'Towards a Global Literature'

       They held a conference as part of IULM's Towards a Global Literature project, and at the New York Review blog Tim Parks reports on it, in A Game Without Rules.
       Among the observations (this one by Francesca Orsini):

Translation, she remarked, could make a novel available, but the real exoticism of the truly foreign text remained a barrier to most readers.

       And Milan-based literary agent Marco Vigevani noted:

the situation of Arab language writers such as the Lebanese Hassan Daoud and the Egyptian Makkawi Said who work in traditional genres that mix poetry and prose that have no Western corollary. Prominent in the Arab world, these writers get almost no attention in the West because nobody has any idea how to read them even when they are translated.

       Parks' own perspective -- wondering, to put it a bit simply, about the emphasis on transcending borders (national, linguistic) as opposed to just being satisfied with engaging on a local level -- also deserves more attention.