‘It’s better when it’s about people’
My current office is at the end of a hall that I share with cardiologists and gynecologists, the idea being to facilitate communication. The shelves in the hall have information on cholesterol, blood pressure control, prenatal vitamins and birth control. Plastic models of the heart in all its glory sit next door to large plastic models of the vagina, uterus and fetuses.
I received a call a year or two ago from a patient mistakenly thinking she was calling one of my distinguished gynecological colleagues. All I knew was that the patient was talking about a Bartholin’s cyst.
Somewhere in the mossy undergrowth of my brain I knew that I once knew what a Bartholin’s cyst was, but my conscious mind was having difficulty accessing my own mental hard drive. This patient thought she was talking to a gynecologist; I thought I was talking to a cardiac patient. And I couldn’t, for the life of me, remember where on the heart the Bartholin’s cyst might be.
It wasn’t more than one or two sentences before I realized, when the patient mentioned something about pain with urination, that I was in the wrong anatomical hemisphere and that this woman was calling the wrong doctor. I explained that I was a cardiologist and not a gynecologist, but she persisted, looking for my advice. I told her that I really did not feel comfortable giving her advice since I specialized in a different organ entirely. She said something like, “But you are a doctor. Why can’t there be a doctor who takes care of people instead of just organs?”
While I knew, more or less, what treatments she needed, I still didn’t feel comfortable telling her what she was looking for, and I promised to pass on the message to my colleague next door.
More recently, a patient who received a stent for a heart attack began to have a bunch of other medical problems requiring a pulmonologist, a urologist, and a nephrologist. I
The literary translation community in the U.S. has a tradition of being highbrow, a carefully tended yet narrow reflection of the stirrings of global culture beyond the Anglosphere.
Then Amazon.com jumped in, like a whale into a koi pond.
Armed with financial might and an intimate, machine-learned knowledge of reader behavior, the e-commerce giant made a big splash.
That annoyed some literary types, wary of the leviathan that has shaken up almost every aspect of the media world.
But AmazonCrossing, the publishing unit devoted to scouring the world for good tales, has in a short time become the most prominent interpreter of foreign fiction into English, accounting for 10 percent of all translations in 2016, more than any other publishing house in a field populated by small imprints.
It helps that Amazon is rather numbers-driven about its tastes, which tend toward blockbuster genre fiction — crime thrillers and romance novels — although it also picks well-regarded literary jewels its editors feel would do well with an English-speaking audience.
The goal “is to find great stories, and we think you can find them anywhere,” said Gabriella Page-Fort, AmazonCrossing’s editorial director.
Amazon’s rapid rise to prominence in the translation of foreign prose is yet another sign of its growing cultural significance.
In Hollywood, this newfound power has been recognized by critics and industry peers: In February Amazon Studios garnered three Oscars. Series such as “The Man in the High Castle” and “Transparent” have earned Emmy and Golden Globe awards.
In the book world, Amazon has enabled hundreds of thousands to self-publish their works on Kindle, its digital reading platform. Some of these works — such as Andy Weir’s “The Martian,” which became a best-seller and a movie — have made an impact.
It also has several imprints devoted to various genres, including literary fiction.
Yet Amazon’s shine has been tarnished by a contentious relationship with New York publishing houses, bookstores and some authors. Many bookstores — hurt by the online retailer’s dominance in book sales and its pricing power — have boycotted titles published by Amazon. They’re also less likely to get reviewed by the traditional literary outlets, experts say.
But some members of the literary-translation community, long beset by indifference from major publishers and a lack of resources, appreciate Amazon’s foray in their field.
“It’s kind of amazing. They have the resources and the ability,” says Chad Post, an academic at the University of Rochester who publishes Three Percent, a blog about international literature that draws its name from the estimate that only 3 percent of all books published in English are translated from foreign languages.
In the blog, Post keeps a thorough database of literary fiction translations into English — which clearly shows Amazon’s trajectory to the top. In 2010, AmazonCrossing’s first year, the imprint published two of 340 foreign translations, or less than 1 percent — one from German and one from French. In 2016, there were 607 fiction and poetry translations and Amazon was responsible for about 10 percent, in languages as diverse as Finnish, Hebrew, Indonesian and Chinese.
By focusing on genre fiction, Amazon is “filling a huge gap” and helping people in the community get “more experience, become better as translators,” Post said.
Not all have super-warm feelings for the Seattle behemoth, however.
Susan Bernofsky, who teaches literary translation at Columbia University’s master of fine arts writing program, says Amazon is still perceived by many translators as having an exploitative relationship with the literary world. The company “has been financially throwing its weight around,” and is viewed with suspicion by many who perceive it as seeing books as mere products, she said.
Teutonic touchAmazonCrossing began in 2010 as a bid to bring undiscovered foreign-language fiction to the electronic bookstore’s huge English-speaking audience. It was the company’s second imprint, after Amazon Encore, an outfit that sought to resuscitate out-of-print books and give a boost to promising self-published oeuvres.
AmazonCrossing’s team of editors is based in Seattle, London, Madrid, Milan, Munich and Paris. They look everywhere for stories: book conferences, pitches from an extensive network of freelance literary translators, and of course, the company’s own data.
Amazon’s presence in most European countries gives the editors a good perch to see what is working for readers in other languages. One big book market in particular has proved to be a rich source of material for the venture: Germany.
German customers love reading, and what they like also jibes with Americans’ own tastes, says PageFort, a New York University graduate with a passion for literature and languages who came to Amazon after a long stint in New York’s publishing world.
Germany gave the imprint its most significant blockbuster: “The Hangman’s Daughter,” a historical series by Oliver Patzsch. The English translation made by AmazonCrossing has reached 1.5 million readers in print and through digital downloads, Amazon says. Another series, “The Glassblower Trilogy,” by Petra Durst-Benning, scored 700,000 readers.
So while French and Spanish-language literary works are generally the most often translated into English across the wider publishing industry, Goethe’s language dominates AmazonCrossing’s catalog. About half of the titles it published in 2015 and a third of those published in 2016 were originally written in German.
That said, AmazonCrossing is an increasingly polyglot affair. In 2015 the imprint announced it would spend $10 million through the end of the decade in part to expand its roster of countries and languages. Fifteen languages other than English were represented in 2016, up from two in 2010.
In a way that befits Amazon’s online roots, AmazonCrossing has set up a website that allows authors and translators to submit books for consideration to be translated into English. was explaining the situation to her daughter who, while extremely grateful, wondered out loud why there couldn’t be just one doctor taking care of her mother, instead of all these specialists for different organs.
The days of a general doctor with a black bag showing up at your door to deliver babies, comfort the dying and diagnose appendicitis or pneumonia are not that distant a memory, but certainly not the norm. A patient of mine complained recently that he went to the emergency room with gastroenteritis and was treated by a harried physician’s assistant who cared more about his illness than about him and that he barely saw the doctor. The treatment he received seemed reasonable and, in fact, he did well enough. Ultimately, he agreed his care was adequate.
Still, something seems missing in each of these cases. Leave it to a hilarious old pool salesman, Ronny Brauman, to make me realize what it is. Ron frequently reads this column and isn’t shy with his critique scribbled on a piece of paper that usually also contains several truly funny, albeit filthy, jokes. “Doc,” he wrote last week. “Last column was OK, but it’s better when it’s about PEOPLE!” The critique may only have been about something I wrote, but it is also right on target about what’s missing in medicine.