New Spanish Books: The online guide of titles from Spanish publishers and literary agents with rights for translation in the UK. To consult titles available in other markets please click on the above links.
Chirstopher MacLehose
Christopher MacLehose (Edinburgh, 1942) has hada long and prestigious career in the UK publishing industry, specialising in literature in translation. After working at Hammond & Hammond, Chatto & Windus, and Collins, he was editorial director of Harvill Press from 1984 to 2004, when it became an imprint of Random House as Harvill Secker. He now runs MacLehose Press, from where he continues to publish the best of foreign literature. One of his latest acquisitions is No-one Loves a Policeman (Guillermo Orsi), featured in the spring edition of newspanishbooks.com. We interview him in his favourite place, a tiny and charming Ethiopian restaurant in north London.
How many Spanish books have you translated from Spanish?
In the twenty-one years that I was the publisher at the Harvill Press we built an enviable list of Spanish authors: Atxaga, Bolaño, Cortazar, Cozarinsky, Dominguez, Estévez, Carmen Martín Gaite, Llamazares, Mariás, Marsé, Mendoza, Moncada, Montero, Neruda, Pauls, Paz, Rivas, Vila-Matas, and also Che Guevara and Arturo Pérez-Reverte. We did what we could, but we did not publish all of the books of all of these writers. In some cases other and more influential publishers were involved, in the cases of Paz and Neruda particularly. Since the launching of the MacLehose Press in January 2008 we have commissioned the translations of Evelio
Rosero's “The Armies” (for publication in October 2008), Alberto Barrera Tyszka's “The Sickness” and Guillermo Orsi's “No-one Loves a Policeman”. Contracts for two other Spanish-language authors are in preparation.
How do you decide to translate and publish a book from a Spanish author? Is it a long process, and is www.newspanishbooks.com useful for that purpose?
Those publishers whom we may call translation houses generally concentrate on a handful of languages, which they may read, or for which they may have qualified and experienced readers. It is not a straightforward business to maintain a network of counsellors in even twenty languages. A reader needs to know the literature as well as the language. He or she will also need to know the publisher's list. A book that would properly belong on one list might not be good for another. It isn't a question simply of what will be a bestseller: a list has to be identified with a certain range and quality of literature. It might be cookbooks, it might be crime fiction. Most especially perhaps in the field of literature in translation will an imprint be a guarantee, of the translation as well as of the calibre of the author. Readers may say that the imprint means nothing, but it does. A Carcanet poet, or a Faber poet or a Bloodaxe poet, all of these are recognizable. So it is with translations. A bookseller could begin his own filtering process by bearing in mind that what is translated has not only been chosen by the original publisher but has now been chosen to be one of the miniscule 3% in English , and that by the act of translation not infrequently a further refining process is put in place. That 3%, winnowed down from the best of the books published in, say, thirty languages, should be (very possibly is) the equal of the best 3% of what is published in English.
Your wise Spanish readers have to know their way around Peruvian, Mexican, Colombian, Venezuelan, Argentinian, Uruguayan, Cuban, and Chilean literature too. It is a monumental canvas, physically unmanageable. But Spanish publishers and agents, through whom the vast majority of Spanish-language writers reach other European publishers, cover those immense distances, travel to Latin-American bookfairs, have their own branches there, or at any rate maintain as close a contact as they can. Every one of the non-Spanish writers -- save one -- that we published at Harvill came through a Spanish publisher or agent. (Che Guevara's literary Estate was handled at that time by an Italian publisher!) So you spend whatever time you can listening to Spanish publishers, to your regular translators, and to your regular readers who read the literary press and who have their own network, and whom the internet has given hitherto unimaginable wings.
And when you have all your reports, all the good advice from learned sources that you can find, on what basis do you say yes? You say yes when you believe that the author's work will be read still in 25 years time. That has to be the aim of the literary publisher. One explanation of the notorious 3% is that some booksellers in America will send a book back after six weeks if it isn't selling. And British booksellers will not be far behind.
The costs of maintaining your network of readers, and paying your readers, is just one of the extra costs, a cost that publishing a text written in English does not incur. Not only the merely prudential will then point to the cost of translation, but the fact is that national bodies exist, and sometimes supra-national bodies and private institutions which give generous subsidies -- one senses especially to the English publishers -- to defray this cost. The Cervantes Institute will often also bring authors to London, host readings and lectures and conversations. “NewSpanishBooks.com” is a very sophisticated bonus, drawing as it does on the scholarship of many readers, of a jury too of translators and booksellers and critics who in one sense are doing half the publisher's work for him. Whereas the commercial value of the work of every sort of cultural attaché is presumably impossible to guage, this is an initiative that can only bear fruit -- by giving authoritative, free and impartial advice to anyone who wants to benefit from it -- for Spanish authors and publishers.
For myself I have bought one writer from each of the two published lists, and mine may be the smallest imprint in London. I applaud this branch of cultural warfare whose campaign trophies will soon assuredly be another critical or commercial success for a Spanish-language author and that -- it always happens so -- will be followed by a troop of other new Spanish writers through the newly-opened door. English publishers and British readers are all sheep (or creatures of habit) and if they read one Scandinavian crime story with pleasure they will buy a dozen more.
Why do you think translations are less common in the UK than in other European nations?
The reason most often proposed for the humiliatingly low percentage of translations published in the English language is that there is so rich a culture in Indian English, in Irish, in Canadian, in Australian, in American and South African and New Zealand (et alia) English that there is no space and perhaps no need for the literary works of other languages. Spanish and all other European publishers, and also Chinese publishers of course, translate from all of the Englishes and still make room in their lists for the best of a dozen or more other languages besides.
It is important to go on reminding ourselves that this 3% includes all academic works, all children’s books, all commercial and illustrated books as well. The steady development of English as the dominant language of the computer will do nothing to reshape the mentality of the British or American common reader or publisher. There is an almost depthless incuriosity in the Anglo-Saxon world as to what is written, published, discussed in other languages. Almost but not total. There will always be a small but significant minority of book buyers willing to read the very good books that are translated into English. There are, over and above that tiny core, a huge number of book buyers -- in the order of a million on each side of the Atlantic -- who will every two or three years buy the "book of the moment" even if it is in translation from Umberto Eco's Italian, Peter Høeg's Danish, Carlos Ruiz Zafón's Spanish. The tragedy is that these occasional huge sales do not tempt publishers and book buyers and, crucially, booksellers' buyers to be more courageous in promoting the claims of other foreign writers of the same quality.
There are, of course, no rules which convert vast Spanish sales, of Eduardo Mendoza, for example, or Javier Marias into a similar British sale; no rules indeed which could predict the very different sales in Greece or Germany or France of certain British or American writers -- Paul Auster or Jonathan Coe are two interesting cases -- whose sales in translation far exceed their sales at home. What is certain is that in the last twenty years or so foreign writers have been disproportionately well served by British literary editors, and there is a seemingly irreducible number of exceptional booksellers who will read books in translation and make up their own minds that they will present them to their customers. If that were to change, or if the literary editors who matter were to be discouraged from taking the same heroic care of literature in translation then the relatively few publishers' editors who for the most part work in the field of translation will be doomed.
What do you think about present Spanish literature?
Impossible to overlook the vigour today of almost every sphere of Spanish letters, laureates or storytellers, Catalan or Basque, Galician or every shade of Spanish; and very importantly there are now so many excellent translators from Spanish that the best work remains the best work. Invidious to make comparisons, but I have been grateful to work with Nick Caistor, Margaret Jull Costa, Jonathan Dunne, Edith Grossman, Anne McLean, though alas never with Margaret Sayers Peden.
How is it possible to create a best-seller for MacLehose Press?
It's disarmingly simple: you find a publishing team (mine is Quercus, sold by Faber here and in Europe and in Australia by Murdoch) which is first rate from top to bottom and you have the great good fortune to light upon an exceptional book, which has sold two million copies in its native Sweden. It was one the first MacLehose Press books and has so far in all editions since its publication in January sold 195,000 copies. It is by Stieg Larsson and is called “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”. It is the first volume of a magnificent trilogy, so we are talking about three bestsellers. But what your question perhaps wanted to know is: no, there is nothing on earth to stop very good books being sold by very good people even if your publisher is a tiny independent dwarf beside the leviathans. The phenomenal success and the brilliant publishing of Profile/Serpent's Tail, Atlantic, Quercus, and Granta/Portobello have marked a sea change.
One of the themes of the National Year of Reading is “You are what
you read”. Do you agree with this expression? Are we really what we read?
I prefer to think rather that "You are what you have read", but the magnificent independent Danish publisher of Peter Høeg, Rosinante, once made a t-shirt which I have worn regularly for the last twelve years which has on it "You are what you read", so I abide by it. Which said, no editor would very much want to be what he reads. He reads too much, too much that he will not publish and sometimes texts that he absolutely would not want to “be”. But certainly your soul is made up of all you keep of what you read. The interior of the cathedral in Léon is, in every changing daylight hour, all the light that comes through the glorious stained-glass windows, and all experience, all absorbed literature is the same influenced, shaped, stained and sunlit conglomeration that is your mind and heart.
Note of the editor: It is estimated that translations represent around 3% of the total number of books published in the UK.