Quattro Books was founded in 2006 by Allan Briesmaster, John Calabro, Beatriz Hausner, and Luciano Iacobelli, with the aim of publishing established and emerging authors who represent the linguistic and cultural diversity of literature in Toronto and across Canada. As such, from the start, Quattro Books has sought to bring out works originally written in English alongside those translated from the multilingual voices of Canadians who have arrived in the country as immigrants or refugees. The press’s recent acquisition by Bilal Hashmi, president of the Association des traducteurs et traductrices littéraires du Canada / Literary Translators’ Association of Canada (ATTLC-LTAC), and a translator himself—from French, Urdu, Persian, and Hindi—has led to a shift in focus that favours the latter. This is evidenced by Quattro Books’s first catalogue since Hashmi took over as Executive Director and Publisher. Due out in the fall of 2020, it will feature English translations of Canadian works spanning six languages. Asymptote’s co-Editor-at-Large for Argentina, Sarah Moses, met with Hashmi in Toronto to discuss Canadian literature as international literature, works in translation as partnerships, and how he’s shaping Quattro Books into a translation-focused press.
Sarah Moses (SM): I’d like to begin by asking you about your involvement with the ATTLC-LTAC. How has it led to Quattro becoming what you’ve described as a translation-focused press?
Bilal Hashmi (BH): Beatriz Hausner is central both to the ATTLC-LTAC and Quattro. She’s one of the founding members of Quattro and was the president of the ATTLC-LTAC in 2017, when I joined. I had the privilege of being mentored by her in translation and advocacy work, and the one thing we all sort of agreed on is that there should be more international works in translation available in Canada. So the movement from the ATTLC-LTAC to Quattro was, in a way, organic—the work at the former led to the idea: now we have an opportunity, let’s see what happens. That’s the way I thought of it. I started off as membership secretary in 2017 and I’ve been the president since June. We continue to work through some of the same issues that we’ve dealt with in the past: translator visibility, proper recognition, and so on—these remain our goals. But I think what Quattro will possibly do in the future is shift the discussion so it’s no longer necessarily the “two solitudes” of English and French, but the multilingual nature of Canadian writing that comes through.
SM: Is this primarily how you see Quattro Books fitting in among publishers of translation in Canada and internationally—as a press that moves beyond translations between English and French?
BH: In our first catalogue we have translations from French, Serbian, German, Russian, Portuguese, Spanish, and then two titles that were written in English. We’re not going to do exclusively translation, but that’s the focus, which I think is unique in Canadian publishing. Whether or not that continues is something we’ll have to determine. We’re really hoping to find out if publishing majority translations is a viable activity.
Working with translation has involved a very international cast of characters, which is really what I find most exciting about Canadian literature as international literature. I think those who are very skeptical about translation’s profitability or potential for success kind of forget that you do have access potentially to other markets. Typically, Canadian books are marketed internally for Canadian consumption and the expectation is that Canadians will buy fellow Canadians. It doesn’t always work that way. My hope is that these books will be seen as Canadian literature, plus whatever other literature they’re referencing—let’s say the Portuguese-Angolan return novel, of which there’s now a sizable and critically acclaimed subgenre in Portuguese fiction. So the hope is that they’ll cross over into other markets, beginning in the US.
The catalogue started as kind of an exercise in fantasy, which I think I shared with you a couple of summers ago. It was an exercise in what works within the funding paradigm. Readers of Asymptote should know that in Canada the main translation activity is English-to-French, French-to-English, but the official requirement for funding from the Canada Council for the Arts is that the author be Canadian. There’s no limitation on the source language so long as the work is translated into French, English, or an indigenous language. I did a little bit of a research and I found a list of about twenty or so Canadian writers who brought in different literary histories with them. All of these works are technically eligible for Canada Council for the Arts grants, and we’re very lucky and grateful to the Canada Council for funding all six, which may be a first in Canadian publishing for one season, and probably unique in this part of the world. So that’s how it started. I think we have another half dozen languages already in the pipeline if not already under contract, also all Canadian authors. My hope is really to explore this lesser-known part of Canadian literary history, which tends not to see that much exposure in the current framework.
In the first couple of years, the focus will be on Canadian content, but we’re also starting to acquire from outside, including translations. That’s a challenge since I will insist that everyone gets paid at the Canadian rate, which is the determining factor. Because if it’s a five-hundred page novel and there’s no funding for it, then we’re probably not going to be able to pay the eighteen-cents-per-word rate—that’s the rate for prose. I believe the per-word rate remains at twenty cents for theatre and twenty-five cents for poetry.
SM: Do you plan to publish theatre and poetry as well as prose?
BH: We have prose, theatre, and poetry being featured in the first year of Quattro’s relaunch. We’re publishing a work of theatre by Catherine Mavrikakis called Omaha Beach, which reflects on the Second World War and memories associated with that. It’s a French play translated by Nathanaël and an oratorio actually, which is really neat; it’s an interesting genre experiment.
We also have a few books of poetry in the works. Beatriz Hausner pioneered a format I really like, which is the bilingual poetry edition. I’ve been very much influenced by that. I’m pleased to say that all of the forthcoming poetry volumes are dual language.
There’s a famous Quebec poet from the sixties, Huguette Gaulin, whose complete poetry we acquired from the French. That volume will probably come out in 2021 or 2022, in a translation by Simon Brown. We have another volume coming out by a Catalan poet, Anna Gual; though she isn’t Canadian, I’m working with a Canadian translator, Ona Bantjes-Ràfols, on that. Ona approached me last year, and I was very impressed with the samples that were published in Asymptote, actually.
Something I want to do personally is an edition of Ezra Pound’s 1913 translations of the Hindi poet Kabir. What I would do is publish the dual language—Hindi and English—and also offer my own retranslations or versions. I do believe it’s now in the public domain because it’s over a hundred years old. That would be a volume from yet another language. Really, we’re trying to get into as many languages as we can. And Archipelago Books, for instance, has been a great source of inspiration in terms of translation from multiple languages.
SM: How do you approach working with translators?
BH: Quattro is really a translator-run press—I hope it’s seen that way. I strongly identify as a translator myself. The approach of working with translators is one of trust. I would say that the people I’ve typically worked with to date are individuals I know already, at least in this first season. That’s very important for me.
In terms of payment, one hundred percent of the grants come to the publisher and what you typically do is give fifty percent to the translator on signing and fifty percent on delivery of the manuscript. I like to give one hundred percent of the funding to translators right away, especially if I know the person. Other than that, I feel it’s very important to have royalty clauses in a contract, so that’s something I insist on. Without getting into the specific details, I would say that every translator should see a royalty right off the bat. I really encourage my translators to specify that in their contract. My view is that this is a kind of partnership—between the publisher, the author, and the translator—and so we’re all invested in getting this book out there and into the world.
Then there’s visibility. The translator’s name should appear on the cover. These are age-old questions of translation and they’re things I’m very adamant about. I think all of the parties involved tend to see eye-to-eye for the most part.
SM: Can you tell me a bit about the editing process?
BH: The standard procedure is that we get the manuscript back from the translator and then we send it to an external bilingual reader to get a report on the accuracy of transfer and potential problem areas. I’m following the model that we have here in Canada—it’s what we do from English-to-French and French-to-English, and it’s pretty much standard practice for that kind of translation editing. So I wanted to begin there and it’s worked out pretty well.
In most situations the process is well received by the translators themselves because you tend to see things that you may have overlooked. Editorially it’s a good idea because then you have a second pair of eyes that can actually vouch for the accuracy of the transfer.
One of the great things about publishing translations is that we do end up working with so many people. Typically, with an English-language work, you have just one author that you’re dealing with. But with translation, you’re dealing with the rights holder, who may be separate from the author, the author and the translator, and then the editor—the number of people involved multiplies. So in that sense it’s very exciting, I think. It’s an activity that also has the potential to involve a lot of people—as freelancers, as editors, as bilingual readers, revisers, and so on. It’s something that creates opportunity within the arts, which I think is very important.
SM: Do you have a sense of how you’ll promote your first catalogue—in particular considering the impact of the pandemic?
BH: Let me give the example of F. P. Grove’s poetry, which we’re coming out with in translation by Renée von Paschen. This is a Frankfurt Book Fair themed volume. Canada was meant to be the guest of honour at Frankfurt in 2020, but because of COVID that’s been postponed until 2021. This project was really aimed at that festival: a text in both English and German, sold in German-language markets around the world. Because it’s in the public domain we have no limitations to where we can sell it. So the idea would have been to really launch this as a book that brings together the literary histories of these two countries—Germany and Canada—in the way that Grove himself did very interestingly. He was a late nineteenth-century aesthete, and he was in Stefan George’s circle, and was translating Gide and Oscar Wilde, and then he ran up a big debt, and sort of faked his death to escape from Germany. He started a new life in Canada in a new language and became a Prairie novelist in English. It wasn’t until the seventies that a researcher connected the two people. Felix Paul Greve is the same as Philip Grove. This has been written about; there have been a couple of studies on his transatlantic lives. I thought this work would be a great way to reintroduce the author to both reading publics.
This year is atypically challenging in the sense that all promotion has to be online. We’ll try not to have anything too close, but promotion will likely spill into 2021. The first order of business is to get everything out before year’s end, which is really our fall season, and to stagger the releases so that we can give attention to each of the authors. I think this year we’re going to have to do readings online—some of them live, some of them prerecorded on Facebook, YouTube. I should say that Quattro is getting a new look as well, which is very distinct. We’re going to go with a new aesthetic, which is much more minimalist, sort of a boutique style, that’s maybe reminiscent of the old European presses and also some of the presses in Latin America and other parts of the world. The idea is to have a signature look that’s recognizable as a library. That’s the kind of mentality that I’m approaching this with for now—which is not to speak ill of my colleagues in publishing. If it becomes a bestseller, it should look like one. So the new editions will be more flashy and more consumer-oriented in that way. Really the idea is that Quattro should be spotted a mile away both for its content and its look.
SM: Where do you see Quattro Books headed in the future?
BH: We’re going to try and maintain the translation focus for as long as we can, for as long as it’s viable. And here I want to make sure that I’m not seen as being unrealistic about it. If there’s a market that has potential, the sales will tell. Given the challenging times we’re in, that’s an added set of expectations. But even so, I do want to emphasize that we’re still very much interested in publishing original English-language work. Quattro has typically had an emphasis on publishing the novella and poetry and so our readers can expect to have short prose, fiction, and poetry featured in the years to come. As I now have the opportunity to re-immerse myself in the Canadian arts scene, I will try to acquire the most compelling works in the English language in fiction and poetry.
My hope is to eventually move in the direction of a bilingual press. Like Linda Leith Publishing but at a smaller, less commercial scale. I don’t say that by way of criticism. The same kind of boutique-style literary press. I’m taking some concrete steps in that direction. We hope very much to launch a French imprint in the near future, which would also feature translations into French. It could potentially be the scenario where we translate the author that we publish in two languages, so we start distancing ourselves from the typical set-up even more so than in the past or in the current iteration.
Bilal Hashmi is the executive director and publisher of Quattro Books. He teaches Urdu at the University of Toronto, where he obtained his BA and MA in English before pursuing advanced studies in comparative literature at New York University. He is the President of the Literary Translators’ Association of Canada/Association des traducteurs et traductrices littéraires du Canada and also serves on the editorial board of the literary translation magazine ellipse. His annotated English translation of Aziz Ahmad’s Urdu novel Flight (Gurez; 1945) is forthcoming from McGill-Queen’s University Press. Current translation projects include a selection of Kabir’s Hindi poetry, as well as an experimental novel each by Jacques Godbout and Reza Baraheni (from the French and Persian, respectively).
Sarah Moses’s translations and fictions have appeared in journals and anthologies including Bogotá 39, Brick, and Event, as well as in the chapbooks as they say (Socios Fundadores, 2016) and Those Problems (Proper Tales Press, 2017). Her translation of Agustina Bazterrica’s novel Tender Is the Flesh was recently published by Pushkin Press in the UK and Scribner in the US. She co-translated Ariana Harwicz’s novel Die, My Love (Charco Press, 2017), which was longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize and shortlisted for the Best Translated Book Award.
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