Today has been a super ratty one for me, unfortunately, but one which would have passed fairly uneventfully if I’d not (four weeks too late, damn and curse it!) come across this inane excuse for an opinion piece… I’m not going to go into all that I object to in Mr Caines’s argument, but I think it utterly ridiculous to pick us out – for all that other publishers are mentioned, it does appear to be a rather unecessarily pointed attack – for lack of creativity, and LAZINESS?! And this in a world riddled with Gaudi/Duma/Da Vinci Keys…
The accusation that we are somehow ‘cashing in’ on Big Name Classics would be a fair point if it weren’t for the fact that the majority of our titles are not public domain texts, readily available for anyone to plunder: our Dickenses and Austens, which are all hugely successful (enough justification in itself for their publication I’m sure anyone in Sales and Marketing will avow) allow us to publish translated works - by authors as well known and readily available as Sciascia, Odoevsky, Fenoglio, Alarcon, Petofi and Kuzmin, all of whom the article’s author has no doubt read; he’s right: it really is about the names… – which are classics in other cultures but unknown and potentially alienating to the English-reading book-buying public, and to bring into the English literary consciousness contemporary European literature, which is certainly not the complacent and lazy way out! I am totally ignoring the preposterous comparison with Jonathan Swift, but feel obliged to ask: how far can anyone claim Yasmine Ghata rivals TOM CLANCY?
In every case, English language originals included, – Jenny Wren, Aphra Behn, Mary Borden, Bulwer-Lytton, David Garnett, Edgar Lee Masters, to name but six – the books we publish have been researched at great length; we read hundreds of books which we discount (as dross, unreadable, for being too readily available, but never too obscure…) before picking the titles which end up on our list; in short: we work bloody hard to find the titles we then publish. For someone to denigrate all our hard work as being cynical and lazy, someone who according to his ‘biog’ hasn’t yet managed to finish writing anything himself, is far too much for me to take without clearing my throat. Wiesengrund puts it perfectly.
Oh, and the reason Robert Bage is not widely in print I’d guess, is that nothing that he wrote was very good. In the immortal words of Thumper…
KA, Blame It on the Hormones.
That is a very stupid article, and your wrath is entirely justified. The wonderful books–and writers–that Hesperus has introduced me to through your new translations can be counted in the dozens.
Don’t even rise to his bait – this is a lazy journalist who clearly couldn’t take the time to look more closely at the lists of the publishers he denigrates. Yes, Hesperus publishes the Brontes – but guess what? I would never have gotten around to reading Charlotte’s marvellous juvenila if you hadn’t done so and I’m incredibly grateful to small presses like yourselves and so many others – Persephone, NYRB, Melville – just to name a few, who are making available long out-of-print titles (many by women who should never have been forgotten) and lots of international literature in translation. This type of publishing takes intelligence, guts, and incredible dedication and any true reader know this.
Katya, ignore the idiot at the Guardian and keep up the good work!