Who defines "world literature"?

When the Frankfurt Book Fair opened its doors to the international literary scene last October, it generated—as it does every year—a great deal of media coverage. This level of attention is rarely paid to books for the rest of the year, particularly since many leading German outlets have significantly scaled back their arts and culture sections.

At least there’s the fair, the one annual event where books, authors and publishers are given a little more space than usual. A range of German outlets—Spiegel magazine, TV channels and online magazines—present their best-of lists and reading tips before the fair every year.

But almost all of these lists have one thing in common: with a few exceptions, small publishers and non-Western literature are virtually ignored.

There are many reasons for this. One is that hardly anyone working for these outlets is familiar with the literature of Asia, Africa or Latin America; it follows that the literature of Islamic countries is rarely given attention.

The one noticeable improvement in recent years has been the increased visibility of works by authors of non-Western backgrounds who live in Germany, but this is largely due to their publications by commercial publishers and recognition with awards.

Non-Western literature is a subsidised business

While countless large, general publishing houses have been absorbed by corporations like Penguin Random House or Holtzbrink, where the pursuit of profit often takes precedence over quality and a distinct publishing identity, non-Western literature remains, at best, a marginal concern even within other major houses.

If authors are well known in the media or have the potential to cause a scandal, or if they’ve been around for a long time, then their books will continue to be published. Translations from Arabic, Persian and Turkish, however, are considerably harder to find.

As for smaller publishers—those who put out feelers into the Islamic cultural sphere and have good contacts with publishers in Tehran, Istanbul, Abu Dhabi and Cairo—they have long been dependent on support such as that offered by the annual German Publishing Prize as well as translation grants from the likes of Litprom, the Sheikh Zayed Foundation or the German Translators' Fund to publish at all.

Almost no one likes to admit it, but non-Western literature in German translation is (again, with some exceptions) a subsidised business, which rarely covers its costs. 

Media attention is too limited, as is public interest in anything that could be perceived as "foreign". Small publishers and lesser-known authors have a hard time in the book trade anyway, due partly (if not only) to the market heft of large chains and online retailers, who aim for quick sales rather than cultural sustainability.

Arrogance and ignorance

Some may ask whether that is such a bad thing. Is it not normal that in Germany and the EU, that which is most widely read is predominantly local and therefore "Western" literature in the broadest sense? And yes, that focus is of course both reasonable and understandable.

But to understand the extent of the problem, take a closer look at all those best-of lists and literary prizes that tout the term "world literature". Anyone who takes the term, which coined by Goethe, seriously, should be concerned with balance. Literature from around the world should be given equal weight, rather than categorising "world literature" as a subjective assessment of works deemed to be of supposed world-class quality.

But "world literature" lists usually consist predominantly, or even exclusively, of Western literature. Occasionally, a list may offer about ten per cent non-Western literature, that is, books by authors who do not come from Europe or North America.

That is not only a sign of ignorance, but also betrays a good deal of arrogance and hubris: anyone who marginalises literatures beyond the West in this way is demonstrating, at the very least, that they do not take them seriously and consider them to be less important than Western works.

Of course, that is nonsense. Iran, Egypt, Turkey and Saudi Arabia are just as likely as Germany, the United States or France to produce world-class prose and poetry. It's just that we don't hear much about them because so little is translated and those few translations that do exist are usually overlooked.

A further illustration of this discrepancy: Goethe usually appears on such lists. Of course. Hafez, on the other hand, does not. Yet the poetic works of this Persian icon are undoubtedly among the most timeless in literary history.

Last year, new German translations from Persian were once again hard to find at the book fair. Years in which there are more than five new translations are in any case rare, and in some years, none appear at all. In 2024, there was, at least, a new book from Amir Hassan Cheheltan: "The Rose of Nishapur", translated into German by Jutta Himmelreich and published by C.H. Beck. 

Cheheltan is now known in Germany and has long been on the radar of newspaper editors because he has written extensively about Iranian politics for Western media, making him a prime example of the situation outlined above.

His first novel to be published in German was "Teheran, Revolutionsstraße" ("Tehran, Revolution Street"), which appeared in 2009. It was published by the Peter Kirchheim Press, a small publishing house in Munich which, due to the age of the publisher, is no longer active. 

Kirchheim, a publisher who always fostered a curious “Blick in die Welt” (“view of the world,” as Goethe called it), discovered and published the exceptionally strong book. The novel garnered significant attention, sold well, and was later picked up by C.H. Beck, who has published Cheheltan ever since—though not exclusively.

Cheheltan’s strongest novel by far, "Iranische Dämmerung" ("Iranian Dawn"), was republished by Kirchheim in 2015 presumably because Beck felt that the text was too difficult for a German audience. This should not be taken as a broad criticism of C.H. Beck, who generally curate an excellent catalogue.

But it is frequently the case that small publishers are the first to track down interesting and important world literature, often at great economic risk, and when this literature then by some miracle overcomes all the hurdles and reaches a larger audience, the big publishers pounce. You can hardly blame the authors for going along with this; some do so with great reluctance, as they will admit, if only in private.

Reproducing stereotypes

This is due, in some part, to the way books are handled when they are actually published. Some large publishers, especially those in the Penguin Random House group, tend to drown their book design in clichés. Almost without exception, books from Islamic countries have either a veiled woman or a mosque slapped on the cover, even when the book itself makes no mention of mosques, as in the case of Hakan Günday's excellent novel "Loss".

This not only reproduces stereotypes of certain countries and demonstrates how little the publisher itself takes this literature seriously, but also ensures that the books sell significantly fewer copies than they could.

While the small audience who are already interested are permanently irritated by these covers, others don't bother to pick them up because they don't want to read books about Islam. They never even find out that the works are usually about completely different things.

So long as amateurish marketing by large publishers combines with the invisibility of small publishers, ignorance in the media and trade, and reluctance on the part of the public, then talk of a true "world literature" will remain little more than a pipe dream.

As Goethe so aptly said, "Those who read books see the world and not just the fence", a neat formulation of what the term "world literature" actually means. In an era of multimedia polarisation and oversimplification, this becomes all the more important.

Getting to know a country or culture by travelling there and interacting with local people, or people who come from there, is entirely possible, but this quickly reaches its limits. After all, who can ever really travel to all the countries of the world?

A lifetime doesn't offer that much time. But you can read your way around the world. Every novel, every poem offers a glimpse behind the scenes, providing historical and cultural insights that are hard to come by if you only consume news media. Literature helps to build a more nuanced worldview and in so doing, a more nuanced view of the self and of one’s knowledge and ignorance. But that is only possible if the books are available in translation and are there to be read.

This text is an edited translation of the German original. Translated from German by Louise East.