Translating the Literatures of Small European Nations

The literatures of smaller European nations, written in less well-known languages from less familiar traditions, all depend on linguistic and cultural translation to be heard by the wider world. Scholars and others who perform this work for academic and broader audiences, however, generally work in parallel and even in competition, divided along linguistic, geographical and professional lines, and are unused to examining the precise nature and implications of this shared situation. As a result, scholars of a given national literature may view its situation too narrowly, while scholars of comparative literature, in imagining a supranational organisation of literature, fail to consider how the literatures of Europe's smaller nations might become part of it. Public-facing intermediaries may view their work only from their own professional perspective, in the context of their own commercial, cultural or diplomatic motivations.
This project creates the opportunity for the first sustained comparative analysis of how, through translation, the contemporary literatures of small European nations endeavour to reach the cultural mainstream. It brings together researchers from typical examples - Czech and Slovak, Portuguese, Scandinavian and South Slav - who work as cultural translators in both academic and public-facing contexts. Both strands are reflected and combine in the project's approach, activities and outputs. Through public workshops, the project will bring together academic and public-facing intermediaries in the UK to discuss their contributions to the work of translation and explore the opportunities and barriers they encounter and strategies they use. This innovative engagement with participants in the process will not only lead to a better mutual understanding of different intermediaries' roles and motivations, but also feed into a comprehensive analysis of the cultural dynamics underlying the current translation of these literatures. These findings will be published in on-line reports, prepared in consultation with and designed for use by public-facing intermediaries in their subsequent work. These reports will also be shaped by a series of case studies arising from the investigators' specialist areas and drawing on material from the workshops and interviews alongside analysis of quantitative data, public documents, critical material and literary texts. For example, the project will examine the role of intermediaries in the recent international rise of Scandinavian crime fiction, and the impact of this apparent success on publishing plans, cultural perceptions and other genres. It will also explore the motivations for state funding of translation, and particularly how literary exchange may be used to promote notions of tolerance and civil society, for example in the former Eastern Bloc or Yugoslavia, or to foster political and economic relationships between peripheries, unseen by the centre. A project conference will invite researchers working in other literatures to contribute to these questions, and this research will be gathered in a major edited volume that examines how far these literatures of small European nations may be viewed as a specific literary system in their interaction with the centre and each other. By identifying more precisely both the range and limits of cross-border translation, the project may thus contribute to a better understanding of the complexity of current cultural and political interaction between Europe's nations.

The main direct beneficiaries of this research will be the wide range of 'public-facing' intermediaries who support the linguistic and cultural translation of the literatures of small European nations. These include translators, literary agents, publishers, booksellers, cultural attachés, national cultural institutes, and charities and NGOs that promote literature and cultural communication, some of whom advise on cultural policy in their own countries or at EU level. It will also benefit policy-makers seeking a broader understanding of contemporary national self-perceptions, priorities and interactions in Europe. The project will also reach and hear from readers interested in European literature in translation and thereby raise the profile of the less widely known literatures it explores.
The project will bring together academic and 'public-facing' intermediaries who normally meet - if at all - for a particular purpose at often geographically circumscribed, hastily arranged events, often interact mainly along national or regional lines or in narrower professional spheres and may consider themselves in competition with each other. Public workshops will encourage these intermediaries, including the academic investigators, to step outside their national and professional contexts and engage with one another's situations. They will explore the similarities and differences between their roles, priorities and aspirations and the challenges they face, and examine what lies behind them, focusing in particular on prevailing national attitudes and contexts in both the UK and throughout Europe. Audiences will test intermediaries' assessments of notional target readers and the strengths and merits of national stereotypes and preconceptions.
These interactions will bring discrete practical benefits in identifying what does and does not work well, what changes might facilitate intermediaries' work and how they might work differently. The workshops and on-line reports arising from them will not only build greater understanding among academic and 'public-facing' intermediaries of each other's roles in the 'system', but also foster greater awareness of one another, greater coherence of networks and more effective and visible interaction between different intermediaries and 'peripheries' in the future. At the same time, however, the research will interrogate the limits of a single, supra-national cultural agenda by identifying not only shared priorities and opportunities for cross-border cooperation, but also points of tension, competing agendas and concealed hierarchies within and across 'peripheries' which may not be easily overcome, but with which intermediaries need to engage. Through a precise characterisation of the dynamic, 'unequal' structure of the contemporary European literary system and how 'peripheral' literatures negotiate it, the project will provide a broader picture of the complexity of cultural and political interaction between Europe's nations. By simultaneously shedding further light on the facts and underlying context behind the UK's low production of literature in translation, it will also support and strengthen the work of 'third sector' groups who seek to promote greater British openness to and interaction with national literary cultures.