If you walk into any Buenos Aires bookstore, you will probably see Colleen Hoover, Stephen King and Nicholas Sparks mixed with local authors and other foreign translations. If you walk into a bookstore almost anywhere in Latin America, France, Italy, or Germany, you’ll recognize dozens of familiar titles coloring the shelves. However, in US and UK bookstores you’d be lucky to find a solitary “Translated Titles” table.
Only regarding 3% of the books published each year in English are translations, according to estimates by the University of Rochester. Of that 3%, only a small part receives coverage in the main media. Even titles that pass the sniff test, are selected by a publisher, and spend months in translation can go largely unnoticed in the already oversaturated English publishing sphere.
In Edinburgh, a small Argentine publisher is opening the door to Latin American literature so that it not only reaches the English world, but also into their hands.
Charco Press focuses only on translated literature from Latin America, and wants to make titles from the region “accessible to the whole world.” The publishing house, which publishes an average of six books a year, has translated works by great Latin American authors, such as Claudia Piñero, and new voices, such as Ariana Harwicz.
Despite the challenges of publishing only translations, Charco has also achieved notable successes, with three titles nominated for the International Booker Prize and others for the annual Best Translated Book Award. Since its inception, more than six years ago, Charco’s initial print runs have gone from 1,500 to 5,000 copies per book, and some special titles, such as Elena sabe, by Claudia Piñero, have sold more than 20,000 copies.
The publisher’s directors hope to continue drawing the attention of the entire linguistic hemisphere to their authors, many of whom have become household names in Latin America.
“Translations of publications aren’t usually best sellers – that can’t happen – but I think Charco has surprised some people,” says Frances Riddle, Charco’s translator. “They just exploded.”
History. In 2016, Argentina’s Carolina Orloff and New Zealander Sam McDowell co-founded Charco Press “out of a combination of deep frustration and equally deep passion,” says Orloff.
Orloff grew up surrounded by great local writers like Adolfo Bioy Casares and Jorge Luis Borges in her great-grandfather’s bookstore in downtown Buenos Aires. So when she moved to the UK, she was struck by the “radical lack” of contemporary voices in Latin American literature on English shelves.
Orloff and McDowell decided they needed to revitalize the landscape, not only bringing contemporary Spanish and Portuguese authors closer to English speakers, but also new translators who would reflect the variety of voices and styles of the authors they represent.
That same year, Charco presented his first catalog of five books, all of them by Argentine authors. According to Orloff, it wasn’t just regarding representing his home country, but regarding making a statement regarding the diversity of books from every country south of the American border.
“From a single Latin American country, within a specific generation, you can get five extremely different novels,” each with “completely different styles, completely different points of view, different aesthetic projects, different rhythms, voices, and games.” says Riddle.
The name “Charco” is a play on the language of connection, because Charco Press is a linguistic bridge that connects countries “across the puddle” from each other.
However, bringing Latin American literature closer to English readers is not as easy as sending a translation “across the pond”, and Charco knows it. “They don’t just publish these books and then let them live their lives,” adds the translator. “They are making sure that they get as much attention as possible, that these books reach as many readers as possible.”
The import/export problem. Outside the Anglo-Saxon world, “the most normal thing is to read translated books,” says Fionn Petch, editor of Charco Press.
In Argentina, around 30% of published books are translations, a dramatic difference compared to 3% in English-speaking countries.
In part, this is due to a stingy market as big publishers stick with what sells. Most of the big Anglo-Saxon publishers don’t put money or resources into translations because “they’re not easy to sell,” Petch explains. Publishers sometimes attribute this to the difficulty of sending foreign authors on tour. Whatever the reason, the “Big Five” rarely give translations the green light.
But the lack of translated titles can also be attributed to a dominant culture syndrome, Petch explains to PROFILE. While in other countries most foreign titles are translated from English, Anglophone readers simply don’t want to read a foreign title.
“Satisfaction, a lack of curiosity, and the idea that foreign literature is more difficult or more serious” make it difficult to market translations to anglophone audiences, Petch argues. “There’s a feeling that ‘we don’t need it because we already publish so many different things in English,’” she explained.
The great Latin American novel. With few Latin American titles making it through the fierce selection process for translation, a very limited genre of “Latin American stories” has emerged in the English-language book world.
“In the English-speaking world, there’s this idea that it’s either magical realism or living under a dictatorship,” Petch stresses. The “boom novels,” with titles like One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Times of Cholera, from the Latin American literary movement of the 1960s and 1970s, were widely translated and broke into the elusive English market, he recalls. When the translation market contracted once more, these novels remained and became the anchor for what English-speakers know as Latin American titles.
There is a huge gap between what modern Latin American fiction is and what the Anglo-Saxon public thinks it is, explains Petch. In fact, by miscategorizing “Latin American literature” as a genre, English-speaking audiences neglect the diversity of stories across the southern hemisphere.
Since his first round of translations in 2016, Charco has set out to diversify the stories on English shelves. Last year, they published an English translation of Cristina Bendek’s acclaimed novel Cristales de sal, which tells the story of the Caribbean island of San Andrés, close to Nicaragua but claimed by Colombia.
Through the journey that the protagonist Verónica takes to understand her own upbringing, the book uncovers the island’s confusing Spanish, Puritan, African and Arab history. He reflects on the interrelated themes of colonialism, climate change, and intergenerational trauma, and their collective impact on the small island.
But the size and geographic isolation of San Andres don’t make this story any less relevant to readers around the world, Bendek said. “We are like a fractal,” he explains. “We are a part of the world where all problems are reproduced.”
In fact, the author assures that this book is especially aimed at foreign readers who still do not understand the context of the decolonization projects on the island. Read in Latin America, she thinks, “many people would say, okay, I understand this reality, we can all see what is happening.” But chances are, English-speaking audiences can’t see what’s going on: they may not even have heard of Saint Andrew before reading Crystals of Salt.
Getting this novel into the hands of foreign readers was always Bendek’s goal, so when Charco reached out with the offer to translate the title into English, he says it’s “a dream come true.”
He believes that at a time when the former colonial powers are beginning to recognize the ugly sides of their colonial past, this story is more important than ever to English readers, Bendek said.
“We are in a time where we are looking back: we reviewed and revisited many of the narratives that we believed were crucial to building the frameworks in which we operate as a society. This is precisely a novel regarding looking at all of that in a very personal and intimate way, and trying to find ways to take responsibility.”
The history and present of San Andrés, like the stories of cities, towns and neighborhoods throughout Latin America, might never have reached the Anglo-Saxon world without Charco.
As the publisher continues to put out new translations, it hopes to fight the stagnation of stories like this one, meant to be read around the world, and challenge the narrow genre that Anglophone audiences attach to Latin American literature, Orloff says. And there is still much to do.
“Latin America is a vast literary country,” he said. “This is just the beginning of what we’re trying to do.”
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