Many novels are collaborations. The Great Gatsby, for example, proved to be almost too much for F. Scott Fitzgerald, so his editor Max Perkins had to take over much of the heavy lifting. While many nameless people at the publishing house don’t get credit for their contributions to a work, it’s very unusual for that one name running down the spine to be the only one responsible for that final, highly polished work.

Translated books take this situation to an entirely different level. Where does the work of the author stop and the translator take over? Certainly, the choice of the precise word is ultimately up to the translator. As anyone who has tried to order food in a foreign country can tell you, a bad translation has to be handled with the same patience and understanding that goes with speaking to children. Complicated ideas and delicate images are only wisps of ideas hanging over the situation unless the speaker is fluent.

Many novels come to the English Language these days from other places. This is hardly new, since French works were known through the English connections to Normandy since before printing existed. The number of French words and phrases that made it into English, such as “cuisine” or “je nais se quoi” is vast for this reason. These words make it into our language because there is no precise equivalent and because there is a population that understands them in their native tongue.

In the USofA today, Spanish is the most common point of origin for foreign works for very similar reasons. There are enough people who are skilled in the language that they provide an initial market and eventually someone will provide a translation. South American novels have been translated into bestsellers, starting largely with “One Hundred Years of Solitude” by Márquez and gradually working through to teen young adult books by Isabel Allende.

This greatly enriches the choices of reading we have. But how close to the original are these works? I’m not one to tell you, frankly, since I haven’t plowed through them in an attempt to check. I did manage to make it through Hesse’s “Demian” in German, one of my lifelong goals, and I have to tell you that the translation commonly on the shelves is damned good; my Herculean effort to read it auf Deutsch was entirely unnecessary.

Even if the translations of foreign works are quite true to the original, isn’t something lost all the same? After all, a work of literature is a reflection of the culture that it was born in, just as any human baby is. How can we strip a work of its cultural context? For example, does anyone really understand Márquez in the USofA? I seriously doubt it. The whole discussion about what “Magical Realism” is shows that people treat his work as if it is a place apart, removed even from his native Colombia. That’s sad. We’ve been given the gift of a great work that labors to get into the mind of a people and an entire culture, yet we remain unable to grasp it as anything other than a wild fantasy. Translation, it seems, just isn’t enough.

The other problem with translation is less about quality than it is about quantity. I’m sure there are excellent writers in Brasil who have the ability to shake our minds the way Samba shakes our butts. The Portuguese / English divide is one Hell of a barrier to getting those works out to us, however. That’s even more true for people writing in Malay or Chinese. What are we missing from these cultures? What wonderful works will we one day read when there are translators available from nearly any language?

I think this is an important topic for many reasons above and beyond the quality of the works we are reading. Stories are the way we digest complicated ideas that are deeper than our ability to intellectually process them; we absorb a lot of our world through our guts. Globalism demands that we have access to that kind of knowledge about people who we will be dealing with on a daily basis if we are going to process less esoteric things like a bill of lading on a cargo ship from Malaysia. If we don’t know the people, it will only be about tradable goods – and too often throughout history, people themselves have been made into tradable goods.

The other issue that concerns me is that I don’t like the state of novels in the USofA today. We have become very inward looking and hollow. The great luxury of ennui has become what trade paperbacks hawk to a large extent. It’s all reminiscent of a culture that is either at the end of its days or seriously needs to be refreshed. The real success of the USofA has been its ability to refresh itself when it gets fat and happy, however. One way to do this is to read more works from other cultures that open our minds and give us something to imagine beyond our own empty selves.

A good translator can find the right word to make literature come alive. But it’s the authors from distant lands with new and awakening experiences that provide the images. We could use a lot more of that right now in the USofA, assuming it’s packaged properly so that we can absorb it. It’s all in the translation.