Looking across the floor of Exhibition Hall One of the Taipei World Trade Center today, you cannot help but believe that reports about the death of the book at the hands of the Internet have been very greatly exaggerated. In this hall alone, 789 publishers from 41 countries are displaying their wares. Exhibition Hall Two is devoted to the comic book, with 39 publishers, and Exhibition Hall Three to children’s books, with a total of 78 publishers. An ocean of books is laid out before your eyes.
The scale of the Taipei International Book Exhibition (台北國際書展) makes it Asia’s largest, and this year the presence of a high-powered delegation from Germany, including Juergen Boos, president of the Frankfurter Buchmesse, acknowledged as the world’s biggest and most important book fair, underscores what is at stake. While the exhibition will be a chance for Taiwan’s readers to learn about the wide world of books being published overseas, this is also a chance for Taiwan to promote its own literary talent to overseas publishers. International exchange has always been the name of the game at book fairs, but this year, with China being invited as the guest of honor at the Frankfurter Buchmesse, Chinese-language literature has been brought to the fore and opportunities for Taiwan are greater than ever.
PREPARING FOR FRANKFURT
For Boos, the reason for inviting China at this time is largely a response to international trends within the publishing industry.
“We have different criteria when we choose a guest of honor, and the most important is the interest of the publishing industry worldwide. If somebody wants to make business with this country or this country wants to become internationally more involved, that is the first reason why we have chosen China,” Boos said in an interview on Tuesday.
Political issues were also a factor. Boos said that Western readers were familiar with some Chinese authors, but these were mostly dissident authors living outside China. He felt that the situation had now changed. “There is a new openness, a going out policy which started about three years ago. So it is now more writers in China who get published and get translated. It is now the first time you can get information about writers writing in China,” Boos said. (Lin Tsai-chueh (林載爵), chairman of the Taipei Book Fair Foundation (財團法人台北書展基金會), said five Taiwanese writers would also be attending Frankfurter Buchmesse in an effort to promote their work, and Taiwanese literature as a whole.)
Speaking about the relevance of book fairs in the age of the Internet, Boos was upbeat, pointing to the continued strength of events such as the Taipei Book Exhibition and Frankfurter Buchmesse. “It is about the content, it’s not really about the medium. [Book fairs] are about selling rights. In the past three years there has been a major change. Rights business has usually been about selling from a hardcover to a softcover or selling a regional right. What are being sold now are rights for the audio book, for TV, for movie business, for the digital world, for the mobile world. So it is a lot more rights that are sold … It is still a book fair if you think of the book as content, if you think away from the medium.”
Casting a quick glance around the Taipei event, the vast array of flat screens and audio content seems to back this up. Books don’t just come between two pasteboard covers anymore. Taipei Book Fair Foundation Executive Director Lin Wen-chi (林文祺) said that this year’s fair had an overwhelming focus on events, with an unprecedented number of foreign guests participating in readings, panel discussions and lectures. A detailed list of these can be found on the exhibition’s Web site at www.tibe.com.tw.
TRANSLATION TO NEW WORLDS
As books, or as Boos might prefer it, content, spreads across the globe, a crucial factor is language. The ability to interpret cultures across sometimes chasmal gulfs is the job of translators, a group of often aggrieved cultural mediators. Boos confirmed that the Frankfurter Buchmesse was currently at the center of a pay dispute between translators and publishers in Germany, but said that significant emphasis was placed on fostering translation as a means of making foreign works accessible to a German public.
“Part of the invitation as guest of honor [at Frankfurt Buchmesse] is a translation program that the guest nation has to finance. They need to translate around 30 titles. But also publishers worldwide will have this focus as well if a guest of honor is showing their culture in Frankfurt. European publishers at least will also translate more Chinese titles than they have done in the past,” Boos said
Ulrich Janetzki, head of the Literary Colloquium Berlin, runs an organization that seeks to foster new German literature and, in an effort to promote it internationally, develop translation talent as well.
In Janetzki’s view, translation gives access to unique elements in other cultures, and it is the unique voice that is the essence of literature. “Reality is not the sum of facts, but the sum of possibilities … It is a kind of reality that we did not know yet,” Janetzki said. It is translation that gives access to these other possibilities, and the Colloquium provides opportunities for translators to have an intimate association with the world that they are trying to interpret through residency and exchange programs. In regard to Taiwan’s promotion of its authors, he suggested “that you [need to] find good translators for this special Taiwanese literature. You have to invite them to Taipei or other towns to connect them to the author. Let’s talk to them. Let’s understand what he means. Then he can make the connection. All the countries that are successful with their literature do it in this way.”
“You have to send your authors to other countries,” Janetzki said, without hesitation when asked about promoting literature. “You need translations and you need readings. This is how to make it successful … You need participation in book fairs. For the first time, we will present three Taiwanese authors at the Leipzig Buchmesse [March 12 through March 15]. This will make them well-known, maybe make them famous. We translate them, we present them and connect them.”
Janetzki believes strongly in getting authors out in front of the crowd, interacting with their readership. Leipzig Buchmessa will be a test, as authors such as Egoyan (伊格言), who represents a new generation of Taiwanese modernists, and Hung Hung (鴻鴻), an active figure in Taiwan’s theater and poetry scene, have been invited to attend.
With greater exposure to Chinese-language literature, Janetzki said German readers now wanted to know about the regional variations in Chinese literature. “We are more and more interested to know if it comes from Taiwan, or from the north, south, west or east of China. It makes a difference.”
In line with Janetzki’s emphasis on presenting authors to the public, the German Pavilion will offer a rich program of readings and discussions during the exhibition. Janetzki himself will provide an introduction to German writers and literature today at 12:40pm, and other authors to be featured will include the prolific young German author Juli Zeh and writer-musician Jan Bottcher. To highlight the fact that books are not just about words, there will also be a display of manual printing techniques by print artist Guido Hafner and a display of work by illustrator Wolfgang Nocke. A similar menu of readings, talks and lectures will also be presented by other specially featured nations: Thailand, France and the US.
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