Somewhere in the world, a writer is sitting in a small room with a manuscript that will eventually make someone in Ohio cry. It could be in Oslo, Seoul, or a small apartment in Naples. Ohio is probably not on the writer’s mind. They are considering the sentence in front of them, making sure it is correct, and whether the word they have selected has the necessary weight. However, the emotion somehow spreads. It lands somehow.
The publishing industry has never been able to provide a clear explanation for this mystery, which lies at the heart of literary translation. Why does a story transcend national boundaries? What makes a Norwegian man’s extensive, self-centered, and formally peculiar life journal something that millions of readers in dozens of languages find impossible to put down? My Struggle by Karl Ove Knausgård makes sense as a case study for this phenomenon. Outside of Norway, it shouldn’t function. It is almost claustrophobically autobiographical and intensely local. Nevertheless, it can be found on shelves from Toronto to Tokyo.
Perhaps the answer has less to do with universality than we usually think. The widely held belief that great stories are successful everywhere because they speak to something “universal” about the human condition is probably overly simplistic. The real experience of translation, which is never about finding equivalency, is flattened by this. It’s about discovering a fresh approach to feeling something. Chana Bloch wasn’t looking for universal truths when she spent years translating biblical Hebrew into English. Word by word, she was battling the task’s impossibility. The art resides in that battle.
The essays in the literary translation-focused anthology Crossing Borders present this argument in a more nuanced manner than most discussions of the topic permit. There, seasoned translators write about the practice with a devotional seriousness that is uncommon in mainstream publishing discourse. They contend that framing is important and that translation is the closest form of reading. It views the translator as an active co-creator of meaning rather than a supporting role or conduit. Whether you realize it or not, when you read Elena Ferrante in English, you are also reading Ann Goldstein.
The factors influencing what is translated have changed significantly in recent years, even outside the realm of small literary presses, where the majority of translated fiction finds its American home. International literary awards have developed into potent catalysts for cultural change. In less than ten years, South Korea, for instance, has risen from relative obscurity on the world literary map to a prominent position thanks to government funding for translation subsidies, planned editor tours, and a persistent effort to get Korean literature in front of the appropriate gatekeepers. It was successful. It is no coincidence that Han Kang appears on lists of international bestsellers. It is the result of intentional institutional work coupled with genuinely powerful writing.
This is where the picture becomes intricate and, to be honest, fascinating. The idea that great stories translate because they speak to something fundamentally human ignores the machinery that goes on behind the scenes, such as the editors at large conglomerates choosing which foreign titles receive a genuine marketing push, the festival organizers selecting which authors appear on panels, and the bureaucrats allocating funds. Elena Ferrante from Italy, Karl Ove Knausgård from Norway, and Sofi Oksanen from Finland all became global stars thanks to international media ecosystems that amplified their work at precisely the right time. There was writing. However, the infrastructure was also.
Perhaps inadvertently, the fiction in Crossing Borders implies that American authors frequently view translation as an experience of guilt rather than curiosity. Many of the stories in that collection center on Southeast Asia and Eastern Europe, areas where the US has left complex legacies or fought wars. That pattern has a revealing quality. When the American literary imagination expands, it usually does so in areas where it has been implicated. That may be shifting. Most likely, it should.
It’s difficult to ignore the fact that individuals under forty, many of whom are not Americans at all, are producing some of the most fascinating translation work available today. Thanks to festivals, residencies, social media, and the fact that authors and translators now frequently reside in different nations, the global literary community is closer than it has ever been. Before translating a novel into English, a translator who spends three years in the home country of the language adds something to the text that dictionary work cannot match. Translation ceases to be a technical exercise and becomes more akin to art when one has this immersive knowledge of idiom, silence, and what a sentence sounds like when read aloud in a kitchen.
Stories that make the greatest effort to be universal are rarely the ones that seem to travel the furthest. They are typically the ones with the strongest ties to a particular location, era, or perspective. In a succinct and distinctively bizarre contribution to Crossing Borders, Lydia Davis successfully transforms a French grammar lesson into a mystery with real stakes. The feeling is exact, but the location is unclear—perhaps France, perhaps some fantastical version of it. What makes it through the crossing is that accuracy. Not the exact words, not the geography, not the cultural allusions. The sensation of being taken.
None of this is guaranteed. In the United States, translation is still a commercial afterthought for the majority of major publishers, supported by small presses with genuine enthusiasm and narrow profit margins. The “three percent” estimate, which represents the approximate percentage of translated literature in American publishing output, is likely still overly generous. However, some of the most important reading experiences accessible to English-language audiences can be attributed to the writers who carry out this work and the editors who support it. That is not insignificant. In actuality, that is a significant amount.
Only a portion of the mystery has been resolved. A story travels because it is well written, the translation is accurate in the important ways and free in the necessary ones, institutions, subsidies, and rewards line up at the perfect time, and a reader in Ohio picked it up on a Tuesday and didn’t put it down until midnight. At the same time, all those things must be true. When they are, a tiny room in Oslo or Naples becomes much more expansive.
