In his essay ‘Die Weltliteratur’, Milan Kundera (2013 [2005], 292–93) identifies ‘provincialism’, defined as ‘the inability (or the refusal) to see one's own culture in the large context’, in both large and small nations. While the latter may hold ‘world culture in high esteem but feel it to be something alien’ and ‘inaccessible’, with ‘little connection to their national literature’, the former, by contrast, may appear provincial in their resistance to the Goethean idea of world literature because their own literature seems to them sufficiently rich that they need take no interest in what people write elsewhere. This book explores how ‘small-nation’ European literatures, written in less commonly spoken languages or from less familiar traditions and ostensibly dependent on translation to reach the wider world, negotiate and seek to overcome the inequality born of these mutual ‘provincialisms’, as expressed in theory, reception and industry practice.

As this book documents, we can easily discern these contrasting provincialisms in the ways in which translated literatures cross European borders and languages. Translations flow predominantly from the ‘Greenwich Meridian of Literature’, today mainly anglophone markets, to the rest of Europe, and only rarely and fleetingly does the tide change (Casanova, 2004, 90). Lawrence Venuti (2008, 13) memorably describes the complacency, or provincialism, of Anglo-American publishing as ‘imperialistic abroad and xenophobic at home’. The unequal dynamics of the transnational publishing market are felt especially in smaller European nations, since their literatures rarely find their way to readers in larger nations, while most translations into their own languages have an English source. Although there are regional variations within Europe, according to Miha Kovač (2002, 49–51), ‘almost 50 percent of all translations in the world are made from English into various languages, but only six percent of all translations are made into English’. An increasingly unequal transnational market for literature, marked by increasing lack of diversity, makes it ever more difficult for authors from small nations to reach international audiences.

The consequence of hegemonic inequalities between global and European centres and their peripheries is not only small-nation authors’ exclusion from the European mainstream, but also the declining diversity of voices accessible to the centre.