Soul support

In another recent Hbl feature the paper notes that it's becoming more and more common for Finland's authors to derive all or most of their income from state arts subsidies of various kinds, with such support increasingly being perceived as the measure of a writer's success and the quality of his/her work. According to researcher Elina Jokinen, who is quoted in the article, the subsidies are far from regular or reliable, with grants being made on a one-off basis, and there's a need for a more stable and long-term solution to the problem.

1,000 copy guys

Over at Three Percent, E.J. Van Lanen is writing about the FILI editors' trip:

We do different kinds of books here (My favorite story so far is when a publisher was going to tell us about two books: one, a more commercial author, they thought would sell 10,000 copies in the US, and the other, a more literary author, who was wonderful but who they thought would sell 1,000. Chad and I both said at the same time, “Tell us about the 1000 copy guy.”), and because we do a special kind of book, I feel like we have different kinds of meetings with publishers.

FILI move

FILI (aka the Finnish Literature Exchange) has moved down the road from Mariankatu to premises in the Ritarihuone assembly building on Ritarikatu. The staff email addresses and phone numbers remain the same, however.

Translation funding - push and pull

As a literary translator, I receive a significant proportion of my income from translating novels. Time is money, although you cannot translate too many works at once. If you take on too much work, you run the risk of slipshod translation.

One major source of income in this context are the funds set up in the source-language country to promote the national literature. That is what I call the "push" side of things: the country is pushing its literature onto the rest of the world, and is prepared to pay out money to do so. But there is a "pull" dimension, e.g. when the UK pulls in literature from abroad. This too is promotion, but this time of other countries' literature. Again, money could be paid to the translator, this time by funds in the target-language country, in this instance the UK. I fear that this side of funding is somewhat neglected.

The core Scandinavian countries have solid translation funds which pay not only for complete, book-length translations, but nowadays also for excerpts that a translator may use when promoting a particular book with a publishing house, alongside the synopsis. This money is most welcome. But cannot British funds, state-run or private, do more to promote translations by way of a supplement to what the Scandinavians offer? Cannot the Arts Council or England and private funds ensure a regular supply of money so that serious Nordic literature, poetry and prose, is translated?

I read in the Standpoint magazine that it could be time to abolish the Arts Council. While this may be throwing out the baby with the bathwater, it is true that from a literary translator's point of view there appear to be precious few British sources of state translation funding. While literally millions of pounds is spend on regional art galleries and museums that sometimes prove to be white elephants, Arts Council funding of the translation of, for instance, European literature as a whole is negligible. Maybe a British National Translation Fund could be set up, working alongside similar private sources of funding. This would ensure that literary translators are not galloping from one Scandinavian crime novel to the next, in order to make ends meet, but may have time to translate poetry collections and general novels.

If money comes to the translator from various sources, at home and abroad, this would also ensure that neither the vested interests of source-language country nor of the target-language one narrow down the choice of works to be translated too severely. Promoting a more varied flora of literary works appearing in English seems to me to be a good thing.

Eric Dickens

Grant Central

Each year the Finnish Literature Exchange (FILI), a long-established Finnish culture ministry-funded organization (earlier known as FLIC, the Finnish Literature Information Centre) which aims to connect publishers, translators and authors, awards €510,000 in translation and publication grants to more than 300 projects worldwide.

In former days, grant recipients learned the fate of their applications by snail mail, but now are expected to check the lists of awards that are published on the FILI website.

A glance through the lists - there are two, one for complete translations of Finnish and Finland-Swedish works, and another for sample translations of the same - can be useful in forming a picture of what Finnish titles may be likely to appear in translation from English-language publishers in the following year or years.

Sometimes, however, the crop is sometimes quite small, as in the current spring awards, with much of the funding going to translators working in languages other then English.

Book-length translations receiving funding in the first part of the current grant year include Juhani Aho's Rautatie (translator Owen Witesman, publisher Norvik Press), Henry Parland's Sönder (translator Dinah Cannell, publisher Norvik Press), Riikka Pelo's Taivaankantaja (translator David Hackston, publisher Twisted Spoon Press) and Boel Westin's study of the life and work of Tove Jansson, Tove Jansson: Ord, bild, liv (translator Silvester Mazzarella, publisher Sort Of Books).