Prizing Translation

October 2005 saw the inaugural ceremony of the Deutscher Buchpreis, awarded on the eve of the Frankfurt Book Fair to the “best” novel written in German and published in Germany, Austria or Switzerland that year. ¹ Founded by Germany’s main book trade association, the Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels, and endowed with 37,500 Euros in prize monies, the Deutscher Buchpreis was a high-profile addition to the existing range of German-language prizes for literature and the first to focus exclusively on novels in German. The rationale for the new award, however, had less to do with a specific attachment to the genre of the novel than with a desire to raise the profile of literature in German as a whole: the Buchpreis, according to the Web site, was founded in order to draw attention “beyond national borders to authors writing in German, to reading and to the keynote medium of the book”, meaning across borders within the German-speaking world but also—and more importantly—beyond its external borders. At the inaugural prize ceremony, Gottfried Honnefelder, speaking on behalf of the Buchpreis steering committee and the Börsenverein, highlighted the unequal flow of literary translation between English and German (nearly two thousand works translated into German each year, compared to forty the other way) and noted that Germany had a high proportion of translated bestsellers, with domestic bestsellers playing a minor role. ² For many in the German book trade, these statistics told a familiar tale: German-language literature’s “chronic export problem”, as the Tagesspiegel (Richter 2005) put it, was already a source of concern for publishers and cultural intermediaries and played into critical debates in which the “transnational value” (Taberner 2011, 636) of German writing was at stake. At the same time, the apparent failure of German-language writers to find a broad-based readership in the domestic market confirmed for some the insignificance of contemporary German-language fiction in a global context (Finlay 2007, 32). These concerns combined around the time of the Buchpreis in the view of Germany as a “literary importer”, with German-language literature perceived to be underrepresented at home and abroad. ³ The new award aimed to remedy this situation by promoting German-language literature in the domestic market and bringing novels in German to the attention of foreign-language publishers.