• by Leonardo Padura Fuentes
• Monday, September 07, 2009
• Inter Press Service

It was a news item that naturally filled me with admiration: one of the world's busiest and most overworked men, US president Barack Obama, was taking a week's vacation on the island of Martha's Vineyard off the coast of Massachusetts. But his rest would be that of an active and intelligent man: it included 2000 pages of reading. But the authors on Obama's list shared a common feature: they are all American and they all write in English, the dominant language of expression of their multi-cultural and multi-ethnic country, writes Leonardo Padura Fuentes, a Cuban writer and journalist whose novels have been translated into a dozen languages.

In this analysis, Padura writes that taking into account his origin, it is not so strange that Obama would be reading only authors from his own linguistic and cultural milieu. Analysts of the publishing industry have pointed out that of the fiction read in the Anglo-Saxon world, a mere 2-3 percent is in translation. In other words, of 100 works published in the English-speaking world, only three are translations from Spanish, French, German, Chinese, Japanese, Greek, or from the other countries that comprise "the rest of the world".

We inhabitants of "the rest of the world" (the Soviet empire and German fascism both had their own "rest of the world" too) have the privilege of having a more global and unprejudiced approach to cultural consumption. The literary references for my generation included many American and English writers as well as Hispanics and French, and the result of this is a cosmopolitanism and a vision of life in which there is no "rest of the world" imposed by nationalists, fundamentalists, and other exclusionists who make use of any difference or division to ignore those who are not like them.

(*) Leonardo Padura Fuentes is a Cuban writer and journalist. His novels have been translated into a dozen languages and his most recent work, La neblina del ayer, won the Hammett Prize for the best crime novel written in Spanish for 2005.

//NOT FOR PUBLICATION IN CANADA, CZECH REPUBLIC, IRELAND, POLAND, THE UNITED STATES, AND THE UNITED KINGDOM//

© Inter Press Service (2009) — All Rights Reserved. Original source: Inter Press Service

Where next?

Advertisement