> It is really amazing how little Russian writers get translated.
It's not just Russian writers. According to the National Endowment for the Arts, "fewer than 3% of all books published in the U.S. . . . were translations" (John O’Brien, "A Simple Question," Context, No. 14, 2003, at <http://www.centerforbookculture.org/context/no14/ simpleQ.html>).
O'Brien claims that, in contrast, about 40-50% of books on sale in Western European countries are translations.
It is said that translated books seldom sell well in the US (I don't know about the UK and Australia). And yet it costs quite a bit of money to have books translated and put them on the market. O'Brien provides some back-of-the-envelope calculations, which (he says) show that most literary works in translation result in small to considerable losses for publishers. He suggests that foreign governments subsidize the translation and publication of their countries' authors' works.
Yoshie Furuhashi <http://montages.blogspot.com> <http://monthlyreview.org> <http://mrzine.org>