It took me a long time to grasp the shadowy nature of the literary world. The ins and outs of applying for funding, usually tied to another form of funding, like a grant to a foreign publisher or a translator. Basically, without support from the state, there would be no Czech books published abroad.
And even when they are published, thanks to that support, they’re usually just printed, that’s it. The book sits around in some warehouse and no one even knows it exists. Then, after six months or so, I get an email, say, from the Slovenian publishing house Mladinska knjiga, with an official statement informing me of the sale of four copies of my novel Kratka zgodovina Gibanja.
My email thanking them for doing a truly excellent job of hiding my books typically goes unanswered. In Poland, fortunately, things are different. I make a note in my calendar of an upcoming event there, marking the nine hundredth birthday of the author of the Chronicle of the Bohemians, Cosmas, whose Polish origin was recently accepted by most Czech historians after years of controversy, which means that the oldest Czech chronicle is of Polish origin.
Meanwhile I think back to the affable ex-activist from Egypt who reached out to my agent a few years ago. She offered an average sum for the rights to one of my novels, promising to publish it with “a cult independent Cairo press, specializing in the finest contemporary foreign prose.” It sounded almost as earnest as the activist-publisher’s biography I found online. After obtaining a degree in management, she was employed at Telecom Egypt until, at the age of thirty, she decided to give her life meaning by founding a small publishing house with a café that serves as a meeting place for Cairo bohemians.
But a few days later, while looking up grants on the Czech Ministry of Culture website, I accidentally clicked on a spreadsheet titled “Translations of Czech Prose Supported in 2018” and found her name right at the top. According to the spreadsheet, in 2018 she received a grant for the translation of my book at a rate several times higher than the standard. She only bought the rights as a pretext to get funding.
There was never any real interest in publishing my work and the novel never came out, though I have no way of knowing whether or not it was translated. Anyway, as long as the money from the Czech Ministry of Culture went to finance the Cairo alternative scene, why not? I stand in front of a class of my students.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
