Books by Patrick Modiano on display in Paris on October 9, 2014.Photograph by Etienne Laurent/Anadolu/GettyAs soon as the Nobel Prize in Literature was announced on Thursday, people started asking the inevitable question: Who is Patrick Modiano? For an answer, read Alexandra Schwartz’s piece
and work. Here, let’s raise another question: Why is it that, so often, when a Nobel Prize is awarded to a non-American writer, readers in the U.S.—even the most well-read and cosmopolitan among us—find themselves drawing a blank?There are several ways to answer this question, but the most cited one is that so few translated books come out in the U.S. Last year, traditional publishers put out about sixty thousand print titles in fiction, poetry, only five hundred and twenty-four of those were translated books of fiction or poetry, according to the Three Percent Web site, run by the University of Rochester. Three Percent has painstakingly
since 2008 and, for each year since, has broken down its database into categories like country of origin (Europe tends to win—France, Germany, Italy, Spain) and publication date (spring and fall are the most popular).The most interesting breakdown is of the publishers who print these books. Last year, the small press Dalkey Archive topped the list, which was dominated by small publishers, including Europa Editions, Seagull Books, Archipelago, and Open Letter (though an Amazon imprint called AmazonCrossing came in second). Larger publishers like Farrar, Straus and Giroux and Knopf showed up further down the list.This matters because, in publishing, there’s often a relationship between the promotion budget and the awareness of that book’s author. In 2009, the French writer Marie NDiaye won the prestigious Prix Goncourt for a novel called “Trois Femmes Puissantes.” The book attracted the attention of the U.S. publisher Knopf, which, in 2012, published it in English in the U.S. I remember reading a
of the English version, “Three Strong Women,” in the Times (“the poised creation of a novelist unafraid to explore the extremes of human suffering”) and picking it up. The book was stunningly original and unflinching. I found myself eagerly anticipating the next book to be translated.On Thursday, I spoke with Chad Post, the publisher of Open Letter, who informed me that, since then, another one of Ndiaye’s books had been published in English, last year, and a third was due in a month—both from a smaller press, Two Lines. I’d heard nothing of these books—no Times reviews, no advertisements in the magazines I read. “Three Strong Women” has eight hundred and eighty-one reviews on G “All my Friends,” the novel that came out last year, has thirty-six.“We don’t have the resources to fund a huge marketing campaign—especially if the author doesn’t speak English really well,” Post explained. “Even if they do, it costs a fortune to tour them, and it usually doesn’t get you much sales anyway. There are, like, five people in the audience, and it’s an eight-hundred-dollar plane ticket.”The inability to spend much on marketing has partly to do with the scale of these operations. Small-press publishers tell me that they typically pay advances of under five thousand dollars for foreign-language books that th books often sell fewer than five thousand copies. These presses are often nonprofits or are part of universities that help fund them, which means they can seek g they don’t need to rely solely on book sales.By contrast, for English titles at large publishing houses, advances—and book sales—often reach five, six, and even seven figures. Large publishers, which have greater overhead and are often part of publicly traded companies with profit-motivated investors, often are reluctant to invest in a small book that is unlikely to become a big, or even moderate, hit. (Of course there’s an inherent chicken-and-egg problem in the debate over why large U.S. publishers don’t invest more in foreign titles: they can’t do it because not enough people buy translated books, but one reason not enough people buy translated books is that they tend not to be promoted as heavily.)There are exceptions, of course. Knopf decided to publish Stieg Larsson, the Swedish crime writer, after he had died, because an editor “recognized that these books had a richness and texture and narrative drive that would prove irresistible,” Paul Bogaards, an executive vice-president at Knopf, told me. Knopf also publishes translations of , Javier Marías, and others. Still, Bogaards said, half-jokingly, he has to ask himself, when considering whether it makes sense to publish a book in translation: “Do they speak English? How would they look in a glossy magazine? And might they be awarded a Nobel someday?”Modiano, a sixty-nine-year-old French writer who has been publishing since 1968 and is well-known in France, has had several books published in the U.S.—including one by Knopf, in the seventies—but has never quite caught on here. David R. Godine, a well-regarded small press in Boston, has published three of Modiano’s books, including “Missing Person,” perhaps his best known, whose French version, “Rue des Boutiques Obscures,” won the Prix Goncourt, in 1978.I spoke Thursday afternoon with David Godine, who founded and runs
he was at Godine’s warehouse, helping to pack books to be shipped to independent bookstores that had ordered them. “It’s sadly ironic that twenty-five years after the fact”—after first publishing Modiano—“here we are with books still sitting on the shelves,” he told me. Godine paid Modiano’s French publisher advances of under five thousand dollars for each of the three books—the others are “Honeymoon” and “Catherine Certitude”—and, before the Nobel announcement, each had sold a couple thousand copies. (“Missing Person,” for example, sold around two thousand copies.) Godine had sought what publicity he could, but, he told me, it’s getting increasingly difficult to persuade mainstream publications to review books that have been translated.Godine had stopped printing the Modiano books but still had a hundred and sixty-four copies of “Missing Person” sitting around, along with four hundred and sixty-nine copies of “Honeymoon” and three hundred and seventy of “Catherine Certitude.” “We probably had a three-hundred-year-supply of Modiano without the Nobel Prize,” he said. “There is just not demand in this country.” Now, the firm is scrambling to print thousands of additional copies, which it expects will take up to a couple of weeks.Godine was thrilled about the award, which another one of his authors, Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, also won, in 2008: “I can tell you from experience that the best way to get attention for your writers is to have them win the Nobel Prize.” But judging from his experience with Le Clézio’s books, the inevitable rush of sales—Godine expects to sell six or seven thousand of each—will eventually slow. “My takeaway thought to this is that it’s really sad that the only way that these people get any attention is when they win the Nobel Prize—and then, five years from now, no one’s going to remember it, no one’s going to remember that Modiano won it,” he said.The Nobel laureate has returned again and again to the same themes: the pull of the past and the blurring of moral boundaries.By CurrencyBy CurrencyBy CurrencyBy百度题库旨在为考生提供高效的智能备考服务，全面覆盖中小学财会类、建筑工程、职业资格、医卫类、计算机类等领域。拥有优质丰富的学习资料和备考全阶段的高效服务，助您不断前行！
京ICP证号&&
京网文[3号&&
Copyright (C) 2017 Baidu您要找的是不是:
什么也不做，无所事事
热模锻；模锻法
do foreign
你们外国也有微博吗
我做手机外贸
国外怎样批发
你可以做外贸了
还在国外吗
你有很多外国朋友吗
你们外国也有微博吗
涉外会计怎么翻译
更多收起网络短语
What kind of role do foreign student advisers play?
外国学生顾问有什么作用呢？
I have enough confidence in myself! I'm learning English and learning how to do foreign food.
我对我自己充满信心！ 我正在学习英语和学做外国的食品。
Just as State warns Americans about dangerous places to travel, so too do foreign ministries in other countries — and some countries warn their citizens to avoid heading to certain cities in the US.
正当美国在警告国人不要去危险地方旅游的同时，其他国家的外交部也在采取一样的措施。 有些国家警告国民避免去美国特定的一些城市。
But he also says many visas are delayed because foreign students do not bring all their paperwork when requesting their travel documents.
VOA: special.
A moral maturity as it comes to economic systems, as it comes to how we treat our most vulnerable, how we do foreign policy, what are some of the pathways as you see in front of us as we do moral maturity as we grow up?
经济体质的道德成熟，对待弱者的道德成熟，怎样制定外交政策，在我们逐渐成长的过程中,你认为我们有什么途径能够达到道德成熟吗？
The Fulbright Foreign Student Program helps graduate students and young professionals do research and study in the United States for a year or longer.
VOA: special.
Yet China's private firms face even more structural impediments to their businesses than do foreign ones.
Mr. Berger: This is not — again, I do foreign policy.
But then everybody knows that not cultivating Mr Helms, whose latest fit of pique is holding up the confirmation of America's ambassador to Mexico, would do foreign policy no good.
$firstVoiceSent
- 来自原声例句
请问您想要如何调整此模块？
感谢您的反馈，我们会尽快进行适当修改！
请问您想要如何调整此模块？
感谢您的反馈，我们会尽快进行适当修改！星火英语听说集中赢高瞻远瞩放眼全球
每天学英语
想进步，请坚持参与每天学英语活动！
每天一词：
最新社区精华帖子
<span style="color:#FF
走遍美国教学版
哈利学前班[英语儿歌]
海绵宝宝 英文版
风中的女王第1季
经典学习方法
听力资料目录导航
　　　　　　　　
　　　　　　
免责声明：本站只提供资源播放平台，如果站内部分资源侵犯您的权益，请您告知，我们会立即处理。
Copyright &
大耳朵英语 & |}