Translation and its Discontents: Part I

At the end of last year, in the wake of the annual Nobel to-do, during which J.M.G. Le Clézio took the literary prize, Horace Engdahl, permanent secretary of the jury, publicly declared that “There is powerful literature in all big cultures, but you can't get away from the fact that Europe still is the centre of the literary world... not the United States…The US is too isolated, too insular. They don't translate enough and don't really participate in the big dialogue of literature... That ignorance is restraining.”

A parallel compliment was paid three years ago in the selection of the late Harold Pinter; this time political intention was more baldly at play. There is absolutely no doubt that Pinter’s oeuvre was up to what we think of as Nobel standards. The problem is that Nobel standards are not always up to what we think of as literature. Pinter should have received the Nobel when his active career as a playwright was something less than a distant memory. It might have spared us the terrible poetry that was to follow. Instead, his Nobel awarders, one senses, had more regard for Pinter’s political activism, taken up when his literary output was on the wane. José Saramago, the recent Portuguese Nobel, is a similar case. If the Nobel were to go to a Portuguese author, it should have gone to António Lobo Antunes, the better novelist and (unfortunately for his Nobel prospects) as apolitical as Saramago is political.
Engdahl’s statement reads something like a corrective of these past choices. At least he’s trying to steer the criteria for the literary prize back towards the literary and away from the anti-American agitprop of aging European littérateurs.
His charge is twofold, part directed at American publishers, who have been too slow to take up – except for the obvious choices – the new European fiction; secondly that Europe, at any rate, is still the culture-producing continent par excellence. The first charge reflects economic envy, the second Eurocentric hubris. By leveling the accusation of ignorance, insularity and parochialism against the United States as an entity (its publishers, its reading public and, by extension, its cultural life in general), he contrives to condemn its novelists and poets, by default, to similar irrelevance.
Two things Americans must understand are that our Nobel secretary’s notion that Europe is a single literary or cultural agglomeration is simply false and, secondly, that the whole logic of his position is absurd, in part because Europe – the project – is absurd, having ever less to do with bringing national cultures closer together, and ever more to do with supranational ownership of industry, banking and the colonization of new consumer market space. It is not that this is necessarily a bad thing (how else should Europe proceed?) but for a cultural czar like Engdahl to misunderstand the extra-literary foundations upon which he constructs his bully pulpit borders on blindness.
Engdahl’s inability to see Europe in proportion is a side effect of the tangled procedures of post-war cultural, intellectual and political reconstruction, which in modern European history derives a good deal of its energy from a compensatory and continent-wide process of sublimation, namely the need to forget all about its reliance on the American military to protect its borders. Recently this cold-war era inheritance has been given new impetus by the breakup of the Eastern block and the war in the Balkans. What rankles Europeans the most, especially the intellectual and political classes, is that, with no standing “European” army (even though the very definition of being a nation state in Europe today depends on maintaining a highly militarized and fully equipped national police force), Europe is as dependent on parochial America as it was in 1945 for the defense of “Project Europe”, which, in practical terms, means the defense of Europe’s Eastern Front. What this boils down to is that Europe is in charge of policing it’s internal affairs, while America, under the auspices of NATO, and often overriding competing (and self-canceling) national European agendas altogether, is in charge of policing its expanding borders. The proposed anti-missile shields in Poland are just the latest manifestation. The last great expression of European inadequacy on this account was the tragic tit for tat war in Balkans. Lately the problem has shifted to Georgia, and finally, this winter, in the bitter cold of December and January, to the power games played out in the arena of essential resources, namely the gas-wars between Russian and the Ukraine - that on again off again NATO pretender.
Thus, in the cultural sphere, one of the by-products of Europe’s geopolitical weakness is its compensatory need to luxuriate in the fantasy of cultural supremacy, on the one hand, and on American vulgarity on the other. Engdahl is an old style Nordic polyglot who, according to Tom Leith, in the Telegraph, “speaks Swedish, English, German, French and Russian fluently,” (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/culturecritics/samleith/3561561/Nobel-Prize-judge-is-wrong-to-denounce-American-literature.html). Leith’s rather unhelpful opinions run to the other extreme, citing the cultural and political hegemony of the English language and basically dismissing Engdahl and his cohort of linguists as behind the times.
My question, and one which I would like to explore in a series of posts, is whether or not Horace Engdahl has a point? He might, especially where poetry is concerned.
The problem is not so much if, or how much, European poetry and fiction are translated into English and made available to readers in the United Sates (by any standards it is a significant amount), but rather the extent to which these translations are read and absorbed into the stream of American letters. The powerful influence of American authors on the Europeans, not only on the general reading public, but on European authors themselves, is a given, but does the influence extend in the other direction? At the heart of Engdalh’s complaint, though he shrouds this in arrogant exaggeration, is that American readers and authors don’t return the favor.