John O’Brien sounds rather frustrated:

To the foreign country’s question, “Why don’t Americans publish more of our books?” the only answer is, “Because you make it so difficult to find out what we need to know, and then scarcely help in allowing the publisher to so much as break even financially.”

Several thousand miles separate us and there is no easy way of finding out about a country’s literature and what’s really going on in it, short of actually going there and meeting and talking with as many publishers and critics as possible.

A common response, however, is that “we don’t have such a program.”

Instead, you are handed a catalog filled with the books that someone somewhere thinks Americans will like.

Foreign governments do not seem to like the idea of helping an American publisher or editor travel to their countries to find books to be translated. 


In an other part of this page, a colleague offers a somewhat different perspective