Time Out New York reports that it’s the small presses keeping translated literature alive.

If you’re the sort of person who keeps track, you’ll know that big American book companies still think that publishing literature in translation can be a worthwhile enterprise. HarperCollins recently dropped a reported cool million-plus on the English rights for Les Bienveillantes (The Kindly Ones), the American-born Jonathan Littell’s French doorstop told from the point of view of a loyal SS officer. Knopf puts out worthy novels by Japan’s Haruki Murakami, French provocateur Michel Houellebecq and Holocaust victim Irène Némirovsky. Last fall, FSG released one of the best translations of the year, Grégoire Bouillier’s The Mystery Guest, and next April it will publish the first English edition of The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño, a Chilean-born novelist whose stateside reputation has been on the rise, thanks to New Directions press.

There’s more, but people who really keep track argue that America’s literature-in-translation output remains dismally low. In 2002, the National Endowment for the Arts determined that a mere three percent of books published in the U.S. were translated from another language.

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But even if the above presses are reaching an audience, the question remains: how many readers, who may already have piles of important but unread books on their nightstands, are looking to add to their to-do lists? FSG editor Lorin Stein suggests that a little can go a long way. He has worked on books by Americans (Lydia Davis, Sam Lipsyte) and international authors (Bouillier and Bolaño), and for him, it’s reading, not translation, that publishers should focus on. “This vague idea that reading things in translation is like eating your vegetables—it’s good for you—is terrible,” he says. “It makes much more sense to talk about individual writers you love than to say, ‘You should go out and buy books by Chileans or Germans.’”

Part of the “problem,” as it were, with translations is that they don’t age well. It seems that every generation is given new translations of works by literary giants like Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Alexandre Dumas, and Dante. Then, of course, there’s the question of the translator’s aesthetic and interpretation—the substance of a translated work may be present, but translations live or die based on how the work is presented. But I wonder how much consideration translators give to the author’s original intent, as well as to the literary and cultural conventions of the era during which a book was written.