Found in translation
Sam Leith
I was having lunch the other day with the publisher Christopher MacLehose, and we fell to talking about translation. This is not wholly unexpected: as well as having been (I discovered) PG Wodehouse’s last editor, MacLehose is a man with a career-long interest in translated fiction. He discovered Steig Larsson, and the motto of his MacLehose Press is “read the world.” I’ve been curious about whether some language communities export better than others ever since I learnt they go stone bananas for Donna Tartt in the Netherlands. But MacLehose says that it’s often got more to do with the translator.