In this episode of Critical Friends, the Strange Horizons SFF criticism podcast, Dan Hartland speaks with reviewers and critics Rachel Cordasco and Will McMahon about science fiction in translation (SFT), and specifically about those books appearing from small presses based in the US. They discuss recent news on NEA grants to these publishers, the SFT ecosystem in general, and how the literature might reach a wider readership.

Transcript

Critical Friends Episode 13

Dan Hartland: Welcome to Critical Friends, the Strange Horizons SFF criticism podcast. I’m Dan Hartland, and in this episode I’ll be joined by critics and reviewers Rachel Cordasco and Will McMahon.

In every episode of Critical Friends, we’ll be discussing science fiction and fantasy reviewing: what it is, why we do it, how it’s going.

In this episode, we’ll be discussing SFF in translation. Why do we read it? Why don’t we read it? And, in the face of a number of in some cases urgent challenges, how can we ensure it reaches ever larger audiences?

We began by discussing the immediate spur for our conversation.

[Musical sting]

So I guess we are all gathered here, the three of us, to talk about SF and translation via small presses. But there’s a reason for us doing that, which is not great.

Will, you emailed me a few months ago now and said, “This thing is happening. It seems like a thing that we should do something about,” and I agreed. Do you want to just talk a little bit about why you emailed me, what about?

Will McMahon: I would say, if anyone out there is unaware, my and Rachel’s country has been taken over by a kind of gang of fascists. This was a long time coming and I won’t get into the background, but a friendly correction is: it was barely over a month ago, ’cause that’s how the speed of these things go. Feels like the accumulation of years.

But yeah, basically at the beginning of May, a series of nonprofits, small presses, and literary magazines in the United States received a very bizarre email from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, saying that their grants from the NEA, the National Endowment for the Arts, were being terminated because they did not fit with President Trump’s priorities. And those priorities were listed in just kind of a stream-of-consciousness chunk that included things like AI proficiency and veteran services. And anyway, kind of the upshot of that is that there’s a few dozen literary arts organizations in the United States who have lost funding pretty much effective immediately.

And, when looking at the initial reporting, something that was very striking was that they were disproportionately presses that fund the translation of international literature. And it’s not that big of a leap to connect that to the kind of inward-looking nationalism of the kind of reactionary government of the day.

So, I think that’s the situation—and what we can do about it or why we’re talking about it, maybe we’ll all get into. Yeah.

Dan Hartland: I’m amazed it’s only a month because I get so used to not replying to emails in good order that thought it must be at least eight weeks! As you say, it’s also a function of the amount of stuff that gets thrown at us, which is why I was really keen when you emailed to do something about this ... just with whatever platform we have at Strange Horizons Reviews to give some focus to this at a time when it’s quite hard to sort of know where to shine the spotlight.

And of course, Rachel, the reason that then the first—literally the first—person that I emailed after getting that message from Will was you is because you’ve established yourself—you are going to object to this, I’m sure—but you have established yourself as the expert on SF in translation. See, you are objecting already!

Rachel Cordasco: No, no expert!

Dan Hartland: Well, your website, SF in Translation, your reviews at Strange Horizons and elsewhere, you’ve just ... you read a lot of this stuff. So I emailed you straight away, because I wonder whether you could talk a little bit about the SF in translation ecosystem and why, if we are looking at the future health of small presses, that this will impact upon SF in translation.

Rachel Cordasco: Yeah. While Will was talking, I was thinking of what I’ve been kind of complaining about for a long time. You know, I started SF in Translation, the website, in May of 2016, so next year will be ten years. And, as with all things that people kind of start and get involved in and then get excited about, I jumped into it and was like, “Oh my God, look how much there is.”

Like, there is a ridiculous amount that is actually available. You just need to be able to get it. But then, as the years went by, I saw the rise up to 2017 into 2018—I guess between 2017 and 2020, honestly, which was interesting—there was a definite rise in the amount of SF in translation that I was kind of capturing and seeing what was being published.

Most of this was because of Lavie Tidhar, and Francesco Verso, and the Apex Book of World SF. There were five of them. Francesco has also done a lot with Future Fiction, putting out all kinds of anthologies. Haikasoru, which I’m still crying about, which is one of the greatest publishers of Japanese SF in translation—they shut their doors a couple years ago and, and we have really suffered for it. I know most people don’t even know what that is, but you know, I miss it ‘cause it was amazing! And then Kurodahan Press, which did the same thing, also shut their doors the last couple of years. So there’s been a steep decline that I’ve noticed actually since 2020 in short fiction, in long, just across the board.

A lot of this is because these presses … so I put together a list of the presses that are based in the US that publish SF in translation. None of them focus exclusively on it obviously, but there are eight. So there’s Europa, Graywolf, Two Lines, Deep Vellum, New Directions, Wakefield, Restless, and Open Letter.

And all of them are, yeah, small, independent presses. Their thing is translation. But you know what is probably going to be cut first? Speculative fiction, because it’s the least read. I mean, if you’ve got like, I don’t know, Elena Ferrante versus Yoshiki Tanaka, people are not going to go for the Yoshiki Tanaka, unless they know who he is. They’re going to go for the literary fiction. They’re going to go for what they know.

Honestly, if you’re even reading translated fiction … If you’re reading, okay? That’s great! If you’re reading fiction, that’s amazing. If you’re reading translated fiction, that’s even better, you know? So by the time you get … I mean, SF and translation is so niche that you can’t compare it to the world of literary fiction.

Speculative fiction is always about what it means to be human, but in a way that’s thinking about the planet itself, everyone, it’s thinking about our place in the universe. It’s a lot more specific like that. And seeing all of these books across these different publishers and across the years shows us that it’s so important to read internationally because, at least from the US I mean, the news is very sparse when it comes to international news. I don’t really know much about what’s going, I don’t know anything about what’s going on, in Italy. I don’t know what’s going on in Korea. I don’t know, you know, if I just turn on the news, I’m not seeing anything. I would have to go to specifically to like the world news and it’s like clips, you know?

But I feel like when you’re reading widely and you’re reading in translation, and you’re learning about how other people are seeing the world, I mean, that’s only a good thing. And yeah, like Will said, it breaks through that parochial, inward-looking approach. And I honestly think the SF world in the US is very inward looking, which is very surprising, and so this helps kind of break us out of that.

And that was a big rant, so I’m sorry!

Dan Hartland: No, there’s so much good stuff in there! I think I’d really like to get a little bit actually into the science fiction community in particular and how it relates to these works in translation, because I think you are right that they are seen as “something else” sometimes. But before we did that, I did want to quickly circle back, because you were right to circle back yourself to what Will was saying.

Because of course, everything you’re saying about the importance of reading widely, the importance of reading in translation in, uh, in order to be more aware and more informed and more empathetic brings us right back to what we were saying about the gang of fascists. And it tells us something of why they might want to withdraw by fiat over a million dollars worth of funding from exactly the presses that are publishing this stuff.

You know, Will sent me the Publisher’s Weekly piece about this and, of the presses you mentioned, several of them are mentioned just in the PW piece. You know, Deep Vellum is mentioned, Open Letter are mentioned, and these presses that—you’re right—SF should be looking to, should be relying upon, for providing this service to the literature are now at serious risk.

I wonder whether we should get into—because this is Critical Friends, so we are critics and we are meant to be able to expound upon the virtues and values of literature—I wonder whether we should briefly pause, rather than take for read the value of SF in translation. You know, Rachel’s just done a great job of advocating for it. Will, I wonder whether you wanted to talk about your relationship to these kinds of texts and why for you it was “ring the alarm bell, this is happening” as soon as you, you saw that piece.

Will McMahon: Yeah, absolutely. You know, I think that when they talk about this—not just this situation, but literature in translation, and in the genre—critics really rightly point out that it is almost uniquely parochial. The percentage of published literature that’s in translation in the English language market, three percent, is significantly lower than even other major language markets. And that’s really—at least in the US, which is the dominant English speaking country in the world (sorry, Dan!)—is, you know, easy to tie to that nationalism of course. You know, we’re the home of Hollywood, of New York. You know, “everyone wants to read our stuff.” And, you know, narratives of where—whether it’s the origins of science fiction where everyone wants to talk about Hugo Gernsback or maybe some older English authors, but English—there’s kind of this, um, kind of Anglo-chauvinism. And even beyond that, I think it’s just … there’s so much out there. It’s very easy to just be like, well, I’m just gonna keep reading the people that I like and know from my country or my language.

And I think that that leads to a literature that can be overly self-referential, overly kind of self-iterative, where we just kind of recycle the same—whether it’s plots or ideas or tropes or cliches. And innovation is measured by how much of a twist you put on them or, you know, a new perspective to the old thing. And that’s not to say those things aren’t valuable, but there are literatures, there are perspectives, out there that read as far more fresh. If you can encounter them!

And I think I would say that if you have—obviously there is, like Rachel was talking about, a small readership that specifically seeks out literature and translation—but if you have a speculative fiction reader that maybe you read it here or there, but you know, you’re mainly in kind of the core of the English language field, you are benefiting greatly from the fact that these translations are happening—because a lot of the writers you are reading are drawing from this.

I had a great conversation last year at Readercon in the US with Jeffrey Ford and Sofia Samatar about how both were very influenced by the work of Roberto Bolaño, and particularly his short fiction. Now, in the US that was translated by New Directions, which was not receiving NEA grants. But I looked up several of Bolaño’s translators and they were receiving the NEA translation fellowships that are also being cut. So, you know, we’ve got a very good Sofia Samatar novella up for the Hugo this year and, you know, you want to talk about this is work that’s having a very large impact on the English-language field that might not be there, or wouldn’t be the same, if not for this ecosystem of literature in translation. And so I think that it’s something that we should do more of, but what’s already happening is a really key engine of innovation in the field.

And I just did want to tack on that I’m doing the podcast on my end from Rochester, New York, and last week I reached out to Chad Post of Open Letter, which is based out of the University of Rochester, just to get a little more background from him. And the first thing he said when I told him what we were doing was, “Oh, have you talked to Rachel Cordasco?” So I think we’ve got the right people here or one person is the right person!

Dan Hartland: We have Rachel, that’s all we need!

Rachel Cordasco: Yeah, you’re too kind.

Dan Hartland: So I wanna co-sign everything you just said, Will, and I want to dig even deeper.

So Rachel, you mentioned that in all your reading of SF in translation—and then also just sort of as Will was saying about basically Anglophone SF, right?—you perceive a kind of strange relationship.

So at Strange Horizons, we do what we can—I’m sure we could do more, I’m sure we could review more texts in translation, but we try for all the reasons we just talked about—but there is undoubtedly a perception that it is its own thing, that it’s not as integrated as Will is correct in saying it actually is.

So can you talk a bit more about that—how you perceive the wider community of SF to kind of receive or not receive SF in translation?

Rachel Cordasco: I think Strange Horizons actually does the best job, honestly. I’m not just saying that because you’re here, you really, you really try to make a big effort and, you know, I’m honestly super impressed whenever I look through each edition and I see  people like Will—and I mean, there’s so many other people I can’t even think of all of their names—who are reviewing SF in translation.

I’m seeing a lot of it and then I look at Locus. They have Ian Mond who does most of the reviews for SF in translation, but he only does so much. I’ve been in contact with them for years and I’ll send them something. I believe Locus was the one that published my kind of grand review of the ten-book series Legend of the Galactic Heroes, which was, you know, huge. But then, I emailed them last year about something; I don’t hear anything. You know, I emailed them about something the year before; I don’t hear anything. There’s no kind of contact.

And I’m not saying that I need to be the one, I’m just saying I’m not seeing the kind of coverage that they actually used to do, honestly. They used to have a page, Jeff VanderMeer used to do a ton promoting SF in translation, and Lavie and everybody: They used to have a page where they’d kind of have a paragraph of what’s being written interesting in Bulgaria, what’s interesting in Portugal, what’s interesting in Bosnia. And I love that. Give me more, you know! But I’m not seeing so much of that anymore.

[Musical Sting]

Dan Hartland: What’s behind that?

Rachel Cordasco: I think, and I’ve talked to some people who are kind of like, “Well, why would the SF community in the US kind of promote what isn’t itself?” Like, it’s going to, it wants to promote itself. It wants to, everybody wants to, do what’s kind of promoting themselves.

I think there’s such a massive market of English language SF that the ugly stepsister is, you know, the SF in translation. I hope I didn’t offend anyone! But why are we going to, you know, promote something that’s coming out of Italy or promote something that’s coming out of Croatia, when we’ve got all these other people, all these very established people here?

I guess what bothers me is the fact that there’s the talk of, you know, “We are, look at us, we are so diverse and we love everybody and look at our Hugo Awards.” That’s my huge ... I mean, I wrote an essay that I put on my site that’s pretty like, you know, it’s like me being pretty bitter! And, I know no one wants to be reading like a bitter essay, but I was just like: Just because, you know, Cixin Liu won something once and Han Kang won something once, and then ten years ago, Thomas Heuvelt won something. that doesn’t a world prize make!

And we can go into the whole thing, which there’s another big lift again this year of trying to get a translation category in the Hugo Awards. If you look at all the other awards—the French awards, the German awards, the Dutch awards, the Italian awards—they all have a translation category. And, you know, you’ve got, again, another person, Neil Clarke, who has done so much to bring short SFT to English language readers. Most of it is Chinese, you know, it’s not a broad range, but it’s a lot. I mean, we are not wanting for Chinese SF and it’s thanks to him, he’s done a lot of that. But he and other people think that it’s a bad idea, because it would ghettoize certain things and keep them on their own instead of them being like eligible for like other, bigger awards or something.

And you know, honestly the question is a question of visibility: Nobody is gonna know what’s out there if nobody knows what’s out there. And I can tell you, I wish my website was the place everyone went. Like, you wake up in the morning and you go to Rachel’s website. That’s not how it works. So how are they gonna know what’s available? And these awards are a huge way of promoting that and saying “some random people that you don’t know said that these books are awesome.” And you’re like, “That book is from a country that I never even knew they wrote SF!” or something. And so then you go look it up and then you say, “This looks cool!”—and that’s it, you’re in.

You know, even if it was just one year, just one year, one translation category, one year! And then, cut it, you know? You’d get like ten more people who’d be reading it. But everybody’s had a reason why it’s not a good idea.

Will McMahon: So I think it’s interesting talking about … You know, we have to this point been largely talking about the English language and translation. So you might get the idea, there are two languages in the world: There’s English and there’s Translatio or whatever. But obviously, you know, the spectrum is the rest of the world.

I mean, good call-out on Clarkesworld doing really great work. And I think they have, I think a year or two ago they had like a Spanish-language submission window. I know they’ve done a number of other things, too. But, when I was talking with Chad at Open Letter and kind of asking him what he saw, the kind of carry-on effects of this—because the NEA grant funding isn’t the majority of any of these presses’ money, but it is a significant chunk—he suggested that in addition to potentially being one or two fewer books a year put out—and right now they only put out ten a year, so that’d be a pretty significant cut—they’d have to look for alternate sources of funding. And there are countries that will on the other side fund translation into English.

And then there’s increased market considerations, where it’s like, “Well.” The people who buy translated literature are not a monolith. Something translated from French is likely to sell more than something translated from Slovenian or whatever, right? So, even if you can cobble together enough money to say, “OK, we’re gonna keep up the translations,” the world narrows, right?

Like Chinese science fiction has entered the English-language market—partially, not as much as maybe it should, but, but it has kind of staked out a bit of a reputation, whereas, you know, for smaller languages it’s even more of an uphill battle.

Rachel Cordasco: Yeah. But like I said, it’s always been a struggle, I guess, with a lot of these languages. If the government is not … if there’s not funding from their governments to publish here—like, you know, Romanian, let’s say, they’ve got such an amazing world of speculative fiction that has made its way into the US but in strange ways, and only because of funding that dries up and then comes back and then dries up and comes back—you’re, you’re gonna get less and less.

But you know, like I say, the two major Japanese publishers of SF in translation: They shut down. I mean, feel like it was just yesterday, but it may have actually been three or four years ago. Haikasoru was VIZ Media, and VIZ Media was like looking at all of the things they do, and it’s like: Manga sells, but SF in translation, not I guess selling as much. So let’s just cut it.

Dan Hartland: You know, more and more I’m trying to center this kind of, these sort of, material questions in my criticism. I don’t know if I do very well, to be honest, because I prefer the abstract! But it strikes me as so important to acknowledge all of these material conditions in terms of the texts we get and how they reach us. Which of course this whole episode really is about, and I find it really interesting, that historical arc that Rachel’s painting for us—that maybe in the early 2000s, you know, like you say, we had people like Zoran Živković, who I think is great, winning the World Fantasy Award.

Rachel Cordasco: Very much. Yeah. He really deserved that.

Dan Hartland: Yeah! Awesome, awesome author. But that kind of focus has dissipated in recent years, and I can’t avoid the conclusion that it is because people felt their job had been done a little bit.

Rachel Cordasco: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm!

Dan Hartland: Right? “We did it.” You know, “We gave one of these guys an award. What more do you want?!” And critics, too, are I’m sure guilty of that. You know, this idea that, well, we reviewed one once and, you know, we did a big thing and a splashy thing and now we’ll just go back to normal. Whereas what we are aiming for is a kind of more integrated approach rather than this consistent, “Oh well, we looked at that special thing a few years ago and now we can just revert backwards.”

And I think this is because—for me, the reason this is important is because—I agree entirely with what Will said about this is how we get new ideas. This is not to say though, right, that as critics we should be wholly positive about all works in translation.

So we are in this episode advocating and saying, you know, please go and read this stuff, support it, because they are losing other forms of support. But as critics, we also need to be able to say, “Okay, this one is good. And this one isn’t.” And I wonder whether there’s a tension there for us, because we are simultaneously saying how important work in translation is in the general, in the aggregate.

So how do we then go about this, when we find a book that isn’t quite so good—and Rachel, I think pretty recently you’ve published with Strange Horizons in, in this way—when we come across a specific work in translation that just doesn’t work for us? How do we handle that?

Rachel Cordasco: I mean, you know, how many emails have I sent to you where I’m like—it hasn’t been many, but it’s been a few!—where I’m like, “This book is bad. What am I gonna do?” Because it’s really hard to write.

I mean, I could unleash, but like, what’s good about that? Who’s that gonna benefit? You know, that’s just a screed. Like I think SF translation is honestly held to a higher standard. International literature is held to a much higher standard. And what’s interesting is that I feel like the percentage that’s good, like just a kind of objectively good, is actually higher in the amount of international literature we get, because things have been vetted so many times.

Dan Hartland: And this is where the material context comes in, right? The bar is higher.

Rachel Cordasco: The bar is so high. Like, first you need to get published, right? Then you get published in your country, then someone needs to make the decision to translate it. Then you have to translate it. Then you gotta get it published again, and then, you know, by the time you get it in the hands of the readers—believe me, I am the first one to be like, this translation sucks, you know?—but I rarely come across bad translations.

I just have to say it’s like the translators feel like they have an extra burden on them because the most annoying thing to hear is like, “This reads kind of like English, but not really.” No one wants that. So the translators, often writers themselves, are really going above and beyond making the translation sound. As you know, what people want is for it to read … they don’t wanna know that it’s translated. They wanna just read it. And they wanna enjoy it. And these translations are done very well, these translators are very high quality. And the publishers are choosing high quality translators. You’ve got Open Letter, you know at the University of Rochester, I think they have a program, and a bunch of other places around the country have translation programs, where you can get your degree in translation.

I feel like it is a very high bar. But yes, I recently read a couple of books in translation that I really wanted to like, I really did. The translation was perfect. The translation was excellent. These translators have translated books that I’ve loved in the past. So it wasn’t them, it wasn’t the quality of the translation, it was the story. I’ll let you go for a long time before I say, “OK. That’s just, we’re not going there.” And you know, sometimes you get to a book where you’re like, “This is … what are you doing? You’re just rambling. You’re all over the place and it’s not working and I feel like you just wasted my time.” And I get real mad when I feel like a book is wasted my time.

But it’s just so rare. And all I really read is SF in translation, so I can tell you. You’re absolutely right. We shouldn’t say, “Well, it should all be published. It’s all good. Everybody should love it. End of story.” It’s like any other thing. There’s high quality, there’s low quality, there’s stuff that gets through for one reason or another. There’s stuff that other people will say … I’ll just give one more example and then I’ll shut up.

A few years ago, another critic, I don’t even remember who it was, and I both reviewed a work of Japanese, kind of classic SF—almost like a Stanisław Lem type. It was surreal, you know? It’s like science fiction and then it’s like, you know, inward science fiction. It’s the mental and the universe and everything, and I just thought it was really fascinating. I’d never read anything like it before. I took it for what it is. And I thought the translation was excellent.

And the other critic was like, this sucks! Because, you know, “I don’t like this about it. I don’t like that about it. I don’t like this about it.” And then the great international literature reviewer Michael Orthofer I remember put up a tweet and said: “Hold on! So-and-so said this was great, So-and-so said this was horrible, what?!”

And I said, “Well, we’re approaching it … I was approaching it very textually. They were approaching it kind of culturally, politically.” They wanted the book to be what it wasn’t. I was approaching the book as it was, not how I wanted it to be, which is very hard sometimes. You want a book to be a certain way and you’re disappointed; but, you know, you, that’s what you get. Sometimes you get a book that two people think is completely different.

But like I say, I just think the quality is really great and people don’t realize that.

Dan Hartland: Yeah. I mean, Will, I don’t know what you make of this question. I mean, one thing that that struck me as Rachel was speaking was, when I’m reviewing a work in translation, I am intensely aware that I can’t really rate the quality of the translation, except in so far as it feels natural. The prose feels natural, you know, in terms of … I suppose by quality, part of what I’m talking about is the accuracy. Is this the book? And of course, that’s a whole other thing we don’t need to go down.

Rachel Cordasco: Yeah. You can’t know.

Dan Hartland: But, when you read as widely as Rachel does—and we try, Will!—you can’t be an expert in the cultures from which every single one of these texts is coming. So you do have to read in a very open way, I hope. But there will nevertheless still come—even if you read as openly as possible, and even if you let the translation speak to you and don’t worry too much about this, that and the other—there will still be books that maybe don’t work for you. So, yeah, I don’t know whether you’ve had that experience, Will, and what you think the critic’s role is when it comes to, “Yes. in aggregate. But what about the specifics?”

Will McMahon: Yeah, I think the bigger picture answer is that the way we get towards a more global perspective on, literature as English-language readers is by making sure every discussion of literature and translation doesn’t feel like an advertisement, but to kind of treat it equally—as, like, I’m just gonna engage with this like I would with any book. Now obviously it’s not really like with any book because you’re saying the cultural context or kinda the history of the things that people would have reading in that context.

I read a lot in translation—or, I don’t know, I try to read a lot in translation, I’m actually just in general a slow reader, so that’s always been a struggle—but I vaguely tilt myself towards Latin American literature and, and originally, Spanish language, but far from exclusively. So I try, and especially if I’m doing a review, to understand something of the context.

One of the best books I read last year, coming out of one of these affected small presses, Transit Books, was The Novices of Lerna by Ángel Bonomini, originally published in the 1970s in Argentina, a beautiful short fiction collection. Some of the stories didn’t work great for me, but it was really only a couple. Overall it was, just really scintillating prose, really fascinating ideas. But, you know, also all the narrators of all the stories, or almost all of all, were men, and had like pretty, just in general, a pretty reductive and objective view of women. And I noted that in my review for the Ancillary Review of Books, which also does a lot of reviews in translation.

But just put it in the context of, you know, this is not particularly surprising for an Argentine man in the 1970s, just like it wouldn’t be for an American man in the 1970s—or frankly today. But I think just kinda like noting it, if you understand something of the cultural context, you do need to be a little more careful around those cultural elements.

Oh, and I just want to append, because especially in this discussion, I should really be noting the translator’s names as well: That one was translated by, uh, Jordan Landsman. You know, you gotta talk about style and prose, and I think you just have to, in that case I think you have to say Bonomini’s prose, as rendered by Landsman, right? You know, this version that I am reading.

[Musical Sting]

Dan Hartland: Will, you just mentioned Ancillary Review of Books, and we should mention that the editor there and our friend, Casella Brookins, is the person behind what Rachel was talking about, which is the potential award for translated work Hugo. Rachel was talking about the pushback there has been against that, even though I agree entirely that it’s a chicken and egg situation here: It’s really hard to argue you can’t have a Best Translated Hugo because no one reads best translated work, because then the cycle just never stops.

But I guess, Casella’s work there—and I, I know Rachel, you are working really closely with him on it as well—brings us to this other question that jumps off my kind of poor critic idea: “Oh. What do you do when you’re reviewing a book? It’s so hard!” What can we do as critics—as readers, as engaged citizens!—to improve the lot of SF in translation? The obvious answer is just read more about it and write more widely about it. But at this time of potential, in the US, crisis for SF in translation—and every single one of the publishers that I have contacted for review copies and just to let them know we’re doing this thing, have responded immediately, which with all due respect to my publisher friends, is not common, so my suspicion is they feel the urgency also—what can we do?

How can we help, you know? What is it that we should be looking towards in terms of the future of SF in translation?

Rachel Cordasco: Well, I would like to put the burden on—and I know that, you know, this is just me talking, everyone can roll their eyes and ignore it—but I can tell you that I get very few notes. I don’t know why this is hard. Put a sticky out. You work at one of these publishers, put a sticky on your laptop and it’s just got my email. Anytime you’re going to be publishing a work of SF in translation, just let me know. I mean, no one tells me!

So, you know, that’s part of the work that I’ve taken on to do myself, which is to hunt for it. But why should I have to hunt for it?! If you just … I mean, I will literally splash it across my, my website. I’m finding things out months later. This is not like my full-time job. I’ve got some time where I’m able to focus, but you know, I’m doing twenty-five million other things, three young kids and a part-time job. And I’m trying to keep all this going! But, like you’ve said, you know, my website has a purpose. It’s a very specific purpose and I have a number of people—I’m not on all the different social media sites, whatever—but I have a certain number of people that have followed me for years and they look to me to aggregate this stuff. So all I’m saying is, if people let me know what is coming, I can distribute that widely, not eight months later when I suddenly find out, you know?

But if people will just tell me, come to me, and just email me: “Guess what? We’re publishing this, end of story!” You know, “Look, this is coming out.” I’ll be like, “Great!” And I’ll put it on there and you know, I know people do go to my site. So people will go to the site and they’ll see it and I will then ask you, Dan, or I’ll talk to World Lit Today, or I’ll talk to Words Without Borders. I will help distribute that knowledge of what is coming out, what exists. I should email people more. I should, of course I can review more. I can do more, you know. But I’m saying there’s some stuff they can do, you know, that would help.

Dan Hartland: Rachel, I would like to submit for the consideration of our listeners that in fact you could not do more! There is no more that you can do as a single human being!

Rachel Cordasco: When my children are in college, I’ll do more! But until they’re in college, you know, we all have a limited amount of time. I’m trying because I love this. This is like this what, this makes me very happy.

Dan Hartland: We do all have a limited amount of time and resource and that is why step one—which is what you’ve just told us and which is so important—is use the platforms we have already.

Rachel Cordasco: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Dan Hartland: We have them, and we can use them more, and people can reach out to them more.

I mean, I do think that one of the functions of what we’ve been talking about—which is this slight-slash-increasing separation between “core” SF (and I put that in scare quotes) and SF in translation—one of the functions of that is that the people who are publishing SF in translation don’t automatically think of us when they are promoting their books—which is fair because some people just don’t reply about this stuff! And it is about, as a magazine, reaching out to these publishers and saying, “Please, please, we define speculative fiction very widely. We set out to have a global perspective on the literature. Please, please, please tell us about this stuff and do some of the work to integrate the cultures a bit more.” I guess that’s something that I will commit to doing!

Will McMahon: Yeah, I think the, the critic’s role is that we could be meaner towards English-language work.

You know, and I say that jokingly. I don’t want to over-blow this, I mean there’s some amazing work coming out of kind of Anglophone literature, though that itself is now very internationalized, which is one of the very positive things that I have been going on in the field. When I was talking with Chad from Open Letter and we were talking about this book I’m reading from them right now, The Fake Muse by Max Besora, originally in Catalan, and it’s very mosaic and crazy and shifting. And you know, he said to me like, “Oh, and you know, that makes me think: I just bought this book on a friend’s recommendation and it was Rakesfall by Vajra Chandrasekera.” You know, friend of Strange Horizons! So there is some really phenomenal stuff obviously happening.

But I do think that in the Anglophone genre and at least kind of the mainstream conversation, whatever that means—I don’t know, the Hugo scene or whatever—I think that there is not nearly enough discussion of style. I think in kind of the English-language speculative fiction that’s getting put out, especially in short fiction, there’s a lot of experimentation in form, but it feels like not quite as much in style and—and I think especially in the novel field. I think that there’s a couple of dominant styles in kind of quote-unquote mainstream science fiction and fantasy in the English language.

And I think it’s just kind of taken for granted. It’s the water and a lot of the discussion—and, I’m not talking specifically about critical discussion—is just about like the ideas, the characters, the plot, and, you know. None of those things actually exist, right? The only things that actually exist are the words. It’s just a string of words. I actually was just reading the recent reissue of Ursula Le Guin’s essay collection, The Language of the Night, which is very good if you can wade through the four different introductions and prefaces and whatever that they’ve tacked on over the additions.

But there’s one essay I was just reading, and I forget the name of it, where she’s complaining about the kind of lack of good criticism in science fiction. And this was in the 1970s where she was saying, “If you’re a concert violinist, someone will tell you if you’re second rate. But if you write science fiction, people are just gonna buy it. And then, you know, it’ll drop off the face of the earth after, you know, the first printing or whatever.” And I, I do think that this has probably only gotten worse as we’ve gotten out of … like, newspaper reviews are dying. Criticism is kind of moving off to its little online silos, and then there’s the ascendancy of Goodreads and the reader as consumer.

And if we shift what we’re talking about and if as critics at least are able to broaden the conversation just a little bit to be talking about what exists and what is possible when it comes to style and how these stories are being told, I think that just makes a very natural opening to frankly the much more expansive possibilities that are out there in the translated literature.

And, you know, hopefully we’ll just make things better in general!

Dan Hartland: And it links back to what Rachel was saying about the higher bar, right? So we’re reading these SF in translation texts and we are aware that the bar is so much higher for those books getting published. Yet somehow, perhaps some of us in the critical discourse aren’t making those bars visible.

Rachel Cordasco: So steps, right? Moving forward, keep doing what we’re doing. I think maybe other things to do: continue to reach out to publishers, continue to stay on their radar. Continue to kind of engage, find ways of engaging readers. You know, I tried to do, and totally didn’t work, and people could have told me this if I had asked! But I tried to do an informal best best SFT novel, best SFT story. And I did like a Survey Monkey or something and people game it and mess it up, you know? But it was a way to try to engage people. Sometimes I’ll on social media do trivia and I’ll say, “What do you think was the most published language this year in SF? Was it Spanish? Was it Korean?” And people are like, “Ooh, what a question!” And then, and then I’ll point them to my spreadsheet and I’ll say, “Here’s the spreadsheet, you can look at all of the charts and you can see kind of what was big this year.”

And then the question becomes, why was Korean surrealism so big this year? Why was French horror so big last year? Keep lists. Keep lists of the things that you wanna write about. And then send them, you send them to Strange Horizons, World Lit Today, Words Without Borders. I have to say, World Lit Today has been more responsive to me than a place like Locus, because they’re really, really trying to, capture international lit, which pulls in SF. And Strange Horizons, which focuses on speculative fiction, you’re capturing the translation.

And I think there is also, only so much you can, because the pool of readers is itself quite small—readers, period. And so I’m starting to not care if people’s eyes glaze over. I talk to people at my kids’ school. They say, “What do you do?” I say, “Oh, well, let me tell you!” And I talk to people, if I’m talking to people at a grocery store and they say, “What do you do?” I’ll say, “Oh, I’m a freelance writer, but you know what I write about?!” And I’ll tell ’em. And if they seem kind of bored, you know, maybe a few days later they’ll be like, “Oh, that’s interesting. Maybe I’ll look it up.”

It’s a lot of talking, it’s a lot of word of mouth, it’s a lot of pushing forward, you know, and waiting for the next wave—because I can tell you, there was a wave of interest in SFT in the seventies, there was a wave in the nineties, there was a wave in like the twenty-teens, and it’ll come back again. It seems to be pretty consistent generationally, because every generation has people. There’s always going to be a generation of people who raise this up. I just need to keep contacting as many people as I can, because this is what I love and I want everyone else to love it.

If you look at the long, broad sweep of history, I feel like it’s really positive, honestly. Things always come around.

Will McMahon: Yeah. Things I would just point people towards: We’ve mentioned Open Letter several times, one of the publishers affected. Anyone who’s interested in the situation as it’s happening now and what these presses are thinking and what the future might hold, I would really strongly recommend the three-part podcast—The 3% Podcast is the name—the podcast put out by Open Letter. They did a three-episode series last month, with Chad Post as the host, and he brought in a number of people for each episode from the organizations affected. And that was really informative and I think they had some really fascinating discussions.

I mean, one thing about the scale of the problem here: We’re talking about it like it is this huge blow to literature and translation, but that is such a small market. We’re talking $1.2 million a year, these direct NEA grants. You wanna talk about all these arts councils and translation fellowships, but you could endow that for $25 million, right?

This is pocket change to, say, the Big Five publishers and, frankly, considering how much they benefit from this work, both directly—like, you have an author that breaks out with one of these small presses, pretty soon they’re gonna be getting published by Penguin Random House or Macmillan—but also indirectly, like I said, it, this is like the fertilizer keeping Anglophone literature relatively healthy. It would be nothing for these large publishers to endow an independent organization that just kept up these grants. The danger is when you’ve got kind of these individual donors, right—like, the Elizabeth Koch situation.

So, yeah, I think it’s interesting to look at, and people are thinking about how these nonprofit small presses aren’t nonprofit just because they make no money, but because they’re also like doing things like Rachel was saying, they’re attached to translation programs. They’re trying to do things, put things out into the field. So I think supporting them in that—and then, the last thing is read. People should read more work in translation. I don’t want it to sound like homework, right? It’s the same thing that I think genre readers often have when discussing like quote literary fiction (which is not a coherent category anyway): It sounds like kind of stuffy or like eating your vegetables, which I don’t like. (I like vegetables if you cook ’em right.)

But, you know, this stuff is great. It can be wild, it can be off the wall. I mentioned I’m reading The Fake Muse by Max Besora, translated by Mara Faye Lethem from Open Letter right now: This thing is insane. The text is littered photos of giant hamsters shooting lasers out of their eyes and it’s kinda like a zine and there’s all this wild like typography, it’s just a blast. Some of the best science fiction, short fiction I’ve read recently was from a Bolivian writer, Liliana Colanzi. Her collection, You Glow in the Dark, translated by Chris Andrews for New Directions, is dark cyberpunk, really good. This stuff is great, right?

So this isn’t, “Do it because it’s good for you,” but because it’s good. We wanna support these presses, do it because this stuff is great. And I think, when we’re talking about being too inward looking or not looking at the rest of the world, the biggest sin there is against ourselves. We’re missing out on so much great literature when we’re not engaging with the rest of the world. Literature is a conversation. All art is a conversation. And if we cut off who we’re talking to, that conversation is just gonna be less interesting.

Rachel Cordasco: I’m so glad that Strange Horizons does so much to promote SFT. It’s been really great talking to you guys. Thank you so much.

Dan Hartland: Honestly, thank you. Really appreciate it.

Rachel Cordasco: Thank you. I’ll talk to you guys later then.

Will McMahon: Yeah. Bye. Thanks.

[Musical Outro]

Rachel Cordasco: I, yeah, just keep working and staying positive is really my suggestion.

Dan Hartland: Rachel, it is entirely not on brand for this podcast to end on a note of optimism, but thank you.

Rachel Cordasco: Oh, I’m glad I could bring some, because I’m, sometimes like, “Oh, everything just sucks.”

All: [laughs]

[Musical Outro continues]

Dan Hartland: Thanks for listening to Critical Friends, the Strange Horizons SFF Criticism podcast. Our music is “Dial-Up” by Lost Cosmonauts. You can hear more of their music at grandevalise.bandcamp.com. See you next time.