Thursday Fiction Corner: The Value of Publishing Translation

“Both surprised and pleased with the willingness of other countries to help finance such publications, it wasn’t until much later I began to wonder why they did this–why was being published in English so important?” — John O’Brien

We are proud to be distributing Dalkey Archive Press, one of the leading publishers of avant-garde fiction and literature in translation! In today’s Thursday Fiction Corner post, we are happy to present a short essay written by John O’Brien, the publisher of Dalkey Archive Press, on his history of publishing works in translation and on the cultural value that he believes such works provide. The essay originally appeared in The Art of Empathy: Celebrating Literature in Translation, a collection of essays on translation published by the National Endowment for the Arts.