From May 17-20, Ukraine was a Guest of Honor at this year’s 52nd International Warsaw Book Fair
Ukrainian book publishers have been eyeing Poland as a gateway to the European book market, as Polish readers and book publishers show a growing interest in Ukraine’s national literature and writers.
From May 17-20, Ukraine was a Guest of Honor to this year’s 52nd International Warsaw Book Fair, highlighting the growing audience in Poland interested in modern Ukrainian literature.
The trips of three of the six Ukrainian authors who attended the fair – Yuriy Andrukhovych, Andriy Kurkov and Serhiy Zhadan – were financed by the fair’s Polish organizers.
According to publishing market insiders, the last three or so years have seen appetites for Ukrainian literature grow in Europe thanks to the successes and international recognition received by high-profile entertainment and sports personalities, such as 2004 Eurovision Song Contest winner Ruslana Lyzhychko, and super heavyweight boxing brothers Vitaly and Volodymyr Klitschko, as well as the Orange Revolution, which threw Ukraine into the world’s geopolitical and investor spotlight in 2004.
Natalya Bondarenko, the head of the Kyiv representative office of the Kharkiv-based Folio publishing house, said that in Poland, where readers are becoming increasingly familiar with Ukrainian literature, publishers have been displaying a higher interest in it.
“Ukrainian literature was thought to be known only among the younger generations in Poland, but this year’s exhibition showed that Ukrainian modern prose has found an audience in the older generations as well,” Bondarenko said, adding that it was clear that the number of Ukrainian books translated into Polish would continue to grow.
According to market insiders, Ukrainian writers receive little assistance promoting their work on foreign markets, and the few who have managed to cross the border with their books have largely done so through their own efforts.
Iryna Kuchma, the manager of the academic publications program at the Kyiv-based International Renaissance Foundation (IRF), said that there are no initiatives underway in Ukraine to promote the country’s authors abroad, and Poland is becoming Ukraine’s gateway onto the European book market, with Poland being the only country in the last several years to consistently buy the rights to translate Ukrainian authors’ works into Polish.
Kuchma attributed the current success that Ukrainian writers are experiencing on the Polish market entirely to “the ties and efforts of the last decade’s iconic Ukrainian writer Yuriy Andrukhovych.”
A Western-oriented poet and prose writer, Andrukovych was a cult name in underground literary circles in Ukraine in the 80s and is considered the father of modern Western-style Ukrainian prose. He is also the founder in 1987 of Bu-Ba-Bu, a post-modern literary and poetic group based in Lviv.
Kuchma said that Ukrainian literature needs more government support and an official organization dedicated to promoting it abroad, since in most cases translations of Ukrainian authors have been the result of individual efforts, chance and luck rather than the product of an organized publishing operation.
“The ideal situation would be to create a non-governmental foundation, but with state financing, which is common practice in most European countries,” she said, adding that such an organization wouldn’t need a big budget.
“Several people who know the languages and are able to communicate effectively, with a yearly budget of at least $20,000 out of $80,000 allocated to book publishing issues by the government, would be more than enough [for such an organization] to begin,” Kuchma explained.
She said that Andrukhovych became a literary cult figure in Poland due to his own efforts.
“He is a very public person, and originally he promoted his works himself. That’s how he made his way to Germany and other European publishing houses,” she said.
“As a result, today what Poland is publishing is either Andrukhovych or his proteges, and in many respects we have to thank him for the fact that Ukrainian authors are still published abroad, although not much and not often.”
Writers’ bloc
Other big-name Ukrainian writers, like Oksana Zabuzhko and Andriy Kurkov, have been blazing the trail into the European book market as well.
Zabuzhko is the author of the resoundingly successful “Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex,” which has been translated from Ukrainian into 11 other languages, including Russian, Bulgarian, Czech, Polish, Hungarian, German, English and Swedish. In all, Zabuzhko boasts 18 published translations of her books.
Kurkov, who was offered a publishing deal by Polish publishers at this year’s International Warsaw Book Fair, is said by market insiders to be the best known Russian writer in Europe, and is particularly in high demand in France, with his books having been translated into more than 30 languages – a record for modern Ukrainian authors.
Insiders say that Kurkov’s books have made top 10 bestsellers lists in Europe with more than 4 million copies sold abroad.
Like Andrukovych, Kurkov met his first publishing successes in Europe through his own efforts.
Agreeing with IRF’s Kuchma, Oksana Zabuzhko said that individual effort on the part of an author is not enough to tackle the problem of promoting Ukrainian writers’ works abroad and that a national strategy and program were needed to move Ukrainian books into foreign markets more effectively.
“Authors shouldn’t be preoccupied with their own publishing and translation issues. Their work is to write, not to find interpreters and publishers abroad,” Zabuzhko said.
“We [Ukrainian authors] are obliged to do it all on our own. The issue becomes even more complicated with the absence of good Ukrainian-language specialists in Europe. It is much easier to translate a book from Russian than from Ukrainian, and that’s partly the reason for Kurkov’s success. He writes in Russian,” she added.
Market cautious, but promising
If several years ago the list of Ukrainian authors translated into other languages was limited to Andrukhovych, Zabuzhko and Kurkov, today that list is being lengthened with fresh young talent, although translations of younger Ukrainian authors’ works are largely into Polish.
“In most cases the scenario is the following: The author is noticed by the Polish market (mostly due to the recommendations of personalities, like Andrukhovych), which then gets the authors attention in Germany, and once the author gets a German translation, that is already the door to all of Europe,” IRF’s Kuchma said.
She added, however, that many foreign publishers remain wary of risking investing in translations of Ukrainian works, since they have only a vague idea of what Ukrainian literature is.
“This, in its turn, is due to the absence of a national [Ukrainian] policy in this respect,” she said.
According to the writer Kurkov, the promotion of its national literature and culture is a good way for Ukraine to develop a positive international image in general.
“It is much easier to organize cultural integration than political or economic. Unfortunately, the state does not understand the benefits of making such an effort yet,” he said.
However, Folio publishing house director Oleksandr Krasovitskiy said that normal market processes are at work and that the government’s support of the Ukrainian publishing business is not central to its further development.
“The state simply isn’t able to take the question of book translations upon itself. It’s a matter of cooperation between local and foreign publishers, and the problem in Ukraine is that it hasn’t become a business yet. We don’t have market publishers and nobody invests money into it,” Krasovitskiy said.
“Of course, if the state would provide some support, it would simply speed up the process a bit, but the market will grow anyway,” he said.
Krasovitskiy said the problem with the Ukrainian book publishing market’s growth is the absence of popular fiction for the masses, since it is impossible to make a profit on “high” literature.
According to Krasovitskiy, popular literature, which normally occupies about 90 percent of the market in Ukraine, comes largely from Russia.
“The book market in Ukraine is an inverted pyramid. Instead of being at the top, the so-called high literature forms the base. It is a vicious circle. The authors do not write mass products because publishers don’t invest in and publish them. As a result there is nothing to publish, which is not going to change in the nearest future,” he said.
Currently in Ukraine, there are only a few authors positioning themselves as mass fiction writers.
One of them, Andriy Kokotyukha, claims that Ukraine has to start mass-producing “fashionable” literature.
“If our authors want to be really popular abroad, they not only have to learn to swim with the current, but to produce a novel each month and get used to the thought that after three months it will be forgotten,” Kokotyubkha said.
“We simply don’t have such a culture here. We just have to fill the market. I, for example, am ready to write 10 novels a year, but in Ukraine, there’s nowhere to publish them,” he added.
According to the director of Lviv-based publishing house Kalvaria, Petro Matskevych, the last two years have seen more than 10 modern Ukrainian writers translated – a development that Matskevych characterized as positive.
According to experts, the future of modern Ukrainian literature lies with the keyboard flourishes of the nation’s rising literary stars, such as Irena Karpa, a popular youth fiction author, and Lviv-born Lyubko Deresh, considered among the brightest of Ukraine’s younger generation writers.
Deresh published his first novel at the age of 18, and at 23 today, boasts works translated into several languages, including two in Polish and two in German, with Italian and Serbian translations of his works to be published this year.
