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How can foreign language fiction get into Britain? Passport control at Gatwick airport. Photograph: Gareth Fuller/PA Archive/Press Association Images
How can foreign language fiction get into Britain? Passport control at Gatwick airport. Photograph: Gareth Fuller/PA Archive/Press Association Images

Fiction in translation's future?

This article is more than 12 years old
Bright sparks amid gloom over the number of foreign-language books reaching English readers

That nasty rumour still won't go away: publishing houses in the UK are allergic to literary fiction in translation. A recent report by English PEN even warned that "future geniuses comparable to Murakami or García Márquez might never become accessible to English readers" if the situation isn't properly addressed. Are we really on the verge of a drought?

On Monday night, a conversation had around a stove-heater in a greenhouse in Wapping gave reason for a bit more hope. It was the latest reading group of young publisher And Other Stories, which has jettisoned one traditional tool of the translated-fiction world: the book report. Usually written by readers outside the company, these short assessments are often all a commissioning editor has to go on when deciding whether or not to buy the rights to a foreign book. So although insufficient, they have up to now been indispensable, too.

But what if you gather together readers, translators and editors, all grounded in the literature of a region, to talk for a whole evening about the books you're considering? One of the reasons this doesn't sound plausible is that no money is offered to readers. (Book reports are done for a fee which, although it won't get you much more than your groceries and bus fares for a week, at least recognises that there is some expertise involved.) It is And Other Stories's modus operandi, though, and it seems to be working.

Monday's meeting, at the Wapping Project Bookshop, was of the Spanish-language group. The debate – about a recent crop of Latin American novels – surely beats a small attachment quietly dropping into the inbox. Does Colombian Antonio Ungar stretch credibility too far? (Half an hour.) Can any Latin American novelist – Cuban Abilio Estévez, in this case – use a house as a metaphor for family history and not make us feel like we've heard it all before? (See One Hundred Years of Solitude.) For warmth, we'd transferred to the pub by the time we got on to the third book. Can the Mexican writer Carmen Boullosa crowd her narrative with dead writers revived for a literary conference and get away with it?

Each book tends to end up having a lead proponent and 10 dissenters to sketch a full web of possible objections. And Other Stories's publisher Stefan Tobler told me that Bolaño's Savage Detectives was an inspiration "with its brawling poets of Mexico City". No brawls were had in Wapping, but the group left exercised, confident of having made a real contribution to editorial decisions. And the publisher went away well informed.

Even its advocates are divided about the likely future health of literature translated into English. In the best-of-times camp, people point to the Scandinavian crime-fiction wave, and mention that the low production costs of ebooks mean that publishers have less of an excuse not to invest in literature from overseas. In the worst-of-times camp, editors wring their hands about paying two advances, not to mention how much harder these books can be to market and publicise. With its open, public-spirited approach, And Other Stories is showing that there is another way, calmly removing one or two of the obstacles.

Translators stand to benefit from this, too. Of the three translations published by And Other Stories in 2011, two were translated by the readers who recommended them. What's more, And Other Stories may make a small increase in the number of translated books published elsewhere, by sharing their author pages and the results of their reading groups online. They recognise that they can't publish all the books they enjoy: so why not share the wealth?

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