![Michiel Horn [portret]](http://www.boekvertalers.nl/weblog/wp-content/uploads/2007/08/michielhorn.jpg)
In July 2003 I met Lex Jansen, the head man at The Arbeiderspers. Although he had a very natural interest in seeing a translation of Het woeden appear in the US, he warned me not to expect too much. He drew my attention to an article by Stephen Kinzer that had appeared in the New York Times a few days before. Its title: ‘America Yawns at Foreign Fiction’. Among its many sobering sentences was this one:
‘Writers, publishers and cultural critics have long lamented the difficulty of interesting American readers in translated literature, and now some say the market for these books is smaller than it has been in generations.’
And this one:
‘Several [publishers] said a decisive factor was the concentration of ownership in the book industry, which is dominated by a few conglomerates. That has produced an increasing fixation on profit. As publishers focus on blockbusters, they steadily lose interest in little-known authors from other countries.’
And these:
‘Some publishers said that they had no staff editors who read foreign languages, and that they hesitated to rely on the advice of outsiders about which foreign books might capture the imagination of Americans. Others mentioned the high cost of translation, the local references in many non-American books and the different approach to writing that many foreign authors take.’