Articles

Posted by Dalkey Archive Press on 21/11/11

Martin Riker of Dalkey Archive Press explores International Literature, National Literature, Publishing Translations, and Creative Writing Programs.

Although Dalkey Archive Press is known in part for our interest in books from other countries, I have to say I'm not very interested personally in the concept of "foreign literature." I don't care about publishing "foreign books," even though we publish a lot of them. I prefer to think that we understand literature to be an international art form, and we decide what to publish based upon how much we like each book. I once heard Colum McCann say that readers are all "citizens of the nation of literature," which is more or less how I feel about it.

A friend of mine who runs an organization that promotes translation has a funny line: "We live in a country where the literature of the rest of the world is considered a niche market." She's right, of course, but accuracy is not ultimately the point of this statement. There's an expediency and a promotional value to talking about literature in the us-them way, turning translation into an "issue," and, moreover, there are plenty of legitimate reasons for doing so. Unfortunately, there's also a downside. It's no secret that a culture in which literature is valued primarily as a commodity (how much of the book market is X, how much is Y) tends to resist or even be hostile toward discussion of artistic value, since these two ways of thinking are so often at odds. Of course the market-focused portion of our book culture sneers at discussions of "art," since art is an unquantifiable value and therefore, in terms of the market, at best a vapid pretension, and at worst a distraction from what really matters (numbers of reader-consumers). This is the case even among the legitimately well-wishing, e.g.: "Reading itself is in jeopardy! People are getting dumber every day! This is no time to talk about art!" Fine, okay. The problem is that when those of us who do care about art start talking only about the market (in order to gain the support of those who think only in terms of the market) we find ourselves with no one left to talk, and ultimately to care, about art.

This situation has real-life implications. I'll give the following as an example, both because it happened not long ago, and because the mentality behind it is happening all the time

Back when I taught undergraduates, I once designed a class the entire purpose of which was to discover whether or not there is such a thing as a uniquely American literature. My intended syllabus included, among others, Whitman, Twain, Dickinson, William Carlos Williams, Gertrude Stein, Stanley Elkin’s The Franchiser, something by DeLillo, and Jaimy Gordon’s wonderful novel Bogeywoman, even though it for some reason reminds me of Kafka’s Amerika, which latter I planned to argue was the opposite of an “American” book. The questions were to be: Do these writers have something in common that other writers do not? And if so (although the answer had to be yes or else it would have been a very short class) what are those things and how do they come about and to what end? I never actually got to teach this class, but it seems likely that if I had, we would have discussed such possibilities as shared cultural conditions, a shared sense of purpose, of history, as well as a more literary sort of inheritance: literary traditions, styles, forms, tropes. If I’d had my way, we would eventually have tried to define a quality that I might have called (and have since called) the “particular energy” of a text.

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