My Brilliant Friend

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Translated Fiction Outselling Non-Translated Fiction?

By one measure, yes:

The Man Booker International Prize has commissioned Nielsen Book to conduct an unprecedented research project into the translated fiction market. Nielsen Book examined and coded the data on physical book sales between 2001 and April 2016. The findings show that the proportion of translated fiction published remains extremely low at 1.5% overall and 3.5% of literary fiction. However, in terms of sales, fiction punches well above its weight with translated fiction providing 5% of total fiction sales in 2015 and translated literary fiction making up 7% of literary fiction sales in 2015. On average, translated fiction books sell better than books originally written in English, particularly in literary fiction.

The translated fiction market is rising, against a stagnating general fiction market. In 2001 51.6 million physical fiction books were sold, falling to 49.7 million in 2015. However translated fiction rose from 1.3 million copies sold a year to 2.5 million. In the literary fiction market, the rise was from 1 million copies to 1.5 million.

Of course, translated literary fiction still makes up a minuscule fraction of the literary fiction market, but increasing your units sold by 50% in 14 years isn’t terrible performance, particularly when your competition is in decline.

I think this is a pretty clear confirmation of the inroads that translation fiction advocates are making into the corporate media—that’s where you need to get your message out if you want to sell in large numbers. It probably also reflects the resurgent independent bookstore scene and a general resurgence in alternative culture, enabled in part by Internet technologies.

I’d be interested to see what the comparable stats are for the American market. My guess is that the U.K. fares far better, since it is a part of Europe and so close to so many nations that speak other languages (in addition to the much greater anti-intellectualism in the U.S.).

The article also lists the top ten best-selling translations of 2015. Fascinatingly, while Elena Ferrante has 3 of the top ten, Karl Ove Knausgaard has none. Not quite sure what that’s all about, but it is eye-catching.

New Zealand Listener

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New Yorker editor and translator Ann Goldstein – interview

The New Yorker editor who turned Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet into vivid, bestselling English novels has become the face of translators.

By Michelle Langstone

Illustration/Daron Parton

Behind every great anonymous Italian writing sensation stands a brilliant translator – though Ann Goldstein, who has transformed Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet into vivid, muscular English prose that has both charmed the critics and scaled bestseller lists, might shy away from being described in such a way. In person, Goldstein, a long-time editor at the New Yorker, is quiet and precise, her voice exuding a gentle curiosity and wry humour.

The Neapolitan books, which centre on the ruthlessly honest friendship between two women, have also been hailed as bringing to light a bold, new modern voice. Is there something about Ferrante’s use of Italian that is unique? “Italian is a naturally beautiful language. It’s very mellifluous. In terms of the sound, it’s very expressive. English can be very beautiful, but not in the same way – it’s not this kind of flowing, fluid thing.”

Goldstein says Ferrante talks about how she doesn’t want to be a “beautiful writer”. “Italians are very into these sorts of elaborate, beautiful, flowery kinds of sentences, and that’s the sort of classical Italian, and she doesn’t really fit into that. She’s so direct about what she’s describing, about emotions, about feelings, about the things that happen between people. The fact that she’s describing things that are not usually described in those terms in Italian literature means that the language she uses is often a little cruder, more raw. I don’t mean vulgar. I just mean it’s more direct, really. And kind of brutal.”

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The Millions

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Spurn the Translator at Your Own Peril

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A few years ago I was invited to speak at a New York bookstore with Elena Ferrante’s translator,Ann Goldstein. At the time, Ferrante was not yet the literary sensation she is today; she had a few slim volumes out with Europa Editions, for which Ann and I have done an extensive amount of translating — at that point, our combined efforts apparently accounted for over a quarter of their catalog. The event was modestly attended, as such events generally are, even in New York. But for a moment,Ann and I were on stage, visible, recognized for what we do.

Now we have “Ferrante Fever.” For for me as a translator, the phenomenon is doubly fascinating because of the author’s deliberate invisibility. Elena Ferrante is a pseudonym; we suspect she lives in Naples, but other than that she is a mystery. It is Ann Goldstein who has become the “face” of Ferrante — who is interviewed, invited to festivals or events that authors regularly attend. This reversal of the usual relationship between author and translator is an opportunity for the reader to remember — or realize — that not only is literature in translation something to enjoy and cherish, but that it is a collaborative effort. The translator, like the interpreter of a piece of classical music, is an artist in her own right, not merely a backstage employee of the publishing company whose name is all to often left out of reviews or other publicity. (Imagine advertising a concert at Carnegie Hall without crediting the soloist.)

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BBC

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Man Booker Shortlist: Translating Elena Ferrante

This month the winner of the prestigious Man Booker International Prize will be announced. Weekend is featuring all six of the shortlisted books before the winner is made public. Unusually the $72,000 prizemoney is divided equally between the writer and translator.

This week’s book is The Story Of The Lost Child by Italian writer Elena Ferrante. It’s the final part of a series known as the Neapolitan Quartet, about the sixty-year friendship between Elena, a successful writer, and her childhood friend Lila.

Weekend’s Julian Worricker spoke to the book’s translator Ann Goldstein, who says she has never met Ferrante herself. But her acquaintance with her work goes way back.

BBC

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Man Booker Shortlist: Elena Ferrante On Using A Pseudonym

This month the winner of the prestigious Man Booker International Prize will be announced. Weekend is featuring all six of the shortlisted books before the winner is made public.

This week we look at one of the hot favourites: The Story Of The Lost Child by Italian writer Elena Ferrante. It’s the final part of a series known as the Neapolitan Quartet, about the sixty-year friendship between Elena, a successful writer, and Lila, her friend from childhood. Elena Ferrante refuses to have a public profile, but she does communicate via email and agreed to an exchange with the BBC. Her answers have been voiced by an actress.

Her writing is extremely intimate and emotionally honest. But she herself is pseudonymous. Weekend’s Julian Worricker asked why she keeps such a distance between life and work?

 

The Guardian

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Translated fiction sells better in the UK than English fiction, research finds

Survey commissioned by the Man Booker International prize finds authors including Elena Ferrante and Haruki Murakami are driving a boom in UK sales of translated literary fiction

Haruki Murakami

Translated literary fiction is selling better on average in the UK than literary fiction originally written in English, according to new research, with authors including Elena Ferrante, Haruki Murakami and Karl Ove Knausgaard driving a boom in sales.

Though fiction in translation accounts for just 3.5% of literary fiction titles published, it accounted for 7% of sales in 2015, according to a survey commissioned by the Man Booker International prize.

The research, conducted by Nielsen Book, looked at physical book sales in the UK between January 2001 and April 2016. It found that translated fiction sales almost doubled over the last 15 years, from 1.3m to 2.5m copies, while the market for fiction as a whole fell from 51.6m in 2001 to 49.7m in 2015.

Although the proportion of translated fiction is still “extremely low”, at 1.5% overall, the sector still “punches well above its weight”, said the book sales monitor, with that 1.5% accounting for 5% of total fiction sales in 2015.

“On average, translated fiction books sell better than books originally written in English, particularly in literary fiction,” said Nielsen. Looking specifically at translated literary fiction, sales rose from 1m copies in 2001 to 1.5m in 2015, with translated literary fiction accounting for just 3.5% of literary fiction titles published, but 7% of the volume of sales in 2015.

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Sidney Morning Herald

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New Yorker editor Ann Goldstein a travelling ambassador for Ferrante Fever

LITERARY EDITOR, THE SYDNEY MORNING HERALD

Challenging work: Ann Goldstein, Elena Ferrante's translator, says she "might be a little anxious" to meet the strong-willed author.

In the determined absence of the Italian novelist Elena Ferrante, whose real identity is a secret, her American translator, Ann Goldstein, has become the willing ambassador for the phenomenon known as Ferrante Fever.

Goldstein says she has trouble explaining the addictive attraction of Ferrante’s fiction for women of all ages – and plenty of men.

“It somehow mirrors women’s experience, even if it doesn’t specifically mirror it,” she says. “There’s something universal about it in the sense that we all have mothers, husbands, children, all those relationships she explores.”

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The Bookseller

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Translated fiction ‘5% of UK fiction sales last year’

Sales of Italian literary fiction rose from 37,000 in 2001 to 237,000 in 2015, due in “no small part” to the Ferrante “phenomenon”.

UK sales of translated fiction represented 5% of all print fiction sales in 2015, a 96% rise in volume from the translated market’s 2001 sales figures, according to statistics from Nielsen Book. A report into the translated fiction market was commissioned by the Man Booker International Prize, with Nielsen Book examining and coding data on physical book sales between 2001 and April 2016.

The report says that the proportion of translated fiction published remains “extremely low” at 1.5% overall and 3.5% of literary fiction. However, in terms of sales, translated fiction “punches well above its weight”, providing 5% of total fiction sales in 2015 and translated literary fiction making up 7% of literary fiction sales in 2015.

According to the report, the translated fiction market is rising against a “stagnating” general fiction market. In 2001, 51.6m physical fiction books were sold, falling to 49.7m in 2015. However, translated fiction rose from 1.3m copies sold a year to 2.5m. In the literary fiction market, the rise was from 1m copies to 1.5m.

However, 2015’s sales were some way off the UK translated fiction market’s peak in 2010, when Stieg Larsson’s Quercus-published Millennium trilogy alone generated £26.7m on sales of five million print units through Nielsen BookScan.

During the period of study, literary fiction books were translated from 91 languages, from Afrikaans to Yiddish. The most popular source language was French, with 200,000 books selling in 2001, rising to over 400,000 in 2015.  Sales of Italian literary fiction rose from 37,000 in 2001 to 237,000 in 2015, due in “no small part” to the Ferrante “phenomenon”. Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend (Europa) was the best selling translated literary fiction title of 2015, selling 108,969 copies. Meanwhile Ferrante’s The Story of a New Name and Those Who Leave and Those Who Staywere the eighth and ninth bestselling translated literary fiction titles, selling 35,229 copies each.

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BBC

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Man Booker Shortlist: Elena Ferrante’s Naples

This month the winner of the prestigious Man Booker International Prize will be announced. Weekend is featuring all six of the shortlisted books before the winner is announced.
This week we focus on the hot favourite – a novelist calling herself Elena Ferrante, whose real identity remains a secret. In her globally successful Neapolitan Novels, she’s been said to give one of the finest descriptions ever of her home city, Naples, in the south of Italy. Weekend’s Paul Henley has been there to investigate:
(Picture: An apartment block in Naples’ Scampia district. Credit: Filippo Monteforte/AFP/Getty Images)

7 minutes

New York Times Magazine

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Editors’ Picks: Mother’s Day Gift Ideas

The Neapolitan Novels by Elena Ferrante (boxed set, Kindle Edition)
This may seem terribly basic, but a year ago I bought my mom the first two novels in the Neapolitan series by Elena Ferrante and I couldn’t be more surprised to learn that Ferrante is Mom-approved. She would text me details from the lives of Lila and Elena as if they were people we knew, and I would occasionally have to stop to make sure they weren’t. Maybe it’s a mother-daughter thing, or maybe it’s because my great-grandparents are from Naples, but the Neapolitan novels ended up being a verified hit with my mom. She didn’t wait for me to get her the final two books in the series, but thanks to a box set that came out last October, you can deliver them to your mama all in one go.
$40 at Amazon

The Neapolitan Novels by Elena Ferrante (on Kindle)
My mom has a master’s in English and reads more than any person I’ve ever met. We are in a book club for two that doesn’t meet formally. I love a book, I tell her to read it. She loves a book, she tells me to read it. We discuss. For months I haven’t been able to shut up about these epic novels about life in postwar Naples and the friendship between two women. I would have given her my hard copies but she’s been practicing the KonMari method since before I was born and would never want a stack of books, so she reads the Kindle editions.
$10 each at Amazon 

The Toast

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How To Tell If You’re In An Elena Ferrante Novel

You are poor, bright, and beautiful, but you never feel quite bright or beautiful enough because your best friend is brighter and beautifuller.

Your best friend has never forgiven you for being the first to experience menarche or being allowed to progress beyond primary school. Ever since, she’s been competing with you over just about everything.

You feel an unnameable, shameful aversion to your mother, whose limping gait you are afraid you will come to adopt.

Naples is trash, and you grow up to realise that you live amongst trash.

You watch helplessly as your little sister falls into the arms of a wicked man. This would never have happened if you didn’t live in Naples.

55de351ce8f804624a30022b_elena-ferrante-story-lost-childYour brother grows up to disappoint.

Your son grows up to disappoint.

Your father is fine but inconsequential.

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dna India

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Who is Elena Ferrante?

alt GARGI GUPTA | Sun, 1 May 2016-07:50am , Mumbai , dna

All the world loves a good mystery and really there’s none better than discovering who really is Elena Ferrante, the pen name of the author of My Brilliant Friend and The Story of a Lost Child. Gargi Gupta finds out more on the famously reclusive author who refuses to divulge ‘her’ name

Literary circles the world over are agog over one question these days, “Who is Elena Ferrante?”

Some things about Ferrante we know – that it’s the pen name of an Italian writer whose latest book, The Story of the Lost Child, has been short-listed for the Man International Booker Prize 2016, and the Best Translated Book Award; that in the past 25 years Ferrante has written eight other books that have been critical and commercial successes; that she’s been called the “most important Italian writer of her generation”; that she has made it toTime magazine’s list of 100 most influential people for 2016.

But there’s a lot we don’t know either. No one, barring her publishers, knows her real identity, not even Ann Goldstein, who has translated six of her books into English. In fact, it’s not even known for sure that Ferrante is a woman. The Italian media has tried to unravel the mystery surrounding her and attempted to substitute truth with speculation where they failed. For instance, in early March, an article in the Italian newspaper Corriera Della Serra argued that Ferrante was actually a professor of history in Naples University called Marcello Marmo. The piece of gossip was repeated by everyone from the New York Times to The Times of India but was later denied by both Marmo and Ferrant’s publishers.

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The Guardian

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Ferrante fever in full swing at the PEN World Voices Festival

Ann Goldstein, Elena Ferrante’s translator, sat in conversation with Judith Thurman, Roxana Robinson and Rebecca Carroll to discuss the author’s work

Naples, setting of Ferrante’s novels, with Versuvius in the background.

Ann Goldstein has two coping mechanisms for translating especially difficult passages of Elena Ferrante’s novels, she told an audience at the PEN World Voices Festival on Thursday.

First, she gets up and walks around the house. Second, “I sit there thinking, ‘Don’t do that, don’t do that!’” said Goldstein. Goldstein is also head of the copy department at the New Yorker. Her translations of the Italian author’s books have garnered much acclaim. Passages about politics and history in the Neapolitan quartet were technically complicated, but the most emotionally wrenching section was the death of a beloved pet in Days of Abandonment.

“I almost had to stop translating, or rather, stop revising it, because I couldn’t bear to read it another time,” Goldstein said.

It is this visceral, “heightened intensity” that makes Ferrante’s novels so compelling, says novelist Roxana Robinson. The Neapolitan quartet, which chronicles the lives of two friends named Elena (also called Lenu) and Lila, from childhood into old age, has become an unexpected success in the US, making the pseudonymous author the subject of much debate. The last novel in the quartet, The Story of the Lost Child, was also recently shortlisted for the Booker prize.

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Literary Hub

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NAPLES, THE READING LIST: YOUR GUIDE TO THE CITY OF ELENA FERRANTE

ON THE EVE OF SAN GENNARO, 15 BOOKS TO SATISFY YOUR NEAPOLITAN CRAVINGS

April 29, 2016  By John Domini

These days, plenty of people know Elena Ferrante, but not so many have heard of Januarius, patron saint of her native Naples. New Yorkers will recognize the Italian name,San Gennaro, from his festival in Little Italy, the last Saturday in April (tomorrow). Yet over by the Tyrrhenian Sea, this 4th-century martyr may have a greater physical presence than Ferrante herself.

Back when Gennaro’s head was still tumbling away from its body, the story goes, some acolyte stooped to collect vials of his blood. The reliquaries are kept in Naples, and twice a year, the Duomo is packed for the miracle of liquefaction. The more freely the stuff flows, in its gilded containers, the more it buoys up the prayers of the locals, the Napoli D.O.C. Better yet, they get two chances at a miracle, one in September and one late in April.

At some point Ferrante—then still using her actual name—must’ve been among the believers. These days she may no longer live in town, but the city remains an abiding subject for her, integral to her power. So too, as her quartet follows Lenù and Lila around Naples, as it steeps in the beauties and toxins, it generates hunger for more. Readers can take Ferrante tours, now, and they’ve begun seeking other books written in the shadow of Vesuvius.

Piacere mio, my pleasure. I’ll limit my suggestions to titles available in English and pertinent to the novelist’s generation.

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