Daily Star 4 October, 2004 When the 56th annual Frankfurt Book Fair opened this week  some 200 novelists, playwrights and poets from the Arab arrived  with one overriding hope: to stake a claim in the global market.

Their chances aren't bad. The Frankfurt Book Fair is the largest of its kind in the world, and this year, the Arab world is the event's official guest of honor. In the past, authors from other guest-of-honor countries have attended the fair, and in turn, increased their sales. In rare cases, an appearance at Frankfurt can mark a big break into the canon of world literature.

Yet the global book publishing market is becoming more and more difficult to crack. Even renowned authors from continental Europe are finding it hard to enter. Arab literature will have to find a place in a market increasingly dominated by English-language books. Especially in the U.S. and U.K., anything not written originally in English has a tough time igniting the interest of publishers.

"Frankfurt reflects the increasingly one-way flow of trade between the United States and its sidekick, Britain, and the rest of the Western world," writes Pierre Lepape in an article on the fair for the French monthly Le Monde Diplomatique. "French, Spanish, Italian and German publishers all go to the fair with a single and near-impossible dream: to sell a book to the Americans even for a derisory amount, or to a British publisher as a first step to the paradise of the U.S. market."

Although more books are sold in the U.S., the U.K. represents the largest market in the Western world when it comes to publishing. About 125,000 new and revised titles are published each year. Translations make up only 3 percent, according to Lepape. "The U.S. manages only 2.8 percent."

In Germany, the situation looks better. About 40 percent of the 80,000 new titles published each year are translations. But Peter Ripken, from the German Society for the Promotion of African, Asian and Latin American Literature, notes in a survey he has written on Arab literature in translation that "of these, less than 0.3 percent are by authors from the Arab world."

According to Ripken, 500 works of fiction by Arab authors are currently in print in Germany. Yet less than half have been translated from Arabic. Most are either written by Arab immigrants in Germany or translated from French.

The situation in France is similar, although there are more Arab novelists writing in French than in Arabic. "In France, Maghreb authors are more or less part and parcel of French literary life since most of them write in French. Authors writing in Arabic get less recognition when translated into French, even if the French government has supported some translations," says Ripken.

"The sales figures of translations from Arabic in France are especially disappointing because the literary pages ... of Le Monde and Liberation often carry lengthy reviews or profiles of these authors," he adds.

In Germany, most critics ignore books that have been translated from Arabic. Stefan Weidner is one of the few who doesn't. Writing on the Web site www.qantara.de, he says: "There are hardly any literary critics [in Germany] who specialize in Oriental literature. The Neue Zurcher Zeitung and the Frankfurter Allgemeine are the only major newspapers that publish reviews of Arabic literature with some degree of regularity."

The position of Arab authors in the English-speaking world is less bleak. More titles are available, and classics are seldom out of print. Certainly, there is a high demand for English translations not only within English-language countries but also to specialists and travelers living and working in the Middle East. However, the large number of translations tend to be undertaken not due to market demand but rather because of funding from academic institutions.

"Those few publishers who have committed themselves to publishing English translations of Arab authors [such as Garnet and Quartet Books in the U.K., and university presses in the U.S. like Syracuse University Press or Interlink] hardly reach high print runs," says Ripken. "The situation of translation of contemporary Arab fiction would be worse if it were not for the ambitious program [run by] the American University in Cairo Press."

All this is a great improvement from how things were just 30 years ago. According to Stefan Winkler, a specialist on publishing in the Middle East, there was a time when you could only find books by your favorite Arab author "in shops for hubbly-bubblies and belly dance. ... In 1985, I started to get interested in Arab literature. Back then there [weren't] even 10 books in print by contemporary authors on the West German market."

Roger Allen, an Arabic professor at the University of Pennsylvania who has translated many Arab novels into English, remembers that from the start of his career in 1968, the few works that were translated into English showed a clear focus on Egypt. In an initiative called "The Project for the Translation of Arabic," he writes: "The 1970's saw an undoubted improvement. ... Not that commercial or even university presses suddenly decided that there was a market for Arabic literature, but rather that enterprising presses such as Bibliotheca Islamica and Three Continent Press decided that works from the literary tradition of such a large area of the world should be subject of interest to the scholarly reading public."

The late 1980's marked the beginning of what some experts call "the Mahfouz effect." The Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1988, sparking a frenzy of translations from Arabic, some of which were hastily done and deeply flawed.

In addition to questions of quality are issues of interest. Today, there are many works by Arab authors available not only in English, German, Spanish and French but also in Danish and Hungarian. Still, readers' interest remains limited. As translator Hartmut Fahndrich said in an interview on German interest in Arabic literature on the Web site www.qantara.de: "There are only some groups of readers interested in third world literature, to which Arab literature belongs. I think that the interest in Arabic culture has increased among those readers, and this is only natural, since the works are available now."

Asaad Khairallah, a professor of Middle East languages at the American University of Beirut, illustrates a vicious circle: "On the one hand, unless Arab authors achieve a major breakthrough, they will not reach the general public; on the other hand, as long as they have not reached the general public, or at least have the potential to reach it, no big publisher will take the risk of translating them and [publishing] them on a wide scale. So they would remain limited to those directly interested in the region, either as Orientalists or as specialists in other fields. And these would be searching for what satisfies their curiosity, not necessarily for the literary qualities of a book."

But the general public is getting even harder to reach, as the book selling business is rapidly changing in most Western countries. "Megastores and internet retail services ... have gradually displaced independent bookshops," writes Lepape. "These chains exercise huge power over publishers by refusing to stock books they don't believe will sell enough, charging for prominence in their windows ... and returning works that don't sell quickly enough or receive insufficient media attention."

These conditions will make it difficult for authors from the third world to ever write a bestseller. "No translated works in any field have made the U.S. bestseller lists for years," Lepape says. The same authors who become bestsellers in the U.S. tend to become bestsellers in Continental Europe as well, while local authors lag far behind. "English language authors are so big in Spain that sometimes they take the top five bestselling slots," Lepape writes.

And Arab authors face an additional problem: Their books don't even become bestsellers in their own countries. "Publishing in the Arab world and a limited culture of reading lead to a situation that many fiction titles by Arab authors are not very successful in the Arab World," says Ripken. The statistics are glaring. The U.K., for example, publishes 30 times more books each year per capita than Egypt. And even though 5 percent of the world's population lives in the 22 countries that make up the Arab League, those same countries produce a mere 1.1 percent of all books published world wide.