The Changes at SELTA - 2

I'm rescuing a couple of comments from an earlier post because I think they raise some issues that could do with further discussion, and if they are lost back in an earlier thread there's less likelihood of that happening. Also, in view of the fact that SELTA holds its spring meeting next week on 18th March, it may be that some members would like to give their feedback here.

I wrote...

What I have always wondered is whether at some stage (probably fairly early on) in SELTA's history it was actually taken over as a sort of cultural arm of the Swedish authorities,although this has never been officially acknowledged by any of the parties involved. The insistence on the use of the Swedish Embassy premises for the association's meetings always looked to me a bit suspect, and there seemed to be a very cosy relationship between the various Swedish cultural counsellors and the top SELTA membership.

Also, SELTA has traditionally been a place where various rivals in a rather restricted field meet one another, not always with positive results, and I'm wondering too whether this may be one of the factors underlying the present troubles in the group. The online forum seems to have brought some of that latent disharmony out into the open at last.

And Rod Bradbury replied...

The Swedish authorities obviously pay to keep the Swedish Book Review going. And although that is called SELTA's journal, it feels more like a shopfront (and a very useful one too) for Swedish publishers, with the Swedish Arts Council (formerly it was the Swedish Institute)in the background. In a sense, that arrangement is beneficial to both. Sweden gets a magazine on the cheap and SELTA gets a forum for members' translations/articles etc that it would otherwise not have access to. There might be a clash of interests somewhere, of course, as translators also need to earn a living, and there is a limited amount of literary translation work available. But SBR seems to be open to translators to present their work / new authors and so on, so perhaps one should be satisfied with the system as it is.

One of the original reasons for establishing SELTA was to have an organisation for the Swedes to do business with, a 'motpart'. That is how things are done in Sweden.

See also in this blog: The Changes at SELTA