For the past few years, translations have been creeping into the forefront of Australia's literary landscape. Translated books made a showing at top literary prizes. This year, Behrouz Boochani's No Friend but the Mountains, translated with Omid Tofighian, won the Victorian Prize for Literature and the Victorian Premier's Prize for Nonfiction. In 2018, The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree, by Shokoofeh Azar (translated by Adrien Kijek), was shortlisted for the Stella Prize. You can walk into the crime section of most bookshops and see a healthy amount of Scandinavian noir.
In terms of publishing numbers, however, translations in English take up a tiny portion of what is on the bookshelves. It's called the three per cent problem, coming from a Bowker study that only three per cent of US books available for sale were translations. There's a lack of reliable statistics and consensus, but most predominately English-speaking countries have a low literary translation output, with Australia faring poorly.
Of that tiny percentage, it's estimated that only 30 per cent of translations are books written by women. Like other books by women, this problem is then exacerbated by the fact that books by women routinely get less promotion in stores, fewer awards and less coverage in the media, as well as facing gender bias. And like with other parts of the publishing industry, books by marginalised and/or non-European writers can be often similarly overlooked.
Translations, in general, have so much to offer. Translations have a knack for defamiliarising English and how we think language and storytelling works. It's there in the assured transcendence and brutality of Han Kang's book of short stories Human Acts, translated by Deborah Smith, when she describes the 'silenced corpses' on the floor of a gymnasium. It's present in the lingering sentences in Valeria Luiselli's essay collection Sidewalks, translated by Christina McSweeney, placing concepts of philosophy and space and language from various cultures side by side and then letting the new ideas formed wander out of one essay, waiting to be picked up again in another one.
Or Clarice Lispector, whose works are considered classics in the Portugese-speaking world, but is only now getting her due with English-speaking audiences. In her novel The Hour of the Star, translated by Benjamin Moser, she stuns readers with beautiful and strange writing like, 'the toothache that runs through this story has given me a sharp stab in the middle of our mouth'.
Reading translations also