Stephen -- you're new here. I "Personal Messaged" you. (the little PM at the bottom of the screen).

Dick Morgan

Dan,

Hadn't realized that the Egyptian population was that high or the Spanish population was that low. Ah well, my bad for my "last I checked" being back in grade school, if ever. FWIW, I did look up the Egyptian literacy rates.

Of course, if I was going to look up alarming statistics, I suspect that the US government is having less stuff translated into English than the the Spanish government is having translated into Spanish, simply because so many things are published in English in the first place. That, however, is suspicion rather than statistic.

Kevin, weren't the figures you quoted the entirety of the translations by publishing concerns in the countries mentioned? In the U.S. what the government translates would be a drop in the bucket -- although I believe that this year some government agencies stopped translating information originating from the U.S. Government, into English.

Dan

They were Dick's figures and I can't recall whether they were government output or total publishing ventures for the country. In the case of the US, it makes so much 'nevermind': With the rare exception of foreign language bestsellers and other works where they are guaranteed to make a buck, US publishers do not translate anything into English. It's the responsibility of the non-English-speaking authors to arrange their own translations and then market them to the various US editors. Same thing with the UK editors, and yes, I've heard this directly from the editors themselves.

It's also unfair to compare Spanish publishing with Egyptian publishing because Spain has a very lucrative secondary market in Mexico and the rest of latin America and other former Spanish colonies (which rather annoys the Mexican publishers), and while I have not studied the state of Arabic publishing, I would suspect it's base is in Saudi Arabia with marketing to other Arabic-speaking countries.

And yes, I can speak to this because I've been in Mexico City and signed works of mine which were translated and published in Spain. No, I don't have exact publishing statistics, but the secondary market is a big one.

It also becomes more convoluted when you have countries side-by-side sharing the same language. I've written books for US publishers but the books also had Canadian prices stamped on them. But before we talk of the awful state of Canadian publishing, it should be noted that my US editor is a Canadian citizen and the books were printed by Quebecor, which is not only in Canada but in Quebec.

If an Egyptian tranlator living in Morocco translates a German book for a Saudi Arabian publishing house and the book is printed and bound in, oh, say, Hong Kong, then sold in Iran, who exactly gets bragging rights?

About the best you can do is count the number of books translated into Arabic and leave it at that.

Okay nitpicking first, Kevin (and I should really google rather than assume, but I'm tired too.) My guess is there's more publishing in Egypt because of 1) greater populations and 2) its position as one of the cultural centers of Islam, in the cosmopolitan sense. Saudi Arabia gets to keep the holy places, and I dare say a good number of Qur'ans might be printed there. Otherwise, it's Cairo, not Riyadh, that serves as a secular intellectual center in the Islamic world. I think Egypt's the more "open" society, and also the one with the larger publishing industry (although again, that bears fact-checking.)

The larger question Dick raises should not go ignored, but as you note, one cannot just count translations and "leave it at that."

The larger question he points toward, is whether Egypt and other Arab nations are playing a significant part in a cosmopolitan, international exchage of ideas, in the same way that, let's say, the "world cities" like New York, Paris and London do.

I don't think they do. I do think the West's intellectual class takes multiculturalism for granted, attaches status to works produced by another culture, and cycles through fads regarding which external source of culture is best. There are no fatwas out against the author of The Poisonwood Bible or the producer of The Last Temptation of Christ, and the only significant limit faced by the Western intellectual is the sterile existential dilemma created by the lack of norms left against which to rebel (in which predicament many predictably resort to cannibalilsm, as it were, rebelling against one another the moment one weltanschaung gains ascendency.)

The importance of Arabic works to English- and Spanish-speakers (as well as, for instance, Chinese texts, Indian texts, French texts, etc.,) has more underlying it than relative wealth. It is the hallmark of Western society that it translates first and asks questions later (which, if you think about it, is as it should be.) Western society is largely secular society under Christian banners (which we have discussed before,) whereas Muslim societies are Muslim societies under secular or religious banners. This difference is part of what the Islamists are fighting to preserve, possibly because (if we believe either the Islamist or the Western secularist worldview,) secularism is indispensible for establishment of a modern lifestyle.

The error here is to judge Muslim nations as advanced or primative, by examining the openness of their cultures. In other words, we judge them by the standards of the West, by which standards they are destined to fail.

Of course, in some cases, the less open Muslim societies are also impossibly sexist (for instance,) and rabidly anti-Semitic. The Saudi notion that all women should wear veils (like it or not,) is very different from the voluntary use of the veil, and cannot be supported on its own merits by any sane Westerner. The trick is realizing the limits of Western influence on some of these cultural features.

My POV is that the closed societies in Arab nations are "our" business in the West, when they are made our business, but otherwise not. Certainly not unless we in America want the French telling us we're barbarians for our death penalty.

Okay, my fingers are out of breath now.

Dan

Well, speaking as a relatively sane Westerner, I can argue that the Saudi idea that women should wear veils differs from the Western idea that women should wear tops only in yardage and placement. Remember the ridiculous foofarah about Janet Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction" at the Superbowl a few years ago and the obscene fines levied for the display of a single female nipple, something it should be pointed out that half the people on the planet see two of in the mirror every morning, and everyone has at some point in their life not only seen but also had in their mouth?

Certainly, I agree that the use of the veil should be voluntary but I dare you to contstruct a sane and logical argument why the veil should be voluntary but the tube top is still mandatory lest Western civilization itself crumble at the sight of evil evil nipples!

Otherwise, if the West gets to grandfather in its religiously-based tube-top laws, then you have to allow Muslim countries to do the same with their similar laws, whether it's wrapping women in veils or going for the extreme and just dropping a lace tablecloth over them.

I'll agree on the last, though I think Saudi Arabia is no slouch either. I've received highly literate emails from folk there and I know they had a Fatwa against Pokemon cards (for various reasons, the most amusing/insane of which was declaring them "Zionist"), so my thought is that there is certainly some cultural literacy going on there too. I expect they publish a lot more than just Qurans.

What about Tokyo, Milan, Rio, Capetown and Sidney? And the others? Helsinki? Kiev? Prague? Hong Kong? Beijing?

Whoops, I just skipped Madrid and Mexico City.

Anyway, if you want a cosmopolitan international exchange of ideas from a Muslim country and a "World City," look to Istanbul. I bounced around YouTube today and suddenly was watching Tarkan's latest Pepsi commercial. Tarkan? Oh, Turkish Europop star. Color me clueless before, but there you have it, cosmopolitan international exchange of ideas.

You sort of missed that whole "gay marriage" thing, didn't you? And Janet's nipple? Creationism tarted up as "Intelligent Design"?

I'm sorry, you must have wax in your ears. Publishers do not, I repeat, do not, translate anything into their languages unless they think they can sell copies of it.

Unless you're talking about having an imperial censor (or similar) vet the works to be translated first, but if the Pokemon card thing is any indicator, that's not happening in Saudi Arabia either. Pokemon ran rampant over the country before any fatwa was issued against it.

Unless we're talking Turkey or Morocco, or, until recently, Iraq.

For certain values of "indispensible" and "modern," likely so. I'd argue that rather than "secular," some variety of "tolerant non-fundamentalist" can work too.

If I were Turkish, I'd be really pissed to read the above statement.

From a Western perspective, yes, and assuming that by "impossibly" and "rabidly" you mean "extremely."

Then it comes the question of when "our business" is ended. And you're also falling into the trap of "extreme cultural relativism." If the French don't get to call us barbarians for the death penalty, then we don't get to say there's anything wrong with having a woman stoned to death for adultery, or killing someone because their race doesn't fit your personal pantone.

And anyway, we are barbarians. Our government is currently torturing people and lying about it, then when caught, trying to legalize it. And this is the government that the majority of the country wanted.

"A 2002 United Nations report on development in the Arab world cited the meagre number of translated books available there each year. But the annual figure, 330, is about the same number of translated literature titles that the United States, with its huge publishing industry, put out in 1999, the most recent year for which America’s National Endowment of the Arts has full figures. When viewed as a percentage of the total books published, the Arab world surpasses the United States. "

This is a tad stale, but Harper's Index recently gave stats on the paucity of Arabic titles being translated into English by U. S. publishers. No market here. There's plenty of good literature being written around the world for which we exhibit no curiosity.

Bob

"National Endowment for the Arts Announces 11 Literature Translation Fellowships

October 15, 2003
BANNED POST
Contact:
Victoria Hutter
202-682-5570
BANNED POST

Washington, D.C. - The National Endowment for the Arts announced today it will award 11 grants for the translation of works of prose from ten other languages into English. Grants in the translation category are for $10,000 or $20,000, depending on the artistic excellence and merit of the project, for a total of $160,000.

"Given the dwindling number of translations published in this country, it is essential that the Arts Endowment continue to support this important work," said National Endowment for the Arts Chairman Dana Gioia. "Translations provide Americans with valuable insights into other cultures and an enriched array of literary options. Without translation, there would be no Bible or Koran and most Americans would not be able to enjoy writers as essential to our culture as Homer, Dante, Dostoevsky, Proust or Neruda."

Fellowship projects will include translations from a total of ten languages including Bengali, Chinese, French, Greek, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish and Turkish. "

Not much chance in this set for The People of the Book.

Bob

Sorry for the double post. Don't know why it happens, especially after an intervening post.

Bob

[This message has been edited by Robert J. Clawson (edited September 17, 2006).]

As I understand it, publishing houses in the U.S. do not translate books "unless it makes them money," basically.

Again, I need to do some spot fact-checking; It would not surprise me that this is essentially true. What would surprise me is that the market for translations is so nonexistent, that the U.S. also lags behind Spain by a similar margin.

Kevin, your points on Turkey are correct. Post in haste, repent in leisure. It's easy to make statements about the challenge of modernization for Islamic societies, when, after all, the Turks have made the transition. I'd describe Hussein's Iraq within the description "Islamic societies under secular or nationalist banners," but it's a formulation that probably won't hold up under examination, so I'll just ditch it, in deference to the Turkish counter-example alone.

Here's (I believe) a place where you can read what Morgan quoted:
http://www.worldpress.org/Mideast/663.cfm

"The oil wealth is matched by social backwardness, and the only other region of the world with an income level lower than ours is sub-Saharan Africa. Productivity is decreasing, scientific research is virtually nonexistent, the region is suffering a brain drain, and illiteracy afflicts half of Arab women. The report was only diplo-matic concerning implicit criticisms of extremist Islamist movements as a cause of the culture of backwardness and absence of fertile ground for democ-racy. Interestingly, the report found that the total number of books translated into Arabic yearly is no more than 330, or one-fifth of those translated in a small country like Greece.

Indeed, the total number of books translated into Arabic during the 1,000 years since the age of Caliph Al-Ma’moun [a ninth-century Arab ruler who was a patron of cultural interaction between Arab, Persian, and Greek scholars—WPR] to this day is less than those translated in Spain in one year. "
http://sf.indymedia.org/news/2003/05/1607582.php says...

"About 3% of the fiction and poetry published in the United States in 1999 was translated (approximately 330 out of the total 11,570 fiction and poetry titles published). America compares unfavourably to almost every other country and most unfavourably to western Europe, the region closest to an ideological sibling.

There, Germany translates the most works - about six times as many as the US each year. Spain is close behind, while the French publishing industry exceeds the US by four times. "

Oddly, in this site, we also see that the Arab world translates about 330 titles a year, and the U.S. translates about 330 titles. We also find that Spain translates four times as many, which we must think means about 1300. However, according to the other site, more books are translated in Spain in a single year (say, 1500) than have been translated into Arabic in 1,000 years (for an average of 1.5 a year.)

The variables are these:

1) the figures are from two sites. However, both sources seem to be quoting Khalaf's UN report.
2) The figures for all translations in Arab countries are different for all translations into Arabic.

If 2 is the case, what we are seeing here is a smallish but tolerated business of, for example, translating Turkish to Persian, Persian to Turkish, Hungarian to French, etc., in Arabic-speaking nations. What is not tolerated is the tranlation of foreign works into Arabic.

As to the comparison of the tradition of enforced veiling, versus public nudity prohibition:

It is also illegal for those women who cannot show their faces in many Islamist societies, to show their nipples (if you are confused on that subject.) The female nipple's "tabooness" in the West, is due to the fact that it can signify sexual receptivity, and arouses biologically (not culturally) determined reactions. All manner of social awkwardness is thus avoided by public display of same, although of course it's silly for a whole nation to go into paroxysms of shock over a super bowl nipple display. However, the location and square footage of a piece of cloth are not arbitrarily determined here.

Hence, some Muslim women are not only forbidden to show their nipples but also forbidden to show their faces. Your position is basically that full freedom is best, so less freedom is not any worse than more freedom, if there is a utopian ideal that neither achieves.

I would argue that universal nudism (or the right thereto,) is not an unmitigated personal or social good, based on my comparative study of wearers of spandex.

However, even if you argue the inherent rightness of a universal right to nudism, the trouble is Western dress is, by comparison, a modified nudism -- which is closer to your ideal than the Islamist model.

Your flip-flop at the end is about as comical as my distance from the [Western] rationalist conclusion. To wit, you say I have to be careful about my moral relativism (uh, about that veil thing...) because people are stoned for adultery in these countries. Right-o. If we have sufficient influence to effect change in that regard, that's great.

What I am referencing here is that we need to know the difference, if we cannot achieve the goal. After all, Mr. newly found backbone, the enforced veil is a symptom of the same underlying problem, as the death-for-adultery stance.

And I doubt you'd advocate a newly Moralistic approach to these nations mideast supported by force; so what, exactly, are we to do? I think the answer is something like "speak out. raise a ruckus."

Well, the thing is, we can speak what we want, we can write what we want, but unless the goal is to assemble a mob in front of an embassy, it's never read or heard. These are closed societies.

I think we've seen what happens to happily concocted dreams of regime change. However painful it may be to watch, I think these nations must themselves come to the conclusion that modernization's benefits outweigh its pitfalls.

Give up? No. But I think it's the voices of Muslims themselves which will eventually be the difference in these nations (as they were in Turkey.)

Dan