Gender, Genre and Nation: Nineteenth-century Swedish Women Writers on Export

The chapter centres on a comparative study of the international reception of two Swedish women writers, the Romantic poet, Julia Nyberg, and the best-selling novelist, Emilie Flygare-Carlén, using their examples to highlight the different opportunities for disrupting the balance between small and major, and presenting gender, genre and nationality as key factors in the process of attaining an international readership for not only Swedish, but also writers from other small nations. The chapter concludes by arguing that both writers had the potential to enter the international literary mainstream, but through reception and promotion were progressively removed from the centre into an increasingly gendered context, the ladies’ room in the peripheral history of Swedish literature.

The Global Presentation of Small National Literatures: South Slavs in Literary History and Theory

This chapter uses the particularly prominent and sensitive South Slav context to compare how representatives of dominant and subordinate literary cultures attempt to characterize and narrate the history of smaller national literatures. It begins from a notion of exchange whereby dominant literary nations are traditionally perceived to export stylistic features for emulation by writers in subordinate literatures and systems of periodization and classification for adoption by those literatures’ historians. In return, these subordinate literatures gain a channel of communication through which some degree of recognition or cultural legitimacy may be bestowed. The chapter addresses recent efforts by the academic community of dominant cultural systems to move beyond national models of literary history, focusing on accounts by pre-eminent scholars Linda Hutcheon, Stephen Greenblatt, Pascale Casanova and David Damrosch that use South Slav examples to make their case. These accounts are set against the earlier endeavours of Serbian literary historians – Jovan Skerlić, Pavle Popović and Svetozar Petrović – who engage with similar questions in their complex local context. The chapter argues that this attempt to eradicate a political agenda identified in the national approach to literary history in fact reinforces the hegemony of the dominant over the subordinate.

Supply-driven Translation: Compensating for Lack of Demand

This chapter challenges the dominant notion in descriptive translation studies that literary translation is effectively driven by demand from the target culture. Gideon Toury argues that a target culture translates to fill gaps exposed by a source culture which the target culture views as prestigious. While this notion may work historically for the purposes of comparative literature, literary historians and translation theory, and in the context of high-brow literature, this chapter considers it unsuited to other genres, less widely translated literatures or the contemporary book industry. Using mainly Scandinavian and Czech examples, and others found in this volume, the chapter elucidates the notion of supply-driven translation from smaller European literatures, aimed at fighting the norm of non-translation. The chapter concludes by providing a typology of supply-driven interventions, with some commentary on their apparent advantages and drawbacks that sheds light on the roles, motivations and contributions of different intermediaries in the translation process.

Literary Translation and Digital Culture: The Transmedial Breakthrough of Poland’s The Witcher

This chapter explores the international transmedial phenomenon, The Witcher, which began life as a 1986 Polish short story, ‘Wiedźmin’ (The Witcher) by Andrzej Sapowski, but has become a paradigm of the intercultural communication facilitated by the digital age, including not only translated fiction, but also fan fiction and fan translations, a videogame trilogy and a film. The chapter highlights the new opportunities that digital cultures offer translated literatures, regardless of national origin, and the challenges they present to existing translation studies theory, dominated by the circulation of high literature in book form. It also notes, however, how even internationally co-owned genre franchises, old considerations of national cultural diplomacy, narrative and identity remain.

Strategies for Success? Evaluating the Rise of Catalan Literature

This chapter uses an account of the twenty-first century efforts of Catalan literature to break into English-language book markets as a means of examining the opportunities, challenges and strategies that present themselves to smaller literatures in a changing reading and book-buying environment. The chapter first explains the historical significance to Catalan culture of translation, as a means not only of filling gaps in a disrupted history, but also of building and unifying Catalan cultural identity. It highlights the institutional measures put in place to support this effort and assesses the work of the Institut Ramon Llull. Though its initiatives appear to have increased production and visibility of Catalan literature, the chapter argues that the key role has been played by translators acting as gatekeepers. The chapter concludes with an assessment of the relationship between commercial success and major international prizes or choice of genre, noting that Catalan literature has not targeted either.

Exporting the Canon: The Mixed Experience of the Dutch Bibliotheca Neerlandica

This chapter presents an archive-based case study of the Bibliotheca Neerlandica, a project launched in 1955 by the newly established Foundation for the Promotion of the Translation of Dutch Literary Works, which aimed to publish commercial English translations of seventeen volumes of Dutch literature, but ended abruptly in 1969 with the publication of the tenth. Through analysis of the underlying aims, the prevailing culture of literary translation, the choices of text and the notion of a ‘Dutch canon’, the structure and management of the commissioning body and the relationship with the publisher, Heinemann, the chapter provides a nuanced cautionary tale about the use of imaginative literature for cultural diplomacy. The chapter documents the breakdown of the project’s relationship with Heinemann, prompted not only by the publisher’s major commercial difficulties in the period, but also by the quality of the translations, which regularly needed review, revision and correction, and the unsuitability of the texts chosen. It highlights the negative reception of those volumes that were reviewed, which found in the texts precisely the claustrophobic provincialism that the series had been conceived to overcome.

Introduction

The introduction presents the volume as the first detailed comparative, interdisciplinary analysis of the strategies, motivations, opportunities and obstacles underlying the international circulation of smaller European literatures, defined as those written in internationally less widely spoken languages or from less familiar literary traditions, which depend on translation to reach a wider audience. It contextualizes the historical and theoretical perception of these literatures as a distinct group, and suggests that the volume offers a much more precise understanding of what unites them and distinguishes them from ‘big’ and post-colonial literatures, both of which they at times appear to imitate, while also demonstrating how perceived peripheries negotiate the inequalities of increasing globalization. The introduction argues that the volume’s comparative analytical approach, combining literary, historiographical and translation methodologies and detailed knowledge of different national contexts, serves our understanding of the international circulation of these literatures better than either traditional nation-centred or prevailing world literary approaches.

When Small is Big and Big is Small

The leading Danish comparative literature scholar, Svend Erik Larsen, responds to the findings of the volume. Writing from the perspective of a smaller European literature, but with a wealth of experience and knowledge of world literature scholarship, his conclusion assesses how the volume confirms, challenges or changes prevailing theoretical views of the type of national literatures under discussion and highlights where the need for further research and theoretical conceptualization is most pressing.

Does Size Matter? Questioning Methods for the Study of ‘Small’

This chapter examines the theoretical frameworks within which we discuss the literatures of ‘small’ nations, arguing that there is a need for alternative modes of analysis that move away from a ‘one-size-fits-all’ model of the communications network and allow for a fuller revelation of the complexities of the processes by which translations do – or indeed do not – come to be published. The theoretical approach is based in sociological and cultural studies approaches to questions of gender, colonialism and power, querying how decolonial thinking may inform our understanding of the relationships between the de facto ‘centre’ of the English-speaking literary marketplace and enable us to hear the alternative voices and alternative ways of reading that are present in the so-called margins of Europe. The chapter presents as case studies a number of Portuguese texts, which are used to demonstrate the multiplicity of narratives present under the visible surface of the network: canonical male authors (José Saramago, Jorge de Sena, Luís de Sttau Monteiro) are placed alongside anti-canonical female authors such as the ‘Three Marias’ to reveal the gendered and colonialist dynamics of power and discrimination inherent in the publishing and translation industries, and in the theoretical frameworks available to scholars.

Translating as Re-telling: On the English Proliferation of C.P. Cavafy

This chapter focuses on a rare success story among the poetries of small European nations: the transition of the Greek C.P. Cavafy (1863-1933) from national to global poet. The chapter shows how the poet’s status and image abroad is effectively defined by a synergy of actual translation and retranslation and diverse forms of imitation, which over the course of decades, and in a context of intense dialogue between literary systems, has changed Greek critical attitudes towards the poet and fostered international interest in Greek poetry. Centrally, Cavafy experiences fresh ‘translation’ in the poetry of others. In various examples where a poet’s encounter with Cavafy is dramatized in verse, the lines are blurred between appropriation, elective affinity and near-fictionalization. Anthologies of poetry inspired by Cavafy translated into Greek have changed his status in Greek literature and enhanced his myth. In turn, projects like 12 Greek Poems after Cavafy show how a poet’s presence within world literature creates interest in the inner workings of his or her national literature.