Translation and Symbolic Capital in the Era of Globalization: French Literature in the United States

Abstract

The discourse about the ‘death of French literature’ which has spread throughout the Anglo-American publishing industry since the 1990s raises the question of the conditions required for a dominant national literature to maintain its symbolic capital in the era of globalization. This discourse is a sell-fulfilling prophecy used as a weapon in the international competition and struggles within the world market of translation in a context of accrued economic constraints. The present article first confronts discourse to practice through ohHan empirical study of the circulation of French literature in the United States in the era of globalization, based on a quantitative analysis of all the literary titles translated from French in the United States between 1990 and 2003, on interviews with publishers and translators, and on archives. The symbolic capital of French literature appears to be founded not only on its past achievements (classics) but also on its present production, which accounts for 40% of the translations. Although most are novels, upmarket genres like poetry and theatre are better represented than commercial genres. The data also displays the growing diversity of translated authors, regarding gender and nationality. However, the high centralization of the publishing field in the Francophone area impacts the circulation pattern: most translated works were published in Paris. The article then turns to analyse the structure of the American publishing field, using Bourdieu’s opposition between small-scale and large-scale production: French literature is located at the pole of small-scale production, a factor that explains its growing invisibility. A network analysis displays three clusters of publishers: large conglomerates who prefer to reprint classics, university presses engaged in the canonization of modern French literature, and small independent publishers investing in living writers. A by-product of the stiffening of commercial constraints on the publishing industry, the discourse on the ‘death of French literature’ paradoxically contributes to nourishing the well-founded fiction of national literatures. On the theoretical level, using world system analysis, field theory and the concept of symbolic capital helps explain isomorphism by imitation in the global market of translation.

Keywords

sociology of translation translation globalization literature French literature American publishing publishing publishers world system analysis field theory symbolic capital world literature international transnational field

Since the 1990s, discourse announcing the ‘death of French literature’ has been propagated throughout the Anglo-American publishing industry. The narrative that underlies this discourse is that of the ‘grandeur and decadence’ of a national literature that dominated the World Republic of Letters (Casanova, 2004) from the 18th century to the 1970s, when American literature began to strongly challenge its position (Sapiro, 2010a). This narrative raises the question of the conditions required for a national literature, in this case French literature, to maintain its symbolic capital on the international scene in the era of globalization, which has induced a transformation of the power relations between national cultures. This question should not, however, overshadow that of the power relations between national publishing fields in a context characterized by concentration, by the rise of multinational firms and by the strengthening of economic constraints (Bourdieu, 2008; Sapiro, 2009; Schiffrin, 2000; Thompson, 2010). While the role of publishing in the building of national literatures (Anderson, 1983) and in the creation of symbolic capital in national literary fields (Bourdieu, 1993a) has been acknowledged, concern about its role in the transnational literary field and its impact on the building of transnational literary capital is more recent (Franssen and Kuipers, 2013; Sapiro, 2010b, 2015).

In this article, I shall try to explain the loss of the transnational literary capital of French literature not as a result of its intrinsic value but as the consequence of the changing power relations between the French and American publishing fields and the tendency of the dominant American publishers to abandon translation for commercial reasons. As I have already argued (Sapiro, 2010b), the discourse on the death of French literature is more of a self-fulfilling prophecy on the part of these publishers, in order to justify the fact that they renounce publishing translations, than an observation. However, literary works continue to be translated into English in the United States, though in more marginal regions of the publishing field, as we shall see. What works are translated? If the works are mainly classics, then it could be argued that ‘French literature’ continues to exist in the world market of translation only through its past symbolic capital. If contemporary literature is sufficiently represented, then it would contradict the discourse about the death of French literature. But if French contemporary literature is published by small or non-profit publishers, this can explain its loss of visibility and symbolic capital. In this situation of American publishers disengaging from translation, it can also be asked what kind of works have a chance to be translated, and whether the symbolic capital of the original publisher has an impact on this circulation. This last question raises a more general one about the circulation of symbolic capital in the world market of translation.

I will investigate these questions through an empirical study of the practices of publishing translations of French literature in the United States in the era of globalization. This study is based on a quantitative analysis of all the literary titles translated from French in the United States between 1990 and 2003, on interviews with publishers and translators, and on archives.¹ The objective of this article is to provide empirical data about the position of French literature on the dominant American scene and to confront discourse with practice. After a presentation of the theoretical framework and methodology, I shall discuss the results of the quantitative analysis of the database of translated titles, and turn then to the exchanges between French and American publishers which underlie these cultural transfers.

Theoretical Framework

In my previous work on translation (Sapiro, 2010a), I proposed an approach combining world-systems analysis (Wallerstein, 2004), using the core–periphery frame, with Bourdieu’s theory of field (Bourdieu, 1996). In the present article, I would like to refine this model with the help of Bourdieu’s theory of domination and symbolic capital, and confront it with neo-institutional theory of organizational fields (DiMaggio and Powell, 1983), which has been applied to publishing (Franssen and Kuipers, 2013). The core–periphery model has proved its heuristic value for studying the unequal system of relations between languages (De Swaan, 2001) and the unequal flows of circulation of translated books in the world market of translation (Heilbron, 1999). The relation between core and periphery offers a spatial representation of the dominant–dominated opposition in Bourdieu’s theory of social space, making possible its extension to the geo-political relations between countries and/or cultures. In her study of The World Republic of Letters, Pascale Casanova (2004) uses the dominant–dominated opposition to describe relations between nations (for a general theory of unequal spatial relations under global capitalism in a Marxist perspective, see Harvey (2006)). The advantage of combining these two sets of notions is that the center–periphery opposition is a powerful descriptive model for spatial relations, including semi-central and semi-peripheral positions. Centrality is also a measure in network analysis, which is a useful tool for describing the relations between agents, in our case publishers from two countries linked by a common title (or, more precisely, by the tie: ‘having translated a work originally published by this French publisher’; see Sapiro, 2010c), or publishers sharing translated authors (as discussed below). Grounded on the unequal distribution of capital (Bourdieu, 1984), the dominant–dominated opposition provides an explanatory framework for the phenomenon of centrality. The symbolic capital accumulated by Gallimard (Sapiro, 2015) explains this French publisher’s centrality in literary exchanges with American publishers, as we shall see.

In contrast with Marxist theory, Bourdieu’s theory of domination distinguishes between different species of capital: economic, cultural and social. The differentiation between economic and cultural capital which underlies the chiastic multidimensional structure of social space (Bourdieu, 1984) is a manifestation of the distinction between temporal and symbolic power, which also applies to fields. Fields of cultural production are likewise structured around the opposition between temporal and symbolic capital: symbolic capital is acquired through the accumulation of specific capital in the field, according to the field’s autonomous rules, that is, through peer recognition, whereas temporal capital refers to resources which are not specific to the field, such as economic capital resulting from large sales or marks of official consecration awarded to cultural producers by authorities from other fields, for instance the political or religious fields (Bourdieu, 1993a). Thus symbolic capital and temporal capital are distinct: a writer can be endowed with much literary recognition, the sales of his or her books notwithstanding, and, conversely, an author of bestsellers can be considered as low-brow by authorities in the literary field. By the same token, the symbolic capital of a literary publisher is not a function of the publishing house’s size or dividends. Moreover, the autonomy of a field can be measured through the capacity of symbolic capital to be reconverted into temporal capital. This is the case in the field of literary publishing, where a firm’s accumulation of symbolic capital translates into economic value (Reynaud, 1999). Literary prizes also have the power to operate such a conversion of symbolic capital into economic capital in this ‘economy of prestige’ (English, 2005). The symbolic capital accumulated by a publisher, incorporated in its backlist, is encapsulated in its name (e.g. Gallimard functions as a ‘brand name’). The initial accumulation of symbolic capital by a firm happens by a transfer of symbolic capital from its first authors (such as André Gide in the case of Gallimard); once their reputation is established, a publisher acquires the power of consecration for debut authors. The circularity of symbolic capital between authors and publishers is thus resolved if we put it in historical perspective.

The transnational literary field is structured by ‘national literatures’, a category of perception relying on a ‘well-founded fiction’ – to use a term employed by Bourdieu about the notion of ‘family’ (Bourdieu, 1993b) – produced by the role played by literature in the construction of national identities and which has become reality (Corse, 1997). As Pascale Casanova (2004) convincingly argues, national literatures are also endowed with an unequal amount of symbolic (or literary) capital in the World Republic of Letters. This can be measured by the number of works from a national literature which have become part of international cultural patrimony. Translated works, which became representative of ‘national literatures’, became classics by the end of the 19th century, replacing the Greco-Latin European heritage in the first half of the 20th century, as demonstrated in a study based on the most translated works in all languages, using the Index Translationum (Milo, 1984). The position of French literature at that time was dominant, as a result of its tradition and prestige dating from the 18th century (Casanova, 2004). It is now acknowledged that national cultures were built in the context of harsh international competition (Thiesse, 1998). While translation contributed to the building of national literatures by establishing a corpus of literary texts and models in the newly-codified national languages (Even-Zohar, 1990), translation was also an instrument of this competition: being translated was a measure of international recognition, and thus of transnational capital. The rise of German and Italian literatures, starting at the end of the 19th century, can be assessed through the growth in the number of translations of literary works from these languages. Conversely, once the national literary field was established, translations could be regarded as ‘invading’ the national market and competing with the national production, as was the case in Fascist Italy (Rundle, 2010).

This competition was mainly European. American literature emerged on the international scene only in the 1930s, thanks to translations into French (Gallimard published translations of Faulkner and Dos Passos, for instance; see Sapiro, 2015). Though American publishers fought the domination of English/British firms from the 18th century on (Casper and Groves, 2007), it was not until the mid-19th century that American literature acquired autonomy from British literature by inventing new literary models. After the Second World War, the United States achieved a dominant position in all cultural industries. American products were widely exported. American hegemony was extreme in cinema and in genres of large-scale production such as mystery and romantic novels, classified as ‘low-brow’ in cultural hierarchies. In the 1960s, the American publishing industry succeeded in reversing the power relation with its British homologue. Between 1955 and 1978, book production in the United States increased more than sixfold (from 12,589 to 85,126 titles), more than twice as much as in France and Germany (from 10,364 to 31,673 in France) (Milo, 1984).

In his analysis of the field of publishing, Bourdieu (1993a, 2008) distinguishes between the pole of large-scale production, which is ruled by the law of the market, and the pole of small-scale production, which functions according to the specific rules of the field. At the pole of large-scale production, the value of a book depends on its profitability and thus is measured only through sales figures, but at the pole of small-scale production, the aesthetic or specifically literary value of a work, as assessed by specialists (literary critics, peers, literary publishers), prevails over its economic value.

This polarization also functions in the world market of translation (Sapiro, 2008a, 2010b). It is expressed in the classifications made by publishers and literary agents, who distinguish between ‘upmarket’ (and even ‘literary upmarket’) books – those endowed with symbolic value addressing a public of learned readers – and ‘commercial’ literature, and translates into different distribution circuits (bookstores versus mass market). As the American publishing industry was concentrating on temporal power at the pole of large-scale production in the transnational book market, French literary production was confined, along with most other national literatures, to the pole of small-scale production. As we shall see, literary works translated into English in the United States can be situated in the upmarket category, and this explains their relatively limited sales, compared to the pole of large-scale production. This is an effect of globalization and of the concentration of publishing around large multinational conglomerates: while commercial literature in French used to be translated into other languages in the 1970s (for instance into Hebrew; Sapiro, 2010d), that is no more the case. Distinguishing the circuits of large-scale and small-scale production thus sheds a different light on the controversial issue of English hegemony and linguistic diversity. Mélitz (2007) observes that the dominance of English in the market of translations, far from simply reflecting the size of the market, has actually increased in spite of the falling share of English language books in book production worldwide. Thus, according to him, the dominant language tends to ‘crowd out’ other languages. Against this observation, it has be argued that book production in English is still the largest in the world and culturally so diversified that this can explain why so much is translated from English into other languages, and relatively little from other languages into English (Ginsburgh et al., 2011).

Without discussing these arguments here (for a full discussion, see Heilbron and Sapiro, forthcoming), it can be observed that, if we take the original language of books as a measure, the world market of translation’s pole of small-scale production is much more culturally diversified than its pole of large-scale production, where English is overrepresented (Sapiro, 2010b). The English domination at the pole of large-scale production everywhere in the world (sometimes even competing with national languages) also explains why the percentage of translations in overall book production is so low in the United States and the United Kingdom – where very few translations are done in the mass market sector – compared to other countries (Sapiro, 2010b): around 3% by the end of the 1990s, against 15–18% in France and Germany, 25% in Italy and Spain, 40% in Greece. These figures are also an indicator of core–periphery relationships: the more a language is peripheral, the more it imports books in translation and vice versa. And if we relate them to export figures, we observe that the more a national culture exports, the less it imports and vice versa (Heilbron, 1999). Exportation thus appears to be an indicator of centrality in the world system of translations.

One should specify that this average varies very much according to the categories of books: in France, for instance, the share of translations in literary production is twice as high as the average for book production overall (around 35%). English is far and away the most translated language: it represents two thirds of the books translated into French, and it is dominant even at the pole of small-scale circulation, accounting for one third of the translated titles in the foreign literature series of literary publishers such as Gallimard and Le Seuil (Sapiro, 2008b; on Le Seuil, see Serry, 2002). Because of its historical link to the construction of national identities (Corse, 1997; Thiesse, 1998), and the resulting belief in the existence of national literatures - a belief which, as already stated, still structures the perception of the World Republic of Letters (Casanova, 2004) - literature is indeed the category where translations are the most numerous and where cultural diversity as assessed by the variety of original languages is highest, though as already stated, this diversity can be observed only at the pole of small-scale production (mass-market and genre fiction are not identified with a national culture, except for the upmarket segment of ‘noir fiction’, where the plot is more socially and culturally anchored). Literature (upmarket and commercial altogether) is also the most translated category of books in the world market of translations - it accounts for around 50% of all translated books in the world according to the Index Translationum.

The dominant position of the American publishing industry on the world market of translation confers to American firms a high consecrating power in the transnational literary field, meaning that if a book is translated in the United States, its chances of being translated into other languages increase. Thus being translated into English in the United States provides a higher amount of symbolic capital than being translated into another language and/or country. By the same token, the hierarchy of languages according to number of literary translations in a dominant publishing field such as the American one can be taken as an indicator of the amount of symbolic capital of different ‘national literatures’. From this standpoint, French literature was still first in the United States in 2008, with a share of 16% (58 titles out of 361 literary translations from 46 languages recorded in the Threepercent database),² closely followed by Spanish (50 titles, that is to say, close to 14%), then German (30 titles, 8%), Arabic (27, 7.5%), Japanese (23, 6.4%), Russian (20, 5.5%), Italian (14, 3.8%), Portuguese (14, 3.8%), Chinese (12, 3.3%), Hebrew (12, 3.3%), and Swedish (11, 3%) – other languages had fewer than 10 titles in translation that year. These figures clearly show that this hierarchy is not proportional to the book production in the original country, a large country such as China and a very small one such as Israel having the same share. Though French is first, and though its share is twice the ratio of the number of translated titles per number of languages (7.8), the differential with the following languages is much smaller than between English and other languages translated into French. From 1997 to 2006, using the data produced by the Syndicat national des éditeurs (SNE) on the basis of the publishers’ declarations,³ French publishers acquired from American publishers the translation rights for an average of at least 137 literary titles per year, this average representing 27% of all titles for which the rights were acquired (and 42% of the English titles). Considering that these data are not exhaustive and that they exclude translations of books which are in the public domain, and considering also that the share of translations in French literary book production is more than ten times superior to the equivalent percentage in the US, the position of French literature in the United States appears to be much weaker than that of American literature in France. In our database, the yearly average number of literary works translated from French between 1990 and 2003 is 80, including books in the public domain and reprints, with fluctuations between 60 and 95 per year. Moreover, we need to know whether the books translated from French are contemporary or classic works, in order to assess the symbolic capital of contemporary French literature.

Methodology and Sources

The database of literary works translated from French into English in the United States includes 1124 titles published between 1990 and 2003 (including new editions of translations done before the period). This data was extracted from the UNESCO Index Translationum. The quality of the data of the Index depends on the quality of the bibliographies of national libraries, which in some cases are not reliable (Sapiro, 2008b: 47–51). For the United States, the Library of Congress, which is generally considered as very reliable, had provided UNESCO with complementary data just as we were constructing the database, and we were able to include this new data. We compared it to the data gathered by the Bureau du Livre Français (BLF) for the same period. The UNESCO database was three times larger than that of the BLF and contained all of the items in the latter. The variables in the Index Translationum included the author’s name, the translated title, category (literature, social sciences, etc.), the original language, the language of translation, the publisher, the city and the country. We were thus able to extract precisely the titles of literary works translated from French into English and published in the United States during the period (including those co-published with British publishers). We excluded youth literature, which is a different market segment. Using the Library of Congress, the BLF database and publishers’ online catalogues, we checked this data, completed it and added other variables regarding the genre, the date and century of publication of the original title, in order to distinguish classical authors from modern and contemporary ones. Our database thus includes 15 variables: author’s name, author’s sex, author’s nationality, English title, original publisher, city of the original publication, year of release of original publication, century of original publication, year of publication of the translation, city of publication of the translation, publisher of the translation, format (hardcover versus paperback), genre, name of the translator(s), number of pages. The genre (according to the Dewey classification) is divided into 15 modalities: autobiographical novel, autobiography, epistolary novel, graphic novel, historical novel, medieval literature, mysteries and thrillers, novel, philosophical tale, poetry, science fiction, short stories, theatre, and the modality ‘various’ for anthologies mixing various genres. The variable ‘century of original publication’ includes 11 modalities: from the 12th to the 21st. The 20th century was divided in two modalities, in order to distinguish the authors who were dead in 1990 and who, like Gide, Camus and Sartre, have become or were in the process of becoming classics, and contemporary works (generally published after the 1970s) by living writers, whose transnational symbolic capital is in the making and who can be involved in the promotion of their translations.

In order to characterize the main publishers of French literature in translation, a second database of the 69 American publishers or imprints who published five or more translations from French between 1990 and 2003 was constructed out of the first one. They represent 26% of all 266 publishers recorded in the first database, and account for 72% of the titles published, illustrating the ‘oligopoly with fringes’ model, characteristic of competitive markets (Coser et al., 1982: 42; Reynaud, 1982). The data were collected from websites, emails and phone interviews when possible.⁴ Using the indicators proposed by Bourdieu (2008), a first group of variables encoded properties of the firm: date of creation, legal status (profit/not-for-profit), independence versus affiliation with a large conglomerate during the period under study (the university presses were coded separately), and number of employees. A second group of variables concerned the firm’s editorial production: number of titles published per year, publication format (hardcover, paperback, or both), number of literary translations from French between 1990 and 2003, preferred literary genre, share of classical, modern and contemporary works out of overall publication (when one of these categories represented more than 50% of the list of translated works). The presence of a Nobel Prize winner in the list was coded as an indicator of symbolic capital; we coded separately the presence of a French winner of the Nobel Prize. We distinguished publishers which published works by these authors before they won the prize (such as David Godine for Le Clézio, who was awarded the prize in 2008, and the University of Nebraska Press for Herta Müller, who was the 2009 winner) from those who published them afterwards. This distinction was made in order to differentiate investment in the accumulation of symbolic capital of a foreign author (a riskier business) from the acquisition of rights for an author already consecrated. We used multiple correspondence analysis (MCA) and network analysis to explore these data. I shall present here only the network analysis between American publishers (for the MCA and the network analysis between French and American publishers, see Sapiro, 2010c).

The qualitative study made it possible to understand agents’ motivation and to complete the inquiry for the more recent period. Interviews with American publishers (28 individuals, for 26 interviews, two of them having been carried out with two editors at once), translators (13), literary agents (7), booksellers (5) and one state representative were conducted between 2007 and 2010, in the United States and in Paris. Among the publishers, five worked in a prestigious literary imprint affiliated with a large conglomerate, three in a large international conglomerate, 10 in independent publishing houses – one in an old and prestigious house (medium-size), the nine others in small, newly-created firms – five in non-profit houses and four in three university presses.

French Contemporary Literature in the United States

The first result of the statistical analysis of the database is the share of classic, modern and contemporary literature. The classics represent close to one quarter of the translations (17% for the 19th Century, 4% for the 18^th century and 4% for the 17^th century, translations of works from an earlier period being rare). One third of the translated works belong to what I have called ‘modern literature’: deceased authors of the 20th century who are already canonized or are in the process of being canonized as classical writers. Jean-Paul Sartre, Marguerite Duras and Georges Perec are examples of such authors. Note that one third of these modern classics were originally published by Gallimard, confirming the crucial role played by this publisher in the consecrating process. These titles represent 55% of the translated titles of this publisher during the period, 45% being works by contemporary authors, a rate which is higher than the average of 40% being contemporary titles for the whole database. That the majority (60%) of books translated are classic or modern classic titles shows that the past symbolic capital of French literature is still valued in the American book market. Publishers indeed continue to reprint classics and to translate modern works of the 20th century for the first time. However, the share of works by contemporary writers (40%) is not as low as one might imagine considering the discourse on the death of French literature.

The distribution among genres displays the dominance of the novel, which accounts for half of the translations if we are to include autobiographical novels. We coded the latter separately, since they do not fit in the classification between fiction and non-fiction which prevails in American publishing; see Table 1. However, the relatively high percentage of poetry collections (13%), works of theatre (8%), short stories (5%), and other upmarket genres, compared to the very low share of commercial genres (mysteries/thrillers, 6%; science fiction, 3%), corroborates the hypothesis that translations from French in the US are mostly located at the pole of small-scale production. That poetry and theatre are overrepresented in translations from French into English appears clearly when we compare this percentage to their very small share in the translations from English into French (0.6%), whereas the commercial genres represent altogether one third.

Table 1.

Distribution of translated literary titles from French into English in the US (1990–2003), according to genre.

Genre	Number of titles	%
Novel	503	44.75%
Poetry	142	12.63%
Theatre	90	8.01%
Mysteries/Thrillers	71	6.32%
Autobiographical novel	70	6.23%
Short stories	56	4.98%
Historical novel	54	4.80%
Autobiography	40	3.56%
Science fiction	32	2.85%
Medieval literature	23	2.05%
Various	17	1.51%
Philosophical tale	14	1.25%
Epistolary	5	0.44%
Graphic novel	6	0.53%
Missing Data	1	0.09%
Total	1124	100%

Source: Sapiro, 2010c.

What are the characteristics of the translated authors? A former head of the French Publishers’ Agency, who represents most of the French publishers in the United States for selling the translation rights of a selection of titles, recalls in an interview that during the 1990s, American publishers would tell him: ‘don’t try to sell me French, dead, white, male, conservative’ authors (26 April 2009). This quote reflects the watchword of cultural diversity in the Anglo-American publishing field (as in other cultural industries) at that time. How was this watchword put into practice in translations from French? Did it help counterbalance the selection effect of Parisian publishing, whereby women, minorities, immigrants and writers from peripheral Francophone areas were marginalized, a selection effect which usually tends to be reinforced in the world market of translations (Sapiro, 2010a)? (On gender inequality in the American, French, and German literary fields through bestseller and prize winner lists from 1965 to 2005, see Verboord (2012), who shows that, for prize winners, the gap is the widest in France and the smallest in the United States; on African Francophone authors, see Ducournau (2015))

In our database, the percentage of works written by female authors is 21% (against 76% written by male authors, and 3% by a collective; see Figure 1), but if we consider only titles of contemporary literature, the percentage goes up to one third (see Figure 2). Though there is no data allowing for a comparison with the overall percentage of works by female authors in France during the same period, this percentage reflects the increased visibility of female authors on the French literary scene at this time, as well as the interest of American publishers in ‘women’s literature’. If we consider now the 67 most translated authors during the period (four titles or more), there are 10 women: four belong to the category of modern classics (Simone de Beauvoir, Colette, Marguerite Duras, Marguerite Yourcenar), and six to the contemporary (Hélène Cixous, Andrée Chedid, Maryse Condé, Annie Ernaux, Nancy Huston, Marie Redonnet).

Figure 1.

Distribution of translated literary titles from French into English in the US (1990–2003), according to the author’s sex.

Figure 2.

Distribution of translated contemporary literature titles from French into English in the US (1990–2003), according to the author’s sex.

Diversity can be measured not only through language but also through the nationalities of the authors (see Table 2). In this respect, there appears to be a high level of diversity among the translated authors: about 30 different nationalities are represented. However, these nationalities are unequally distributed. Three quarters of the translated books (858 titles) were written by French writers. Belgian writers follow (83 titles), mainly because of Georges Simenon, the most prolific and the most translated author, but there are also two contemporary Belgian writers. The presence of authors of American nationality is mainly due to Julien Green and Elie Wiesel. Swiss nationality (16 titles) is represented, in addition to Rousseau and Madame de Staël, by three living authors. Nancy Huston is the main Canadian author (six titles out of 15). Forty-five titles were written by writers originating from Arab countries, notably the former French colonies (Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia), 17 were written by Sub-Saharan African authors (from Congo, the Ivory Coast, Mali, Senegal and Guinea) and 7 by Haitian authors.

Table 2.

Distribution of translated literary titles from French into English in the US (1990–2003), according to the author’s nationality.

Author’s nationality	Number of titles
French	858
Belgian	83
American	30
Swiss	16
Algerian	15
Canadian	15
Collective	14
Moroccan	12
Irish	10
Lebanese	10
French/American	8
Haitian	7
Congolese	5
Chinese	4
Cameroonian	4
Egyptian	3
Ivorian	3
Romanian	3
Dutch	2
Iranian	2
Italian	2
Malian	2
Senegalese	2
Tunisian	2
Albanian	1
Chinese-French	1
English	1
Guinean	1
Lebanese-American	1
Scottish	1
Syrian	1
Turkish	1
Anonymous/Missing data	4
Total	1124

Source: Sapiro, 2010c.

This high level of diversity attests to the heterogeneity of the works translated from French and could contribute to the idea of the death of ‘French literature’, identified with Parisian white, male authors, as opposed to what was defined at the same period as ‘world literature in French’, referring to writers coming from the Francophone periphery and challenging the inertia of central Parisian literature. A manifesto was published in Le Monde on 15 March 2007 by two writers, Jean Rouaud and Michel Le Bris, followed by a collection of essays published by Gallimard, which began a large international debate - see Rouaud and Le Bris (2007) and Sapiro (2010a). Interest in writers who were formerly relegated to the margins because of their geographic or ethnic origins came to the fore around 1992. That year, the Saint-Lucian poet Derek Walcott was awarded the Nobel Prize, the Sri-Lankan born Canadian novelist Michael Ondaatije the Booker Prize, and the French author Patrick Chamoiseau, from Martinique, the Goncourt Prize. In 1993, the French government adopted a decree (n°93-397) stipulating that authors writing in French (instead of French writers) are entitled to receive financial support from the Centre National du Livre. While the French government exports these authors within the label of ‘French literature’, their importation and critical reception in the United States emphasize their geographic origin and their residency in France rather than their choice of the French language in most cases: Texaco by Chamoiseau, a French writer originating from Martinique, was categorized as ‘Carribean literature’, Testament français by the Russian emigré Makine was translated as Dreams of My Russian Summers, and, as one of our interviewees remarked, Dai Sijie is regarded as a Chinese author. However, their choice of the central French language and of residency in France is significant, since these factors increased their chances of achieving recognition in the World Republic of Letters. A third variable, the location of the publisher, was determinant: the houses are concentrated in France, and overwhelmingly in Paris. Publisher’s location is in fact the hidden variable which unifies the heterogeneity of translated books, confirming that chances of accessing the world market of translation are highly conditioned by the centrality of the publisher and, as we will now see, by the latter’s symbolic capital.

The Exchange of Symbolic Capital Between Publishers

A quantitative analysis of the database reveals the central role of Parisian publishers in the exportation of French literature – or more precisely literature in French – to the United States: all of the publishers who originally published at least five of the translated books are Parisian (see Table 3) (apart from Actes Sud based in Arles, in the south of France), as are most of those who published fewer than five titles. The role of symbolic capital is revealed by the high percentage of titles published by Gallimard: 29% of the translations (212 titles). Gallimard is followed at a distance by Le Seuil (7.1%), Éditions de Minuit and Presses de la Cité (around 5%), Grasset and POL (around 4%), all of the others are below that level. We should note that these percentages do not reflect the publishers’ size or business: Éditions de Minuit and POL are two small publishers whose share is equivalent to that of larger and more profitable houses such as Grasset or Albin Michel. Both are endowed with great amount of symbolic capital: founded as part of the Resistance during the German occupation of France, Minuit has accumulated its symbolic capital as the publisher of Beckett and the authors of the Nouveau Roman (Simonin, 1994); POL is the publisher of many innovative contemporary writers.

Table 3.

Main French publishers of titles translated into English (⩾5 titles) (1990–2003).

French Publisher	Number of translated titles	%
Gallimard	212	28.8%
Le Seuil	52	7.1%
Minuit	37	5.0%
Presses de la Cité	36	4.9%
Grasset	33	4.5%
POL	28	3.8%
Robert Laffont	23	3.1%
Denoël	19	2.6%
Plon	17	2.3%
Fayard	16	2.2%
Mercure de France	16	2.2%
Flammarion	14	1.9%
Albin Michel	12	1.6%
Actes Sud	11	1.5%
Stock	7	1.0%
Editions des Femmes	6	0.8%
Seghers	6	0.8%
Balland	5	0.7%
Calmann-Lévy	5	0.7%
Ferenczi	5	0.7%
Other	191	26.0%
Total	736	100%

In the publishing world on the American side, literary works translated from French present a different image, revealing the structure of the American publishing field. More dispersed quantitatively and geographically, even if we focus on the 69 publishers who published at least five titles during the period under study (see Appendix 1), it is split between three groups of publishers: imprints in large conglomerates (23), small independent publishers (27) and university presses (13), the distribution of the translations among them being uneven. These three groups occupy different positions in the structure of the field. While the imprints represent the upmarket production of the pole of large-scale circulation, the university presses and the non-profit small publishers are located at the pole of small-scale circulation, the trade independent publishers being spread in an intermediary space (though in our case most of them belong to the small-scale segment). Although some prestigious imprints affiliated with large groups such as Knopf, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich (which has since then disappeared as an imprint, replaced by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) and Farrar, Straus & Giroux still continue to publish literary translations from the French, they represent only one third (23) of the 69 publishers who published at least five titles during the period, whereas 40% (27) are independent publishers, and 19% (13) university presses. One quarter of these 69 are non-profit publishers, and if we concentrate on those who published 10 titles or more, this share is increased to one third (see Table 4).

Table 4.

American publishers having translated at least 10 literary titles from French (1990–2003).

American publisher	Number of translations
University of Nebraska	60
Alfred A. Knopf	33
Modern Library	30
Arcade Publishing	29
Dover Publications	25
Dalkey Archive Press	23
Harvest Books	22
Edwin Mellen Press	20
Marlboro Press	19
Seven Stories Press	19
The New Press	19
University of Chicago Press	19
Grove Press	16
Farrar, Straus & Giroux	15
University of Virginia Press	15
Peter Lang	14
New York Review Books	14
David R. Godine	14
Wesleyan University Press	14
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich	14
George Braziller	12
Marion Boyars	12
Vintage	11
Burning Deck Press	11
Exact Change	10
University of California Press	10
W.W. Norton	10
Oxford University Press	10
Northwestern University Press	10

Moreover, the imprints in large groups tend to focus on the (re)publication of classics or modern classics rather than on contemporary literature: only 7 out of 23 imprints have more than 50% of contemporary works in their list of translations from French (see Table 5). They prefer to rely on assets of established symbolic capital rather than take the risk of playing a role in the construction of this capital for a living author. For instance, the French literature list of the prestigious imprint Knopf, now affiliated with Random House, includes classics such as La Fontaine, Montaigne, Charles Perrault, Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau, Choderlos de Laclos, Balzac, Stendhal, Victor Hugo, Flaubert, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Maupassant and Zola, modern classics such as Martin du Gard, Camus and Beckett. Knopf’s major contemporary French author was at that time the provocative Michel Houellebecq, along with Elie Wiesel, Sijie Dai and Shan Sa, all very well-selling authors. Farrar, Straus & Giroux (FSG) focuses more on modern classics, its two major authors being Colette and Marguerite Yourcenar. Its list, in the period under consideration, included three successful contemporary French authors. As an editor at FSG, in charge of translations from French, explained in an interview, when asked about his criteria for choosing a book to translate:

And if I fell in love with a French book, we’d probably publish it, and unfortunately, no one’s German is good enough, […]. But it’s really like that, I mean, there’s so little economic incentive to do it, so for it to have any chance – financial chance, or critical chance, or commercial chance at all – we have to be completely insanely in love with it. And if we’re not insanely in love with it there’s no chance for it to work at all, so, that’s pretty much the only criterion. And then you can ask, well, what kinds of books do you tend to fall in love with, and I, and I don’t know. (Interview, 10 March 2009)

Table 5.

Share of classics, modern and contemporary translations from French, according to the publisher’s status (1990–2003).

Share of classical, modern and contemporary works	Independent publisher	Imprints in a conglomerate	University presses	Missing information	Total
>50% classics	7	6	2	2	17
>50% contemporary	16	7	6	2	31
>50% modern	4	10	5	2	21
Total	27	23	13	6	69

These results reveal the marginalization of contemporary French literature (and of translation in general) on the American publishing scene, as a consequence of two main factors (Sapiro, 2010b): the concentration process in the publishing industry and in book distribution (to large chain stores which tend to select titles with commercial potential) which has stiffened commercial constraints (Thompson, 2010); and the disappearance of staff editors mastering foreign languages, compared to an earlier era in American publishing (which probably indicates a change in hiring criteria). These factors underlie the representation of the low profitability of translated literature. Cases contrary to this representation, such as The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery, which after having been refused by all American publishers was published in English by a small ‘outsider’, Europa Editions, and became a huge bestseller, are regarded as ‘exceptions’. Publishers usually underscore the lack of interest in translations on the part of the American public, which, though never proved by any survey, functions as a self-fulfilling prophecy, to use Robert Merton’s concept (Sapiro, 2010b). This is a self-fulfilling prophecy which has relegated contemporary French literature mainly to the independent and non-profit sectors, where books have a very small-scale circulation and very low visibility.

By contrast, the investment of small independent trade or non-profit publishers in translation, especially of contemporary literature (see Table 5), proves that translating literary works is a mode of accumulating symbolic capital for newcomers in the publishing field, who do not have the economic and symbolic resources necessary to attract American authors, because of the high advances on royalties that their agents demand. The Bostonian publisher David Godine, who founded his publishing house in 1970 and has published translations of works by Georges Perec, Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio (before he won the Nobel Prize in 2008), Patrick Modiano (who also won the Nobel Prize in 2014), and two other contemporary innovative authors, Jean Echenoz and Sylvie Germain, told us in an interview that he prefers publishing, at a lower cost, a foreign author who is internationally recognized, rather than a young ‘mediocre’ American debut writer whose agents request disproportionate advances.⁵ However, the economic stakes in the publishing field are such that David Godine cannot keep an author once he has been awarded a major international distinction such as the Nobel Prize, since he will immediately receive much more interesting offers from larger companies. Thus the symbolic capital is reconverted into economic capital only for the titles he already has on his list.

Small publishers are much more autonomous in their decisions than acquisition editors of large conglomerates imprints. However, such investment in translation requires specific resources – linguistic skills, knowledge about European production (authors and publishers), building a network of relationships – since these editors cannot afford to hire scouts like the big companies. For these publishers, specialization in translation is a strategy of distinction in the book market, where they occupy a niche. They praise the richness of European editorial production, as Michael Reynolds, the founder of Europa Editions - a small publishing house set up in 2005 by the owners of the Italian Press Edizioni E/0, with the objective of bringing European voices to the Anglo-American world - expresses in an interview:

[…] you know, publishing translations in the US market, we’re spoiled for choice, because there are loads and loads of things in Europe that are really great. And nobody else either is interested in them, or they don’t know about them, so there’s just really wonderful books to be published. (Interview, 9 August 2010)

Among the 27 independent publishing houses who published at least five literary translations between 1990 and 2003, 11 are recently founded firms created in the 1980s or the 1990s, as opposed to the prestigious imprints or the university presses, most of which are older. The oldest of the 16 firms set up before 1980, and which stayed independent during the fusion-acquisition period, is New Directions, founded in 1936, which concentrates on the reprint of classics from their backlist, all the while making a cautious opening to a more commercial upmarket contemporary author: Amélie Nothomb. By contrast, Burning Deck, set up in 1961 by Keith and Rosemarie Waldrop, and located in Providence, Rhode Island, specializes in poetry, an upmarket non-commercial genre, and has published innovative authors such as Pascal Quignard in the French series launched in 1990. As Rosemarie Waldrop explained in an interview:

Well, we are interested in, in poetry that, but especially in poetry that is, well, somewhat innovative and not the run of the mill. And that’s how we started, publishing American poets, but we added two translation series gradually because, well, we started that in the 90s and at the time there was really, there were a few foreign poets, mostly very famous ones, but uh, and mostly either very old or dead [laughs]. And in a way that’s natural, there is usually a certain gap between publication in one country and translation and publication in another. But we had met a lot of French poets especially, that we were very enthusiastic about, and we decided, well, something should be done about communication. And so we added a French series and then a German series because that’s the two languages we are competent in. (Interview, 23 December 2010)

The new firms were set up either by young newcomers or by seniors like Richard Seaver and André Schiffrin, who were laid off from their former publishers as a result of the concentration process (Grove Press and Pantheon Books respectively), and reconverted their experience, as well as their symbolic and social capital, to build a new independent structure: in these cases, Arcade and The New Press. Richard Seaver, the former editor, at Grove, of William Burroughs, Henry Miller and the authors of the Beat Generation, introduced Beckett and Ionesco to the American readership. He founded Arcade in 1988 with his wife, Jeannette, who is French. In the interview I did with them (on 15 October 2007), Jeannette defined the editorial line as ‘literary, entirely literary, upmarket let’s say, in the style of Minuit/Seuil’. Arcade has acquired the English-language rights to three Goncourt prize winners: Amin Maalouf, Andreï Makine and Jean Rouaud. The son of Jacques Schiffrin - who founded Pantheon books after he fled, in 1941 from occupied France, where he worked at Gallimard - André Schiffrin was hired in 1961 by Pantheon, which was already part of the group Random House, and where he edited books by Foucault, Sartre, De Beauvoir and Duras. In 1980, Random House was acquired by S.I. Newhouse and by the end of the 1980s, Pantheon was declared unprofitable by the conglomerate (Schiffrin, 2000). The mass dismissal of editors, including André Schiffrin, sparked a huge demonstration calling for Pantheon’s preservation. At this point Schiffrin decided to embark on a new publishing venture, founding The New Press, a non-profit publisher of political essays and critical research targeted at an audience beyond the confines of the academic world. Following the model of the French publisher Minuit, which during the Algerian war published politically committed books along with avant-garde literary works by the authors of the Nouveau Roman (Simonin, 1996), Schiffrin also published translations of French literature, most of them by contemporary writers who were already recognized by that time, such as the 1987 Goncourt prize winner Tahar Ben Jelloun, and by a new generation of innovative authors, including Patrick Chamoiseau, along with some modern classics by Marguerite Duras, Claude Simon and Georges Perec.

While these elders served as a model, most of the new firms were set up by newcomers. This is the case of Seven Stories, founded by a young publisher, Dan Simon, who, similarly to Schiffrin at The New Press, built a politically engaged list of essays, publishing upmarket literary works in translation at the same time. Seven Stories is the publisher of two female authors endowed with high symbolic capital: Annie Ernaux, an author of autobiographical novels published by Gallimard, who won the Renaudot prize in 1984, and the Algerian Assia Djebar, who has taught since 2001 at New York University and was elected to the Académie Française in 2005.

This trend of the creation of small publishing houses specializing in translation has continued after the period under consideration. At least four non-profit firms have been created since 2003: Europa Editions, already mentioned; Archipelago Press, founded in 2005 by Jill Schoolman, published Small Lives by Pierre Michon, an experimental author who has achieved recognition in the French literary field; Open Letter, set up by Chad Post, who had previously worked at Dalkey Archive Press, acquired the translation rights to the experimental Zone by debut author Mathias Énard; Ugly Duckling is a publisher specializing in poetry, mainly from Russian and other Slavic languages, but also from French. Asked in an interview how he finds the works he publishes, Matvei Yankelevitch, the head of Ugly Duckling, a PhD student earning a living as a teacher of Russian, answered:

That hasn’t been much of a problem for like seven years, um, it just started to happen with the Eastern European poets series because once I let people know it was happening, there are so many translators who had been looking for a place to send translations, especially Russian and Eastern European avant-garde, and contemporary work, there were not many places interested in publishing it, because it’s pretty esoteric, publishers here didn’t know what to choose, they didn’t want to invest money in it because they knew they wouldn’t sell it, so. (Interview, 30 September 2010)

Investment in translation in accumulating symbolic capital is confirmed a contrario by the fact that, once publishers have established themselves as recognized firms, the share of translations with regard to total publications tends to decrease, while original language publications increase in number.

The role of university presses is one of the specificities of the importation of French literature in to the US, compared to other countries where university presses seldom play such a role. For most university presses, choices are very much related to academic programs. They often result from recommendations on the part of professors of French and Francophone literature who will include the title in their syllabus, thus reducing the risk of publishing these authors while at the same time contributing to their canonization. The University of Nebraska Press is the primary importer of French literature, with 60 titles translated during the period under study; twice as many as the next three publishers. Its list of translations from French includes more than 50% contemporary works, mainly of major Caribbean authors. Dalkey Archive Press, which is a non-profit press endowed by the Mellon Foundation and linked to the University of Illinois, continues to play a central role in the introduction of French modern and contemporary literature. It published 23 titles in the period under consideration, mainly of modern classics.

Among the five university presses having translated between 10 and 20 titles during the period, contemporary authors accounted for over half of the titles in two cases: the University of Virginia Press and Northwestern University Press. The University of Virginia Press has specialized in the translation of African and Caribbean writers in its CARAF Books series of ‘Francophone literature from the Caribbean and Africa’. The list, launched by James Arnold and Kandioura Dramé at the end of 1980s, includes, besides modern classics such as Césaire and Senghor, contemporary works by Ahmadou Kourouma, Mongo Beti, Maryse Condé, René Depestre, and Lilas Desquiron. Thus the presence of Francophone writers from Africa and the Caribbean in American book production is mainly due to university presses - they published more than half of the 24 titles by Francophone authors from these areas in our database, not including French Martinique - and by inference to these universities’ Francophone literature departments, whose faculty contributed to the constitution of a canon of these literatures. One could think that, for a university press, publishing fiction is a means to enhance its economic capital, but this is not the case. The print runs of the CARAF series fell from 500 hardcover and 2000 paperback copies in 1991 to 250 cloth and between 750 and 1000 paperbacks today, as Cathie Breitshneider, the head of the Virginia University Press, told me in an interview. She explained why this was not a reason to stop it, and why she was personally committed to the series:

Yeah, I mean I have to be [committed to the series] in some ways because it’s so much work! But it’s not an amount of work that would ever prompt me to say, can we just let go of this? You know, coz it’s too important. So, just that. Just that, I mean, you know, it’s world literature, and you really do want to increase the, the audience for these books. Because, you know, it’s not just literature, it’s a culture, it’s a history, it’s a political situation that in many cases is horrendous. […] it’s important, and that’s why I’m committed to it. So I, I mean, for all, sometimes the money we lose, the time it takes, I would not be a champion of wanting to abandon the series. (Interview, 27 February 2009)

For the university presses, like for the small independent publishers, translating contemporary authors is thus a strategy of distinction in the book market, which expresses an aesthetic and/or political stand.

The configuration of relations between American publishers according to the number of authors they share can be visualized through a network analysis. Sharing a translated French author is taken here as an indicator of proximity in publishers’ editorial line and list and of competition for the same kind of symbolic capital, thus a proximity of position in the field (for the way network analysis can be used with in the perspective of field theory for designating objective relations rather than interactions, see Anheier et al., 1995; De Nooy, 1991; Sapiro, 2006). The 69 American publishers who published at least five translations from French during the period under study account for 73% of the translated authors (348 out of 475). Some of the variables collected on the publishers were used to interpret this network analysis: the number of translated titles, the status of the publishing house (independent, affiliated with a group, university press), the share of classics, modern classics and contemporary works among the translated titles. Figure 3 reveals the centrality of The University of Nebraska Press, which shares the highest number of authors with the other publishers. This graphic displays three clusters of publishers according to their specialization. It appears that the firms who publish a majority of contemporary works (in black: University of Nebraska, Arcade, The New Press, Seven Stories, David Godine, Grove, etc.) have few ties with those that prefer to focus on the classics (in white: Knopf, Modern Library, Edwin Mellen, Dover). The latter constitute a dense network, sharing the great 19th century authors: Balzac, Hugo, Zola. The publishers whose lists are mainly composed of modern classics (in grey: Harcourt, The University of Chicago Press, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Peter Lang, etc.) share ties with the two other groups.

Figure 3.

Network analysis of the American firms which have translated at least five titles between 1990 and 2003.

This configuration can be explained by the fact that classical authors and some modern authors belong to the public domain and are thus free from intellectual property rights, a fact which, combined with the high symbolic capital attached to their names, increases the tendency to isomorphism among Anglo-American publishers (Di Maggio and Powell, 1983). Most of the titles of these authors are reprints of former translations that they have on their list and do not require any specific investment, retranslation being, because of its riskiness and its cost, a very rare strategy, adopted in some cases like Lydia Davis’ new translation of Madame Bovary, published by Viking, a Penguin imprint, in 2010, the added symbolic value being here the quality of the translation. Small independent publishers might compete with university presses for the titles of modern authors whose works are falling into the public domain, and they sometimes encounter difficulties in acquiring the rights of titles belonging to the catalogues of prestigious French publishers like Gallimard, who would rather sell rights to a more established publisher. The demand for French contemporary literature is not large enough to create a situation of harsh competition among publishers, apart from in a few cases such as Chamoiseau’s Texaco, the 1992 Goncourt prize winner, for which there was an auction between four publishers. As already stated, for a small independent publisher, investing in the translation of a foreign writer can be less costly than publishing a young American author. Uncertainty is reduced here by the fact that they usually invest in contemporary authors who are already endowed with symbolic capital or whose first title has encountered high recognition. By doing so, they enhance this author’s symbolic capital in the transnational and (French) national literary field; but they may lose him or her when s/he is awarded a prestigious prize like the Goncourt.

Conclusion

The empirical study of literary translations from French into English shows that, despite a loss of symbolic capital during the globalization era, compared to its former uncontested centrality, French literature is not ‘dead’. Classic, modern and contemporary works in French continue to be translated into English, albeit less than before. It is a more culturally diverse body of works that circulate from French into English, in terms of both the gender and ethnicity of authors. While questioning the very notion of ‘French literature’, and more broadly the well-founded fiction of the existence of national literatures, this cultural diversity attests to the central position that the French language still occupies in the transnational literary field, attracting writers from different countries and from former French colonies, despite the debate about the choice of the colonizer’s language. But what analysis of the original publishers reveals is the centrality of Parisian publishers in the world market of translations: they monopolize the circulation of most works from the whole Francophone area into English. Thus cultural diversity is rendered possible not only because of the selections operative in the circulation process, but also because Parisian publishers have in their lists writers coming from different cultural contexts.

Analysis of American publishers explains why French literature has lost its visibility on the American book market: as a result of the concentration process and the accrued economic constraints on publishing, translations, which were regarded as not profitable enough by the large conglomerates, have been partly relegated to the independent and not-for-profit sector, which has limited access to the bookstore chains.⁶ While the editors in imprints affiliated with large conglomerates or older independent firms like New Directions concentrate on the reprinting of classics from their backlist, thus yielding a profit from the symbolic capital accumulated by their predecessors without taking too many risks with contemporary authors, many newly created independent publishers invest in contemporary literature in order to accumulate symbolic capital. The circulation of symbolic capital from French publishers to American small independent publishers is transferred in return to the authors, since their translation in the United States contributes to their recognition in the transnational literary field. University presses take part in the consecration process of contemporary writers, in particular for Francophone authors from Africa and from the Caribbean, all the while playing an important role in the inclusion of modern French authors from the 20th century in the world literature canon. The relative loss of symbolic capital of French literature should also be related more broadly to the diversification of cultural exchanges, and especially the rise of interest in non-Western cultures, which is an aspect of globalization (see Berkers et al., 2011; Janssen et al., 2008). Paradoxically, however, while being instrumentalized in the power relation between American and French publishing fields in order to belittle the symbolic capital of French literature, the discourse on its death contributes to nourishing the collective belief in the existence of national literatures or cultures.⁷

The consecrating power of a publisher in the transnational literary field depends firstly on the position of its country of location and language in the world market of translation (central versus peripheral), secondly on its position within the linguistic area (central versus peripheral; for instance the United States versus India in the Anglophone area), and thirdly on its position within the national field (temporally and/or symbolically dominant versus dominated). Because of the centrality of the American publishing industry since the 1970s, its transnational consecrating power is much higher than that of Dutch or even German publishers for instance. Thus, far from being confined to the United States, the marginalization of translations from French and from other languages in the American book market impacts upon the whole transnational literary field, confirming Mélitz’s point about the dominant language crowding out other languages, in which he sees a threat to the welfare of the future generation of authors and readers (2007: 212). Contrary to attempts to downplay the consequences of the domination of English (Ginsburgh et al., 2011), this case study confirms that cultural diversity is menaced by the concentration of the publishing field around large conglomerates, but it also shows that the role of producing symbolic capital in the transnational literary field is partly taken over by small publishers. In France this role is still endorsed by prestigious literary publishers like Gallimard and Le Seuil, in their series of foreign literature, and they still have a transnational consecrating power (for instance, for the selection of Nobel Prize candidates), but economic constraints and the American model have already entailed the suppression of such a series in favour of more commercial translations at Calmann-Lévy, for instance (Sapiro, 2008b: 175–210, 2010b). This raises questions about the phenomenon of isomorphism in the international book market.

On the theoretical level, combining world system analysis with field theory enables us to relativize and refine the analysis of isomorphism in organizational fields. As already pointed out (Franssen and Kuipers, 2013), isomorphism in the world market of translation is located in ‘niches’, such as specific genres. However, while at the pole of large-scale production isomorphism across countries is orchestrated by literary agents, at the pole of small-scale production it is fostered by informal ties (social capital) and by affinities between publishers from different countries. This tendency is limited by the specificities of local markets (some authors encounter great success in some countries and not in others) and by the structure of the publishing field. Unequal relations between countries in this market and the structure of the national publishing field can, for instance, explain improbable exchanges between symbolically and temporally dominant firms like Gallimard and small independent publishers (some of them non-profit). Moreover, the circulation of models is not random: it depends once again on the symbolic capital of the publisher at the three levels defined above. Thus, and this observation does not apply only to the book market, isomorphism based on imitation is determined by symbolic capital.

Footnotes

Appendix

Funding

The author received funding for research trips to the United States from the New York Bureau du Livre of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and a Fulbright scholarship. She also received funding from the MOtif (Observatoire du livre d’Ile-de-France) for building and exploiting the database and from the French Ministry of Culture for a qualitative research on the obstacles to translation.

Notes

Author biography

Gisèle Sapiro is Professor of Sociology at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales and Research director at the CNRS. Her interests include the sociology of culture, of literature, of intellectuals and of translation. She is the author of La Guerre des Ecrivains, 1940–1953 (Fayard, 1999; English translation: The French Writers’ War 1940–1953, Duke University Press, 2014), La Responsabilité de l’Ecrivain (Le Seuil, 2011) and Sociologie de la Littérature (La Découverte, 2014). She is also the (co-)editor of Pierre Bourdieu, Sociologue (Fayard, 2004), Translatio (CNRS, 2008), Les Contradictions de la Globalisation Editoriale (Nouveau Monde, 2009), L’Espace Intellectuel en Europe (La Découverte, 2009), Traduire la Littérature et les Sciences Humaines (La Documentation Française, 2012), Sciences Humaines en Traduction (Institut Français, 2014), Dictionnaire Bourdieu (CNRS, forthcoming).

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