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On the work of a Turkish literary agency

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Turkey has been in the headlines lately -- Turkey and Iran, Turkey and Israel -- and now Publishing Perspectives, a website dedicated to the international side of the book business, looks at Turkey and books.

Specifically, they’ve posted a piece by Amy Marie Spangler, an American living in Turkey and the founder of AnatoliaLit, a primary Turkish literary agency. AnatoliaLit both represents foreign publishers and agents in Turkey and sells Turkish authors to publishers in America and elsewhere. Spangler writes:

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We face the same problems that anyone trying to do this job faces when trying to promote our authors abroad, especially as we are dealing in Turkish, a “non-major” source language, the first of which is getting editors to read or have our titles read... There are also often certain expectations, I find, on the part of English language publishers in particular, which don’t always mesh with our list. There seems to be a bias when it comes to works from other parts of the world, especially from countries like Turkey, which are seen as relatively exotic. I often find that publishers seem to expect foreign fiction to provide easily digestible information about the cultures from which the works originate, and that this can often take precedence over literary quality or the nature of the stories themselves. Any work inevitably provides an insight into the culture from which it hails, but this doesn’t always come in obvious chunks of information. In terms of what publishers take an interest in, I find it particularly difficult to pitch any kind of humor or satire, which, despite claims to the contrary, I think is definitely effectively translatable, if indeed a challenge.

Works in translation, it is often said, constitute just 3% of American publishing. Spangler hopes this will change, saying, “the imbalance and insularity is, quite frankly, embarrassing.”

If those books tend toward the didactic -- with “easily digestible” nuggets of cultural information over books that are good, smart or funny reads -- then it’s no surprise that publishers tend to say works in translation don’t sell. But one exception proves that American readers will welcome translated works that do not try to teach cultural lessons. Although the young writer Muriel Barbery had a hit in France with “The Elegance of the Hedgehog,” her work was unknown in America when the book was published by the small independent house Europa Editions. Translated from the French, “The Elegance of the Hedgehog” spent more than a year on the New York Times bestseller list and weeks on NPR’s bestseller list.

-- Carolyn Kellogg
twitter.com/paperhaus

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