 First, we'll have Chad Post, then Elizabeth Harris, then Jeff Brock, and then Diana Thau will finish up. So, Chad, do I need to introduce you? No. Everyone knows who Chad Post is. He publishes... That's true. Probably. At Alter, right? Publisher of Open Letter runs 3%. The database, and so has a whole bunch of data for us on Italian translations. Yeah. I'll just tell you the story. I've looked at this report in a while since we were in turn, whenever that was, for their book fair, but I'll tell you the story in trying to give you some of this information. I'll contextualize everything that you guys will talk about, hopefully, because it's very data-specific. In 2008, at Open Letter, we run this website called 3%. A lot of you probably are familiar with. That's like a blog and review site. At some point in time, I started keeping track because there's always a debate on how many books are published in translation in America. And where does 3% number come from? There's different people that have come up with ways of saying why, or that there are only 3% of the books published in America are in translation, but they never know what books they are. There's no actual granular data. So I decided that we could try and do this. So starting in 2008, I created a database that tracks every original work of fiction and poetry published in the U.S. for the first time ever. So no re-translations, nothing that was out of that fallout of print, and then came back into print. I was only looking for the first time this work was available to English readers. So we'd be looking at what new voices are accessible to people who read English. And we keep track of still this day, the title, the author, the translator, the country of origin for the author where they're born, what language it was written in, the pub year and month, the price. Who, if there are any other translators that are involved, and now we keep track of whether or not the author is male or female, and if the translator is male or female. So we have an endless amount of data, essentially. It's not endless, but it's a lot. So a lot of the figures that you'll see get referenced by like the New York Times or in various articles will say like, well, according to the 3% database, 540 books were published in translation last year. And that's all coming from this thing that we've been keeping track of. And that, actually, I think 540 is the right number for 2014. And we put it all online. You can download it. It's easily accessible. Well, about two summers ago, the Italian Trade Commission, which includes Italian books in the book office, I guess they call themselves something to that effect, and they're charged with trying to promote Italian literature. And they called me and the woman's like, well, since Italian literature doesn't get translated at all, we need you to do a report in which you analyze this and break it down and show just how many Italian books are getting translated, how many of them are funded, all this information so we can go to the government and say we need more money to be able to improve the translation of Italian literature into English. So I went back and she wanted it for specifically 2012 through 2014. So those three years and wanted to include children's books and nonfiction as well. So I spent a lot of time going back and adding in children's books and nonfiction to get to this. Now, first off, this is where I'm here. Actually, I did my first ever PowerPoint for this report, but I'm not putting it up there because I know I did something wrong. I can't remember what the mistake is right now, but I know the last time I showed it, I was like, oh, shit, that doesn't add up. So we're going to ignore that. But otherwise, I would be able to show this to you. I can email it to you if you want. There's a whole long report with like 25 spreadsheets that explain all of this. We'll start here with just the overview of Italian books. So in those three years, there are 174 books translated from Italian and published in the US, which isn't a terrible number, to be honest. It's much like you said, it's higher than most others. The third highest is you'll see in a second, the third highest country in terms of translation. So it's not bad. However, just to break this down, too, of those 174 books, half of them are fiction. 62 were nonfiction. 14 were poetry. So the poetry was very small in contrast to even the nonfiction. Let's see where I want to go here. There's so much data in this, man. I've got it written on as like how for fiction it's been pretty much the same. There's like 67 books, 62 books, 45. In 2014, that changed. This is out of date. But there's pretty stable. The thing that was most interesting to me about just looking at Italian and not comparing it to other countries yet, just focusing just on Italian, was that the publishers bringing this out, and that's what you were mentioning right before, are that there's only a handful that are doing a significant number of Italian books. And that handful of publishers in no way corresponds to the publishers that are doing the most translations in America. This will become clear in a second. OK, so over the past three years of this three-year period, 81 different publishers brought out at least one book from Italian. So that's a significant amount. The ones that are at the top were Europa Editions to 24, University of Chicago 10, FSG 9, Verso 7, Chelsea Editions 5, which was most of the poetry then, Penguin 5, Other Press 4, Pushkin Press 4, and Rosoli 4. OK, that's which is interesting. The, skip that, skip that. OK, so compared to the rest of the world, here's where this gets, this starts to get more and more interesting. So between, over that three-year period, there are essentially 2,400 books published in translation. And Italian made up 174 of those. So that's not a great ratio, but to put that in context, French had 539 books, German had 385, Spanish 253, then Italian with 174, then Japanese with 105. So they're still on the top when you look at it just by language in the top five. But like one-third of the number of books of French and half of the number of books translate from German. So compared to their counter, when they commissioned me to do this report, they're essentially like, well, our counterparts are France and Germany. We need to know why we're not doing as well as France and Germany. So in contrast in that light, Italy looks really bad. Like they're not even close to the number that are coming up from France and German, or from French and German writers. But you know, there's a lot, there's a, when you look at this, it's like, when you look at all the other countries, there's like 100 countries here that have like two books that came out over that three-year period. So, you know, we're grain assault. Okay. So then this is the part where I was referring to you before. Over that three-year period, here are the presses. I'm just going to name them. The presses that have published the most translations. Delky Archive, Amazon Crossing, Europa Editions, Seagull, FSG, Other Press, North-South, because this includes children's books, Yale University Press, New Directions and Columbia. These 10 presses brought out 482 works in translation over this three-year period. Okay. So they're counting for a sixth of all of the translations that came out were from these 10 presses. Those 10 presses published a total of 41 books from Italian. And 24 of those were by Europa Editions. So you eliminate Europa Editions and it's down to, is it 17? 17 from the other nine largest presses doing translations in America. And this is the thing that I thought was most interesting was that it just, it's such a weird situation that there's a lot of publishers doing Italian but they're not the ones that are generally doing a lot of other translations, which seems to be some sort of weird disconnect that's happening there that you can talk about later too. There's a lot more information in here. I think the other thing that was worthwhile was that of the 174 books, only 26 were subsidized for the translation, which is a very small percentage. And a lot of the conversations that came out after this, I'll just tell you about that part and answer any numbers, questions you guys might have later after everyone else speaks. But we had a meeting with the Italian government and doing this whole report and talking to them about it. There were a couple of things that came clear. One is that Italy does have a translation grant program but the website doesn't work. The information is not distributed to any publishers. The publishers I talked to, the vast majority did not know that there is a grant support available and that does play some role in what gets through because it is useful for a lot of these presses to know that there's some sort of funding to help offset translation costs or promotion costs, which Italy has but no one knows about. They also wanted it because they wanted to be compared to Germany and France, which is not a great idea because they do things much more smoothly. Both France and Germany have systems by which they promote X number of books a year. So there's the New Books from German magazine that comes out quarterly, I believe, that highlights 10 books from recent publications in Germany. This gets sent out to probably 300 different publishers or editors. It has information in there about how to apply for translation funding. It has information about other programs that they have, all of that. The French granting program, they didn't have their information online but they have a series of things in which they have French voices that they help fund and support books, the Hemingway grants. There were almost more Hemingway grants in one year than there were grants for Italian translations over this three-year period and that's only a portion of the French support. So I talked to them and made a whole proposal in which we would do essentially like a 10 books from Italy publication twice a year that would be like a PDF that could be sent out. They would have all this information in it and the government said that they couldn't find the money for it. Everything sort of, they got to the point of like, here's all the information on what's wrong and how to try and address that and then it stopped. So that's part of the reason, I think, for the gem that you're going to talk about. So I'll just turn it over now to you, Liz. Yeah, that's great. Nobody's surprised. Yeah, nobody's surprised. Yeah, the title is so great of the panel. Traffic jam. What is the, when you said the, and what is the resource for translators, what is that site called? It is. I have a whole report on it in here. I can tell you, let me just open it up. It isn't the Ministry of Foreign Culture translation grant. It is the books in Italy, that IT thing. Books in Italy is new, right? So there's a new website. Okay, so it's on there. Books in Italy. I can't connect. Yeah, but it was like, we tried to apply for a grant for your book and it couldn't get it because it wouldn't function and it didn't, it literally didn't work. And we had to call them and they're like, well, there's nothing we can do then, blah, blah. So it was really discouraging. There's one that we applied for. Oh, it's a different one. Yeah, they got some funding, but it took two years for, they accepted it two years after the book was published. Yeah. They finally got the money. This whole thing, they cut this addendum that I wrote. They cut it from the final proposal because it's just basically like, all the things that are wrong on your website. There's two different due dates. There's two different places you're supposed to mail information. All of it's like literally factually inaccurate and not what they wanted. So they're like, we can't, that's too embarrassing. Like everything else is fine, but this one's too embarrassing. But anyways. Well, I mean, I thought I'd talk about the first couple of books that I've had published that I translated in some ways that I think might reflect partly what gets through, not with big presses, but with smaller presses. The first book I worked on is actually by a very famous writer in Italy, Mario Rigoni Stern. He's very well known. His Sergeant in the Snow, Sergeant in the Neve, it's an international bestseller taught in the schools. He comes out of the neorealism, he's since passed away, but he came out of neorealism. The book I translated was from the 1990s and it won a prize. It is the Stagione di Giacomo, Giacomo Seasons. Sergeant in the Snow was translated. And I doubt it got very much attention when it was translated. I believe it was in the 1950s. And it was by the man who we were talking about last night and he's got a difficult name to pronounce. It's called... Yes. By Archibald, maybe... Let's see. Yeah, a cauldron or something like that. And I have a feeling that part... I mean, he should have been up there with Primo Leve, you know? He should have had, I think, that kind of attention, but maybe it's not as much of a grab because it's not Holocaust, you know? But his work, it's very readable and very interesting, but it was translated very badly. That book was translated very badly and it's been... I hope that guy is not living anymore as I say this. That makes me feel bad for saying it, but it really is... It's so stiff and unreadable and that would be a wonderful one, you know, to republish. It has actually that copy, that particular translation has been republished, but I think that, you know, Parley is based on not being the best of translation so he didn't really get any attention in the U.S. So the book that I translated, I love that book and I think it really deserved a U.S. audience, an American audience, but it's not... It's very well written. It's between the World Wars in Italy. I think it has a very appealing subject matter. You know, I think, Parley, it's the subject matter of what gets published in the U.S. I think, you know, books tied to World War II. I think that that subject matter is interesting. But it's not written from a more typical American, you know, realistic, scenic kind of novel. It doesn't have the, you know, the sort of narrative arc of, you know, more realistic. I mean, it is, of course, in this sort of neo-realist tradition, but it's told from the point of view of an entire community. It has this very gentle voice that in some ways makes me think a little bit of some calvino. It's just, it was just sort of on the edge so that I submitted it. I'm kind of embarrassed about this, but I submitted it over a 10-year period to 50 different presses. Yeah, actually I submitted it to 49 and then I had kind of given up, you know. This really, and actually Chad, you turned it down at a Dahlke archive, but it didn't fit at Dahlke archive and you explained that it was a very polite, and he's right, and so I was just learning like what matches where, but I tried it at, you know, a lot of more standard American just presses and people liked it, but they, I don't know how to market it. I don't know how to sell it because it just didn't quite fit, you know, it didn't even fit the sort of definition of what we wanted for international literature. And it was finally published by a very small translation press Autumn Hill, Russell Valentino's Press, and you know it hasn't gotten a ton of attention, but I hope it will continue to live and it's just such a beautiful book and a very moving book, so I was really happy that, you know, that it found a home, and so that was the first one. What's funny is that that came out in 2014. Would you say there were like 40 books in 2014 that came out? Yeah. So I have two of them, which is so funny because one of them took me 10 years to, you know, to publish. The second one was with Open Letter, and that's Julio Mozzi's This is the Garden, which is a collection of short stories. And that one was, I mean, another book that I just adored, very different, metafictional, very spare prose. I thought very philosophical, yet also imagistic at the same time, and right away it started getting just a whole lot of reception, first from literary journals. Every story was published in a major, Kenyon Review, they were published in all these great journals, and I submitted that as a query, again, still not entirely knowing what the presses are. I submitted it to Europa, but that's not the right place for, it's just not their cup of tea. I would imagine maybe there'll be some discussion about what Italian books are actually being put forward. If the 20 of them are Europa, that's a very different, you know, kind of book. I mean, this one, it has a blurb from Minna Proctor, who says, you know, he's Thai, he's in the tradition of Calvino and Tabuki. I mean, it's highly literary fiction, and he is known in Italy, he's not as Christina, sorry, Christina, I have to mention your name, but as Christina says, he's known and he's respected as a literary writer, but he's a short story writer. He's not, you know, widely read by the general public, but he's highly respected. And that book, so Europa wasn't interested, but the second press I sent it to was Open Letter, and, you know, it took a while to hear, but, you know, so that was just a much different story with a, so it's, you know, these smaller presses that are interested in the more, which might say high art, you know, literary texts, so I'll stop there. And pass it to me. Pass the batons, the batons to you. Well, unlike Chad, I don't have any data. So I'm not sure, I'm not sure exactly what to focus on. I, in a way, the things about transmission that interest me the most are the things that aren't quantifiable or that you can't put any numbers to and that are kind of mysterious, like, for example, questions of untranslatability, which certain authors are sometimes said to be untranslatable, and that's sometimes offered as an explanation for why they don't make it across into other cultures. You know, this has been said a lot about Leopardi. Of course now, maybe it won't be said as much now that the Galassi's translation has done so well, but it was also said about a poet that I translate, Giovanni Pasculli, who was late 19th, early 20th century, Italian poet who's a, you know, major, major figure in Italian poetry, you know, one of the foundational, you know, modern poets, a hugely influential figure, but doesn't really exist in English. I mean, there have been a few translations of him, but none of them have gotten any traction. He doesn't have a reputation in English. You ask people who know Ungareti in Montale, and they've never heard of Pasculli. So it's a mystery to me, you know, why writers like that get overlooked while, you know, I think, and I think, you know, in Pasculli's case, I think it has to do with the fact that he was sort of, his moment was the late 19th, early 20th century, which was not a particularly exciting moment. He wasn't part of any sort of literary movement with, you know, catchy name. It was pre, you know, pre-futurism, pre, you know, modernism. And he sort of, so he sort of falls between, you know, Leopardi and Montale or something in some sort of no-man's land. And so that's, that may be part of it. Certain kinds of historical periods are, catch the imagination of, you know, other places, and we have a place in our imaginations for futurists and so, or we have a place in our imagination for modernists like Montale and Ungareti, but even there, you know, Umberto Saba, who's another great Italian poet on a par with Montale and Ungareti is not nearly as well known as those, as Ungareti and Montale here in this country. Again, it's just, he's also been translated several times, but they haven't gotten that much traction compared to Montale and Ungareti. So those kinds of, those kinds of things are mysterious to me and there's also another case, another poet that I translated was Pavese and I did his complete poems for Copper Canyon and he's kind of almost the opposite case where he's better known in English as a poet and his poetry is fairly influential in the American context Philip Levine was hugely influenced by him I've had a number of American poets tell me or write about how important Pavese was to them and he's much more his profile as a poet is much larger in this country than it is in Italy where he's considered primarily a novelist who also wrote some popular poems near the end of his life and so that's another strange disparity in the other direction that I don't fully know how to explain in Pavese's case it may have something to do with the fact that he was strongly influenced by American writers and so maybe what Americans respond to in Pavese is a kind of echo of themselves or something I'm not sure about that so there's there's that and another thing that interests me is a kind of maybe what might be called a literary myopia where a tendency of the translation community to focus on contemporary works and if they when they translate older works it's they're always going back to the same older works and retranslating them so that you're not discovering any new voices from if the author's dead and didn't make an impact and hasn't already made an impact in some way chances are they're not going to be you know rediscovered at this point that's something that happens I think with Poscoli as well you know he's you know the opardie at least always had some sort of name recognition somehow despite the fact that his poetry wasn't really available in editions in English that anybody read but he was such a towering figure that somehow that allowed him to sort of have a kind of traction even in the absence of translations I don't know I also my most recent translation was an anthology which is the FSG book of 20th century Italian poetry and so I was thinking a lot about some of these kinds of questions and as I edited that and I was very conscious that anthologies in a certain way are these vehicles that can determine who comes across because I had a chance to include a lot of poets who haven't been translated in in book form and so who are virtually unknown in English but you know it's my hope that by representing them with a small selection of a few poems in an anthology that they will come to the attention of readers who might then go dig up more and translate books so I think anthologies can be an important gateway although anthologies themselves often have trouble getting traction they're hard to, from a publishing standpoint they're extremely hard to do, the permissions are absurd and there's no good reason for any right-minded person to make an anthology so anyway I'll stop there and I'll be happy to answer questions about any of those things My name is Diana Thao and I I've translated for a number of years an Italian poet who has gone from being pretty much untranslated in the States to being pretty recognized Amalia Rosselli and I started working on her as a suggestion from a professor from Larry Benuti actually and I'm interested how translators, because hearing Chad talk it makes me think that especially poetry but I think also with prose and hearing Elizabeth as well I feel like this is such an idiosyncratic it's based on what translators are interested in translating and if they have the time and energy to then get it published and the means and so it seems an interesting question how these choices are made and for me they were made or suggested in the university I studied Italian in college I studied abroad in Rome and now as a PhD student in Italian studies in Complit trying to teach these things to non-Italian speakers that I'm interested in teaching in Leopardi whatever it seems to form how I shape my syllabus and how I shape what discussions I'm having with my colleagues who are not in Italian studies so I'm interested in the role also that the university or other resources are playing in sort of giving translators ideas of what to translate what needs to be translated, what hasn't been translated, what's been translated well poorly but with Roselli I started just because I was fascinated by her and she's one of these poets who's sort of between languages because she had multiple languages and she was as a female poet who was sort of an anomaly in the Italian male landscape of 20th century poetics I was drawn to her as well and it's just been a really interesting passage between her being virtually unknown to having mostly all of her books translated and sort of having conversations suddenly with people who are poets who don't speak Italian come up to me and say I love Roselli like it's amazing that you do that work and yeah so I'm interested in hearing how people find the projects that they find and how we can sort of bolster that network because as Choy pointed out like on the other side of things it's a jungle out there in terms of finding Italian publishers or agents or whatever that are going to help us and actually Jamie you can probably speak to this a lot too so I was interested in talking about that and then also a phenomenon that's sort of complementary but interesting in female writing Italian women's writing in the States has a huge interest popularity success in a way that I think it's starting to in Italy but so the idea of women's studies kind of doesn't exist in the same way in Italy as it does in the United States and so I feel like again you know scholars who have come from Italy to the States to study feminist literature or feminist theory women's writing are then translating this stuff Paolo Mazzino is a great example Oroselli people who are maybe even Italian scholars or you know native Italians who come to the United States because they want to pursue this line of study so that seems to be an interesting phenomenon where now and and I think Farante is actually one of those things too I think in Italy people are like Farante is great but you know what's the big deal I mean maybe I'm speaking out of turn people can correct me but again it seems to be that the US is particularly receptive to female Italian voices in a way that's been kind of exciting and maybe a counterpoint to the sort of negativity of like oh we can't get anything published there's only you know four bucks in translation or whatever poetry 14 published in a year so I wanted to throw that into the mix too and I'd be really curious to hear of people in the audience who want to chime in as well and then I have more questions for people but maybe we can just open it up. Okay thank you guys, Shui so thank you for bringing up all of those examples does anyone have questions I can start with some general issues because two of the things that really come out for me are the difference between publication and readership so there's the struggle to get published and then what happens after you get published and how much of that is a matter of money and financing or not right so that's I don't know if you guys have comments if anyone has comments about that about publishing something and then getting readers how where or how does that work I don't know it's mysterious to me again it's mysterious to me what you never know what's going to get traction and why when it's published you get something published like like the Farante and it takes off in a way that was quite unexpected I'm sure to the publisher and other times things that you might expect to do better don't do so well and it's not necessarily a factor it has something to do with what kind of press is behind them but that's not always predictable either you know yeah it's absolutely not and the Farante isn't actually because it did take a long time I mean the Days of Abundance came out in 2003 maybe something like that and that did well enough I think there was like literary following people I knew brought it and talked about it and then there is The Lost Daughter I think is the second one and there's a third one and then the Neapolitan Quartet which was the first ones that actually were very successful sales wise so it did take some I mean it wasn't like she just automatically caught on so there had to be that perseverance but you never know what's going to work but I do think that it's something strange and I'll try and I'll try and articulate this and it'll probably come out all wrong but might generate part of a conversation about this I remembered as we were talking that about five years ago someone contacted me to get information from the database about Italian specifically because there are some I think it was the AP courses or the AP tests for high school students and Italian had been eliminated and they're talking about different foreign languages that had been cut back on in high school students and Italian was like the main one a lot of the programs were being shut down or just weren't being offered for publishing with French and German and Spanish and not so much German but for French and Spanish in particular there's so many people in high schools and students that are learning that like my kids are learning Spanish and French but they don't even I don't think they have Italian offered in the least and in some ways that does make a difference for your audience because you're familiar with the culture to some degree the ideas of it's romanticized and these courses in high school like all the different foods the different things that go along with that country's language and then when you go to read a book about it or read a book from a French author some of that's kind of implanted you already have certain projections towards it with Italian literature that's not as clear cut if there's not the that sort of language training I don't know what I wouldn't know what my kids would think of Italy or like what their preconceived notions are what kind of fiction would they want how would you market it to them that becomes a little bit trickier Geronimo Stilton that's what they know that's literally that's it Geronimo Stilton and that's fine the most successful Italian author next to Ferrante probably or character at least but there's also so related to that with the editors with people working in publishing there aren't a lot that I know that speak Italian either I mean aside from Europe editions Glossier of course they do so many why they're like right up there I mean there's people who are into that that tended to help promote those books but there's something too about like the tradition like you mentioned a ton of the poets and like there is this very rich tradition of Italian literature but there's so many gaps I think in English that it's hard to like place things in a way that's not as difficult if you look at French or German because a lot of the main the 100 best writers of the past 100 years a lot of those are available in English so when you come to someone new or go back to someone that had previously been overlooked it's easy to like kind of formulate and for a publishing perspective that's helpful editorial wise but also in marketing that you can start to figure out how you're going to pitch this the fact that most of the Italian books that come out are like noir does influence and does shade shade that a little bit but that's the thing that we're most familiar with Colvino, Berto Echo noir Ferrante that's the main and Geronimo Stilton and Dante, yeah don't forget Dante contemporary modern things but yeah I don't have a comment or question it's just a thought, yeah no problem I was curious in terms of the numbers like if that percentage sort of matched out on to others in terms of what gets written it's probably pretty close to be honest or like 20 let's just do it I have a question about that as well are there any presses that maybe don't get considered because there are a few Italian like there are a few micro presses that publish a lot of Italian poetry that I don't know if they have any distribution not a lot but that publish only Italian poetry who are you thinking of it seems like Chelsea was on their list yeah she met a son here yeah but it is quite small yeah there is just to put it in there you go so in 2014 which is like probably the most reliable of the most recent years data because 2015 is still ongoing there was 498 works of fiction and 98 poetry so it's basically a 5 to 1 ratio so it's a little bit extreme for Italian but not that much that's actually got to be a better ratio than the culture at large it is a better ratio it's actually better and the vast majority of the poetry books are coming out from and there's the FSG's the Yale that pops up here but a lot of them are the micro presses that you're talking about that do 3-4 books a year and their distribution goes through SPD or through somewhere that's like not necessarily the most active sales force that's out there but they do exist and they find their audience well enough and like you go on the best translate for Italian translation poetry that helps but I wanted to say maybe this is getting off topic then we can get back to your question if you still have questions but what you mentioned or what Jimmy mentioned at the beginning about Italian being it's still a western language it's still like publishing houses seem to want like more, I don't know like sexier or not I guess Italian is pretty sexy but not mainstream languages right and so I found that submitting to places it's like well an Italian poet that's not news that's not something we already have Montale, we already have Fonarte or whatever and so there seems to be Italians between a rock and a hard place in publishing in that not as popular to publish and yet there is I don't know all this allure and attraction that's being generated culturally, I don't know it just seems like an interesting paradox I've been getting I feel like it's just in some ways talking to the to the right presses so the small international lit presses I think they want to do more, two lines is in communication, they really want to do more, especially women but definitely Italian and Archipelago is right now just putting out to Buki and more and one who's major who has, he's not known at all is Antonio Moretzko he's huge and he's just one book now at Archipelago but so I mean Jill Schoolman at Archipelago is wanting to grow her list if I can put it that way that's promising I think you might be too I hope Other questions? I think something that came up in your comments right now and as well as before it's just the more general question of how do we measure success because one of the really concrete things we can focus on are numbers and data or numbers of what gets published that we really measure and even as a translator like you feel like this book did well or well enough for you sales data some kind of other interaction reviews how do we measure success or failure I guess Yeah I mean reviews is a huge factor and I mean like the best the most successful book I've ever done in terms of reviews and just general attention and probably also sales is the Pabese book that Copper Canyon did in 2002 now and that got reviewed all over the place, all over the world in fact and a book that I thought was going to do better was the FSG anthology which came out in 2012 and with the backing of a great publishing house and Jonathan Galassi is a great editor who had a stake in that book and that just did not do that well and then you start trying to figure out why and you say well the cover price was 50 bucks that's probably a big part of it you know it's just an expensive book and part of the reason it costs so much is because it was a bilingual edition which doubles the size of it and also doubles the cost of it and then you start second guessing that kind of decision you know well maybe it would have done a lot better if it hadn't been bilingual also you know then you start looking at cover designs and things like oh that was it the cover's fault the paperback just came out now the paperback just came out finally and the prices what is it? I'd be interested to see if that gets adopted more in classrooms and becomes more I know a ton of people who want to teach it and I think they just I don't know why they didn't buy it except for the price 50 bucks you can't make your cities buy a $50 book it's hard to just sort of anyway so whereas the Paveza just came out only in paperback it was 20 bucks to start with you never had that barrier to entry so and I don't even follow the sales numbers so much but it's the reviews for me at least the number of reviews that indicate whether it's successful I would feel like that's a better there's not as quantifiable but a better metric of success would be and the reviews are in the mentions and the way that the name enters into the literary culture what we used yesterday the literary ecosystem the way that people are then referred to or know that author since as much better the sales are always going to be bad sales for most books are bad unfortunately and depressingly so they did have me on this thing they wanted to know if Italian books sold better or worse than French and German books so I chose randomly 10 books from each country and got the book scan numbers for them and out of those there are only two out of all 30 that sold more than a thousand copies so it wasn't yeah it was a both front no it was no I left her off in tension because I wanted to rig it so I cheated but they were um it was one was that the truth of the Harry quiebert affair whatever it was the French book that came out a couple years ago that they paid a million dollars for as advanced which is why it was everywhere and then the other was a Jean echinos novel um which was weird but it was like just over a thousand copies but yeah so the sales things are always going to make you sad I think I think the more of the getting into the cultural that that that's more important in the long run is like having those conversations and having the impact of the book because there is a lot of stuff that we said to for like um like we in publishers publishers will always focus on the sales numbers or talk about it because it's the way that you have to survive and a lot of judgments are made upon whether or not a book has the possibility of selling enough copies or not um at the same time and this is why translations in some ways get frowned upon because they don't sell as easily as an American author who tours and knows everyone and you sell more copies of their book whatever but um at the same time those those translations or those books that might not sell a lot of copies at the start tend to have a really high influence like there's a bigger impact sometimes where like the books that we most cherish are books that that may not have sold all that well but are very important to us so there has to be some other way of evaluating this or talking about it where it's like this and this was a very important book and had this great influence even though it sold 400 copies. I had a question based on Stephen Snyder's um keynote talk um a couple days ago when he was talking about how um Murakami or how um Japan after the war was the images sort of curated by the New Yorker and um other other institutions powers that be and I was just wondering what how the Italian questions sort of maps on to that like so you know in terms of politics like a similar sort of transition from um enemy to um you know Fellini and you know Resolte Vita or whatever um and and if you guys have any thoughts about if that plays so you're talking about the cultural cap at all like um like what is what is Italian literature's cultural capitol and how do we measure it or how do how have we measured it um starting with post war I don't know if this is a question and I'll open it up to the audience too I'm sure people here can um look up thoughts about that but um yeah following Stephen Snyder sort of shaping I thought that was his thing was really interesting to me too where you're talking about with like um in the 60s especially it was like everything's peaceful zen like instead of yeah I don't know how that I mean the things that I would think are like um a lot of like the more like film the Italian film be very very I mean important in one of the things that sort of breaks through but also seems sort of um European in that like heavy important modernist sense um within with fiction yeah it doesn't seem like I have a quote from Tim remember he mentioned Tim and so I um I have he's fun to read I have to say this because he so he writes himself and I mean he stopped translating and I really enjoyed this so he talks about that there are um antithetical qualities for translators they have to be very respectful and at the same time dominating and that um and that for me always requires such an effort of suppression of my own desires to do things and at the end it was just too much like giving blood and so that's why he stopped translating but he had this to say about um about contemporary Italian novels he says I must say there are really not many contemporary or very recent Italian novels that I love in the way I love um these books here he's talking about uh Verga Bassani um uh you know some just real classic books there have been some very fine novels of the last 20 years but I remember when I read for the Campiello Prize and that's what Regone Stern's book one one of the big Italian literary prizes 7 or 8 years ago I did feel terribly disappointed at the 7 year 80 books that I was reading on that occasion I think this is a very difficult moment in Italian fiction I think that one of the things that's happening is that writers are less and less writing out of the Italian tradition and more and more writing towards a new international tradition so you know working toward smoothing smoothing it out and I mean I think that that is I mean I hate to make big claims because I just don't feel like I know anything but it does it does seem like um there's like different strands of you know of Italian right and then some are definitely um more TV like more I hate to say more of that sort of American seem by seem but you know less of the fill the philosophical I mean that's definitely a you know a tendency but um but then there are there are plenty of amazing writers you know who are who are much more specifically Italian but they're just not not getting um you know put forward that's something I was alluding to that sort of idea it's really pervasive that it's all crap yeah or a lot of Italian writers who maybe don't read that much Italian fiction themselves or you know say oh you know there's nothing good and there's this idea that's kind of exaggerated I think I think so too perception yeah yeah yeah I mean I just that there's I was just looking through you know writers who would be wonderful to translate I mean there's so many of them I just wanted to try to follow up on Diane's question for a minute I think it's really interesting yeah where Italy is and I think I'm probably about to lead into a bunch of wrong stereotypes I'm just going to try it out as I think about those differences between French and German Spanish translations I think what you said about the just what you're supposed to do in high school certainly has to do with it but as I think about the kind of classic American attitude towards Italy we go there in a very capitalist way to consume culture but kind of like the eating, drinking teach us how to go slow and life culture whereas I think and you know they because they badly need the money are willing to sort of market themselves along those lines as well but I think you know for instance France still has a stake in saying we're more intellectual than you can ever imagine if you have Americans or maybe these heavy books or something so that there's a strange way in which you don't turn towards Italy intellectually the way we turn towards other parts of Europe which maybe also has to do with these gaps that there's no continuous tradition literature to it would be great if we were teaching our children Italian but any books at all one question sort of dovetails to her and thinking about this to me the question isn't necessarily what stereotypes Americans have of these places but how do these folks see themselves in the literary thing so France is the Amazon jungle ecology, German is the Malaysian, lots of stuff going on so how do Italian readers and writers think of themselves and do they feel like they're in a rich period and the problem with the other two countries though their government's held and in this case it seems like the Italians don't so is there a up push from the writers or the enthusiasm in the culture for what is being written talked about or films and maybe somewhere in there our editors or our readers are sort of thinking well we don't hear much about them it's not a jungle with lots of stuff in it something's happening I'm just wondering what you know about your own self perception of the reading I mean I think there's probably different impressions from my own impression is from the writers that I know and I think there's a with at least one of them it's very intense there's actually a lot of readings and small presses but a frustration of not being able to break into the larger publishing houses as he feels are very politically run and yes he does refer to them as the mafiosi and you know but so I mean I think that there's actually a very rich group of writers that you know there's a lot that's going on but but some but frustration I don't know about your impressions from others I think so yeah I would agree yeah that there's a sort of it's almost the opposite problem in Italy and that it seems like there's a cultural dominance of the publishing houses and the parts that be in the prizes that dictate so much of what gets published in NY but yeah the sort of smaller presses seem to be cropping up now a lot more and there's a lot more excitement around little publishing houses in smaller but there is a frustration of feeling trapped I guess but how the general reader sort of approaches that problem I have the impression that Italians read a ton compared to the United States generalizations but yeah that the average person yeah is the other way around so we translate like 75% of our literature so we're very much we want to create international literature we have a lot of literature so except for a few which is we wait for the latest friends haha and that was create a huge gap in readership right? if the Italian readers aren't reading Italian writing and then it's not getting translated there's this sense of what am I writing and who's who's it getting to but one thing that's also interesting is that for instance I would never have thought she would be translatable because I mean I've learned also Italy and I honestly love German although I know where to put them historically but I don't know more of my culture so I never would have thought that internationally somebody would read about that and that brings up another problem that or interesting question that hasn't that we haven't talked too much about but which is like regionalisms and dialect because I think there isn't unlike the French and German there isn't this sort of like monolith institution that's dictating what Italianita is and by necessity like after fascism or whatever you know it's like the opposite even so that the landscape seems very fragmented and necessarily so so there isn't it's hard for a translator from the US to put their finger on this is what the next hot thing is going to be sure I don't know if anyone has translated anybody so migrant writing is just a general term you're referring to writers who write in Italian as a second language or of another ethnicity through the wave of migration and I think that sometimes those writers might not fit in in English because they're Italian they have no like claim to Italianness in the same way so and a lot of their works actually are speaking really directly to an Italian audience where like hello I exist because part of it is about trying to integrate into literary culture but also socially and I translated a book by Nicola Lillin who is a transnistrian writer I mean he writes in Italian he's transnistrian which is this breakaway country in the former Soviet Union and it's about fighting in Chechnya and there's nothing Italian about it other than the language so it's very easy for that to be in fact there are a few instances of books where you wouldn't know it's Italian like and so and I think maybe in other cases those writers don't get maybe there's not a place for them in English I don't know because we've already solved their migration problem and there are some I think that there might be actually some room for considering the world consideration of I think that there's room for some of these writers who have this experience there's an anthology I was taking a look at called Pecare Nero that has a bunch of if you're interested in finding writers to translate I mean there's a lot of I think immigrant writers one who has just got a book out is Ijebo Shago Ethiopian you know I think it's Ethiopian Somali born in Italy and her writing is very interesting so you know there's a number of them seems like that might be a wave of and I think would touch actually American audiences and that's something that's a great consideration worldwide I think some of those have been published by small presses and there are a couple of technologies and they're translated also by academics who are primarily academics and not translators which is another issue of the quality of the translations sort of priorities or interest or technique approach of an academic translator as opposed to a more literary translator not that we can totally make that distinction but sometimes people who don't translate really are professionally or extensively translate differently or not as well maybe in some cases so some of those things and there are these little university presses so very low distribution and maybe for use in university courses I would think for course adoptions so so I would say do you see yes well all of us do here because that's why we translate Italian but absolutely what is it what is it are you talking about in the literature or are you talking about just in general I mean to me it's the very cool is how philosophy intertwines with story how much how much of that there is in the fiction that I've picked to translate I just love it and that's cool and and maybe the plurality of dialects like the regionalism that's such a foreign concept for pretty much everyone right how the Italian states independently became their own places I think that's really appealing and seductive and it's been cool for me I don't I think you're asking about sort of in a broader cultural sense would Americans think have that attitude toward Italian literature and I'm not sure about that I mean I think for one thing a lot of the cool factor does tend to follow for better and for worse you know there are good things about this but tends to follow sort of political hotspots or things that are happening around the world that are in the news and those then of places that are in the news then becomes kind of cool or kind of of interest in a to us and so Italy has not been much in the news lately which is probably good financial collapse and also immigrant considerations right but even that doesn't get pales comparison and so in terms of you know we can talk about Italian literature that's regional or gears like a little spot of the world or culture that you're on a conversation with philosophy just the same way and so do you think that there's one more than the other that seem to take off in America I think something kind of notable is that some of the main genres that are most translate noir not really I think something that any of us has really worked with or is super interested in so there's that too and that's probably going to come back around too because like right now there's a lot of focus on like Scandinavian noir but it'll shift back to like Italian I mean there still is a ton of them that are coming out but like I think a lot of the general reader that goes to their public library and checks out the new book that's a mystery they're doing a lot of like Scandinavian stuff now and they'll probably rotate back around at some point that is like a huge and that's a big part of like what gets translated from Italy and has a community and all the communities are coming out I think that has to do with the question of the image of Italy and the cool factor because I think the mafia is really it's a little bit that and if not I think the south is dominant and the American image of Italy in general so you know Naples has a certain residence that I think is like works and things like that I would say more than the north so in terms of broader regional sense any last questions thank you I want to ask one question do you guys have any recommendations because what was sort of behind this panel is getting ignored so does anyone have anything that they'd like to say you guys should check this out yeah Antonio Morasco but the the trilogy you know and you said Archipelago is publishing something of his one is coming out but it's a later book and it's more of the sort of Archipelago taste it's a sort of whimsical the title do you remember the title it's one of yeah La Luchina that one's just coming out but I mean but that trilogy is really some big books that's a thousand page thing you guys have talked to me about right I might know how to get that funded others I don't know I'm blanking now that you've asked the question I was going to say Yamashigo I'm hopefully going to translate one of her chapters of La Miacase Dovesono which I think actually inspired Adua the new novel which is being translated I contacted her and she says it's being translated oh great I mean she's just wonderful she's such a clear writer and I feel like really accessible like a beautiful person like she's just incredible something actually I want to mention sorry this isn't but just to throw in the mix Jumbo Lahiri just published a book of essays written in Italian she lived in Italy for two years I think and said that she always felt a deep affinity with the language and that's just blows my mind and is amazing so yeah that's I think that's going to get published in a heartbeat but it would be interesting an interesting phenomenon if there were more American writers who live the dream and move to Italy or whatever and then start writing in Italian so that would be a built in one book I would recommend is translated into English recently it was Selected Palms of Patricia Cavalli which came out from FSG a couple of years ago and is a wonderful and Antonina Annette does she have a book? I don't know she's in the anthology of words but as like a full yeah I don't know does anyone else have any other recommendations? I know some of you are Italian my big one I think there are a couple of translations of some of that I don't know because you have these Eva don't you have a response with us? yeah Versa has published some of his stuff yeah I think the sixties are a big gap in the Neovan Guard and a lot of those are a huge gap and even some of that fiction I tried to oh Sanguinetti is another someone just got a pen grant to do a collected works I think of Eduardo Sanguinetti that will come out eventually I think that's been that's been translated yeah that came out a couple years ago one that came to my mind is the birth and death of the housewife which we were talking about a lot of writers who might be considered modernist but aren't really categorized as such don't have very much attention in English I think and that book is really great and I think feminist or someone I forget who published it but that's a really amazing book birth and death of the housewife bad title thank you guys thank you