The Commerce of Translation

The Commerce of Translation Edmund Keeley A decade ago, at the 1980 Annual Symposium of the American Literary Translators Association, I delivered a closing address on "The State of Translation" which I hoped might help to raise the spirits of those in the audience who had been professional literary translators during years when translation had a lesser name and bleaker prospects than I felt it had in 1980.1 As an example of progress in the commerce of translation, I offered a bit of personal history—the only source I could be sure of—that juxtaposed what a commercial house offered as compensation for fiction in translation during the early 1960s with what several non-profit presses were prepared to offer for poetry in translation fifteen years later. The latter compensation consisted of a standard royalty, shared by the translator (or translators) and the author, on all copies sold, including a percentage of subsidiary rights. The former required more elaboration, and it had reference specifically to the publishing house of Alfred A. Knopf in connection with the translation of a trilogy of novellas by Vassilis Vassilikos that appeared in a single volume in 1964. The compensation for this prose translation, split by the two translators (my wife and myself), was $15.00 per thousand words, with no royalty clause, no share in subsidiary rights, and a letter from the publisher establishing the terms rather than a jointly signed contract . The translation went through two drafts, was heavily edited by the translators (including a rather drastic excision from one of the novellas that the publisher demanded if the book was to see the light of day), and ended up taking some nine months of collaborative enterprise . The total final return was $1,470 for the equivalent of 18 months of work, or $735 to each of the translators for their contribution to the joint effort. The book had a certain critical success that lasted several months, it was generally reviewed as though it were a work that the author had written in English—that is, virtues of style and the like were credited to the author rather than the translators— Journal of Modern Greek Studies, Volume 8, 1990. 291 292 Edmund Keeley and the book went out of print several years later, never to reappear despite the later fame that the novel Z brought its author. This sad history, perhaps from both the author's and the translators ' perspective, had a profitable consequence that was not a part of the reckoning at the start of the enterprise: one of the translators (the present writer) swore never again to translate modern Greek prose in any form for commercial purposes, and this resolution would presumably allow him to devote himself henceforth exclusively to the translation of poetry during those moments of weakness or passion when translating became an inescapable urge. This meant that he could work thereafter mostly for the pure pleasure of the thing and infrequently, without giving much thought to the commerce, or the responsibilities, of his craft. So he thought. But during the 15 years that followed his resolution, things happened in both the field of translation generally, and of translation from modern Greek specifically , to alter some of the dreary prospects that he had expected to confront. As I pointed out to the ALTA audience, translators began to be accepted as legitimate creative artists during the mid-1960s, and eventually, as legitimate teachers of translation in the various university workshops that came into existence as part of the curricula in the vastly expanding field of study called Creative Writing. A National Translation Center was established by the Ford Foundation in Austin, Texas; a national quarterly devoted to translation, Delos, was created under the same sponsorship; PEN American Center, always in the forefront of the effort to promote the cause of translation and translators , encouraged practitioners of the craft to join their organization, offered prizes for translation, formed a standing Translation Committee as a watchdog group in the profession, and eventually wrote a model contract intended to promulgate what PEN considered just rights for translators; and the National Book Awards—at least for a while—chose to include the category...