From www.washingtonpost.com - September 8, 11:23 PM
Literature that expands the borders of what ‘international’ can mean

Books by Louise Erdrich, Jesmyn Ward and others have interrogated the boundaries meant to contain us.

By Anton Hur
September 7, 2024 at 8:00 a.m. EDT

The National Book Awards will celebrate its 75th anniversary at this year’s ceremony, on Nov. 20. To mark the occasion, The Washington Post has collaborated with the administrator and presenter of the awards, the National Book Foundation, to commission a series of essays by National Book Award-honored authors who consider (and reconsider), decade by decade, the books that were recognized and those that were overlooked; the preoccupations of authors, readers and the publishing industry through time; the power and subjectivity of judges and of awards; and the lasting importance of books to our culture, from the 1950s to the present day. In this last essay in the series, Anton Hur — a finalist for the National Book Award in 2023, for his translation of Bora Chung’s “Cursed Bunny” — looks back at the 2010s.

 

As a non-American, I didn’t know I was even eligible for a National Book Award until I was nominated for one last year. I assumed that any award with “national” in its name was another parochial American institution that would probably have nothing to do with me, like how Bong Joon-ho, director of “Parasite,” once described the Academy Awards as a “very local” film festival. Another well-known honor, the Pulitzer Prize, extended eligibility from U.S. citizens to permanent residents only beginning this year — which still excludes me from contention.

 

In fact, translated literature as a category for the National Book Awards reappeared only in 2018, after an astounding 35-year hiatus, a resurrection that I daresay was mindful of the spectacular success of the International Booker Prize. That honor had also been revamped, in 2016, to its current format, in which prizes are split 50/50 between author and translator, neither of whom are required to have anything to do with the United Kingdom (where the award is based) on their passports. Better slightly late than never — or is it? The International Booker is one thing, but why should a national literary prize award the literature of other nations?

Well, in a nutshell, because nation-states are bogus, especially when it comes to literature. Even the winners of the National Book Awards, especially during the 2010s, have such an internationalist streak that it quickly becomes clear how impossible it is to talk about the nation without talking about the inter-nation. Phil Klay’s “Redeployment,” winner for fiction in 2014, is clearly a book about America and Americans, but it needs the setting of the Iraq War to achieve its power. “The Friend,” by Sigrid Nunez (fiction winner in 2018), uses the narrow canvas of middle-class academics living in New York but includes a plethora of international cultural references, such as Rilke’s “Letters to a Young Poet” (check out the recent translation by 2022 finalist Damion Searls) and Kornél Mundruczó’s film “White God.”

 

The works that fascinate me most among the fiction winners from that decade, however, offer the internationalist perspectives of “nations” within America, such as the Ojibwe reservation in “The Round House,” by Louise Erdrich (2012 winner), and the disenfranchised Black communities in Jesmyn Ward’s “Salvage the Bones” (2011) and “Sing, Unburied, Sing” (2017), an impressive double win for Ward. This more expansive understanding of what “international” could mean is not without its problems, as it otherizes what might rightfully and simply be called American — but this conversation itself seems appropriately American to me.

 

Several winners in the nonfiction category also interrogated the boundaries of what it means to be American. “The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America” (2013), by George Packer, presents portraits of individual Americans almost as if writing for an international audience — or even aliens from space — to explain what this country is. “Between the World and Me” (2015), by Ta-Nehisi Coates; “Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America” (2016), by Ibram X. Kendi; “The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke” (2018), by Jeffrey C. Stewart; “The Yellow House” (2019), by Sarah M. Broom — all these books deal with the experiences of racialized people in America through different lenses, though perhaps it’s more accurate to say that the Black experience, this nation within the nation, is the lens through which America comes into sharpest focus.

 

It is illustrative that “Trust Exercise,” by Susan Choi (2019 winner for fiction), a novel featuring a high school theater class, is set in a space that is marginal to the performing arts world. It shows how generative the tension between the center and the margin, or the familiar and unfamiliar, truly is for artists of all kinds.

What’s immediately salient to me as a translator is that a translator-poet, Arthur Sze, won the award for poetry in 2019 — a feat thrillingly repeated twice in our current decade, by Don Mee Choi for “DMZ Colony” (2020) and John Keene for “Punks: New & Selected Poems” (2022). Apparently, before the translated literature category was revived, poetry was where the translators hung out (other nominated translator-poets in the 2010s included Forrest Gander, Ilya Kaminsky, Ariana Reines, Mark Strand, Jane Hirshfield and Rowan Ricardo Phillips). Translator-writers are quite common in Korea, and they are thankfully becoming ever more common in America. For example, Jennifer Croft, a judge this year in the translated literature category (previously nominated for her translations of “Flights” and “The Books of Jacob,” novels by Olga Tokarczuk), recently published her own novel (“The Extinction of Irena Rey”), and the chair of last year’s judges, Jeremy Tiang, won the Singapore Literature Prize for his novel “State of Emergency.”

 

But why have a translated literature category at all? Neil Clarke, the editor of the science fiction magazine Clarkesworld, had the same thought; he has argued against creating a translation category at the Hugo Awards, claiming that it would serve to further marginalize translated literature. A quick glance at the history of nominees for best novel at the Hugos reveals that a translation has been a finalist only twice, and for the same team: the redoubtable Cixin Liu, author of “The Three-Body Problem,” and his translator Ken Liu. As someone who reads translations primarily and prodigiously, you can’t make me take Clarke’s fears of “further” marginalization seriously. And it has to be said that this also applies to the National Book Awards, which simply stopped taking translated literature into consideration for more than three decades. (In writing this article, I was asked to consider what works may have been overlooked by the awards during the 2010s and, well, imagine me madly gesticulating at all the works in translation published in the eligibility periods between 2009 and 2017.)

To have a translated literature category is to acknowledge and honor the influence that international literature has had on American letters and American life. It declares to the world that the United States is a part of the global literary sphere, that it will make a place for us as we have made a place for it. In other words — and I say this with great affection for my American peers — it makes you look less like cultural imperialists.

 

In 2018, the revived award was given to Margaret Mitsutani’s translation of “The Emissary,” by Yoko Tawada, a novelist who writes in both Japanese and German — name a more internationalist author! Demographic analyses of nominees tend to focus on race and gender, but in translated literature we look at languages: The 20 nominated authors since the award returned represent 12 languages, with three times the number of nominees from Norway than from the entire continent of Africa. It is also illuminating, if unsurprising, to look at the lists of nominated translators. Seven of the 10 translators on the 2019 longlist were women — translators tend to be women, as is the case in most underpaid professions. A translator of color has never won the International Booker Prize, and only a handful have been finalists for either that award or the National Book Award (four each). Perhaps this is less an oversight than a sadly accurate reflection of our industry as a whole. Translation, like most of Anglophonic publishing, is White-dominated, and we still have a long way to go.

Anton Hur is a literary translator and the author of the novel “Toward Eternity.” He was a finalist for the 2023 National Book Award for his translation of Bora Chung’s “Cursed Bunny” and is a judge for the 2025 International Booker Prize.