Translating the Literatures of Small European Nations

This book constitutes the most detailed and wide-ranging comparative study to date of how European literatures written in less well known languages try, through translation, to reach the wider world. Through case studies of over thirteen different national contexts as diverse as Bosnian, Catalan, Czech, Dutch, Maltese, Polish, Portuguese, Swedish and Serbian, it explores patterns and contrasts in approaches to supply-driven translation, cultural diplomacy, institutional support and international gate-keeping, while examining the particular fates of poetry, women’s writing and genre fiction, and the opportunities arising from trans-medial circulation, self-translation and translingualism and a more radical critique of power balances in the translation and publishing industries. Its comparative approach challenges both the narratives of uniqueness that arise from discrete national approaches and the narrative of tragic marginalization that prevails in world literary approaches. Instead, it uses an interdisciplinary mix of literary, historical, sociological, gender- and translation-studies approaches to illuminate the often pioneering, innovative thinking and strategies that mark these literatures as they take on the inequalities of globalization. The most detailed and wide-ranging comparative study to date of how European literatures written in less well known languages try, through translation, to reach the wider world, rejecting the predominant narrative of tragic marginalization with case studies of endeavour and innovation from nineteenth-century Swedish women’s writing to twenty-first-century Polish fantasy.