DO AMERICANS HATE FOREIGN FICTION?
ANJALI ENJETI ON THE SERIOUS LACK OF TRANSLATED LITERATURE IN AMERICA
Two years ago at the Jaipur Literature Festival in Rajasthan, India, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and American ex-pat Jhumpa Lahiri, who’d relocated from Brooklyn to the outskirts of Rome, slammed the American book market for its “lack of translation, the lack of energy put into translation.” The following year, Ferrante fever ignited with the release of Italian author Elena Ferrante’s fourth and final installment of the Neopolitan novels, The Story of the Lost Child. Curiosity over Ferrante’s true identity (the author writes under a pen name) transformed into fandom for Ann Goldstein, Ferrante’s translator.
In the two years since Lahiri’s speech, in the eight months since Ferrante released her concluding book in the series, have translations finally broken through in the American book market?
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