Literary stars far from lost in translation

SCOTS literature is enjoying a new found international popularity with a boom in foreign translations, which has seen modern classics such as Alasdair Gray’s Lanark being printed in languages such as Hebrew, Russian and Greek.

Last year, the Edinburgh publisher Canongate made 800,000 in overseas sales, while translations constitute 40 per cent of its fiction lists.

The rising sales trend has been hailed as new evidence of the strength of contemporary Scots literature.

The Glasgow novelist Louise Welsh and the author Michel Faber - Dutch by birth but living in the Scottish Highlands - are leaders in the field. Faber has sold the rights to his work, The Crimson Petal and the White in 22 countries so far; Welsh has taken The Cutting Room to about eight.

But other authors beyond these current stars of the Canongate stable have also recorded significant sales.

Last October John Burnside, a Fife-based poet and novelist, saw the French edition of his novel The Dumbhouse - La Maison Muette - sell out in a couple of weeks.

Burnside’s poems have also been published in Catalan, Spanish, French, German and Norwegian, and he recently received an e-mail from a Dutch fan proposing to translate them in the Netherlands.

"In many of those countries there is a growing interest in Scottish writing," he said.

"In the old days you saw a great interest in Irish writing. Now people are realising the diversity of Scottish writing, beyond the stereotypes of heather and shortbread, or the gritty urban realist type of Irving Welsh’s Trainspotting."

In Europe, Italy seems to be following France’s lead in embracing Scottish writers - especially those of a more highbrow nature.

The Scottish Arts Council has this year seen unprecedented pressure on its 30,000 annual budget for supporting translations.

About 15 publishers from 13 countries have recently applied for help in translating 21 novels, plays and poetry collections by Scottish writers.

They include three Italian publishers, but firms and translators from Finland to Serbia, Bulgaria, and the Czech Republic have been seeking the grants, which start at a few hundred pounds. They will help translate Liz Lochhead’s collected Scots and English poems and other writings into Italian.

John Ward, a children’s writer whose first book, The Secret of the Alchemist, has sold better in the United States than in the UK, is to see the title translated into Greek.

Anne Donovan’s book Buddha Da, despite being written in Glasgow Scots vernacular, has been sold to the US, Canada, Israel, and Russia.

The British Council, meanwhile, is said to have seen a sharp increase in Scottish writers being invited abroad. There is talk of establishing a clearing house for literary translation, based on similar projects in Wales and Ireland.

Gavin Wallace, the arts council’s head of literature, said: "The booming interest in Scottish writing internationally, and the cosmopolitan Scottish writing scene, are reciprocal trends, and these developments are playing a central part in one of the most exciting periods ever in the history of Scottish literature."

Alasdair Gray has three books already published in France with another in the works.

He found himself being lionised by the French critics with the publication of Lanark, his classic 1982 work, in France two years ago.

"We are certainly being taken seriously," he said, adding with a chuckle: "We’re not taken quite as seriously in England as we are in foreign countries, but that’s quite understandable."

Lanark is shortly being issued in Hebrew. Only one of his books, Poor Things, is out in Italian, but "for some reason that’s the place I get most letters from students writing doctoral theses on my books," he said.

Canongate Books’ managing director, David Graham, said that the firm’s burgeoning success - it has reported profits of close to 1 million this year - has gone hand in hand with building a strong international reputation.

More than three of the publisher’s staff will be working on international rights sales at this week’s London Book Fair.

Mr Graham noted that outstanding Scottish authors, often published by big London firms, have always found an international market.

But translation opens up new areas and Mr Graham cited his own wife, the author Kirsty Gunn, as a case in point.

He said that she was far more celebrated in France, with its taste for novels of ideas, than in Britain.