Michael Orthofer: belief

Transcript context

…What’s your theory of America? Where have we gone wrong? You say correctly there was more interest in foreign fiction in the 1970s, right? We’ve moved away from that. Why has that happened? What’s the institutional failure behind that? You could say lack of someone like you may be part of it, but you’re here now. It’s still the case. A novel comes out in American English, and they try to hide the fact that it was translated, quite often. I’m sure you’ve seen this, or maybe not seen it. Right. Well, I think, actually, things have improved a lot in the time I’ve been running the site. I think a major reason was that there was a generational shift from, especially, the publishing world. The publishers would come across from Europe around World War II, who obviously had brought a lot of international fiction, who were aware of what was being written elsewhere in the world — mainly in Europe, unfortunately, so relatively localized as well, but still. But you also had it with the interest in Japanese fiction, for example. There was that generation, which is also very much due to the sudden interest in Japan from World War II — the people who learned Japanese and then began translating the work. And I think there was a generational shift which played itself out most fully in the 1990s. But yeah, I’m not sure why exactly it went as far down as it did. The wonderful thing is that translation has really been revived in the past couple of years. I think there really has been a greater interest in — especially, with smaller publishers who are really interested in publishing translations. But it is a kind of paradox of globalization, right? After the ’70s in particular, immigration to the United States goes up quite rapidly. There’s a lot more trade, especially with Asia. Many more Americans get passports. They travel abroad. And yet, at the same time, we’re less interested in some aspects of foreign literature. Maybe there’s something more general to this. If you think of America as, in some ways, an open country, actually we’re much less willing to watch foreign films than are people from most other countries. Then you go to Canada, for all of its talk of cultural protectionism — they do a small amount of it — or Paris, arguably they’re, in many ways, more open to foreign cultures than America. What’s the general paradoxical lesson about globalization we can pull out of all of this?…

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