Why Aren’t We Translating Food Media?
The dominance of food writing in English reinforces cultural divisions
This was first posted as the June 29 newsletter, “From the Desk of Alicia Kennedy.” You can sign up here.
Before I was a food writer, before I ever thought about being a food writer, I was attempting a life of literary criticism — almost exclusively done for free — focused on literature in translation. I interviewed translators like Rosalie Knecht for The Awl, who worked with the Argentine César Aira; I asked Natasha Wimmer, best known for translating Roberto Bolaño’s major texts, how it felt to be known for bringing the work of “great men” into English. This fascination was inspired by the simple knowledge that there were whole other literatures out there happening, but I couldn’t access them: the great existential question of Who would I be without Kafka?
It helped that in the late aughts, thanks to interest in the work of people like Bolaño, translation was a big topic of conversation. The statistic, consistently cited, is that only 3 percent of the world’s literature is translated into English, which is the globe’s most dominant language for reasons of empire, politics, and business. Back in 2008, Horace Engdahl, the permanent secretary of the Nobel Prize jury, told The Associated Press, “The U.S. is too…
