Jeffrey Trachtenberg wrote about an interesting publishing trend in last Friday’s Wall Street Journal (subscription required): issuing new translations to boost sales of classics.

Many of these books are in the public domain, although in some cases the translators get royalties.

I’m in awe of people able to debate the merits of particular translations, i.e. in terms of how faithful they are to their originals; it’s beyond me, I’d never presume–translations are always approximations, how can you compare one approximation to another unless you’re fluent in the original language? I’d never presume. (I read Julio Cortazar’s Hopscotch in the original in college, having learned enough Spanish to manage just that, and to acquire a bit of humility on the subject of foreign languages . . .)

So set that aside, and take a look at the sales data.

The Oprah Effect: since she picked Anna Karenina for her book club in 2004, the 2001 translation by Pevear and Volokhonksy has sold 635,000 copies.

Translations of The Iliad and The Odyssey by Robert Fagles, published by Viking Penguin in the 1990s, “were highly praised and have now sold an estimated 1.5 million copies.”

A 2006 edition of War and Peace (translated by Anthony Briggs) has already sold nearly 11,000 copies.

A successful translation can “generate sales for 30 years or more.”

Those are good numbers. Trachtenberg notes that fewer than 1000 of the 170K books published in the U.S. last year were “literary works in translation,” but it appears to be a solid little niche, doesn’t it. Solid little corner of the “neglected middle” ;-)