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WHY I AM ON THE VERGE OF QUITTING TRANSLATION (a thread):
over the past year i’ve sent approximately 25 pitches to editors at over a dozen presses. three of the editors responded with rejections, while the rest never responded, even after two or three follow-up emails.
over the past year i’ve sent approximately 25 pitches to editors at over a dozen presses. three of the editors responded with rejections, while the rest never responded, even after two or three follow-up emails.
translating through the past year of chaos and dread has felt at times like a way of clinging to some structure and stability, but most of the time it has felt like i’m yelling into the void of World Literature for someone (anyone!) to publish my projects.
translators have to do so much legwork to get a book off the ground, from translating and polishing samples to crafting meticulous proposals that make the case for a book to be in a publisher’s catalogue.
why would a translator keep working, for free, on projects that editors across a range of independent and commercial publishers don’t even deign to engage? why would a translator keep pouring themselves into projects that seem to be unpublishable? it’s pure masochism!
it feels crazymaking that the countless, painstaking hours i’ve spent toiling on samples and pitches to try and secure a new project might be countenanced on the part of an editor with complete silence.
i have no doubt that the books i am working on would’ve found a publisher if they were translated from french, spanish, or german—i have been told as such by the editors who’ve rejected them.
i care a lot about translation, and i care a lot about the books i translate. it was tremendously validating to receive the TA First Translation Prize in february, and i had hoped that it would help me secure some confidence (and contracts!) for the new projects i’m working on.
instead, the time since then has mostly been filled with even more silence, and a couple more rejections, and it is really hard not to feel completely burned out by this process.
the dominant discourses of World Literature often cast it as building bridges for cross-cultural understanding and dialogue, but really World Literature’s just a labyrinth, threshold after threshold of gatekeeping that serves to sustain a global hierarchy of language & literature
advocating for these books i care so deeply about has started to feel so futile that i wonder if it’s even worth doing anymore.
sure, we’re all experiencing pandemic burnout. but even though translating is my main source of income, unlike editors, i’m not receiving a salary, so you can only imagine what it’s like to be burnt out *and* poor *and* working on books.
there is a kind of romanticization of the process in which translators spend years advocating for projects (Jennifer Croft’s decade spent trying to place FLIGHTS is a case in point), but let’s really call it what it is: a broken process in the broken world of World Literature.
i’m not seeking reassurances, or crying for help in connecting to more editors (who would in any case not answer my emails, i’m sure); i’m just at my wit’s end with having to send my work into the black hole of publishing, only for it to never see the light of day.
maybe i’m bad at schmoozing with editors, or maybe i’m bad at writing pitches, but i know that i’m a good translator. it’s a shame that that’s not enough in the business of translation.
