On sale: Aotearoa New Zealand literature in Germany

ABSTRACT

The website ANZL – Academy of New Zealand (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.

KEYWORDS:

• Frankfurt Book Fair 2012
• Aotearoa New Zealand literature
• intercultural hermeneutics
• publishing industry
• literary marketing
• “selling”

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Übersetzungsförderung fremdsprachiger Literaturen aus Afrika, der arabischen Welt, Asien, der Karibik und Lateinamerika 1984–2010 [Promoting Translations of Foreign Language Literatures from Africa, the Arab World, Asia, the Caribbean and Latin America 1984–2010] documents translations of more than 600 books composed by more than 400 authors from 79 countries as promoted by the Association and substantially financed by the German Foreign Office and the Swiss foundation Pro Helvetia, in a unique project worldwide that is still being pursued (https://docplayer.org/10004962-Uebersetzungsfoerderung.html).

2. Elizabeth Knox’s The Vintner’s Luck and Janet Frame’s (1988) The Carpathians serve Wilson as examples. While the former was translated as Der Engel mit den dunklen Flügeln (Knox [1998] 2000), the textual complexities of Frame’s novel, it appears, have hitherto discouraged German publishers and translators.

3. The original Diogenes collection of 1980, translated by the Swiss Elisabeth Schnack (1899–1992) from English into German, played a most important role in the reception of English writing from Britain, the US, and the British Commonwealth. The collection can claim, to her credit, innumerable translated texts written by more than 100 authors.

4. Unionsverlag also published Albert Wendt’s ([1979] 1998) Die Blätter des Banyanbaums (Leaves of the Banyan Tree) which sold more than 2000 copies.

5. Though not mentioned here, Hulme’s ([1988] 1992) translated short story collection Der Windesser Te Kaihau (The Windeater), also published by S. Fischer Verlag, is still in print.

6. See Fresno-Calleja (2020), in this issue.

7. Ein anderes Land, edited by Bill Manhire, is not identical with the collection he co-edited with Marion McLeod ([1984] 2008); the early stories of Some Other Country are replaced by more contemporary ones in the German collection.

8. As indicated by the Manatū Taonga Ministry for Cultural Heritage ([2013] 2019): “The pavilion design won the 2012 New Zealand Interior Design Supreme Award as well as the Installation Category Award, and gained third place in the 2013 Adam and Eve German installation design awards. The pavilion also received the International Architecture Award at the 2014 New Zealand Architecture Awards” (n.p.). We are also informed that “[m]ost recently the While You Were Sleeping film by Inside Out Productions won the spatial communication category at the 2014 Stuttgart Festival of Animated Film” (n.p.)

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Dieter Riemenschneider

Dieter Riemenschneider taught Commonwealth literature/English language literatures at Goethe University, Frankfurt (1971–99). His main research areas are Indian English, New Zealand Aotearoa Māori, and Australian Aboriginal literature and culture. Among his more recent publications are Wildes Licht, a bilingual anthology of poems from Aotearoa New Zealand (Kronberg: Tranzlit, 2010, 2012); Gentle Round the Curves, essays on Indian English literature (Kronberg: Tranzlit, 2016) and Neuseeland fürs Handgepäck (New Zealand for your Hand Luggage; Zürich: Unionsverlag, 2019). www.tranzlit.de