{"id":95,"date":"2011-10-16T11:15:42","date_gmt":"2011-10-16T03:15:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/?p=95"},"modified":"2011-11-03T10:54:45","modified_gmt":"2011-11-03T02:54:45","slug":"is-that-a-fish-in-your-ear-interview","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/?p=95","title":{"rendered":"“Is That a Fish in Your Ear” interview"},"content":{"rendered":"

One out of every five Americans is functionally bilingual \u2014 either because they are recent immigrants or they inherited it from their family or because they learned it at school or from residence abroad. That\u2019s quite a high percentage for an English-speaking country.\u00a0America isn\u2019t as monolingual as people say it is \u2014 but it is<\/em> culturally monolingual.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Readers of poetry in translation and advocates for linguistic diversity may be interested Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything<\/a><\/em>, by David Bellos <\/a>(one of Bellos’s crowning achievements is the translation of Georges Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual<\/em><\/a>). I haven’t read it yet, but I did appreciate his interview, under the title “The Birth of the Google Translate Era<\/a>,” at Salon<\/a>. The quote about is from that interview, as is the following excerpt:<\/p>\n

Far more titles are translated from<\/em> English than into<\/em> English every year. What does that say about the relative status of English-speaking culture in the world?<\/strong><\/p>\n

There is a huge asymmetry. Somewhere around 3 or 4 percent of books appearing in the U.S. each year are of foreign origin, whereas in other developed book cultures, like France or Germany, it ranges from 15 to 20 percent. The English language book industry is vastly bigger than any other, so 4 percent of all the books published in English is actually quite a large number of books.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s partly because English is written by so many different cultures around the world \u2014 South Africans, Australians, and so forth \u2014 so the English book world is already diverse. But the fundamental reason is that publishers remain convinced that translated books are a hard sell and that they don\u2019t have much of a public. They don\u2019t really believe in translated books as way of making money. It\u2019s true that very few New York Times bestsellers were originally written in another language, but these are to some degree self-fulfilling prophecies. It\u2019s something I really want to carry on struggling against. Publishers should be more courageous and less enclosed in the received idea that translation is expensive and needs a subsidy and is never going to appeal to anybody.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One out of every five Americans is functionally bilingual \u2014 either because they are recent immigrants or they inherited it from their family or because they learned it at school or from residence abroad. That\u2019s quite a high percentage for … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[3,16],"tags":[56,42],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8srwF-1x","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":1091,"url":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/?p=1091","url_meta":{"origin":95,"position":0},"title":"World Literature Today on Is That a Fish in Your Ear?","author":"Lucas Klein","date":"August 16, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"Click for the World Literature Today write-up of David Bellos's Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything.","rel":"","context":"In "Links"","block_context":{"text":"Links","link":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/?cat=3"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.worldliteraturetoday.com\/sites\/default\/files\/fishinyourear.jpeg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":1247,"url":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/?p=1247","url_meta":{"origin":95,"position":1},"title":"ALTA 2012","author":"Lucas Klein","date":"October 3, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"The annual conference of the American Literary Translators Association begins today, in Rochester, NY. In addition to the scheduled events--such as a plenary address by Is That a Fish in Your Ear? author David Bellos--there will also be recently added tributes to Michael Henry Heim, the master translator who passed\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Links"","block_context":{"text":"Links","link":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/?cat=3"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":257,"url":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/?p=257","url_meta":{"origin":95,"position":2},"title":"More Press on Translation","author":"Lucas Klein","date":"November 3, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"Salon.com has another article on translation, by Kevin Canfield, misleadingly titled \"How do you say 'balls of gold' in French?\" (wouldn't a more accurate headline be \"How do you say 'des couilles en or' in English\"?). Nevertheless, it's a decent take. Here's an excerpt that displays an interesting way of\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Links"","block_context":{"text":"Links","link":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/?cat=3"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2108,"url":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/?p=2108","url_meta":{"origin":95,"position":3},"title":"Poetry on Fire: Xi Chuan & Helen Wing at M Restaurant Beijing","author":"Lucas Klein","date":"August 22, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"Xi Chuan & Helen Wing: Poetry on Fire Sunday,\u00a0August 25, 4 p.m. RMB 75, includes one drink \u00a0 Poets Helen Wing and Xi Chuan come together to explore the idea of poetry as fire, from the fire imagery in their poems to their views on how the poetic imagination spreads,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Links"","block_context":{"text":"Links","link":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/?cat=3"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":4915,"url":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/?p=4915","url_meta":{"origin":95,"position":4},"title":"Chan on Smith’s “problematic translation” of Yi Lei","author":"Lucas Klein","date":"November 23, 2020","format":false,"excerpt":"Writing for 4Columns, Andrew Chan has reviewed My Name Will Grow Wide Like a Tree: Selected Poems (Graywolf) by Yi Lei \u4f0a\u857e, translated by Tracy K. Smith and Changtai Bi. After a nice contextualization of Yi Lei and her poetry, Chan gets to the goods of what he calls the\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Links"","block_context":{"text":"Links","link":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/?cat=3"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/4columns.org\/img\/column\/chan_mynamewillgrowwidelikeatree_cover.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":3008,"url":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/?p=3008","url_meta":{"origin":95,"position":5},"title":"Asymptote write-up of Ouyang Jianghe’s Phoenix","author":"Lucas Klein","date":"February 11, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"Dylan Suher for Asymptote writes on Austin Woerner's translation of Phoenix \u51e4\u51f0, by Ouyang Jianghe \u6b27\u9633\u6c5f\u6cb3 (after a sculpture by Xu Bing \u5f90\u51b0) (Zephyr, 2014): This excellent Zephyr Books edition packages the poem together with pictures of the sculpture, and, in what happily seems to be becoming the norm, places\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Links"","block_context":{"text":"Links","link":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/?cat=3"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.asymptotejournal.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/01\/Phoenix2infliteUSE.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=95"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":261,"href":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95\/revisions\/261"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=95"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=95"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=95"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}