Is There Too Much Translation?

Writing over at Brooklyn Quarterly, Will Evans discusses why he founded a publishing house dedicated to translation:

In addition to being a philosophical problem, literary translation is also a contentious business matter. There are thousands of good to all-time-great books published in the world every year in every language imaginable, but only a couple hundred of those ever get published in English, and that’s in a good year.

Book translations provide a fast way for small presses to build a back catalogue. But does the world need more presses dedicated to translation, or better recognition of existing translated texts? MobyLives (the blog of Melville House, a small publisher with a large catalogue of translated works) considers the question.

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Ian MacAllen is the author of Red Sauce: How Italian Food Became American (Rowman & Littlefield, April 2022). His writing has appeared in Chicago Review of Books, Southern Review of Books, The Offing, 45th Parallel Magazine, Little Fiction, Vol 1. Brooklyn, and elsewhere. Find him at IanMacAllen.com.

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