Moscow’s library of foreign literature plans to set up an institute of translation
Russia has a literature the whole world claims to admire and a translation pipeline that has been thinning for thirty years. Moscow's Library of Foreign Literature proposed to do something about the second problem: build an institute whose entire job is to get Russian books into other languages properly.
Yekaterina Genieva, the library's long-serving director, set out the plan without much ceremony. "The Library plans to set up an Institute of Translation, or a House of the Translator," she said. It would seek financial support to popularise Russian authors abroad through plentiful, high quality translations that demonstrate increasing professionalism. The phrasing was diplomatic. The subtext was not: the translations currently reaching foreign readers were neither plentiful nor consistently good.
Why an institute rather than a grant
A translation fund pays invoices. An institute does something harder. It finds the people. The bottleneck in getting Russian literature abroad has never been money in the first instance, it has been the number of translators anywhere in the world who can read Bulgakov's Moscow slang or Platonov's deliberately broken syntax and then write it as literature in Spanish, Korean or Portuguese.
Those people are made, not found. They need years in the language, time in the country, a mentor who has done it before, and enough paid work in between to avoid taking a job in software localisation instead. The Soviet system produced them industrially, through Progress Publishers and the state translation apparatus, and it produced a great deal of ideological chaff along with genuine craft. When that machine collapsed, nothing replaced it.
What a House of the Translator would actually do
The model Genieva was reaching for exists elsewhere. Germany, the Netherlands, France and the Nordic countries all run translation houses: residencies where a foreign translator lives for weeks or months, works on a specific book, and has access to a specialist library, native speakers and other translators wrestling with the same problems.
- Residencies that put a foreign translator inside the language for the length of a project
- A reference library dense enough to settle questions about period slang, regional idiom and technical vocabulary
- Seminars pairing new translators with established ones
- Subsidies paid to foreign publishers, which is what actually gets a contract signed
- A registry so that an editor in Buenos Aires can find someone who can do the job
Genieva's argument was that such an institute would render a service to foreign translators of Russian literature, helping them advance Russian authors on the world market alongside their Russian colleagues. That last phrase carries weight. Translation into a foreign language works best when a native speaker of the target language leads it. The institute would exist to serve people who are not Russian.
The library behind the idea
The Library of Foreign Literature is not a neutral setting for this. Founded in 1922 and rebuilt after the war, it spent the Soviet decades as one of the few places in Moscow where a reader could sit with foreign books, and Genieva ran it for a quarter of a century as an argument in institutional form: that a country understands itself better when it reads other people. Extending that logic outward, to make Russia legible abroad, was the natural next move.
It is worth being precise about the scale of the deficit. English-language publishers translate a famously small share of what they publish, and within that share the Russian titles are dominated by the nineteenth century. A reader in Chicago can buy six competing translations of Anna Karenina and almost nothing written in Russian in the last decade.
The craft problem nobody funds
Ask any working professional translator what makes literary work different and the answer is rarely vocabulary. It is register, rhythm and the decision about what to sacrifice. Russian carries aspect, case and word order flexibility that English simply does not have, so every sentence involves a trade. Do you keep the strangeness and risk a clumsy English sentence, or smooth it and lose the author's voice? There is no correct answer, only a defensible one, and defending it takes training.
That is what a translation institute is for. It is also why the funding case is always hard to make. The output is invisible. Nobody thanks a translator for the passage that reads naturally.
Money follows prestige, not the other way round
There is a commercial argument buried in all of this that Russian officials were slow to make. Countries that fund translation aggressively tend to see the benefit somewhere else entirely. Scandinavian crime fiction did not conquer the English-speaking world because Nordic prose is inherently gripping. It conquered it because Nordic cultural bodies spent years paying for sample translations, sending authors to fairs, and covering the risk for foreign publishers who would otherwise have passed. Ten years later the same countries were exporting television rights.
South Korea did the same thing with a literature translation institute and a long, patient grant programme, and the payoff arrived as international prizes and a global audience that now buys Korean novels without a subsidy in sight. The pattern repeats: subsidise the translation, build the readership, then let the market take over.
What happened next
An Institute of Translation was eventually established in Russia and has run a grant programme supporting translations of Russian works into dozens of languages, along with a translation prize. Whether it has achieved what Genieva envisaged is a fair question, and the political climate since has made cultural exchange considerably more complicated than it looked when she first described her House of the Translator.
The underlying diagnosis still holds. A literature travels only as far as its translators can carry it, and translators are expensive, slow and produced one at a time. The Library of Foreign Literature understood that its job was not to publish Russian literature but to invest in the people who would rewrite it elsewhere. Working translators still swap exactly these problems in forums such as r/translator, one impossible sentence at a time.