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.
