‘Fever liquefied the days. I fancied I could smell ether or carbolic acid.
'I fancied I heard wheelchairs rolling squeakily down a hallway long ago, in some castle or other full of nymphs in winged head-dresses and wards with row upon row of dazzling white beds in which the sick lay wrapped in sheets like caterpillars in silken cocoons.’
These lyrical, dazzling words are taken from Erwin Mortier’s novel Shutterspeed, published in the UK by Harvill Secker. Or rather, they are taken from Ina Rilke’s translation of Erwin Mortier’s novel Shutterspeed, for it is Rilke’s painstaking work that allows non-Dutch, English speakers to revel in Mortier’s exquisite prose.
Many hundreds of other equally stunning novels from other languages have been translated into English, but these only account for about 3% of the books published in the UK.
There are two ways of looking at this, as prize-winning translator Daniel Hahn notes in an exclusive article written for this website. Either we can despair of this disgracefully low figure, especially when we consider the number of English titles that are translated into other languages, or we can celebrate the fact that 3% of well over 100,000 books published in the UK every year is still a pretty large number of books.
Booktrust, which runs the translated fiction website, is committed to encouraging people of all ages and cultures to discover and enjoy reading. We are proud to be able to expand our work into the world of translated fiction and believe we are well placed to celebrate and broaden readers’ awareness of these amazing novels.
We also want to support the authors who wrote the books in the first place, and the publishers who have committed themselves to publishing these books in a highly competitive and increasing homogeneous market.
Additionally we want to praise the translators – the unsung heroes of contemporary literature – whose intelligence and creativity render into English novels that deserve to be read all over the world.
How can you help?
We would love to hear from publishers about new and forthcoming titles (to review and add to the website). We want to interview translators and authors; and we would like to hear about any news and events.
If you are involved in the world of literary translation and would like to contribute to the site, especially the blog, please contact website editor Nikesh Shukla.
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