Photograph by Kevin A. Roberts
Once upon a time, it made sense for American artists to busy themselves forging recognizably American art. In the late 19th century, Louis Sullivan created a new vernacular for architecture, refusing to gussy up his buildings with Beaux-Arts columns and Greco-Roman bric-a-brac (he died penniless as a result). In the 20th century, when composer Aaron Copland and choreographer Martha Graham collaborated on Appalachian Spring, modern dance and classical music found their American accents. And then, of course, there was American literature before and after Walt Whitman’s barbaric yawp.
In the 21st century, that impulse has run wild; the U.S. is an echo chamber filled with reality shows and realist novels ready-made for ladies’ book clubs. Once in a while, a Stieg Larsson or Roberto Bolaño sneaks onto the book lists. But the charges lobbed against American writers and readers a few years ago by Nobel Prize committee member Horace Engdahl—that we’re “too isolated, too insular”—smarted a little. It’s true, but this is a relatively new thing; who didn’t read Franz Kafka in school?
Dalkey Archive Press, founded in Chicago in 1984 with the mission to publish and preserve the work of overlooked literary writers, is also a major publisher of works in translation. In 2009, it initiated a new series, Best European Fiction, edited by Bosnian-American writer Aleksandar Hemon, to expand what was available to readers in English. This especially includes Americans, who are not xenophobic so much as lacking access. Part of the blame for that can be laid on the U.S. publishing industry, which is so enamored with best-sellers it has come to resemble another uniquely American institution: Hollywood.
“I grew up in a culture where the publishing industry was subsidized, and also translations, so profit was not really a consideration,” Hemon says. “Socialism—among its other horrors, like nationalized healthcare—thought that if people read books it would make them better citizens, along with many other things,” he adds dryly. In the 1980s, when he was first immersing himself in literature, it was programs like these that allowed him to read works by Americans like John Barth and Raymond Carver, who shaped him as a reader and writer.
Dalkey’s associate director, Martin Riker, moved to St. Louis this summer from Urbana-Champaign, Ill., with his wife, writer Danielle Dutton, who’s now on Wash. U.’s creative-writing faculty (she also designs Dalkey’s book covers). The challenge, Riker says, “is finding some way to take a writer who is completely unknown, and has no cultural connection to the U.S., and giving the reader a particular reason to pick that book up rather than some other book.” The anthology, he says, is a way “to present this unfamiliar work in a context that is familiar to American readers, which is this sort of ‘best of’ anthology idea,” and Hemon “becomes this editorial vision behind being able to take this marketing idea and maybe give it some literary legitimacy,” Riker laughs. Giving this year’s collection some added weight is American novelist Nicole Krauss, who in her introduction directly credits Penguin Group’s Writers from the Other Europe, edited by Philip Roth, with exposing her to “transformational” works by writers like Italo Calvino, Bohumin Hrbal, and Danilo Kiš (one of Hemon’s favorite writers, whose work has been reissued by Dalkey). “In a way, Best European Fiction is extending that project, inasmuch as the reason it was such a great project is because Philip Roth was behind it,” Riker says. “There was some kind of familiar aspect that brought people in, and then through that the series developed its reputation, through the quality of the work he was bringing in.”
Though Dalkey’s anthology is only in its third year, it has caught the positive attentions of TIME, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, PopMatters, and the U.K.’s The Guardian, the last of which called it “a precious opportunity to understand more deeply the obsessions, hopes, and fears of each nation’s literary psyche—a sort of international show-and-tell of the soul.” The 2012 anthology, set for release on November 8, includes work from 34 authors writing in languages as diverse as Galician, Catalan, Norwegian, Rhaeto-Romanic, Estonian, and Gaelic. There are even a few stories originally written in English. Even there, as with Desmond Hogan’s “Kennedy,” the terribly American tracksuit becomes a vastly different cultural signifier. Agustín Fernández Paz’s heartbreaking “This Strange Lucidity” will make you happy Fernández Paz never had a mealy-mouthed American creative-writing professor forbidding him to write from the point of view of a dog. That’s not the only animal narrator here, either: The intellectually precocious Arabian stallion who narrates Jiri Kratochvil’s “I, Loshad” expresses his admiration for the buildings of Le Corbusier and matter-of-factly reports how his first master—a translator, incidentally—got sent to the Gulag for reading the poetry of Osip Mandelstam aloud in public.
“What we wanted to do—and this is why it’s an annual thing—is to keep the channel of communication continuously open,” Hemon says. “If you have an interest in how the world operates, and how different countries live, and how people in those countries get up in the morning and go to work or live, you have to read books. That’s what literature is…It sustains this interest in the world, and it requires access to translated work. I think that’s essential. In other words, it is essential to the healthy functioning of American literature.”
Both Hemon and Riker say they didn’t set out to pull together some definitive tome. Some of the contributors are established writers, while others are publishing for the first time; some deal in the fantastic, and others are realists. The only criterion was to find good stories, especially if they were written in underrepresented languages like Lithuanian. “What it is is a snapshot of what’s happening in the world,” Riker says. “These are all writers who are writing right now. And I think that’s a very different project than a book of the greatest European stories of all time. It’s different in its impulse and also in its effect. We’ve had the experience that we signed on a bunch of books because we found them through the European fiction series. So we’ve found authors and then gone on to translate their books.”
Riker adds that American publishers and agents request copies of Best European Fiction—which will hopefully result in more books by these writers being released by other houses. Hemon says his wish is that by giving young readers everywhere something beyond the usual Colossus of American fiction, “reviewed on the front page of The New York Review of Books in all its boring middle-class detail,” that “you open that door, and you’ll have this kid reading this anthology, thinking, ‘Maybe I can do this…’”
“My hope,” Riker laughs, “is there would be 10 of those kids.”
Dalkey Archive Press has yet another St. Louis connection; it publishes the work of Stanley Elkin and William Gass. For more information on the press and the Best European Fiction series, call 217-244-5700 or go to dalkeyarchive.com.
