By Eric Dickens

As I have said elsewhere, I think that the arts in Britain are living in a topsy-turvy world, where Damien Hirst can raise £12 million to encrust someone's skull with 8,000 diamonds, whilst the body entrusted with giving grants to the arts in general dumps a reasonably successful publishing venture involving translations, as well as dumping all sorts of other projects. Translations, especially literary and academic ones, are the lifeblood of a healthy culture. Ignore your neighbouring countries and their literature at your peril. Throughout Europe, many outstanding authors have doubled up as translators, e.g. Nabokov and George Eliot. And one day, when Europe tires of a diet of over-hyped children's books purporting to be literature, Europe will strike back and start publishing fewer British books in translation. It is an absurdity to claim that British readers aren't interested in books in translation. How can they tell? They have access to so few. Dedalus provides some, mostly though not exclusively in the fantasy genre. ACE is being secretive about a number of paragraphs in their disinvestment judgement vis-à-vis Dedalus. They also appear to be quite arbitrary regarding performance, and have a downer on literature as a whole, by the look of things. Almost 1,700 people have signed the petition, yet ACE appears not to regard this as a subtle hint that their policies might be plain wrong. ACE can brazen it out, sack no one, bankrupt Dedalus and come away the victors. But hubris attracts the Eumenides, to use a literary allusion. And how did we hear about the Eumenides (aka Furies) in the first place. Erm, by translation, actually...

05 Feb 08 12:25

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