The fair is a giant catalyst. People make decisions that would normally take months, make announcements that change the world they work in. Harri Moritz, who has spent three years as one of only two people at the Estonian literature centre, gently bringing Estonian books to the attention of the rest of the world, was nearly crying as he spoke about his decision to leave literature for advertising. Everyone loves to hate the Frankfurt fair, but he confessed he would miss it. At the Flemish literature foundation, the Flemish rep and my colleague Martin were so over-tired that they both nodded off for a few seconds while talking to each other – just a momentary adrenaline low before each woke up and carried on in animated discussion.
So how do people cope with this level of intense activity and emotion? One strategy I learnt is to take a "Frankfurt lover." You hook up with someone, preferably of another nationality, whom you never see at home, has nothing to do with your home life and whom you abandon without a qualm at the end of the fair. It’s only a variant on the age-old way of the sailor. My friend told me that she jokingly mentioned this strategy over coffee with a girlfriend – upon which her friend blushed and admitted “it does make everything bearable… and we can meet up at other book fairs too.”
The big announcement of the day in my world was Alexandra Buchler’s delivery of her long-awaited report “Making Literature Travel: support for international literary exchange and translation in Europe.” She has been gathering comprehensive information on the provision of support for translation and publication of European books since 1990. Her conclusions, while not unexpected, are among the first to use hard facts to underline fears about the current situation. While the number of literary books translated from Estonian into other languages is rising steadily (for example), they’re almost never translated into English. Worse, while she has been able one way or another to gather data for all other European countries, the most we can say about publishing in the UK is that in 1999 1.8% of publications were translated literary fiction. The figure is shockingly low (compared for example to the 60-70% found in many other European countries including Germany and France), but more damning still is that have no accurate data more recent than that. No-one is recording data on translation across the UK publishing industry, and what little information there is in the public domain remains accessible only to those who can pay through the nose. Alexandra’s work will become an important tool in the fight to recognise the importance of non-anglophone literature to arrogant English-speakers. The report will be posted on Monday at www.lit-across-frontiers.org and you can send your responses to report@lit-across-frontiers.org.
