Willkommen, bienvenue! New festival celebrates translated fiction from Cameroon to Slovakia as sales boom

A caller festival of translated lit is being launched successful Bristol adjacent week amid a income roar successful translated fabrication successful the UK.

Translated By, Bristol is the brainchild of Polly Barton, writer and translator of the award-winning Butter by Asako Yuzuki, and Tom Robinson, proprietor of Gloucester Road Books, which is organising the festival alongside Barton and different autarkic Bristol bookshop, Storysmith.

“Translated fabrication becoming much fashionable successful caller years has not needfully led to a greater appreciation for the enactment of translators, oregon overmuch information of the enactment of translation itself,” says Robinson. “We wanted to deliberation astir whether determination was thing we could bash that would code some of these concerns.”

The festival, which runs 12-25 May, volition diagnostic a conversation betwixt 5 translators shortlisted for the International Booker prize and a “translation duel” – successful which translators statement their translations of a substance successful beforehand of an assemblage – among different events.

UK readers proceed to person beardown appetites for translated fiction, with Butter selling almost 250,000 copies successful the UK past year. Social media buzz astir peculiar titles has helped displacement copies: Ros Schwartz’s translation of Jacqueline Harpman’s I Who Have Never Known Men, a favourite connected “BookTok”, sold 45,000 copies past year, an elevenfold emergence connected 2022 sales.

Festival organisers were alert of accrued involvement successful translated lit from readers, meaning they felt the festival “would person a breadth of entreaty it mightiness not person done, say, 5 years ago”, says Barton.

A cardinal crushed for the caller occurrence of translated lit is the enactment of autarkic publishers specified arsenic Fitzcarraldo, Peirene and Comma, accidental the organisers. Those presses “tend to beryllium much consenting to instrumentality risks”, adds Robinson.

Polly Barton, writer of books including Fifty Sounds, translator of Japanese lit into English and co-founder of Translated By, Bristol. Photograph: Garry Loughlin

One of the cardinal aims of the festival is to showcase a “breadth of languages and geographies, beyond the large languages and locations of Europe, which thin to inhabit truthful overmuch focus”, says Robinson.

The programme features an lawsuit connected translating the enactment of the Cameroonian writer Jean-Claude Awono and different with Hassan Blasim, who writes successful Arabic, on with his translator Jonathan Wright. The festival volition besides big a speech betwixt two salient translators of Latin American literature, Frank Wynne and Annie McDermott.

“We besides person events featuring European languages that aren’t the 5 oregon truthful that get the astir attention,” says Barton, with conversations astir books translated from Slovakian (This Room Is Impossible to Eat by Nicol Hochholczerová, translated by Julia and Peter Sherwood) and Danish (Iron Lung by Kirstine Reffstrup, translated by Hunter Simpson).

Barton sees this attack of “actively looking beyond our contiguous borders” arsenic helping to “resist the governmental currents promoting xenophobia, prejudice and taste homogeneity”.

The festival volition besides spot Max Porter talking to 2 of his translators, Saskia van der Lingen (Dutch) and Charles Recoursé (French). It volition adjacent with the translation duel, featuring Adriana Hunter and Wynne. “The connection of the slam this twelvemonth is French, and we’re distributing the substance to radical successful advance, truthful there’s the accidental for radical with a small French cognition to person a spell themselves if they like,” says Robinson.

Duels are an “excellent mode of opening up the process for radical and allowing them to get a consciousness of however originative translation truly is”, adds Barton.