Here's the framework, in her own words: "Americans have developed an admirable fondness for books, food, and music that preprocess other cultures. But for all our enthusiasm, have we lost our taste for the truly foreign?"
Kushner argues that Americans by nature tend not to engage with foreign cultures - with international literature specifically - in a meaningful way. She emphasizes the tiny percentage (~3%) of annual publications that are genuine translations of foreign writing, and notes that fundamentally, Americans prefer to read books about foreign places through the medium of Anglophone writers. Though she never uses the word itself, there's a patent hypocrisy at play: Americans are credited with avidly consuming foreign culture, but the reality is that we are too lazy to confront these cultures in their native form. Instead, we access them through the familiar voices of fellow Americans. We filter down the authentic and the exotic for those ingredients most appealling to our pre-existing tastes.
I found it really interesting to hear that Horace Engdahl, head of the Swedish academy, publicly denounced his American counterparts for not participating "in the big dialogue of literature." Clearly this is a biased statement; the European market of ideas that Engdahl celebrates is something of an oligarchy with French, Spanish, British and German princes. I don't know if every contemporary Bosnian or Greek author feels that his or her contribution will be celebrated beyond national borders. While it's true that American ignorance about celebrated foreign writers is depressingly apparent, Engdahl's words signal the equal demerits of European presumption.
From a publisher's vantage point, I took stock of some of the figures Kushner published: 25% of books published in Spain in 2004 were translations; in Italy the figure was 22%, and in South Korea 29%. Even China is applauded for its 4%. I may well be letting my own ignorance get in the way here, but I'd really like a more thorough breakdown of these stats - they're too glossed over. I'll bet anything that the highest proportions of those percentages are translations of Western languages -- if not specifically of English alone. As one acidic commentor writes, "does the neglected Mongolian genius really get a look-in?" I wouldn't make the mistake of ascribing any one country or nationality as the true and democratic celebrant of world literature.
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