The Guadalajara International Book Fair (FIL) celebrates Spanish-language writers from around the world, and just last month, Spain was the guest of honor at the Frankfurt Book Fair. This is a great time to dig into some of the historical publishing data and see if we can identify any trends in the publication of Spanish-language fiction and poetry books and estimate the potential impact that being guest on honor will have on fiction and poetry from Spain over the next few years.
The source for all the following data is the Translation Database, which I started in 2008 for the Three Percent website at the University of Rochester, and which is now housed by Publishers Weekly. The database is a repository of information on translations made available through traditional sales channels in the U.S. for the first time (so no reissues or previously translated works).
Between 2008 and 2021, 1,185 works of Spanish-language fiction and poetry from Spanish-speaking countries were sold into the U.S. market—an average of 85 titles per year. The years with the most publications were 2016–2019, when 126, 109, 121, and 101 titles were published, respectively. Things have tailed off as of late (72 titles in 2020, 79 in 2021), but data from the Covid years is both less available and subject to the extraordinary circumstances of the time.
In order to assess the potential impact of Frankfurt on literature from Spain, we need to take a closer look at the authors’ countries of origin. Twenty-seven countries are represented in that 1,185 book total above, with five of them—Spain (409), Argentina (215), Mexico (170), Chile (110), and Cuba (71)—accounting for almost 83% of all the Spanish (plus Basque, Catalan, and Galician) works of fiction and poetry in the database.
Before digging into the data from Spain, it’s worth considering the situation of Catalan literature in translation, given that Catalonia was the guest of honor at Frankfurt in 2007. The Translation Database only dates back to January 2008, which makes it tricky to fully determine the impact, but, anecdotally at least, it was this appearance at Frankfurt—and the surrounding promotional activities and funding opportunities—that really launched the recent wave of interest in Catalan literature in translation.
Interestingly, in the seven-year period following Catalonia being guest of honor (2008–2014) the average annual number of titles made available to U.S. readers was 3.7. For the following seven-year period (2015–2021), that number jumped to 6.7 titles per year—an 81% increase.
Between 2008 and 2021, 43 presses published at least one title translated from Catalan, with a handful becoming “repeat customers.” Along with Fum d’Estampa (more on it below), the press I run, Open Letter, has published the most Catalan titles over this time—a total of nine. One way of interpreting this consistent growth is to hypothesize that pre-Frankfurt programming and funding (editorial trips and translation grants, primarily) led to increased awareness and interest during Frankfurt, which prompted numerous presses to publish at least one work translated from Catalan.
Now let’s look at the pre-Frankfurt baseline for books from Spain. Since 2008, 409 translated works of fiction and poetry by Spanish authors have been sold in the U.S. That’s an average of more than 29 titles per year, with the high water marks coming in 2016 (53 titles) and 2018 (43).
It would take another article to dive into the more content-based trends in what’s making its way into English (more female authors, a broader range of genres), but it’s worth looking behind the scenes at a major influence on the overall production of English-language translations of literature from Spain: dedicated small presses. Not necessarily as sexy in terms of six-figure advances or marketing budgets (although they’re definitely on the level with “big” presses when it comes to design and production), these are the presses that can make a significant difference in what voices are available to English readers.
There are four presses that truly illustrate this principle: Charco Press (see “Bringing the Best of Spanish to English Readers,” p. 26), Fum d’Estampa, Hispabooks, and Small Stations.
During the five years in which it published titles, Hispabooks accounted for 30 of the 198 Spanish books that came out in English, or 15%. Charco, which focuses on Latin American literature, published 12 translations from Argentina and Uruguay in 2020 and 2021, which is 30% of the 40 titles from those two countries over that two-year period. Although Fum d’Estampa is expanding into other languages, it started as a Catalan-centric press, and it did nine of 16 (a whopping 56%) of the Catalan fiction and poetry books that came out in translation in 2020–2021. (And this is ignoring its nonfiction contributions.)
Finally, the real exemplar of the impact a single press can have is Small Stations. With a focus on books in Bulgarian and Galician, it is quite niche, and, at least when it comes to Galician, essential: Small Stations accounts for 48 of the 54 Galician titles in the Translation Database, or 89%!
And Spain has already put in place another element of Catalonia’s formula for success described above: translation grants. For the past three years, Acción Cultural Española has been funding both sample translations and full book-length publications (see “The Power of the Sample,” p. 38). (Full disclosure: Open Letter has received a number of these grants.). In addition, the Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation (AECID) has published three volumes of 10 of 30, an anthology featuring 30 contemporary authors in their 30s. This is good table setting for Spain’s publishing industry to maximize the impact of Frankfurt.
Given the rise in indie presses, the concentration of funding on these presses, and the activities at Frankfurt, things look bright for Spanish literature—from Spain and from the entire Spanish-speaking world, which is rich, diverse, and ripe for more translations.
