Jorge Herralde

Jorge Herralde is the founder and director of Anagrama, and has also written five books about his work as a Publisher. Widely acknowledged and awarded throughout his life, Herralde has played a key role in having the work of many benchmark authors translated from Spanish to other languages and vice versa.  In 2009, after a long and bold career, Jorge Herralde, considered by a lot of people to be a living legend, signed a deal to sell Anagrama to Feltrinelli Group which will have the majority in May 2016.

Five Anagrama books have been shortlisted by different panels of experts of New Spanish Books. Among them, Fiesta en la Madriguera by Juan Pablo Villalobos, which took part in the 2010 Autumn/Winter edition and was shortly afterwards translated by Rosalind Harvey and published in the UK under the title Down the rabbit hole, by And Other Stories

At the 2012 London Book Fair, Jorge Herralde received the “Lifetime Achievement Award” as an acknowledgement of his more than 40 years at the forefront of Anagrama. The NSB team took the opportunity to meet with him for a chat about the state of translations and other aspects of the publishing industry.

· What does this award mean to you?

It is a very significant award as it comes from the London Book Fair and the Publishers Association, my colleagues. This is the ninth edition of the award and so far all winners have been Anglo-Saxons, except for Antoine Gallimard and now me. It seems we have done something right!

· What is your opinion on the current state of the translations market in the UK?

Trying to sell foreign rights in this country is a heroic task. It is quite obvious that publishers and readers do not like books in translation. However, there are exceptions. This is the case of my very good friend Christopher MacLehose, who already published quite a few Spanish authors during his time at Harvill: Carmen Martín Gaite, Javier Marías, Vila Matas, Roberto Bolaño, Pérez Reverte…Maybe that is the reason why the company went almost bankrupt and had to be sold to Random Mondadori (he laughs)…jokes apart, after some time in Random House, where he was not very happy, he started MacLehose Press, where he has already published various Spanish language authors, such as Anagrama´s Alberto Barrera Tyszka, Venezuelan author of La enfermedad (The sickness), and Tusquet´s Evelio Rosero, Colombian author of Los ejércitos (The armies). There are also small publishers who occasionally go for translation. This is the case of Faber & Faber, or my colleague Pete Ayrton (Serpent´s Tail) who published Juan Goytisolo, Manuel Vázquez Montalbán and César Aira…As I say , it is difficult, but there are a few exceptions.

· Analysing recent statistics, we have noticed a rise in the number of translations. Are we facing a shift in the trend?

Something is changing. Two days ago we were at the veteran bookshop Foyles, which still stands in Charing Cross Road where others disappeared. As we were browsing through the shelves we noticed a number of Spanish authors, some of them from our catalogue. There were books by Villalobos, Vila-Matas, Marías and mostly by Bolaño, from whom we found 6 or 7. Bonsai, by Alejandro Zambra, was there too. By the way, there is currently a film based on the book showing in cinemas.

· Is there anything of the British industry you would like to bring into the Spanish one? Or the other way around, is there anything you would never copy?

On my first trips to London, back in the sixties, I used to look up to the wonderful bookshops here. But, as you know, the fixed price was scrapped a few years ago in Britain. It was an ungodly alliance between WHSmith, Random House and HarperCollins based on revenue-driven criteria, with a very short-sighted, short-term vision. Now, it is the law of the jungle, the 3 X 2 offers, and tremendous discounts. All together this has led to the closure of many independent bookshops and the result is not good for anyone. Under the same neoliberal perspective, the Aznar administration also considered adopting a free price policy for books at first. However, publishers from Madrid and Barcelona successfully lobbied together in favor of keeping the fixed prize policy and the Government maintained it. Until now, the fixed price has stood like a protecting wall of good publishing, good literature and good bookshops. Although it has worked well for the past ten years, this horrible crisis has diminished its effectiveness. Without it we would have faced catastrophe, just like here (UK) or in the US. Before, in New York, you could walk down Fifth Avenue and come across all these charming bookshops and also big chains that today have disappeared. It is Amazon´s Empire, in crescendo.

· Amazon has now arrived in Spain…

Yes, last November, but they must respect the fixed price. So far, if things stay the way they are, it can even do some good. Obviously not to bookshops, because Amazon is massive, they provide instant service in less than 24 hours so they are at a huge advantage. They have also just landed in Italy and France, sowing alarm.

· Do you read e-books?

No, no, I stick to the ancient regime. Although Anagrama has adopted e-books from the very beginning, and from July 2010 it is also on the Libranda platform. All new titles and a big part of reprinted editions are now available on e-book format as well. Just this month we have launched a small digital collection of mini books called Zoom. It includes past and current publications and some advance of future ones:  a short text about Maradona by Villoro; a very funny one by Julian Barnes, “A short history of hairdressing”; Homemade, by Ian McEwan, from his first short stories book “First love, first rites”, and “Entre las doce y la una”, by Quim Monzó. These four titles came out first for the Book Day at a price of 0.99€. We really know where we are in new technologies but market response is…I will not say less than zero, but very timid. It will grow to become more or less important, but in the US it has taken a long while before it got to be significant.      

· Anagrama has a very old and solid relationship with British authors and British humour. Is it of particular interest to Spanish readers?

British humour is in my DNA. It gets quite a good response. A clear example of this is Tom Sharpe, who was greatly successful for decades. Afterwards, we rescued P.G. Wodehouse and Evelyn Waugh and published Douglas Adams very successfully; his “Hitchhiker´s Guide to the Galaxy” was very much acclaimed. In the late seventies and early eighties, I began to publish a few authors who were extremely young at the time and have now come to be known as what we call the British dream team: Ian McEwan, Julian Barnes, Martin Amis, Kazuo Ishiguro and Hanif Kureishi. These writers enjoy a wide readership in Spain.  Ian McEwan was the youngest and least mainstream back then. However, after four or five books, he has become the most popular. And he is succeeding in the US as well, which is a big achievement because the US is mostly a bestsellers market and it is not easy for literary fiction to do well. Especially when the author is British. Not to mention when the book is written in Spanish or any other foreign language. Anyway, there will always be an Umberto Eco or a Milan Kundera, whose translations work very well.

· Koukla MacLehose is Anagrama´s scout in the UK. Is that the way you discover new authors?

Not exactly. Nowadays so much is published and there is such information overload, that we chose her as our scout in 1990 to help us deal with this issue. By then, we had already published the main authors of that generation: Ian McEwan, Barnes and Amis, but we wanted to have some kind of bumper against big groups´ avarice. We had a good relationship with her and thought she could be very efficient, so we brought her on board. Obviously she provides us with a lot of information, but the challenge is being able to identify the most valuable information. Other than being subscribed to I don´t know how many British magazines, agents send us manuscripts directly by mail. Years ago it was the finished book, but today any book with a chance of international success is sent by the agent by email. Koukla supports this process very efficiently.

· What is the translation process like at Anagrama? Do you have a readers´ network?

We always have a group of six or seven readers that change quite often. It is not a permanent job. After a while some of them move on to become publishers themselves, teachers in publishing courses or do other things. As far as translators go, I believe Anagrama’s standard is very high because this is something we really care about. A bad translation ruins a book, especially if it is a literary translation, and ruins it for generations. We replicate our author policy here, just as we follow authors through their career, we try to assign the same translator every time a new book is written.  This is what any literary fiction publisher who is aware of what their job is would do, but there are many who don’t.  

· We took British publishing industry professionals on a trip to a trade fair in Spain and they commented how little significance Spanish publishers give to the book covers when in the UK it is seen as a marketing tool. What do you think about this?

We use different criteria. Here, in the UK there used to be some collections with beautiful and uniform covers too.  Later on, the market started following the US and the covers are for each book, just that one book. In the US sometimes you don´t even see the name of the publisher, or it is in small print. The brand is the author, and the book.  By contrast, in Spain, literary fiction publishers at least, keep a well defined pattern for the cover design, one that is easy to recognize. We like it, and we believe it is convenient for our kind of books. Anagrama, Tusquets, Alfaguara, Seix Barral, most literary publishers use fixed layout schemes where only illustrations vary. Bestseller covers are more pyrotechnic and acrobatic, so to speak, and they follow the US trend.

· Define Anagrama in three words

Dismissing unbeatable, I would say restless, adventurous and rigorous. And lasting, it is now 43 years since we started.

· How is the alliance with the Italians going?

We are at a first stage and it will be in four years time when we will see the change.  So far it is just an exchange of information, mutual advice….our friendship started in the seventies.

· Finally, a recommendation – Anagrama’s most recent discovery?

We are about to publish a book, not the most recent discovery as it is from last year, but it has been greatly successful and it is very good. It is called “Tú y yo” (“You and me”) and it is Niccolò Ammaniti´s latest novel, an Italian author from whom we already published “Que empiece la fiesta”. It is a short novel, really successful in Italy, and can also be found in the British bookshops. Bertolucci has made a film based on the book. It is the story of a teenager from a very wealthy family and with many hang-ups. He has problems with his older sister, who left home and is a heroin addict. Niccolò Ammaniti is one of the best young Italian writers on their forties and he is getting better and better in every book.