How Argentina’s year at the Frankfurt Book Fair boosted literary translation
Sales of translation rights for German books were sliding. Translators working from Spanish, meanwhile, could barely keep up with the work landing on their desks. The reason was a single line on a trade fair programme: Argentina had been named guest of honour at the Frankfurt Book Fair.
Guest of honour is not a ceremonial title. For twelve months the chosen country gets the loudest platform in world publishing, and its writers get the one thing most of them will never buy: the attention of foreign editors who are actually holding a chequebook. Around 7,000 exhibitors and a quarter of a million visitors pass through the halls. Rights get bought there. Careers begin there.
The row over who represents a country
Argentina almost squandered it. When the government revealed which cultural icons it planned to put on the posters, the list included Eva Peron and the footballer Diego Maradona. It did not include Jorge Luis Borges. It did not include Julio Cortazar. For a country being invited to a book fair, this was an odd choice, and Argentine writers and publishers said so loudly.
"In the beginning it was not clear what the government's plan was," recalled Guillermo Martinez, the only Argentine author besides Borges to have had a short story published in The New Yorker. "I was critical at that time because I thought they were missing one of the points of the fair."
The criticism landed. Rather than dig in, the government moved, and it moved in a direction that turned a public relations problem into the most consequential piece of cultural policy Argentina had produced in years.
What SUR actually did
In February 2009 the government announced SUR, a subsidy fund aimed not at Argentine writers but at foreign publishers. The logic is simple once you see it. A publisher in Warsaw or Seoul does not decline an Argentine novel because it is bad. It declines because the translation will cost several thousand euros before a single copy sells, and the risk sits entirely with the publisher. Remove that cost and the calculation changes.
SUR paid the translator. The target was 100 grants. Within months the number had tripled. Within 14 months, 300 books had been subsidised into other languages. Convinced by then of the political weight of cultural representation abroad, the government announced that SUR would keep funding literary translation long after the Frankfurt spotlight had swung to the next guest country.
Why translation subsidies work
The Argentine scheme was not invented from nothing. It copied a model that smaller literary cultures had been quietly running for decades. The Netherlands, Norway, Catalonia, Finland and Ireland all operate variants: a state or semi-state body reimburses part or all of a foreign publisher's translation cost, usually against an invoice and a signed contract.
The economics are brutal without one. Translating a 300-page novel is three to six months of skilled work. Even at modest per-word rates, the bill runs into thousands. For a mid-list literary title with a print run of 2,000 copies, that expense can be the whole margin. Publishers respond rationally: they translate from the languages that sell reliably, which for the anglophone market means very little gets translated at all. English-language publishers are famous for the figure, roughly three per cent of books published, that gets attributed to translated work.
- The grant is paid to the publisher, not the author, so it lowers the actual barrier
- It is usually contingent on a real contract, which filters out vanity projects
- It builds a back catalogue, so the next Argentine novel arrives in a market that already has readers
- It creates work for translators into languages that would otherwise never be commissioned
The long tail of a trade fair
Argentina's numbers looked good on the fair's closing day. They looked better five years later. Once a country's writers exist in German, French, Polish and Korean, foreign editors start reading them for pleasure, and pleasure is how the next acquisition happens. The books also start winning prizes, and prizes generate reviews, and reviews generate the next round of rights sales without anybody paying for them.
That is the argument for treating a guest of honour slot as an industrial policy rather than a party. The fair itself lasts five days. The translations last as long as the copyright.
The lesson other countries took
Guest countries since have arrived with their subsidy schemes already funded, their translator databases already built and their sample chapters already commissioned in three languages. The ones that turn up with a pavilion and a folk band get a pleasant week and very few contracts.
Argentina's flirtation with putting Maradona on the poster now reads as a useful mistake. The row forced a public argument about what a country is exporting when it exports its books, and the answer, in the end, was Borges and Cortazar, plus a fund that paid strangers in other countries to carry them across.
The Frankfurt Book Fair remains the place where the world's publishing rights change hands, and the fair's own organisers now build guest-of-honour programmes around exactly this kind of funding. For readers, the outcome is more prosaic and more valuable: a shelf of Argentine novels in a language that had none, and translators who got paid to make them. Reading communities such as r/books spend a good deal of time arguing about which translation of Borges is the right one, which is itself a sign the policy worked.