A Writer Crosses Over

He landed his first Farrar, Straus position in 1998 -- he started as Galassi's assistant -- and worked his way into an editing job. He also made a Spanish friend who'd known and loved Bolaño, and in 2004, the year after Bolaño's death, Stein went to Barcelona to visit her.

"We were in a bookstore," he recalls, "and she said, 'Look, here's an English translation of 'By Night in Chile,' you have to read this.' "

He took her advice, inhaling the book on the first leg of his flight home, and found himself thinking: "If this exists and I didn't know about it, then we should be doing a lot more foreign fiction."

Galassi, meanwhile, first heard about Bolaño from the late Susan Sontag, who served as a kind of early warning system for superior literature from overseas. He read "The Savage Detectives" in an Italian translation and immediately wanted to publish it.

Who did he see as its audience? The same people who read Faulkner, he says, or García Márquez -- though Bolaño represents something quite different from the great Colombian magical realist.

"This is what's going on in Latin American literature in the post-boom years," Galassi says. "This is a whole new kind of thing. It's influenced by surrealism, but it's not inhumane. It's very accessible, but it's not quite realistic. It's tragic, but it's sexy. It's panoramic."

It's also replete with slang from, at minimum, five countries -- Mexico, Chile, Peru, Argentina and Spain -- which made it no joke to translate. Wimmer says it took her close to a year.

"The obvious challenge is that there are so many voices," she says. She'd plug idiomatic phrases she didn't know into the Internet ("it's really good for finding how words are used in context"). She also wrestled with the rhythm of Bolaño's sentences. Should she break them up, because run-on sentences are far more common in Spanish than English, or should she declare them a stylistic choice not to be messed with? (Short answer: some of each.)

Wimmer and Stein had their share of fights, Stein says, as translators and editors will. But these were outweighed by their shared passion for the book.

What exactly makes him love it, Stein is asked?

He has some trouble answering, but he works at it.

For one thing, Bolaño's portrait of poetry-obsessed Mexican youth "made me nostalgic," he says, "because that's the way we were -- I mean, that's the way any artsy kid is." He shares with Bolaño's characters what he calls "a basic fruitful misunderstanding," which is "that poetry and books matter." Bolaño treats literature as if it's "a church that no one quite believes in anymore -- but that no one can live without."

But there's more.

Bolaño's novel follows its two main characters into a future where every poetic principle they cared about is lost or forgotten -- but it doesn't have to be about poetry. "Everything disappears," Stein says, "and your own youth disappears, and these guys -- they never get it back. You know? You watch them just trail off into the distance."

It sounds desperately bleak. But somehow, "The Savage Detectives" makes it exhilarating.

"I told Natasha afterwards that I felt more alive reading it than I felt when I went out and lived my life," Stein says. "And she said, 'I'm so glad to hear you say that. I felt the same way.' "

I think there's too much poetry, and poetry doesn't sell.

-- From "The Savage Detectives"

So how do you sell someone as strange, original and indisputably non-American as Roberto Bolaño in a U.S. market surrounded, as Sontag once wrote, by a "wall of indifference to foreign literature" -- a market in which, as Epler calculated a few years back, less than .5 percent of the books published are fiction in translation?

That's what Farrar, Straus publicity and marketing chief Jeff Seroy is paid to think about. But Seroy laughs at the notion that he can wave a magical marketing wand and send "The Savage Detectives" flying off bookstore shelves.

"I mean, we're not pulling rabbits out of hats," he says.

Members of the Farrar, Straus team have tried to highlight the book's significance in various small ways. There was the two-page spread in the catalogue, for example, and the roughly 3,000 advance reader's copies sent to reviewers and booksellers. "That's not typical for us to do with books in translation," Seroy says, "so that sent a signal."

They worked hard on the type-driven cover, with its ragged, graphic title and jumble of excited quotes on the back. And they took an unusual approach to the front flap copy.

"Ordinarily one goes into a lengthy description of the book," Seroy says, but in this case, he and Stein decided less would be more. "We really just needed to say: This is a dazzling work which established the international reputation of an important world writer. The plot summary is half a sentence."

There was Wimmer's essay, sent to selected reviewers and journalists and posted on a Web site built for "The Savage Detectives." And there was the fact that the Web site refers readers to the New Directions Bolaños -- an unusual cross-pollination that says: The writer is what's important here.

But in the end, Seroy says, their strategy was simple: They needed to convey "the right kind of excitement to the right people." By this he means letting those in "the literary establishment and the review establishment" know that he, Galassi and Stein truly believed, institutionally and personally, that they were dealing with a great and important book.

Will it work?

Maybe.

There's already been considerable pre-publication press, both in smaller literary publications and in mainstream magazines such as Harper's and the New Yorker, where Daniel Zalewski wrote that the original publication of "The Savage Detectives" in 1998 "aroused the same level of excitement in Latin America that 'One Hundred Years of Solitude' had, three decades earlier."

Bolaño's trajectory could mirror that of W.G. Sebald, whose first books, written in German and unknown here, were also published by New Directions -- to wide praise -- beginning in 1998. Sebald then jumped to Random House, which made a modest splash with his novel "Austerlitz" -- taking great care, as Epler notes, not to highlight the fact that it was a translation.

Yet even the most ecstatic press doesn't necessarily sell books. No one at Farrar, Straus is ready to make profit projections on "The Savage Detectives."

"I'm not looking at a P&L at this point," Seroy says. But even if the book ends up losing money, "it won't put us out of business."

Then he sums up the publishing philosophy, not universally shared, that made his colleagues go after Roberto Bolaño in the first place:

"We'll still always be happy that we published the book. And what more could you ask?"