Homeless and pregnant, she lost her housecleaning job in a nearby suburb. Her husband, Nomen Moyo, had to move away to keep his job as a gardener. Ms. Dube said she and the children walked for a week, sleeping by the road, before finding the shell where they now live.<br /><br />In September, Ms. Dube had a daughter, Mtokhozisi. She left her 3-year-old daughter, Nomathembe, and the two orphans - 10-year-old Pentronella and 14-year-old Kevin - alone while she gave birth in a local hospital. She walked home from the hospital with her newborn. "I left in the morning," she said, "and arrived around 3."<br /><br />A few weeks ago, a man who said he was the house's owner appeared. "He wants us to leave," she said. "He's claiming that this is his house."<br /><br />Asked where they would go, she said, "Only God knows."<br /><br />Across town, Gertrude Moyo, who lived in Killarney for 23 years before being driven out on June 11, lives in a 10-foot-by-15-foot tent with her four children. Her husband died a year ago. She said the police first took the family to a transit camp for the homeless, then to the tent. Mrs. Moyo said she was told to wait for a new home.<br /><br />In fact, the government is building a row of houses next to her tent, and says they are for victims of the demolitions. But Ms. Moyo said the police had told her that her family was going not to a new home, but to a plot of farmland north of town.<br /><br />Robson Tembo and his wife drifted from one church to a second, then to a succession of relatives' homes before finally returning in late September to Killarney's Village Three. They built their scrap-metal enclosure not far from the two-room home in which they once lived, and which the police had razed in May.<br /><br />Once a miner, Mr. Tembo is now too infirm to walk very far, much less work. A son who cleans houses gives the couple maize; a second sometimes brings money.<br /><br />Mr. Tembo's great worry, he said, is that the police, who cruise up and down Killarney's main dirt road, will evict the couple again. "I'm from Malawi," he said. "But if they tear down this hut of mine, I will stay here, because I have nowhere to go in Malawi."<br /><br />Local church workers, who have assumed much of the burden of finding and caring for the homeless here, say that about 240 of Killarney's residents have returned, many living in the sort of scrap-metal lean-to's that the Tembos cobbled together.<br /><br />Down a dirt path, past the charred remains of huts in what was once Killarney Village Two, Mhulupheki Tshuma, 29, his wife, Ncadisani, and their 20-month-old son survive by scavenging plastic containers and collecting white pebbles, which Mr. Tshuma sells as decorations for graves. Two other children have been sent to live with relatives elsewhere in town.<br /><br />Mr. Tshuma was born here, and his parents died here. The family lived in a two-room mud hut when the police arrived in early June and burned it down. "The only thing I took out," Ms. Tshuma said, "was the children."<br /><br />After wandering for three months, they returned on Sept. 4 and built a hovel. The police demolished it on Sept. 29. Now they live in the open air, their living space bounded by knee-high mud walls and pieces of rubbish.<br /><br />Mr. Tshuma said the police returned early this month and beat him roundly, telling him he had to leave. But that is impossible. "We came here," he said, "because we didn't have anywhere else to go."<br /><br />ENDUnknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5208019.post-1131706508769766002005-11-11T05:50:00.000-05:002005-11-11T05:56:47.183-05:00Department of Red Tag Insurgencies"[Suicide bombers in Iraq] don't need a lot of money. Suicide mission[s] at the moment are at rock-bottom prices. The cost is basically [the] cost of transportation from the border to the location of the attack plus the cost of the explosives. These people train themselves outside Iraq. Osama bin Laden actually calculated how expensive is the insurgency of Al Zarqawi. And it's only 200,000 euros, which is roughly $250,000 per week. The United States is spending $1 billion per week."<br />-- <a href="http://www.lorettanapoleoni.com/">Loretta Napoleoni</a>, author of the newly published <span style="font-style:italic;"><a href="http://www.sevenstories.com/Book/index.cfm?GCOI=58322100159090">Insurgent Iraq: Al Zarqawi and the New Generation</a></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com