Sophie Lewis is managing editor of Dalkey Archive Press (UK). This week she is blogging for First Drafts from the Frankfurt Book Fair, the world’s largest book trade event.
It's my first visit to the Frankfurt Book Fair, and after the first full day my main thought is that it’s all about insiders and outsiders. Banal, perhaps, but it has been interesting to see what lengths some will go to to be one or the other, and also what a difference it makes to find yourself within the fold.
The Messe—the fair building—is a complex of enormous halls, joined by walkways and tunnels and also by a little circulating shuttle bus. There isn’t a mini-train running down the length of the hallways, but everything else I had heard is true. I had booked us into meetings almost every half hour from 9.30am through until 6. There turned out to be no chance of getting to all these on time, or even reaching some of them at all, hence one lunch meeting that ended up as all queue and no food.
At an early meeting, the J-Lit Foundation—supporting the translation of Japanese literature—offers us a selection of literary titles, on the great themes of love, death and cities. They don’t understand why it’s so difficult to find decent translators for their books. Why, they ask, are there no great schools of translation in Britain or the US where graduate students can get high-class literary translation degrees? That’s what they have in Japan. Good question. Our few translation departments are underfunded and ignored. They say that in Japan, translation is held in high regard because the culture relies on bringing other literature into Japan, for fruitful interaction. We say that in the west, we prefer to see translation as a technical business, not an academic or artistic discipline at all—and in fact we’d rather not think about it at all when it comes to reading the latest Murakami.
Later on, I leave to speak to the Dutch literature foundation and race across the road to the Hessischer Hof—the elegant hotel where I’m to meet someone from the French publishing house Editions du Seuil. As we shake hands he begins to protest that he’s not an editor, that he has little to do with the press, is actually an academic and a teacher, doesn’t even live in Paris but rather in Brussels, and is only in Frankfurt during the Book Fair by accident… He orders me a drink, starts discussing his interest in etymology and shows me the very personal afterword/essay that takes up a third of his catalogue. Entirely unorthodox—but then the choice of hotel rather than book-fair hall and stand should have warned me.
We spend an hour and a half in discussion before I realise I have to run away. Back to the catalogues and half-hour meetings that are really only 15 minutes by the time you get there and before you think of trying to get to the next one. And all this is before we get to the more free form evening of invitations and parties: getting in is OK, but getting a taxi out? A different story. I go to bed swearing to crack the taxi issue tomorrow if nothing else.
It's my first visit to the Frankfurt Book Fair, and after the first full day my main thought is that it’s all about insiders and outsiders. Banal, perhaps, but it has been interesting to see what lengths some will go to to be one or the other, and also what a difference it makes to find yourself within the fold.
The Messe—the fair building—is a complex of enormous halls, joined by walkways and tunnels and also by a little circulating shuttle bus. There isn’t a mini-train running down the length of the hallways, but everything else I had heard is true. I had booked us into meetings almost every half hour from 9.30am through until 6. There turned out to be no chance of getting to all these on time, or even reaching some of them at all, hence one lunch meeting that ended up as all queue and no food.
At an early meeting, the J-Lit Foundation—supporting the translation of Japanese literature—offers us a selection of literary titles, on the great themes of love, death and cities. They don’t understand why it’s so difficult to find decent translators for their books. Why, they ask, are there no great schools of translation in Britain or the US where graduate students can get high-class literary translation degrees? That’s what they have in Japan. Good question. Our few translation departments are underfunded and ignored. They say that in Japan, translation is held in high regard because the culture relies on bringing other literature into Japan, for fruitful interaction. We say that in the west, we prefer to see translation as a technical business, not an academic or artistic discipline at all—and in fact we’d rather not think about it at all when it comes to reading the latest Murakami.
Later on, I leave to speak to the Dutch literature foundation and race across the road to the Hessischer Hof—the elegant hotel where I’m to meet someone from the French publishing house Editions du Seuil. As we shake hands he begins to protest that he’s not an editor, that he has little to do with the press, is actually an academic and a teacher, doesn’t even live in Paris but rather in Brussels, and is only in Frankfurt during the Book Fair by accident… He orders me a drink, starts discussing his interest in etymology and shows me the very personal afterword/essay that takes up a third of his catalogue. Entirely unorthodox—but then the choice of hotel rather than book-fair hall and stand should have warned me.
We spend an hour and a half in discussion before I realise I have to run away. Back to the catalogues and half-hour meetings that are really only 15 minutes by the time you get there and before you think of trying to get to the next one. And all this is before we get to the more free form evening of invitations and parties: getting in is OK, but getting a taxi out? A different story. I go to bed swearing to crack the taxi issue tomorrow if nothing else.
