The Frame Precedes the Book

Cultural diplomacy presents itself as a handshake. Two cultures, curious about each other, send their books across the border as tokens of friendship, and the traffic is described, by the institutions that fund it, in the vocabulary of exchange: dialogue, mutual understanding, bridges. The vocabulary is not dishonest. Books do cross, readers do meet writers they would never otherwise have read, and something real happens in the encounter. But the word exchange carries an assumption worth examining, which is that what moves in one direction resembles what moves in the other. Along most of the routes that matter in the Mediterranean, it does not.

THE APPARATUS

Most literary crossing is paid for. A novel rarely travels from one language into another on the strength of a reader's enthusiasm alone. Somewhere behind it stands a translation grant, an invitation to a festival, a residency, a stand at a fair, a cultural institute with a budget and a remit. The large national institutes, the Goethe-Institut, the Institut français, the British Council, the Instituto Cervantes, exist precisely to move their countries' books and authors outward, and they do it with skill and with resources accumulated over decades. This is the infrastructure of cultural diplomacy, and on its own terms it works.

What is easy to miss is that the institution funding the crossing is also, unavoidably, selecting and framing it. A grant programme has criteria. A festival has a theme. A cultural attaché has a sense of which authors represent the country well and which complicate the picture. None of this need be cynical to have effects. The books that travel with institutional support are the books an institution was willing to support, presented in the terms the institution found presentable. The crossing is real, it is curated, and the curator has an interest in the image that results.

WHO IS ALLOWED TO BE INDIVIDUAL

The asymmetry becomes visible when you compare the two directions of traffic. When a French or German novel reaches Cairo, Istanbul or Tunis, it tends to arrive as a novel: a particular book by a particular author, read for whatever it happens to be about. When a novel from Cairo, Istanbul or Tunis reaches Paris or Frankfurt, it tends to arrive as a representative: a window onto its society, evidence about a place, a voice from a region the reader has questions about. The Northern book is allowed to be individual. The Southern book is asked to be typical. This is the burden of representation, and it rests almost entirely on one side of the exchange.

The pattern has a history one can date. When Naguib Mahfouz received the Nobel Prize in 1988, Arabic literature became, more or less overnight, something Western publishers understood they were supposed to translate. The recognition was real and deserved, and it also came from the North and reshaped from the North what Arabic literature was taken to be. Mahfouz became the gateway through which a vast and various body of writing was introduced, and much of what followed him into translation was chosen for how well it answered the questions Western readers had already learned to ask. In the decades since, those questions have had a political shape. After 2001, and again after 2011, Anglophone and European markets developed a visible appetite for books that promised to explain the Arab world: its conflicts, the condition of its women, the courage of its dissidents. The literature is large enough to contain all of that and a great deal that has nothing to do with it, but the books that crossed most easily were the ones that met the expectation waiting for them. The frame tends to precede the book.

THE OTHER READING

Against this there is a more hopeful account, and it is not naive. The apparatus that projects images belongs to no side by nature. It is a technology, and technologies can be acquired. A state that wants its literature to travel on its own terms can build the instruments to make that happen. Turkey did exactly this with its TEDA programme, subsidising the translation of Turkish literature into other languages rather than waiting for foreign publishers to discover it. The Gulf states have spent heavily over the last two decades to make themselves nodes rather than margins of the international book world, founding fairs, prizes and translation funds where there had been none. On this reading the asymmetry is a fact about money and infrastructure, and both can be built. A culture that finds itself perpetually described by others can decide to finance its own description and push it outward until it competes.

This is real, and it has shifted things. It is also where the difficult question starts.

FUNDING THE CROSSING, NOT THE RECEPTION

The question is whether the asymmetry is contingent or structural, and the honest answer is that it is some of each, in a proportion no one can cleanly establish. Part of it is plainly contingent. The dominance of certain languages and markets rests on resources, institutions and historical accidents that are already moving as new funders enter and old monopolies thin. A Southern apparatus, well financed and patiently run, can change the position of a literature across a generation, and several are doing so now.

The other part is harder to fund away. To be received, a book has to be made legible to the receiver, and legibility is defined on the receiving side. A culture can pay for the translation, the tour and the festival slot. It cannot pay for the frame inside the reader's head, the prior image through which the new book will be understood before its first page is turned. You can fund the crossing. You cannot fund the reception. The most a projecting culture can do is supply images persistently enough, and in enough variety, that the receiving frame is gradually forced to grow more complicated. That work is slow, and it is never quite finished, because the frame reconstitutes itself around each new arrival.

This is what is at stake in the phrase cultural exchange, and why it deserves to be used with care. What crosses a border is never only a book. It is a book together with the image the other side was already prepared to receive it through, and the two do not weigh the same in both directions. A publishing culture serious about the Mediterranean has to hold both halves of this at once: that building the means to project one's own literature is worth doing, and that no amount of projection fully buys back the power to be read on one's own terms. The work is to keep sending, and to keep insisting on the distance between being circulated and being understood.