Europe’s Literature on the Edge Breaks Into the Mainstream

Half a century ago, Taras Shevchenko wrote:

“Good, brother, who are you?”

“We don’t know. Let the German tell us.”

And when the German reminded the Ukrainians that they had their own language, they regained their reason and hope:

“We’ll speak in our own language, someday,

Like the German says.

He’ll show us our history as well,

And then we’ll be on our way!”

This excerpt comes from one of the Ukrainian poet’s most important poems, entitled, “A Friendly Letter to my Fellow-Countrymen, in Ukraine and not in Ukraine, Living, Dead and as Yet Unborn.” It was written in the years 1844-45 under the influence of the Stepan Samoilov – not one of the Russian poets, for whom the Ukrainian language was one of the dialects spoken by the subjects of the empire.

In the third decade of the 21st century, the topic returns like a boomerang in a slightly changed variant. Each of the Slavic literatures has its 20th-century chapter. Each of them, except for the Russian one, which the Russians managed to export to the world as “great,” is struggling to break through to the Western audience. Putin’s full-scale war against Ukraine drew the world’s attention to the existence of Ukrainian culture and literature. For how long and with what result?

Ukrainian authors in English

Writers, critics and publishers ask themselves whether Polish, Czech, Slovak, Hungarian, Bulgarian or Ukrainian literature is doomed to the margins of the market? Do they suffer from the defect of provincialism, illegibility, entanglement in local problems that writers are unable to transfer into a universal dimension?

Or maybe it is so separate that it will one day spark the creation of its own particular view of Mitteleuropean culture? Olga Tokarczuk has written about it many times, she has spoken about it in numerous interviews. In this dream, which I encountered again at this year’s London Book Fair, there is a refusal – based on self-esteem – to live at the peripheries.

However, this thinking is not strongly based on facts. And it is not because we, east of the Elbe and west of the Dnipro, have been and will be doomed to provincialism. Even if it is true that books by writers from Central and Eastern Europe rarely or never make it to the bestseller lists (except for Nobel meteorites and other award-winners, such as Olga Tokarczuk and Georgi Gospodinov), their authors act as visiting writers at international festivals in order to enrich their programs with Eastern European exoticism. Yet the reason for this “nicheness” is not only historical and political.

In order to define it, it is worth looking at the translations of Polish literature in Germany from the last three decades. I will not reach for the times when Polish literature had to break through the cordon of communist censorship and the Iron Curtain in this text. For balance and a fuller picture, it is necessary to look at the fate of German literature in Poland, not so much at the number of published literary titles, but at their readership resonance.

Oksana Zabuzhko won the Polish Angelus prize in 2013.

The situation of Ukrainian literature abroad was similar. The list of translations of such authors as Oksana Zabuzhko, Serhiy Zhadan or Yuri Andrukhovych was impressive, but we cannot talk about international and commercial success. Oksana Zabuzhko was represented by Galina Dursthoff Agency, and since 2017 by me, Zhadan and Andrukhovych by Suhrkamp Verlag, a publisher open to the East European market.

Everything changed after Feb. 24, 2022. The wave of offers from Western Europe started. But it does not mean that we can talk about big sales and a wave of bestsellers. This is the result of years of ignorance, lack of translators into many languages, and domination for years of Russian studies in Slavic departments at the universities.

I will recall here my 25 years of experience in publishing, with German literature in Poland, and the conclusions of three decades of efforts to find foreign publishers for books by Polish authors. From my numerous contacts with Eastern and Central European writers and publishers, I conclude that the German intermediary so accurately and ironically referred to by Shevchenko is still considered by many to be an indispensable bridge to the world, at least at the beginning of the journey of their books in translation.

“When a German helps” – i.e., when a translation of a Polish or Ukrainian book is published in the German market – the door to other markets seems, if not open, then at least ajar. There is some truth in this. You have to start somewhere. Especially since translations of, for example, Polish literature into other Slavic languages usually do not have such a causative power. However, it also happens that the translation into German ends there. I have come across the argument of Western European publishers about the special interest of German publishers in Polish or Ukrainian literature for historical reasons, which is not confirmed by the statistics of recent years (if we look at translations from other, non-Slavic languages). It was supposed to justify their lack of conviction in this case.

Publishers, literary agents, or executives involved in the promotion of native culture, including literature, know very well that nothing helps their efforts more than a great success, sometimes of one book or one author. It plays the role of a magnet attracting attention and allowing us to build a cultural policy that goes beyond one event, one title, one name. Polish literature in Germany suffers from a lack of such success.

I hope that Ukrainian literature will not share that experience. But there is a lot to do by Ukrainian cultural institutions, publishers and politicians who should know that culture, particularly literature, is one of the best and least expensive means of promotion. But during the war you have a different hierarchy of priorities.

Andrey Kurkov, Yurko Durkot, Viktoria Amelina and Serhiy Plokhy at Frankfurt Book Fair 2018

There have been awards and distinctions, but the phenomenon that the West had hoped for after the collapse of the communist bloc and the USSR did not emerge. The boom of Ibero-American literature had died out, and there was no boom of Eastern European literature.

“Good, brother, who are you?”

“We don’t know. Let the German tell us.”

This time, however, the words from Shevchenko’s poem were already an empty spell that some Polish writers, editors or publishers were counting on, and perhaps still are. Not because, in my opinion, writers from this part of Europe have not found a universal language for stories about the bygone world and the birth of a new post-communist reality. Such books have been published in Ukraine, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Romania, Bulgaria and Poland. Some of them were even translated. But to paraphrase Shevchenko: “The German didn’t help anymore.”

The efforts of publishers and literary agents have not been made easier by the fact that the Polish right-wing government, which is fighting against the European Union, has been seen negatively in Western Europe. I have come across such an argument instead of an open message about the lack of interest. And the fact that Putin’s policy did not harm Russian writers and artists until the full-scale war with Ukraine unfortunately does not change anything in this regard.

The belief persists that the door – still slightly ajar – for the translation of books from the eastern part of the great European plain will not be slammed shut. This seems especially important when there is a war in Europe again.

Publisher and literary agent Beata Stasińska in “Ukrainian Gothic” T-shirt

For the time being, there is no single answer to the question of why Eastern and Central European literature has difficulty breaking through to readers beyond their own borders.

Perhaps the degree of commercialization of the market, formatting literature in the Anglo-Saxon fashion, marginalizing texts that place greater demands on the reader, and limiting the number of translations from languages other than English, with the parallel diktat of a quick return on the costs of publishing and accounting for the profitability of each title, play a significant role here?

“We don’t know. Let the German tell us.” Because it certainly is happening in Poland.

Well, German literature remained the literature of the Great European Plain. Just like Ukrainian, Polish, Czech or Slovak literature. Ukrainian literature is now having its tragic fifteen minutes of the world’s attention.

It is time to draw conclusions from this fact. In Warsaw, Berlin, Bucharest, Prague, and Kyiv...