Foreign Intrigue

Booktrust, a Web site promoting foreign fiction in English translations, features a fascinating piece by British über critic Barry Forshaw on the thorny topic of translated crime fiction. Forshaw told me about this article when we met at last week’s Quercus/MacLehose party, and it is now available online.

The essay begins:

It didn’t quite get to the point of blood being shed, but a contentious debate among British crime writers and enthusiasts arrived at a turning point with the award (a couple of years ago) of the prestigious Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger. The recipient? Arnaldur Indridason, for his novel Silence of the Grave, originally written in his native Icelandic.

Several British writers had long been muttering darkly, ‘Isn’t every sale for a foreign writer one less for a Brit?’ All of this was the calm before the storm: the CWA’s subsequent announcement that future Dagger entries must be written in English (i.e., not translations) thoroughly divided both readers and the publishing world, even though a major new award was inaugurated for crime in translation (with even the translator--so crucial to such work--acknowledged).

All the fuss was justified. Few crime readers on either side of the Atlantic can have failed to notice the avalanche of foreign crime novels flooding into the bookshops--most of them greeted with massively enthusiastic reviews. But these hotter-than-hot new writers (Henning Mankell, Fred Vargas, Karin Fossum, et al.)--taking readers into fascinatingly unfamiliar new climes for crime--are only the latest literary combatants in a crime fiction war that began quite some time ago with some remarkably talented writers ...

A link to the piece can be found here. Or go directly Forshaw’s story, available in Microsoft Word format, here.