When I started my career as a professional literary translator, I began coming up against a mysterious “English reader” whom academics and editors kept referring to when they looked over my work, leaving comments like, “the English reader will find this line awkward” or “I understand, but we need to make things more accessible to the English reader” and so on.Article continues after advertisement
This was very puzzling; I am an English reader, I’ve been reading English the whole of my reading life. I have a master’s degree in Victorian poetry from a prestigious university and worked professionally for years in literary translation, which means, frankly, I tend to be more normative in my English usage, if anything. Look at this paragraph, for example; I sound practically archaic.
But I kept coming up against this hypothetical English reader, and not just in terms of language. When acquiring editors invoked the English reader, they would say things like, “English readers won’t go for that sort of thing” or “English readers don’t like short story collections.”
But who was this English reader, and why did he hold so much sway over my practice? He (he seems to be a he) is actually a minority in the reading world, but everyone in publishing defers to him. Women read more than men, and translated fiction outsells English fiction in the UK, but the Mythical English Reader won’t read women writers or non- European translations (which begs the question: Then why should I care about him?!). He is incredibly finicky, in a way that suggests people have been indulging him all his life instead of challenging him or encouraging him to try new and different things. What he likes seems to be other white men and whatever other white men produce; if he reads translated literature, he might read an obscure dead white male from Germany or Italy, or even some author from a non-European country if at least the translator is white. He likes very few things and hates an awful lot of others.
