Finesse without frontiers

A young man at my table in a caf was reading a book called Le Gnral de l'Arme Morte. "What's it about?" I asked him. "De la futilit de la guerre," he said. The next day I bought the book and discovered it was a translation. Kadar (pictured) was not French, but Albanian.

Years later, when I was working as an editor and translator for a London publishing house, I had the idea for a new imprint - a series of "literary encounters": translations introduced by living writers whose own output had been influenced by the foreign writer. The editorial meeting to float the project took place on 19 May, 1983, and my notes (I have them still) seem now to come from a lost Eden, gloriously eclectic and high-minded.

My lofty proposal began with a quotation from Melville: "For genius, all over the world, stands hand in hand, and one shock of recognition runs the whole circle round." Ideas for translated works ranged from the Czech writer Skvorecky (with an introduction by Tom Stoppard) to Zbigniew Herbert (prefaced by Ted Hughes). I even suggested George Mackay Brown might introduce Strindberg's The People of Hems. In fact, none of these came to pass, but the imprint went ahead and in 1985 brought out its first six titles, which included translations from Hebrew (Aharon Appelfeld), Polish (Witkiewicz), Italian (Grazia Deledda), and German (Gustav Janouch's Conversations with Kafka). Does anyone remember them? They didn't sell.

The following year, 1986, we published another six, among them Kadar's The General of the Dead Army, the story of an Italian general who is sent to Albania 20 years after the end of the Second World War to search for the remains of those who lost their lives. The enormity of the general's task slowly overwhelms him and despair gives way to madness. It is a sobering book, whose haunting message - as indicated by the man in the French caf - is indeed the futility of war.

In those days, hardly anyone had heard of Kadar, or any Albanian writer. Then as now, people struggled to name a single famous Albanian - apart from Mother Teresa. Not much changed until the announcement this month that Kadar was the surprise winner of the International Man Booker Prize. But even John Carey, chair of the judges, said that he had not known of Kadar's work before last year.

There's no shame in this, as some suggest. It's true that in Britain we have tended to be an insular lot, with literary tastes to match, springing partly from a misplaced idea that foreign literature is the preserve of academe and intellectual snobs. But this is changing. The world is getting smaller and publishers are responding. For the last ten years Harvill has had a wonderful list of translated authors, and now Canongate is blazing the trail.

Besides, Kadar is something of a special case, partly because there is no tradition in this country, as there is in France and Germany, of translating directly from the Albanian - which means that his books come to us twice-removed. Many things are lost in translation, not least the resonances and cadences of the original: how much greater the loss for a double translation?

In his illuminating (and reassuring) essay, "The Englishing of Ismal Kadar", David Bellos describes his initial doubts about working at two removes from the original. In recent years Bellos has translated several of Kadar's novels (The File on H, The Pyramid and Spring Flowers, Spring Frost), aiming "to respect the simplicity of the language, and at the same time to decorate it with those classical and Shakespearean associations that seem to me to hover over nearly all he writes". Kadar, who lives in France, is evidently relaxed about this, feeling that "what he has to say will come through in pretty much any language".

Let's hope he's right. The Booker judges have recognised that Kadar is at heart a storyteller whose work deals with universal themes: love, loss, and the strange ways in which the dead are brought into contact with the living.

Jennie Erdal's Ghosting is out in paperback next week (Canongate, 7.99). She will be at the EIBF on Sunday, 21 August, at 8pm.