ABSTRACT
The website ANZL – Academy of New Zealand (https://www.anzliterature.com" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">www.anzliterature.com/feature/selling-new-zealand-frankfurt) – features “Selling New Zealand in Frankfurt”, a review of the 2012 Frankfurt Book Fair with New Zealand as Guest of Honour (GoH); a project intended to enhance interest in New Zealand books and increase their foreign readership. This article first investigates the Book Fair’s intention to achieve this goal by taking the term “selling” literally, and then focuses on the academic reception of New Zealand literature in German-speaking countries by exchanging “selling” with “translating”, or by moving from the commercial to the intercultural creation of dialogue between senders and receivers, between the “seller” and “buyer”. This shift from marketing to hermeneutically understanding New Zealand books across cultural borders points to the longer-lasting effect of “selling” books understood as “translating” them, and furthermore highlights the recipients’ notions of interest in the other, which becomes pertinent for the reception of Māori writing.
