Translation Bibliomigrancy : The Case of Contemporary Caribbean Literature in Scandinavia

How to cite this book chapter: Lindqvist, Yvonne. “Translation Bibliomigrancy: The Case of Contemporary Caribbean Literature in Scandinavia”. In World Literatures: Exploring the Cosmopolitan-Vernacular Exchange, edited by Stefan Helgesson, Annika Mörte Alling, Yvonne Lindqvist, and Helena Wulff, 295–309. Stockholm: Stockholm University Press, 2018. DOI: https://doi.org/10.16993/bat.y. License: CC-BY. This paper presents the theoretical framework for the project The Meeting of Literary Peripheries by means of Translation – Prerequisites for Caribbean Literature in Scandinavia. The framework is derived from the so-called “social turn” of translation studies where the general aim according to Wolf is:1

Pascale Casanova,John Heilbron and Giséle Sapiro. 3 It is commonly conceived of as hosting three main research areas: 1) the sociology of translators 2) the sociology of translating 3) the sociology of translations. The first area deals with translator status, prestige and working conditions. The second studies the act of translating -the translation process, practices and norms. The third area studies translations as products on an international market. 4 The current research project belongs mainly within the third area of research within the sociology of translations. It examines the uneven and hierarchical "flows" of literature in the "world republic of letters" materialised in translation. Considered from a sociological perspective, translations are a function of the social relations between language groups and their transformations over time. 5 Cultural exchanges such as translation have their own dynamics largely depending on the global market structures. Hence, the project constructs the market as a relatively autonomous global field with economic, political and symbolic dimensions. More specifically, the project examines the prerequisites for the meeting by means of translation of two local literary peripheries on the global translation field. It explores the necessary 3  consecration mechanisms for translation taking place from one local periphery to another, Caribbean to Scandinavian literature. Consecration is a term from the cultural sociology of Pierre Bourdieu, which in short means recognition and legitimation by the agents of the field under study. 6 To be consecrated by autonomous agents on the literary field signifies the crossing of a literary border -a metamorphosis of ordinary (literary) material into "gold", into absolute literary value. And translation is from a global point of view a form of consecration. It constitutes the principal means for access to the literary world for writers outside the centre. 7 The aim of the project is to examine the bibliomigrancy dynamics on the global translation field. Bibliomigrancy is an umbrella term that describes the migration of literary works in the form of books from one part of the world to the other. 8 The term comprises two strands: • Physical migration of books, i.e. book production and trade, translations, library acquisitions and circulation. • Virtual migration, i.e. adaptations and appropriation of narratives; in more recent times the technical term for digitalisation of books.
Bibliomigrancy promotes and facilitates the processes of a "worlding" 9 of literature -the most basic condition for connections between central and peripheral positions on the global translation field. Translation gives a wider audience to this "world-making" by helping literary texts to escape the confines of the national borders from which they have emerged to enter other contexts. 10 The bibliomigrancy concept encapsulates both the material and ideational dimensions of literary cosmopolitanism. One methodological step in the study of translation bibliomigrancy dynamics is to test the double consecration hypothesis 11 stating that this kind of literature needs to be consecrated primarily within the centre(s) of the former colonial power, and secondly -due to the strong impact of the Anglo-American culture and literature in Scandinavia -within the British and American literary cultures. Caribbean literature written in French, Spanish and English has to be "filtered", so to speak, through the central British and American cultures in order to reach Scandinavian readers in translation. The relations are schematically represented in figure 5 showing the bibliomigrancy dynamics of Caribbean and Scandinavian literatures.
Nevertheless, each Caribbean language group will probably manifest a specific dynamic depending on how centralised the contemporary literary culture in question is. Casanova has shown that the French literary culture is strongly mono-centric with Paris as the sole consecration centre. 12 The English contemporary literary culture on the other hand is hypothesised in this study as duo-centric counting New York and London as the most important consecration centres. The Spanish contemporary literary culture eventually, is hypothesised as pluri-centric in the sense that literary consecration takes place in several centres alike, notably in Madrid, Barcelona, Mexico City and Buenos Aires for example. However, the British and American "filters" for reaching Scandinavia will be a common denominator for the involved 10 Casanova,Consécration et accumulation,[7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20] literary cultures in order to be translated into the Scandinavian languages. These complex dynamics probably also vary over time and according to genre. The project covers cosmopolitan and vernacular translation dynamics, i.e. literary migration on the global translation field from mainly dominated positions to the dominating in the first case, and from dominating to dominated in the latter, during the period 1990-2010.1 3 Consequently, the hypothesis of the study claims that for this kind of literary translation to take place double consecration within the dominating cultures for each language group on the global translation field is necessary, i.e. writers from peripheral cultures selected for translation into Swedish, Danish and Norwegian have to be consecrated within the centre(s) of their previous (colonial) culture on the global translation field and then within the centres of the British and American cultures. The hypothesis is a specification of a more general hypothesis put forward by Heilbron, that, as Moretti puts it, "movement from one periphery to another (without passing through the centre) is almost unheard of". 14

Centre and Periphery Relations on the Global Translation Field
In order to map out the bibliomigrancy dynamics on the global translation field power relations between language groups have to be taken into consideration. As Mona Baker 15 has pointed out, translation is rarely the peaceful linear transfer of literary and semantic devices described in textbooks in translation. On the contrary, the global translation field has its own rules of functioning based on positions gained from constant struggles of accumulated symbolic power.
One of the most cited databases for statistically surveys of the most dominating -hence most central -source languages on the global translation field is Index Translationum of UNESCO. The percentages in Table 1 are compiled from the findings of Heilbron and Sapiro and then compared to the numbers from 2015 in Index Translationum of UNESCO. 16 Table 1 shows that the ranking of centrality in the global translation field has not changed essentially during the last 30 years in the central positionsexcept for the decline of Russian in the 1990s -English, French, and German remain as the hyper-central and central languages, respectively. Some minor alterations concern the semi-central languages. Spanish and Italian have changed place in terms of importance comparing the 1990s and 2015 and Danish has lost ground from the seventh position of importance in 1980s to the 14   The tendency in the global translation field is towards greater diversification of the amount of source languages mainly due to the decline of the Russian language from 11 per cent in the 1980s to 1.5 per cent in the 1990s, shifting from a central position to a semi-central position and then gaining ground again in 2015 with 5 per cent of the translation market. Swedish has, on the other hand, advanced in the scale of importance from eighth place in the 1980s to sixth place in the 1990s as source language in the global translation field. Due to the Russian climb in 2015, Swedish is, however, pushed down to seventh place in that year. Table 2 shows that domination dynamics in the global translation field are reproduced on a smaller scale within the Swedish literary space. The most dominant source languages occupy a given position even within Swedish literature, but the regional languages -Norwegian and Danish -also play a crucial role, thereby signalling the existence of a regional translation subfield, where Stockholm plays the role of centre in the regional periphery. 20  point of view discussed by Casanova. 25 She distinguishes between oral languages with young writing systems and Creole languages (for example Yoruba and Haitian Creole), languages with newly gained national status (Catalan), languages of established cultures with relatively small populations (Swedish, Danish and Norwegian) and languages spoken by large populations possessing a rich literary tradition but nevertheless positioned in the very periphery of the global translation field (Hindi and Chinese). In the world republic of letters the accumulation of literary capital is decisive for the position on the global translation field. From the statistics and categorisations presented above it is possible to discern two overall orientations for literary translations on the global translation field: cosmopolitanising and vernacularising translation. 26 The orientations reveal the basic bibliomigrancy dynamics of translated literature on the global translation field and are presented in Figure 6. The central positions of dominating literatures and languages are constructed by their historically high access to literary capital and relative autonomy vis-à-vis other national literatures and languages. Cornerstones of literary capital are on the one hand the age of the literary culture and its highly specialised literary institutions, on the other literary criticism, literary values and literary renown. 27 High access to literary capital means that the culture in question possesses a very well-developed literary institution and a literary repertoire, which does not need to count on translations to assert itself in competing with repertoires of other literary cultures. When a text is translated into such a culture it is considered especially valuable by the dominated cultures, which does not possess an equally developed literary repertoire. Translation in this case then becomes a proof of the high literary quality of the text. In the terminology of 25 Casanova,Consécration et accumulation,8. 26 I have schematically organised the main arguments in  to create the model and adapted it to my study by adding the double consecration dynamics at the centre of my interest. The original terms in Casanova (2002:10) are Traduction accumulation and Traduction consécration. 27 Casanova, "The World Republic", 14-15. Bourdieu,28 this process constitutes a means for consecration of the text by the literary agents of the leading institutions of the target culture -a case of cosmopolitanising translation. A typical example of a cosmopolitansing translation is shown in figure 6, case A, when Scandinavian, i.e. Swedish, Danish and Norwegian, crime fiction novels translated into English are launched into the Anglo-American market. The novels then gain in literary prestige, accumulating literary capital by the consecration, and consequently become more interesting for other dominating literary cultures, for instance the French culture. A famous example from Swedish crime fiction is the Millennium Trilogy by Stieg Larsson, in 2009 sold in 10 million copies. 29 Other examples of Scandinavian peripheral writers in cosmopolitanising translation are the Norwegian Torkil Damhaug's Oslo Crime Files Quartet and the Danish writer Jussi Adler-Olsen winner of the Glas Key Prize in 2010 for best Scandinavian crime fiction novel.
Case B in figure 6 shows another dynamic of cosmopolitanising translation -translation taking place between two dominating cultures, for instance between the French and Spanish literary 28   cultures. It is highly probable that the French Goncourt Prizewinner will be translated into Spanish and reversely that the Nadal Prize-winner will be translated into French. The position of the dominated literatures and languages on the global translation field is, on the other hand, due to their lack of literary capital and relative autonomy. The translation relations occurring in these cultures are vernacularising translations, i.e. translations stemming from the dominant positions and languages. A prototypical example of vernacularising translation is from English to Swedish, case C in figure 6. As we have seen in table 2, this translation relation is by large the most common relationship in Sweden. In fact, 71 per cent of all published translations in Sweden during the period 2000-2010 had English as source language. 30 The dynamics of English source language translations are very similar in Norway and Denmark 31 (a veritable wave in the Moretti sense 32 ).
Case D in figure 6 -the vernacularising translation in focus in the project -is elucidated in case D* and illustrates the double consecration hypothesis. That is, in order for two literary peripheries on the global translation field -the Caribbean and the Scandinavian -to meet by means of translation, the migrating source texts have to be primarily consecrated within two central literary cultures, revealing cosmopolitanising dynamics in vernacularising translation as well. This is probably the prerequisite for Scandinavian publisher's decision to publish French, Spanish and English Caribbean writers in translation. Proceeding from this theoretical framework the project will examine the multidirectional dynamics of cosmopolitanising and vernacularising translation on the global translation field.