Bookplanet: If you're Spanish, you'll know more about world literature than anyone English

From judge John Carey's speech at Man Booker International Prize presentation to Ismail Kadare:
"It is a sign of the parochialism of the British literary scene, that foreign literature in translation is so neglected. As Alberto Manguel pointed out in an article in the Spectator, if you speak Spanish or French or Italian or German, or any of a dozen other languages, and walk into your local bookstore, you will find translations of a fair sampling of most of the important books written around the world. You will find what is being imagined in China, what stories are being told in Korea, how the novel is being reinvented in Spain and the Scandinavian countries. But if you live in England you will find no such abundance. When we checked through our original list of 120 contestants, we found that we had to disqualify writer after writer, not on grounds of quality or stature, but because they were not generally available in English translation. Frequently they had been translated back in the 80s or 90s, but the publisher had allowed the translations to go out of print. So we were unable to consider, for example, Peter Handke or Michel Tournier or Christoph Ransmayr or Antonio Lobo Antunes or Rachid Boudjedra or Fernando Vallejo – and so on. To an outsider the British publishing industry can seem like a conspiracy intent on depriving English-speaking readers of the majority of the good books written in languages other than their own. Alberto Manguel is surely right to point out that the same laxity, 50 years ago, would've meant, for the English reader, no Kafka, no Camus, no Calvino, no Borges."
THE SAME goes, in spades, for American publishers. Besides the admirable Dalkey Press, who is there? Speaking the world's dominant language leads ironically to cultural isolation. At least England is right next to Europe. Here in the U.S. we're seriously isolated -- also because we don't play the world's game, soccer.