Promoting one's own literature - the Norwegian experience.

Bente Christensen

Vice president of FIT

Abstract：One might ask: What interest can the Norwegian experience with promoting the country's own literature have for China? Norway is a small country with a language spoken by about 4,5 million people and a rather limited literary production, but I think that the main structures for literary promotion are the same, and that it might be interesting to learn how we have built up our infrastructure in this field and how we are working.

One of the common traits for all literatures (both fiction and non fiction) outside the anglo-american world, is that it is very difficult to be able to communicate them directly to other cultures, without going via English. In our days, there is even a tendency everywhere to write directly in English, especially when it comes to research and non fiction publications. For fiction literature we are not there yet, but we all know that a translation is an interpretation, and if the fiction literature must undergo two translations, first into English and then into the final target language, one can imagine that it will be very much changed on the way. So one challenge is to create direct contacts between various languages and literatures.

Norwegian is, as said before, a language with a very limited diffusion, and with a small, but interesting literary production, much due to the so called Public Buying Scheme, founded in 1965. Every year the State buys 1000 copies of every Norwegian fiction book published that year, and send the copies to the Public Libraries. Recently, they have also started a scheme for non fiction literature. To promote this literature abroad, the different publishing houses have agents, who are working hard to sell their authors on the book markets abroad - especially at the book fairs. But the commercial activity alone will never be able to promote the broad variety of Norwegian literature to other countries. Therefore the Norwegian government has taken some measures to promote our literature. We have two main instances for this: The Department for Culture, Public Diplomacy and Protocol at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the state office NORLA (Norwegian Literature Abroad), founded in 1978. NORLA promotes fiction as well as non fiction on a non commercial base, gives information about Norwegian literature, helps to educate translators and to finance translations. The results are very promising. Until now, NORLA has mostly worked in the Western world, but lately it has started to widen its working field and is also looking eastward.

Bente Christensen, born in Drammen, Norway in 1946，Ph.D. in comparative literature at the University of Oslo in 1992. Chair of the Norwegian Association of Literary Translators 1994-2001. Member of the Board and of the Executive Committee of the Norwegian collecting society KOPINOR 1998-2006. Vice president of FIT (Fédération Internationale des Traducteurs) from 2002. Has published articles and books on Nordic and Francophone literature. Literary translator (from Danish, Swedish, French and English into Norwegian).

Bente女士对中国非常友好，70年代曾自费订阅《北京周报》等外宣刊物。2004年10月曾以国际译联副主席身份随同国际译联执行委员会来华访问，参观了首届中国翻译成就展。此次为第二次来华访问。她对中国文学很感兴趣，阅读过中国古典文学的译本，如狄仁杰的故事。小的时候，她的叔叔在香港工作多年，经常给她们写信，寄中国特色的礼物，使她对香港充满向往。此次访问后，她将自行前往香港“圆梦”。