 Welcome. Thank you for coming. I'm Maria Jose Jimenez. I'm Venezuelan Canadian. I'm a poet and translator living in Massachusetts. And I straddle the border between the U.S. and Canada. I'm a member of both ALTA and ELTA, which is the Canadian sister organization, Literary Translator Association of Canada, and Association de Traducteur et Traductrice Literaire du Canada. Mouthful. So we'll call it LTAC today. This event is part of a pilot partnership between ALTA and LTAC to promote collaboration between the two organizations and increase the number of Canadian participants as well as continue a history of collaboration between the two organizations. We'll also have a bilingual reading tomorrow afternoon at 2.15. Most of us will be there, and most of us are also LTAC members. We will try to focus on a few areas, the status of literary translation in Canada from a few different perspectives, the effect of the emphasis of the two official languages, English and French, on what gets published and what kind of funding is available to translators. And leading into that, the institutionalized support of translation in Canada, which is a very different scenario than in the United States. And we'll try to touch a little bit upon cross-border traffic in terms of what, in the publishing world, but also as translators of non-official languages, collaboration with other countries or being published in other countries. Just a little bit of context. Well, I will introduce participants first. Thank you. Thank you. So Hugh Hazleton is a writer, poet and translator based in Montreal. He translates poetry and prose from French, Spanish and Portuguese into English. He won the Governor General's Award in 2005 for a translated collection of poems by Joël de Vossier. He's a professor emeritus of Spanish at Concordia University in Montreal. And he's a past co-director of the International Literary Translation Center. Stephen Hennigan is a translator, writer, journalist and literature professor. He's the author of four novels, three short-story collections and six works of non-fiction or academic criticism. He's translated one novel from Romanian and is working on his third novel, novel-length translation from Portuguese. He's also the editor of Billy Oasis International Translation Series. Lida Mosraddi translates between English and Farsi. Her translations have appeared in printed online journals. She's published several translations, translated volumes in Iran, so from English into Farsi. And she's been awarded fellowships from the Bamson for the Arts, Yadot and Santa Fe Art Institute. Then Phyllis Arnauth is a very prolific translator from English, between English and French. She translates Quebecois and French fiction, non-fiction and poetry. Her translations have won awards and been shortlisted for prizes, including a Governor General's Award. And she served two terms as president of LTAC. And finally, Howard Scott is also a very prolific translator from French to English. He translates fiction, non-fiction and poetry, and often with Stois. And he won the Governor General's Award in 1997. And he's also past president of LTAC. Just a little bit of context for those of you who don't know LTAC. It was founded in 1975. We just celebrated our 40th anniversary in Montreal last month. And it was created to support literary translation in Canada, across all of Canada. In terms of how it compares to ALTA, it combines the work of ALTA and the Pen Translation Committee in terms of connecting translators and also advocating for translators. Copyrights issues, providing a model contract for translators to use, and things like that. There's a lot of information on our website that I'd like to find out more. But I would like to highlight just a couple of our achievements. One is co-founding Bilsey, the BAF International Literary Translation Center. Obtaining public lending rights payments for translators on an equal basis with authors. We also present the John Glasgow Translation Award every year for the first book-length translation. And many of the activities of ALTA include organizing meetings, conferences, participating in national and international literary festivals. And supporting other organizations to publish translation journals, such as Trans Lit, which is a collaboration with the Association of Translators and interpreters of Royal Sberda. The name of this roundtable, the Great Canadian Roundabout, came from a conversation with Madeleine Stratford, who's the president of LTAC. She was talking about how translation in Canada seems to be sometimes limited and sort of stuck going around the circle because of the emphasis of English and French. And I like the analogy because it is true that there's a lot of limitations, but roundabouts also have a lot of openings and you can go in different directions. And in my brief period of membership in LTAC I've noticed that there's growing opportunities and more support for non-official languages. Translators who work from non-official languages and into non-official languages. So I would like to ask perhaps Howard or Willis to speak a little bit about the institutional support of translation. There are a lot of collaborations between LTAC and other organizations but if we could maybe focus on Canada Council for the Arts, the International and the Domestic Translation Program, which is very different than what happens in the States. The Canada Council gives transfer translations of Canadian authors. So usually between English and French domestically and they also have the International Translation Program for people translating Canadian authors into other languages. Some people often assume that it's only English and French but actually if you're a Canadian author I think you have to be published in Canada. One example I know is Danish. That's eligible for the Canada Council grants also as a translation from Danish. Any language in which a book in Canada has been published, Spanish. You've done Spanish, right Hugh? For third languages it's as long as the writer and the translator are both either citizens of Canada or permanent residents of Canada. And also translations into Aboriginal languages are eligible but it doesn't happen very often. Well, I'm going to talk about Napoloc. The Inuit writer who was translated from Inukto took first into French about ten years ago but none of this happens very much. 98% of the traffic 99% of the traffic is French, English, English, French. The others are very rare exceptions. We also talk about the international program because there's also funding for translations into other languages not English or French from English, they have to have been from English or French but there's funding within the international program as well and perhaps Yeah, for translation into Sure. Sorry, did I cut you off? No. I just wanted to mention something about the international grant which is a wonderful thing to exist but it kind of makes things complicated when you're thinking things in the context of a country like Iran because I have been involved in translating a novel by a Canadian author when I met with my publisher in Iran and I told him about the existence of this international grant but in fact it's complex in the sense of the bureaucratic hurdles that exist but because of the sanctions and all that but so that's one part of it, that's the bureaucratic element of it but also given that almost everything in Iran gets politicized and the fact that you have to acknowledge the receipt of this grant on the copyright page may complicate things even further to the extent of putting the publisher and the translator on the spotlight in not a very favorable or pleasant way so what happens at the end of the day that you as the translator and the publisher in spite of the existence of this wonderful grant choose not to take advantage of it because of the repercussions it might have in Iran I've kind of noticed that in Spanish anyway now I don't know exactly why but a lot of the authors whose books have received the funding which is I think for 50% of the cost of the translation say a Spanish publisher wants to publish a book by Canadian author and the Canada Council will pay 50% of the price of the translation but somehow they seem to go to the most established authors and I don't know whether this has to do with the possible sales of the book or what Margaret Atwood Andachi kind of seen the same names there and looked into Mexican publishers and it doesn't seem to be nearly as used in Mexico as it does in Spain where they have the larger publishing houses so I don't know how that works but there seems to be a slight imbalance towards more established writers but a lot of countries now have have funding for the translation of their own authors into other languages and other countries including Brazil and Argentina also have funds available for that now as well as the European countries and Colombia now just added it, not a lot but it's available France, Belgium The Western European ones have done it for years the novelty is that it's now happening in the Americas Did you have a comment before about the international translation program? Are you speaking to me? I was just going to say what you mentioned the Canada Council pays 50% of the going rate of the country where the translation is being published whereas domestically it's 100% 100% they have a set rate that goes to the translator or to the publisher? it goes to the translator through the publisher but you find out in the hands of the translator actually yes very good point it should end up in the hands of the translator but going back to the domestic translation program I think it's important to highlight that things work very differently in Canada than the United States where the publisher in the States pays out of pocket usually or sometimes through small funding programs but in Canada publishing grants publishers are funded directly they can apply for a translation grant from Canada Council to pay the translator directly and they set the standard rate which right now I think is 18 cents per word for pros and a little more for poetry in a way the institutionalized support changes the game compared to how things work here in the States they pay the publishing cost too as long as you print in Canada as long as you print in Canada in the sense I think the Canadian government even in the last super austerity regime that we had the Canada Council funding wasn't actually it was nibbled at but it wasn't cut for that because there's a consensus that in order for Canadian publishing to survive it has to have government support which is interesting because you can see that in Quebec but Quebec has it in common with Latin American countries and European countries that state intervention to support the arts but in English Canada too in the English speaking world it's rare to see that but that's taken by and large to be deemed necessary sorry go ahead fellas I was just going to say that the part of the reason for the funding of of translation between French and English in Canada is because is not because of their huge respect for the art form of translation unfortunately it's simply because it's part of the package of support for bilingualism we're officially a bilingual country and so the there's definitely an upside to that which means that you know it enables translation and publishing of books between basically mostly between the two official languages the downside is that that the translators are sort of I don't know I considered sort of as technicians of bilingualism or something like that and we're unlike other programs of the Canada Council for the arts we're I wouldn't say that we're really considered artists so that's a kind of a that's why you get treated better I want to be an artist and I want to starve I would go one step farther than fellas I would say it's not even seen as a national funding issue it's seen as a national unity issue and it's not really it continues to be funded because it is not really seen as being part of the artistic realm it's part of keeping the country together but it is funded through an arts funding but it's a lot easier to link to that idea you can get the grant almost automatically whereas any other arts funding is extremely competitive and extremely difficult to get one nice thing when we went to the Bampfield International Literary Translation Center was we were issued a card that said artist on that note I would like to quote Sherry Simon who made a comment during the 40th anniversary celebration last month the John Glasgow Prize for translation was presented but at the beginning of the celebration she spoke as did other well-known translators and she said in French so I'll paraphrase something like it is true that translators have benefited from the institutionalized support of translation by organizations like Canada Council at the same time translators are cornered at the mercy of not just the availability of funding but the language politics and I think that speaks to what you're just mentioning so I don't know did anyone have any more comments about that dichotomy? I think we need to go one step beyond just reciting what the policies are and start talking about some of the psychological and aesthetic impact of this is and that is that while it has promoted a lot of translations between English and French it has also led to a relative indifference on the part of the reading public towards these translations which are seen as products of government policy rather than as exciting works you might discover and actually want to read so you cannot lose money on translating a book from English to French or French to English and whereas you can lose money on any other book you publish and one of the consequences of that I think has been that they don't always get promoted very well and they tend to just be seen as a sort of worthy thing you have to do it's a bit like giving ten dollars to the Christmas seals or something and because of that a lot of the books don't sell very well and in fact it needs to be said that a lot of even very well known authors in one language are often unknown in the other language English Canadian authors tend to be known in Quebec if they are big enough to be translated in Paris if they're translated in Quebec most Quebec readers will ignore them and not read the book and most Quebec novelists are not well known in Canada and in English Canada and the example of that one of the big best sellers in Quebec Yves Beauchemin whose first novel du Métou sold over a million copies worldwide when he started he wrote a four novel series about Quebec from the fifties to the seventies and McClellan and Stuart a very large Toronto publisher bought the rights to it they published the first two volumes in hardcover the third volume came out as a softcover and the fourth volume was cancelled and so the the indifference is pretty clanging excuse me but they weren't great no he's not great literature I'm sorry I just had to say that he's a highly popular writer they're sentimental and they're not very well written but he's the kind of writer who you would expect to have an audience while the rest of us sneer that he's not a great artist and even he's getting cancelled right and somebody who did well internationally and he's done very well internationally yeah I mean his first novel sold a million copies in I don't know 15 or 20 countries so the so that kind of consequence seems to be important and another kind of consequence of which personally I've become very aware and tried in a modest way with some other people to try and remedy is the fact that because translation in Canada has become defined French English English French doing good works to keep the country together we have less publish in country publishing of international translations than we ought to have and that's of course I mean I'm editor of the only literary series in Canada that defines itself as publishing international translations there are a couple of other publishers who have brought out international translations a few times and Nancy has done a few and a small very small press called Exile which doesn't bother to distribute its books have done a few but the so I think one thing we do need to talk about is how and why international the public in country publishing of international titles has been snuffed out and I'd be happy to go on for a long time about that but I think I better I've talked been talking a lot so let somebody else do it comment on that because part of what Sherry Simon mentioned that same night is how she sees Alta being more worldly because members are supported in translating into and out of many languages not just a few or two as in the case of LTAC but your role in the international translation series I mean you published titles from from we have we have published from Polish Portuguese from both Angola and Mozambique Spanish from El Salvador Spanish from Argentina and I'm forgetting but anyway various others yes sorry and we're about to do Catalan I cannot forget this with our funders sitting in the audience so okay let's talk about that this is an interesting subject so one much bigger effect of arts funding in Canada which I strongly support because I think that as a small market next to an enormous market we would have no art at all if we didn't have government funding so I'm not coming at this from an angle of saying we shouldn't have it but it does have consequences and one of the consequences is that publishers assume that books are published with grants for you get a grant for the author if the author is Canadian you get a grant for the printing if you printing Canada so the I mean the publisher has to deal with his or her own overhead which is employees renting office space and stuff but aside from that a lot of the expenses are covered so if you lose money it's it's mainly I don't know some people would say it's pretty hard to lose money although some people a lot of publishers do manage to do it of course publishers tend to be good at that but the but the result is it looks horrendous when you begin to consider the prospect of publishing an international title because what happens you don't get a grant for the author because the author is not Canadian you don't get it to grant for the translator because the translator is not I mean if the translator is Canadian you get sort of it's a little better than if the translator isn't Canadian but you're still you can save a little money you don't get any money for printing costs you can then you can print outside the country and that's cheaper than printing in Canada so that's what we do but then there's the whole issue of buying rights and you have the you know with some of the books we've done they've already come out in five or six other languages and they're not out in English and we go to the author's agent in Frankfurt who says oh well English now we're going to get $50,000 and we say we're a small literary press and so on but you've got three layers of expense that are not there with domestic translations and that since most Canadian publishers are conditioned to working within the domestic conditions that's enough to scare them off from doing international translations and that's why we're the only ones crazy enough to do it wait wait wait I want to say something first of all on the French side because it's very odd in Canada there's somebody might be dreaming of having one national literature I'm not sure it's a great idea but there are really French publishing and English language publishing are totally separate and sometimes rights are exchanged where at Frankfurt at any rate on the French side there has been really a lot of publishing of translations mainly of poetry but really a lot and the publishers are very cleverly taking advantage of the of the grants that come from the source language countries of that poetry so that's one thing I just wanted to point that out it's a big difference that's a big thing sorry it's often promotion anytime we publish it any time we publish a Quebec author we get $1,500 to bring them to Ontario but I mean it is true that because translation has been seen as part of trying to found a kind of a Canadian identity in a bilingual way that it has been limited to more of a domestic axis between English and French and English and even translation programs which in Canada were quite quick to establish translation programs in universities but they were almost always English French French English now there's a growing consensus that it's time to move on that and even the Canada Council they don't like saying too much about it because obviously they can't they're not maybe going to put up the funds but on the French side it's really been astonishing how as they have I think 120 bilingual or translated books of poetry between French and Spanish at least 70 of them in Mexico and what they do is they team up with a Mexican publisher and then they co-publish the book they've worked a lot with Mantis in Guadalajara and so over the last say 15 years they've kept this the ball rolling in this and now they've reached really like 120 130 books they've also co-published books with publishers in Europe and it's to the point where Gaston Belmar who is one of the founders and I remember seeing him in Guadalajara at the book fair and he had his own kiosk and everybody knew him everybody would go buy his table and he speaks Spanish and everything and you know if you take these 70 or maybe more books just in Mexico that Acre de Forge has published and they paid the translation and so on of Quebec authors into Spanish and Mexican authors into French that has left a big imprint if you talk to people in Mexican we're interested in Mexican poetry in Mexico City they say you know everybody the first thing they say is Acre de Forge and as we know there was also Brigitte Bouchard who had Les Alucifs who started to get around it she had offices in Europe and in Quebec and she went back and forth and she promoted the books that she translated she published almost exclusively translations didn't she quite a lot almost exclusively not entirely but almost yeah and so she kept this balance going between Europe and Quebec in the end she sold the business to Lemayac but Lemayac itself a much larger has a lot of translations on its roster so with someone in France yeah Acre de Forge but it's true and there are more and more Wolsack can win Wolsack can win has done some poetry that's true so there are more English publishers coming online with this thing of publishing translations from abroad but the French side has really moved ahead much much faster and much more and especially poetry left a real mark in Latin America there's a lot more exchange between Quebec theater and Mexican theater than between English and French excuse me I have to step over and then I'll be right back can I just say one thing about the theater thing and that's because Seade which is a Quebec theater kind of an association of Quebec playwrights and so on along with other Quebec cultural agencies and sometimes arms of the Quebec government has kind of targeted Latin America because they saw Latin America as they could kind of go over the great Anglophone massive people in the rest of Canada in the US and connect with Latin America and reinforce that connection of the Latino with the Latin Americans of the south and so that's been something that they started doing in the 70's and they've kept doing it and now there is a heck of a lot of Quebec theater that's translated into Spanish and presented especially in Mexico City in Spanish so that's also been an important note. Did you have a comment Steve? Yeah I mean this is all quite interesting but it is very very different from English Canada and it's worth mentioning that. It's also worth mentioning that it is anchored in certain cultural assumptions in Quebec that are not made in English Canada. I mean for example Spanish is widely studied in Quebec in the junior colleges and in the universities in English Canada since we signed a free trade agreement with the states. Three major universities have closed their Spanish departments and another three are about to. So Spanish is about as relevant as Dutch in English Canada The good news that Glendon just started they did have a certificate program in Spanish but now they have a bachelor's I know they do but Glendon is a special environment and it's mainly French which is one reason they do that Glendon is a French speaking college of York University it's in English Canada but a lot of the people who go there are from Quebec which I think is one reason they are able to do this. Is there in terms of the English language publishing are you also competing maybe Canadian public who want to buy works in translation into English to go online and buy them from US publishers? I guess they might buy them from Amazon Technically there needs to be a Canadian distributor if they are to buy them in their local bookstore but most Canadian publishers in fact some of the larger Canadian publishers make a lot of their money by acting as Canadian distributors for a panoply of US publishers so that's usually how that would work. I wanted to Spanish I wanted to connect to another exception to the English-French and maybe talk a little bit about Bilzi because it's a unique. A what? The Banff International Literature Center I should explain I am not a member of LTAC I have never been to Banff I know nothing about the I run this series but I know nothing about it and I am a translator but I know nothing about it We call it Bilzi I've never heard that before but perhaps since you are a former co-director if you'd like to speak a little bit about Bilzi because it has a unique role not just within Canada it includes all three official languages of North America but also in terms of how different it is for most translation residency programs in its linguistic emphasis Bilzi was founded by a group of people including Linda Gaborio and Susan Orio was a translator in Calgary at Banff because Banff Center for the Arts has how many programs residency programs in all different aspects of the arts probably 70, 80 maybe even close to 100 and dance, music, all sorts of things in literary arts they have 10 programs so they had some translation going on in theater Linda Gaborio is probably the person who has translated most Quebec plays into English and but they wanted to see if they could get something broader going and so it was established by Mexico, Canada and the US so it's a trilingual program fully trilingual everything in the round table discussions and so on is accessible in the three languages and they have 15 spots for professional translators the residency program is all paid by the Banff Center and they have three spots for student translators one from Mexico, one from the US one from Canada and people come from all over the world put in for this program the thing is that they have to one of the languages that they translate into or out of has to be English, French or Spanish but apart from that it can be any language in or out of those languages so over the years it's really gained a lot of momentum and in the past few years we've received between 70 and 80 requests for the program per year the student program is quite competitive there's only one student per country and out of that 70 or 80 we accept 15 so the translator has to have a project has to have a pretty much has to have a publisher lined up in certain cases it doesn't have to when we we have a selection committee with two people from each country Mexicans to Canadians to Americans on it and we tried to to accept a certain it became popular enough so there were a lot of translators who were flying from Europe and from all different parts of the world and we didn't want to just have translators with 70 translated works each so we tried to keep an eye out for emerging translators who were promising and so on and to make a kind of an interesting kind of cocktail of translators who would be there for three weeks the program is three weeks which makes it quite different from the European programs and some of the other ones in North America in Europe alone there's I think there's a network called REC which has has residency programs in a number of countries for literary translators I think there are about 15 participating residencies in that program there's another one called HALWA which has 30 or so in Europe but often it's basically for authors but they accept some literary translators but these programs are you work on your own by and large they're open all year so it's not, you know, it's competitive but it's highly competitive it's a lot of BAMF because BAMF it's only for three weeks and the philosophy of the Bilsey program at BAMF is to really encourage dialogue among the translators so instead of just leaving people to translate on their own everybody has their own carton of milk and a refrigerator with their name on it we really tried to we have three roundtables a week and at the roundtables you have the 15 translators, three student translators the directors of the program and three consulting translators who come in that the other translators can ask questions to or show their work to or whatever so that's 28 people coming around these big roundtables and they're really interesting because translators spend so much time working in solitude that on the whole they really they really appreciate the opportunity at BAMF to really exchange ideas you know, talk about what's happening in their country with translation funding of translation and so on and it's really been quite a success and of course a lot of the talk about how to replace over meals or over hiking in a forest or watching the bears or being eaten by a bear the BAMF center also among the 15 translators the center makes funds available for six or seven authors to also be invited all expenses paid including airfare so the author can work with the translator and then the author can participate in these discussions as well and so that makes it even all the more interesting and often there are author translators and translator authors so it's really the program I worked in the program for four years and there's a new I was a co-director of it with Katie Silver who lives in San Francisco she did it on her own for a year and now we're going to have a new Mexican head of the program Pedro Serrano and so Katie's still in the advisory council and so on so looking forward to the program has been quite a success and we hope it continues to be in the future it's great for bringing translators together and with the authors of the year we were there Joseph Boydman was there with his Dutch translator and with his French translator and it was very interesting the exchanges between discussing how they dealt with the problems and translating the book so it's really great for cross fertilization between translators and we've given talks and stuff at Alta for a while we did every year on the program and we really encourage any and everybody who wants to who wants to come to go there one of the great things I was in Bath in 2010 so was Lida and one of the great things that you pointed out was that everybody's there at the same time that everybody's there at the same time as opposed to other literary residencies where you're working by yourself but the intensity and the concentration of everybody being there at the same time leads to great connections and I think a few of you have been there and can speak to that but you know some of us have started collaborating or become editors or connecting to other opportunities to be published whether it's in journals or small presses so it's a very fruitful dynamic program that is not only about the work that you're doing while you're there but you can make lasting connections and speaking of the Mexico, the Mexican the new director part of what we're doing with this pilot partnership between Alta and LTAC is going to lead to including not having like a parallel bringing Mexico in bringing to this program that every year providing programming for for the Alta conferences from LTAC will combine with bringing Mexico in as well to hopefully every year have us even if it's a small contingent of Mexican translators that may or may not be associated with Bill C. as well but it's really exciting for me and I hope I think there are some other Canadians in the group you know there were supposed to be a couple of people here from University of Alberta but I don't know who they are I think they're actually doing another round table themselves at the same time can I mention some of the things that our association has tried to do to get past this impasse of being stuck between French and English we've gone constantly over the years the different presidents of our association have tried to have tried to get support from the Canada Council for translation of other languages and we think that there are very good reasons for that just in terms of you were talking about rights Steve it's very hard I think for publishers, I hear from publishers that it's hard to buy to when you're buying rights if you can sell rights at the same time it's things work better so it would be beneficial if Canadians could be publishing more translations of foreign-authored works there would be better opportunities to sell Canadian-authored works so this is all kind of to say why it would be good for Canada since that seems to be the big selling point of it yes that's the criteria they're going to use it's going to be harder to sell it it's not seen as a national unity issue I realize that but I just want to give a few of the arguments that we've used we haven't been successful we've also said a few years ago Robert Maisel who's a Canadian writer and translator created a petition that was circulated in the translators community saying that any translation that's published in Canada automatically contributes to Canadian culture this seems obvious to us as translators but it's hard to get through to a bureaucrat well that's part of our argument in running our series that in fact we choose differently just because of who we are and that in fact it's important that translation come not only from London and New York but also from places like Windsor Ontario and that is a diversification of culture both on an international scale and within Canada that doesn't make it easy but we have I think it's very brave um you know I don't know if an American publisher would have chosen to do Black Bread than the Catalan novel we're doing I know that several American publishers had turned down on Jacqui who has now become a big international star because his first novel had a very positive portrayal of Cubans in Angola and even New Directions was scared off by it and they sat on it for over a year and they didn't know and so just because the Cuban thing was never such a bogeyman in Canada it was a lot easier for us to do it um on Jacqui is one of the writers we publish he's a young writer from Angola he's in his late 30s he's published about 20 books that have been translated into eight or nine languages and one of he wrote a novel what is probably the novel of his it's best known internationally for the school children in the 1980s and their teachers who were Cubans I translated it okay this is a very important topic okay let's talk about distribution and rights can I finish my list? he did warn us I thought it was done I encouraged I only gave you two reasons I also think it's really when I've been at Biltsie and in other contexts I've really been impressed I'm a typical Canadian I'm sort of well we're okay we're not that great but when we're with other international translators I see that Canadian translators have developed amazing expertise but mainly in French and English and I really think it would be possible to just go that a little step further and develop expertise in other languages and finally my final argument and boy this one really didn't go over was I was saying well look we translators are artists and you give you fund musicians who are interpreting Beethoven you know our translators we interpret writers from other languages why are we not that same respect and if you can think of any other arguments that's an ingenious one I have to say really I'm marshalling all the arguments I can and the problem is I don't think they're interested part of the problem is that most publishers really don't like that idea because they basically feel they get there's so little money given to them that they certainly don't want to share it beyond English and French translation now I'm finished English and French translators still are pretty privileged because they get paid 18 cents a word by the Canada Council if you're translating from another language you get whatever the country offers and this means it's a huge problem if you're publishing a novel from somewhere like El Salvador because there you've got a government that is not going to help you if you're publishing a novel from Sweden you're probably a lot better off but sometimes you do get help from the host country but the host country isn't that well off so you will translate a 300 page novel and you'll get a thousand dollars or something from the host country and that will be your payment so there is if you translate a novel from French doing a 300 page novel will do quite well and get 12 or 15 thousand dollars and probably do better than the author much better than the author much better than the author Alex so I was wondering on Twitter so I see Nick the translator coming from Babylon if not somebody else I'd like to talk about that and link it to that other question thank you for the question but before I get to that I just wanted to mention something very briefly about going back to Glenman and what I find sort of a significant difference between LTCH and ALTA is the lack of LTCH's presence within the university environment and it kind of leaves the field completely open to an institution like ATIO that sort of monopolizes and actively recruits students whereas LTCH could have more of an involved and engaged presence now going back to the question that you had it's not, I always think of it of course being mostly familiar with the Iranian writers who get published in Canada I think of those writers as being the hurdles and getting works from Iranian authors translated into English but it's not a specifically Canadian problem what I think is problematic is the surge of memoirs and sort of these highly exoticized tokenized works that are getting published both in the form of fiction or non-fiction that don't leave much room for work to be translated from Reading Lolita in Tehran We have a Canadian version of it Prisoner of Tehran and a sequel to it and also a work of collection of short stories that interestingly is titled Echoes from the Other Lent I'm not, by the way, I'm not passing any critical judgment on the content of those but maybe I am Did I just be critical but I think and in the case of those few authors who are trying not to fall into those pitfalls they end up self-translating and presenting the work as a work, as an original work that is written in English as opposed to marketing it as a translation and as I said it's not a specifically Canadian problem but it's something I have been in close contact with Could you speak about your translations because you translated from Portuguese and you had your recent volume published They also did an Argentine translation I did before and they were just interested in it I was actually commissioned to find a young emerging Latin American to translate who hadn't been published before and so you can feel this you can feel that the momentum is there now all you're doing at Biblioasis and so on there's a feeling that Canadian publishing has to really start publishing authors from abroad to the point that Will Second Wynn, a small publisher is willing to put up their own money there were no subventions involved McGill Queen's Press One thing I found that's been interesting in the last few years is there's some books that have been overlooked by British American and French publishers for some reason classics that have been overlooked and several Canadian publishers have taken advantage of that and actually published these books and put a fair amount of money into buying the rights and so on one of them was Adan Buenos Aires which is an 800 page novel by Leo Pardo Marichal translated by Norman Cheadle who lives in Sudbury and he devoted years and years to translating to say that he did a great job and fortunately Mark Avely was a literary agent at McGill Queen's and he saw the manuscript and said well this thing is fantastic and it hadn't received it's considered a classic in Latin America but it hadn't received the recognition internationally that really should have partially because Marichal had kind of been more open to the Peronists than Borges would have liked so there were some buttons that were turned off in the reception in the area for this novel and now it's considered a classic McGill Queen said they would go ahead with it Marichal's daughter who is in her 80s now was thrilled and asked for McGill Queen's a pretty hefty payment for the rights and they said okay they wanted to go through with it because they saw it as kind of important that a Canadian publisher should be bringing out this classic the same thing happened on the French side with Ortiz's Contra Puteo which is a sociological classic there's a Haitian publisher who has his own publishing company now he publishes Haitian Immigrant First Nations, in other words Indigenous Writers Rodney Santelois, it's called Memoir d'Orquerier he has over a hundred titles now and he saw this thing and he said it was translated in France and it's a classic of Latin American sociology it was brought out in the 1930s I think and so he he paid for it out of his own pocket he got a few euros the translator was from France and so on so he got a few euros here he got a few Canadian dollars there put the whole thing together so that's another classic now that so there's various kinds of strategies going on to bring out works from other countries Hugh has Claire Varene published French translations of Lispector Lispector French translations of Claire Varene published those I don't think so because the French translations were done by other people we have a woman in Montreal who is an international specialist in Lispector and it's published several books about her writing but I don't think her translations have been I wasn't sure I think the French got to that before we could there was a question earlier about rights and there was a question about reviews and I wanted to answer the question about rights and I was able to do so far so I'd like to tie it in with reviews because the two are somewhat related getting reviewed is of course increasingly difficult for any book but it's really really difficult for translations one thing we I think we have had a total of one or two reviews for all the international translations we have published in Canada yes yes and one of them was our the publisher literally phoned up the book page editor and said you idiot and then took them out for a drink and it took about three drinks I think before we finally got the review but we have had most of our best known authors have not been reviewed in Canada and this leads to rights being strictly on the Canadian market the books would sink the rights in general in Canada are done obviously on a country by country basis so if a Canadian publisher publishes a novel that does well in Canada one of the first things they try to do is sell US rights to a US publisher Biblioasis has a very much a border mentality it is in Windsor Ontario it's a 25 minute walk from the front door of the office and they are the only Canadian publisher that I'm aware of which does not recognize the United States as a separate territory so when they buy rights to Canadian novels they will never sell no matter how successful they become in Canada they will never sell US rights to a US publisher they do the marketing in the States themselves directly and this has this is controversial there are some aspects of it I'm not very comfortable with but it has allowed the translation series to survive and because we have been able to sell the translations in the States and I would argue we've actually had some influence in selling the translations in the States the obvious example is Mia Cotto the Mozambican writer whose fiction had been published by Serpent's Tale in London and when we published his novel Gisoussen which was published as the tuner of silences it actually got a lot of press in the States and I would argue it was instrumental in him getting the Neustadt Prize in 2014 but when we brought him to Toronto I couldn't get the book review editors of any of the three major Toronto newspapers to come to his reading I couldn't get the his reading was packed with 300 Portuguese immigrants all of whom had lived in Mozambique or Angola or Cape Verde at some point but nobody significant from the literary community came to his reading and this is somebody who's a potential future Nobel Prize winner and it's the first time he's ever been in Toronto and we did tons of publicity and so the Canadian literary media is very much attuned to two things one is they know there's certain Canadian books they have to review and then they pick what are the big international things they have to review the Friends and the Murakamis and that's what they review they're not interested in the fact that a press in Southern Ontario has published somebody who might win a Nobel Prize in 15 years but when he does when he does they'll say oh we knew all about it all along yes marginally the but I don't know probably not terribly likely but it would have a slightly better chance would be my guess but the fact of actually marketing the books directly in the States has made the series somewhat viable we still lose money on every non-Quebec translation not a single one has broken even yet but over 75% of our sales are in the States for the non-Quebec translations so they're the only ones that don't recognize the US as a separate territory which I think that is true so most there are other publishers Canadian publishers can sign on with the US distributor and some of the smaller ones do that we're not the only Canadians who are with the consortium which is who we're with there are other Canadians who are there but most of the Canadian publishers are with consortium if they have a book that starts to take off they will try to sell US rights to a US publisher and Biblioasis does not do that that's what I'm saying yes Coach House for example I think is with consortium but they have also tried to sell US rights to books that have done well one really interesting thing that happened a few years ago is Patsy Aldana she worked with a children's publisher called Groundwood Press and Degrio Books so at one point she asked me if I would do a translation of kind of an anthology with beautiful illustrations of folktales from different parts of Latin America and I looked at she had put together this anthology she was born in Guatemala herself and I noticed that the Groundwood books always seem to be doing really well and anyway she said oh by the way could you use American spellings you know so it turns out with children's books she did an incredible job she brought out the most beautiful books huge she had a thing on the version of Guadalupe with incredible pop outs the most elaborate baroque pop outs I'd ever seen with like 32 pieces that would pop out and then you fold them back in and she I would say they just off hand that they had maybe books published some bilingual and they were mainly targeted for the US Hispanic market and they sold in the tens of thousands in the US and you could see a lot of them were actually by Mexican American authors it was really quite extraordinarily quite extraordinary what she achieved it's worth saying what happens in children's publishing is not what happens in adult literary publishing that's another world very savvy since we have only a few minutes left I just wanted to make a comment on how it seems to me that there's enough momentum and there's enough there are enough opportunities that are opening up to increase or to break out of that English French mold and I wanted to know if any of you had any closing comments for any whether it's new opportunities to do this or strengthening and continuing already established programs I mean Bilsey is hopefully going to continue but in terms of publications or collaborations between whether it's LTAC and other organizations or such as the translate publication that their last their most recent issue had just eight different language combinations or with educational programs in translation just to I would say it's something that should come naturally to us because we're a country of a lot of recent immigrants you know there are 52% of the population of Toronto was not born in Canada and another 30 to 40 this is a city of 6 million people with 52% not born in the country and another 30 to 40% are the children of immigrants so a lot of these people have expertise or at least a conversant in languages that are not English or French so we should have an ability to move into this area and publishing well we should be able to develop translators from languages other than French because a lot of people in Canada grow up with languages other than French or English as their home languages and we actually do have in the mandate we've given ourselves in the series I had it we what part of our mandate is to look for books in non-official languages of Canada and one of our the first book the third book we did was written in an archaic Austrian German in Rockwood Ontario and it was by a man who was a retired professor of German at the University of Toronto who had fled Vienna from the Nazis in 1939 and he wrote this book in his retirement it was published by a small press in Vienna got superb reviews and then came out as a mass market paperback in Germany with Rovolt and which is a large German paperback publishing company and we that was one of our first ones so we I think it should be a natural part of our programs to publish not just from abroad but also from German Spanish whatever is out there in terms of Hispanic writers of Canada I mean that subsidy for writers from third languages who were translating into English and French on the part of the Canada Council that was absolutely crucial and so now there's been a lot of stuff published by Latin American writers of who write in Spanish in Canada paid for by the Canada Council and everything and that's had a large impact and in translation programs in universities now as Spanish is starting to come in maybe not it's not part of the translation programs they're still English French English but it's linked from the modern languages program so there is an increasing awareness that the time has come to move out beyond but Canada's really established a strong center of translation between English and French it's great what it's done but it's time to broaden that out into other spheres and obviously we couldn't have done the Cannes and Engelmann the novel we published without Canada Council support it's a 400 page novel it's very complicated we needed a very good professional translator it's full of Yiddish puns and Hungarian slang a German that nobody has spoken since 1945 and so on so we wouldn't have been able to do it had we not received third language funding but that's still a tiny tiny proportion our translator was a German a hyperactive German professor who works 24 hours a day and she publishes articles and she translates books and and she bring the book to you no no I happen to know this gentleman he brought the book to me now he didn't tell us actually that we had to buy rights for me he told us he had the rights and after it came out we got a very angry letter from Vienna saying you didn't buy the rights from us but anyway no it isn't I'm afraid it is a great book though any last quick questions yeah it's good we had a cheff writer too in the 1960s Skorvetsky in Toronto and he kept writing a cheque and his stuff was translated into English you know so that was also the other thing is that the Canada Council sets 18 cents for fiction 20 for theatre 25 for poetry for work well generally English, French, French or from the third languages into English and French if the author is Canadian if the author is Canadian this is really hard but the good thing the good thing in Canada is that those rates are usually quoted by you know in general that becomes like the general kind of touchstone for rates so that helps it's also supposed to be a minimum yes and that's a minimum publishers can give can add more well you can sometimes negotiate a tiny little royalty just for the principle of it well we could be here for a lot longer thank you all