Dour talk about the trade deficit never addresses the grossly unequal patterns of cultural exchange between the United States and other countries. If the hand-wringers looked closely at the culture industries, they’d find an enormous trade imbalance that tilts the other way. Seventy-five per cent of the films shown worldwide are made in Hollywood, while the number of foreign films available in the US remains negligible. Every year translated books range between 10 and 25 per cent of total output in most European countries, while in American publishing the figure hovers around 2 per cent. In 2004 this meant roughly 4,000 translations out of 195,000 books, including some 800 works of foreign fiction. The numbers may seem high, but don’t be misled. In competing for advertising, reviews and shelf space, foreign books always lose out, ultimately sinking like stones in the immensity of print.
These patterns have not changed much since the 1950s; they have just grown more profitable. The latest Harry Potter movie or an Oscar winner such as Million Dollar Baby draws larger audiences abroad than native films do. In Spain it is easier to see a Hollywood product than Pedro Almodóvar’s latest experiment. Foreign publishers similiarly devote a substantial part of their lists to American books – critically acclaimed works as well as the bestsellers. In France, 70 per cent of the foreign books acquired by publishers are English-language originals. Danielle Steel’s romances and Patricia Cornwell’s police procedurals, to take two examples, routinely sell 200,000 copies in French versions. American publishers reap huge profits from the sale of their books overseas, but they invest appallingly little in the translation of foreign books. The charge of cultural imperialism does not seem all that exaggerated. Some observers might go further: the patterns established over the past fifty years have apparently created American readers with provincial tastes, unable to appreciate work from foreign cultures and beset by feelings of inadequacy when confronted with it. Hence readers turn suspicious, if not downright xenophobic, and retreat into the comfort of the familiar.
The implications are potentially far-reaching and deeply troubling. A decline in the importation of foreign culture has coincided with the rise of the US as the most powerful nation in the world, and the supremacy of a foreign policy that justifies decisive intervention into other countries’ affairs, whether economic, political, or military. Has the will to achieve global dominance been nurtured by the exclusion of foreign cultures at home? Would greater openness to cultural differences have led to a more circumspect policy in dealing with foreign governments? And with so much American culture going abroad, we might well wonder about what happens when it gets there. How American does a film or novel remain when it crosses borders? When foreign publishers buy the rights to American books, they are extremely selective. They choose books that appeal to foreign readers, and foreign tastes rarely coincide with American ones, resulting in a skewed image of American writing. The books themsleves never arrive intact because they must be translated. Instead of simply communicating, a translation always interprets, reflects the receiving situation, bends American books to a foreign likeness. Viewed in the mirror of translation, American culture inevitably looks strange.
Take Woody Allen’s film Annie Hall, which like most American movies shown in Spain is dubbed in Spanish. Alvie Singer, Allen’s alter ego, comically reveals his paranoia when he talks about having lunch with “some guys from NBC”. He asks them, “Did you eat yet or what?” and when one answers, “No, didchoo?” Alvie feels under attack. “Not did you eat”, he later tells his friend, “but jew eat? Jew. You get it? Jew eat?” In Spanish, however, the answer is “Sí, judías”, which can mean either “Jewish women” or “green beans”. The joke in Spanish is brilliant, but it isn’t Allen’s. Alvie comes over as less paranoid: the Spanish contains a pun that actually refers to Jews, whereas in the English the anti-Semitic taunt is a mere figment of his imagination.
Contemporary American fiction definitely looks different abroad, if we judge from the translations currently in print. In European countries, the most translated writers include Charles Bukowski, who wrote tales about hard drinking, sex, and life on the skids. The Beat Generation follows close behind. The Italian breakdown is typical: Bukowski has had more than thirty titles published in Italy, Jack Kerouac more than twenty-five, William Burroughs more than fifteen. Noir is also frequently translated: more than fifteen of James Ellroy’s books are available in Italian. American novelists we might consider more representative of our literature are also translated, but far less: Joyce Carol Oates, Philip Roth and Anne Tyler each have some ten titles in Italian, Don DeLillo even fewer.
Italian publishers of course make their selections for commercial as well as literary reasons. But their choices often highlight the bohemian, the nonconformist, the counter-cultural, fashioning a peculiar image of American writing. For many Italian readers, it would seem, the United States is still the frontier of the civilized world, the land where the rugged individual lives according to his own values and novelists write straight from their experience. This is clear in a review Carlo Lucarelli wrote of Edward Bunker’s prison novel, No Beast So Fierce, recently translated into Italian. Lucarelli admires Bunker’s “incredibly objective and abrupt style, ruthless and very hard – dialogue, action, commentary, one after the other, with no room for anything that isn’t essential, least of all rhetoric. It’s the speech of someone who’s been in jail”.
To an American reader, Lucarelli’s remarks might seem a bit naive: the hard-boiled tradition of American fiction, extending from Dashiell Hammett to Jim Thompson to Andrew Vachss, is very much a rhetoric, a stylization that is immediately recognizable as such. Lucarelli’s taste in American fiction has been formed not so much by that fiction itself as by the canon of translated novels created by Italian publishers. And those translations apply their own intensifying rhetoric: when Bunker’s jailbird observes that “the races had become totally polarized during recent years”, the Italian version gives “le razze si erano violentemente divise all’interno della prigione” (the races were violently divided inside the prison).
Foreign readers do sometimes challenge the global sway of American culture. The plot of Tom Clancy and Steve Pieczenik’s novel Op-Center: Balance of power (1998) hinges on the possibility of another Spanish civil war in which Catalan and Basque insurgents join to overthrow the central government in Madrid. Yet it is filled with misrepresentations of Spanish history and culture; not only factual errors, but exaggerations, disparagements, negative stereotypes. Dr Albert Bosch, Professor of Microbiology at the University of Barcelona, posted a review on Barnes&Noble.com in which he complained that “Catalonian people are depicted in the book as greedy, racist, and assassins”. The Spanish version took another path. The translator, Victor Pozanco, inserted corrections and toned down inflammatory remarks. Where an American operative blurted, “Madrid is not the underbelly of Mexico City”, the Spanish version avoided any pejorative connotation by substituting “Madrid no es el Tercer Mundo” (Madrid is not the Third World). Where Spain is called “a nation on the verge of disaster”, Pozanco used the more accurate phrase, “un país dado a los conflictos internos” (a country given to internal conflicts). The translator of seven novels by Clancy, as well as approximately 100 English-language books by (among others) Charles Dickens, Rider Haggard, Nadine Gordimer and Margaret Atwood, Pozanco explained his aim as “preserving the adventure, because to treat the book otherwise would have destroyed the good image I created for Clancy in my other translations. I just see him as a very conservative man, defending democracy in the American way and, above all, fighting terrorism”. Although newspapers such as El País criticized Pozanco’s changes as well as the novel, the translation still strengthened Clancy’s popularity in Spain.
Other translators have adopted bolder tactics, whether to celebrate or to interrogate American society and politics. The Rough Guide to New York City mentions the pleasures of “the 4am half-life Downtown, or just wasting the morning on the Staten Island ferry”, but the Italian version resorts to melodramatic romance, referring to “il Greenwich Village, dove la vita ferve ancora alle 4 del mattino, e il traghetto di Staten Island in un mattino luminoso” (Greenwich Village, where life still rages at 4am, and the Staten Island ferry on a luminous morning). But where the English text acknowledges the significant drop in the crime rate, the Italian version adds some cynical satire, noting that Manhattan authorities have succumbed to “avventate manifestazioni di autocongratulazioni e pacche sulle spalle” (rash manifestations of self-congratulation and back-slapping). The translation at once exaggerates the Rough Guide’s mythologizing portrait of the city and punctures the sanitized image produced for tourist consumption by the municipal government.
American political discourse is treated with a more subversive edge. The Spanish version of Richard Falk’s book Predatory Globalization renders the phrase “rogue states” as “estados díscolos”, which means “disobedient” and is often applied to unruly children. The translators Herminia Bevia and Antonio Resines point out that because Spanish has no exact equivalent for “rogue”, they chose a word that “took the propaganda iron out of the expression in a situation where judge, jury, and executioner are one and the same”. Thus “díscolos” removes the stigma of criminality that “rogue” attaches to certain states in US foreign policy. Yet it also implies that the so-called rogues may be guilty merely of disobeying the orders of hegemonic nations like the United States. To use the word in translating an incisive critique such as Falk’s is a way of reinforcing the rising tide of Spanish opposition, not only to the Bush administration, but to former President José Maria Aznar’s unflinching support for the US invasion of Iraq.
In James Joyce’s Ulysses, Irish art is termed the “cracked looking glass of a servant”. The phrase refers to Ireland’s centuries-long subordination to England, which involved various forms of exploitation and repression, but also gave impetus to artistic movements that opposed British domination. I take Joyce’s resonant words as a metaphor for translation at the present moment, when English is the most translated language worldwide, but not much translated into, when American culture dominates the international marketplace, but is so inhospitable to foreign films and books. In the cracked looking glass of translation, we see reflected a different image of the US, one that we might not have expected, that we might even have difficulty recognizing, but that can be useful in questioning who we have become.
