The illustration is taken from Livro do Armeiro-mor, Lisbon, 1509
I have argued elsewhere that Polish literature is one of the best in the world. (Which of course it is).
Here, I wish to discuss why this treasure remains unknown in English to this day.
There are three reasons why.
1
The first of these is the fifty years of communist rule.
a) To begin with, the communist regime operated a very effective apparatus of censorship, which suppressed the publication or distribution of many excellent works within the country. The story of Bocheński’s Roman Trilogy is a case in point: his books had to be passed from hand to hand in secrecy and could never be discussed in the media. Such works could only be published in samizdat form, or–abroad.
b) Second, Polish and Russian (some would say “Soviet,” pretending that the USSR was something other than a Russian false-flag operation) diplomatic services used every tool at their disposal to prevent the publication of Polish works which they deemed politically inconvenient in the West. The Polish services did this mainly for their own political interest and would not have minded promoting some innocuous Polish literature (stories of happy farmers on a state farm, for example), but the Russian services were interested in putting the kibosh on any and all Polish publication abroad: it remains an established article of faith among Russian elites that all Poles are incorrigible Russian haters. Therefore the Russian policy has always been to oppose the publication of any and all Polish works in the West per se.
A certain version of this remains to this day, as a vast majority of Slavic departments in American and European universities are dominated by Russian scholars, giving the impression that the 260 million Slavs who are not ethnic Russians are really just a footnote to Russian literature.
c) Under communism, publishing was considered a strategic industry (as it was part of the propaganda industrial complex). This meant that any employee of any Polish publisher who found himself in contact with a foreign publisher would become a person of interest to the KGB. As a result, employees of Polish publishers avoided contact with Western publishers like fire. The only authors who succeeded in the West during this time (Miłosz, Kapuściński, Lem) did it through their own personal effort.
2
The second reason grows out of the first. Let us dub it the “publisher inertia.” Polish publishers spent 50 years cut off from normal commercial exchange with Western publishers. They have no contacts, no tradition, no custom of selling their books in the West. They don’t know how. They don’t think they can. They don’t even try.
Western publishers, on the other hand, look back in history and say to themselves: I don’t see any Polish bestsellers in my country, Polish literature must be boring.
Now, the idea that publishers know the market or can lead it is patently false or else all of their books would be bestsellers, while the best statistics I can find show that at least 70% of all newly published books lose money. Publishers simply do not understand the market any better than anyone else does, are risk averse, prefer me-too products, and will do tried-and-true 99 times before they try anything new.
The old market efficiency syndrome is at work here. You will recall the famous story of two economists walking down the street. “Say,” says one, “is that a ten-dollar bill lying over there on the pavement?” “No way,” replies the other. “If it were, someone would have long since picked it up.”
On this topic, the translators of Kapuściński’s The Emperor relate the following remark made to them by a flabbergasted American publisher to whom they pitched the book: “Wait wait, you want me to publish in America a book written by a Pole about the Emperor of Ethiopia?” (Rolls his eyes).
(Today, The Emperor in English has an Amazon sales rank of 50,000 and sells $1500 every month–38 years after its first publication in English).
The result is a kind of institutional defeatism: publishers don’t publish unfamous books unless someone pays them to do it (usually some kind of a charitable government grant) and then do nothing to sell the books because–well–they do not believe in the product anyway. Just look at the Amazon listings of the Polish books published in America over the last 20 years. You will see that they are usually only published in one format and have no reader reviews: a clear sign that nobody is doing anything to promote them. These books are institutional tombstones.
3
Number three also grows out of number 1: lack of translators.
If you don’t translate books, you will have no translators. If you have no translators, you cannot translate books. And if you only have a few translators, you end up with the usual problems of interpersonal politics and anti-competitive practices which mean high fees, unreasonably long delivery times, and lots and lots of politics.
One result are the interminable time frames: a translator I spoke to recently has told me he takes a year to translate a book! A year! There are maybe a dozen good translators and Poland publishes 35,000 titles a year–how is this going to work, ever? Another translator told me he would not handle a particular project because his translator colleagues don’t like it, which, given the size of the group, is of course rational: a job comes and goes, but colleagues will be around for half a century. Since they bid on the same jobs and the same grants, you better play nice.