The Enlightenment of Augusto Higa Oshiro

Some say that the periphery exists in a certain delay, receiving news from the center once it has grown stale and its fashion has passed. The opposite is true: always tardy to the periphery’s discoveries, the center’s self-regard victimizes it into ignorance. When a great writer dies outside of the narrow subset of those selected for translation and subsequent canonization in English, the great tragedy is that publishers grow increasingly unlikely to translate them at all. Translated literature doesn’t sell, and if the author can’t at least be trotted out on tour in search of a couple extra purchases, the risk of failure grows. Although some authors from the periphery profit considerably—both monetarily and in terms of esteem—from translations of their work, the opportunity cost of non-translation is far greater. The center’s monolingual readers and critics remain deprived, ignorant of “distant” innovations. And of course, the periphery always gets screwed, left hungering for the Anglophone literary system’s wealth. When a great writer goes untranslated, nobody benefits.