For the first and very likely the last time in my life, I’m appearing on a prime-time talk show. In Bulgaria. I’m in the capital, Sofia, for a festival, and before I arrived I was sent an article: “Does Bulgarian Literature Have a Place Within World Literature?” The author, Amelia Licheva, also an organizer of the festival, expresses her concern that “Bulgarian literature is far too national, provincial even.” It doesn’t “tackle global issues.”

So here we go. The cameras turn to me, and after a few preliminary questions, the host asks: “Mr. Parks, you’re English, but you’ve lived many years in Italy, you write for American journals, you translate, you know the international scene. Tell me, how can our Bulgarian literature survive in an English-speaking world?” I’m thrown. Does a country’s literature rely on international circulation to thrive? Do they suppose I can tell them how to get a Bulgarian author nominated for the Nobel? Maybe, I suggest, writers should just tell the stories they feel moved to tell and that Bulgarians are excited to read.

But this clearly doesn’t cut it. Sitting in the studio with me are a former prime minister and the speaker of the National Assembly. They’ve been discussing declarations made by the Hungarian foreign minister about the European Union and Ukraine. Or so the host whispered to me. The conversation was in Bulgarian. There’s an awful lot I don’t know here. Is the literary question tied up with anxiety about Bulgaria’s continuing existence in the shadow of an expansionist Russia, something the taxi driver explained to me on the way from the airport?

At another moment, the host asks me how Bulgarians should react to the fact that George Bernard Shaw’s play Arms and the Man, recently staged in Sofia by none other than John Malkovich, depicts Bulgarians as a naïve, militaristic people with poor hygiene.

As he speaks and I reply, I hear the voice-over of a Bulgarian interpreter, which only adds to my sense of disorientation. I manage to remember that Shaw wrote his antiwar comedy in the early 1890s, setting it in a place neither he nor his audience knew anything about, precisely so as to say anything he wanted. He wasn’t envisaging a tour of the Balkans. The host is undeterred, suggesting that if these comments were made about an African population, they would be considered extremely racist. Struggling to appear wise, I say I’m sure the Bulgarians are mature enough to smile at Shaw’s misconceptions and enjoy the play for what it was meant to be.

Later, sleepless in a ninth-floor hotel room, beside a window looking east across the city toward Turkey and the Black Sea, I wonder who has made more of a fool of themselves: me, accepting an invitation to a country I know nothing of in the vague hope they might translate my novels (which spring from a milieu they know nothing of), or them, supposing that inviting me could promote Bulgaria’s status in some globalized literary arena?

What would have been the proper response to the questions I was asked? Turning my pillow, I remember a remark by a Dutch friend, the essayist Bas Heijne, that one effect of globalization is to make people in smaller countries think of their own cultures as minor, inadequate. “Let us no longer express ourselves in a local patois,” the charismatic Dutch writer Gerard Reve proclaimed in the Fifties, deciding to abandon his native language and switch to English. (The Evenings, his Dutch-language masterpiece from the previous decade, had failed to find a British or American publisher.)

But if writers look beyond their national community to appeal to a global audience, wouldn’t that alter what they write? A book like The Evenings had a special effect in postwar Holland. While a fierce debate raged about Dutch collaboration with the Nazis, Reve’s splendidly feckless protagonist was chiefly concerned about surviving a suffocating domestic life with his tedious parents, and though he relishes terrifying, sadistic fantasies, the war is barely mentioned, something critics at the time thought scandalous. For the Anglophone reader who picked up the translation when it finally appeared in English in 2016, this context was lost. Would Reve have written a different book if he’d decided to play his internationalist card earlier? Would it have been as good? His English-language writing got him nowhere.

So where does that leave the idea of World Literature, now taught as a course subject in many universities? My mind goes back to Licheva’s article. Reflecting on “the ability to write globally,” she offers “a roadmap for new Bulgarian literature’s development toward becoming world literature,” listing the trends and tropes that promise international attention. Authors may focus on “experiencing warfare and its effects on the lives of individuals,” or “their countries’ past and the issues of colonialism.” She mentions successful international practitioners: Kate Atkinson, J. M. Coetzee, V. S. Naipaul, as well as Herta Müller and Svetlana Alexievich. “Living under socialism” is another promising topic, Licheva writes (Bulgaria threw off the Communist yoke in 1990). One Bulgarian who ticked this box with success, she thinks, showing he knows “how to broaden the ego and universalize it,” was Georgi Gospodinov. His novel The Physics of Sorrow, which describes Bulgaria as “this empty space between Istanbul, Vienna, and Budapest,” was well reviewed internationally. (“An essential voice in world literature,” claims his American publisher.) His next novel, Time Shelter, which imagines a clinic in Zurich where people can take refuge in meticulous reconstructions of the past, won the International Booker Prize in 2023. As a rule, though, Licheva worries, even when Bulgarian novels do serve up the right subjects—she mentions terrorism, refugees, immigration, the cultural melting pot—they “fail to notice global problems and instead look intently at the political and social problems of Bulgarian society.” How bad is that?

Fortunately, she reports, there is a way to focus on the national precisely in order to be published “beyond national borders.” You “turn the locally or regionally specific into something ‘exotic.’ ” Licheva cites Jhumpa Lahiri, Orhan Pamuk, and Khaled Hosseini as celebrity examples and mentions the success of the Bulgarian writer Ruzha Lazarova, who switched from her native tongue to the more international French, producing stories about her childhood that “Bulgarian readers may find it difficult to identify with . . . because they seem hyperbolized, inauthentic, and rather narrowly suited to the expectations of a foreign audience.” Another Bulgarian, Miroslav Penkov, Licheva writes, “won the BBC National Short Story Award for a story that presents his native Bulgaria as a place of unique (one might say ‘weird’) customs.”

In short, it’s not easy to please both the home crowd and the away. And it’s not always easy as a reader to know what to think. Is Elena Ferrante’s Naples authentic or, as one prominent Italian critic put it, “a poster for tourists”? And what about the Sicily of Andrea Camilleri, the country’s other big literary export? “A souvenir,” complains another critic: “the exotic, inauthentic idea that, say, an American from Dallas has of Italy.” Is the reader of world literature essentially a tourist?

This brings to mind something else to keep me awake. For some weeks now I’ve been wondering whether to resign from a panel of judges granting residencies to writers—that is, the opportunity to concentrate on their writing in a pleasant environment with all expenses paid. The project is funded by a major American endowment, though it is open to writers the world over. In fact, as judges we are aware that, although there are no quotas for nationalities or genders, a broad spread in the writers we select will be welcome. I’m thinking of resigning because so many of the applications are of a kind: writers with a range of nationalities and ethnic backgrounds, though for the most part residing in the United States and teaching at American universities, offering as their sample work accounts of their or their parents’ or grandparents’ sufferings. Nothing wrong with that, but these unhappy tales form an astonishingly large proportion of the applications, rather as if the writers were following the Licheva-style road map that cited the grievances of the displaced person as likely to appeal to the judges of international awards.

Is this the scenario, then? That with so much of the world focused on America as the great driver of globalization—following American news, watching American films and TV, reading American books—American writers hardly have to worry about pitching their work to an international audience? In any event, the U.S. book market is by far the largest worldwide. Meantime, however, those from less privileged or peripheral countries who want to join the party are tempted to draw attention to their ethnicity or don national costumes to get international attention. It’s a depressing thought, but I remember now, in Salman Rushdie’s memoir Joseph Anton, he describes how, as a young man who had spent much of his recent life in England but who was disappointed with his failure to break through as a writer, he decided that his Indian identity would be his trump card and abandoned his London job in advertising to rediscover the country he had left years before. Later he records his exultation at the Booker Prize dinner at which he opened a “handsome, leather-bound presentation copy of Midnight’s Children” to find a “bookplate inside that read winner.”

That word does it. I’m not going to sleep. Is this what I’ve dedicated my life to? A game of winning or losing? Standing at the window, I see nothing recognizable (at least to me) on the Sofia skyline but the victorious Golden Arches of McDonald’s. A single recipe for all the world. “In general”—these are the words of the Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi, writing in 1820—“you could say that the tendency of the modern spirit is to reduce the whole world to one nation and all nations to a single person. . . . Even language is becoming the same for everyone thanks to the widespread propagation of”—but here I have to smile—“French.”

Is that where it all began? The battle for global supremacy between English and French? My wife has just published an article about a quarrel between Voltaire and the Italian Anglophile Giuseppe Baretti, a close friend of Samuel Johnson. Voltaire, who in the 1720s had admired Shakespeare and even translated parts of Hamlet, changed his mind after British victories over France in the Seven Years’ War, gains that guaranteed Britain’s hegemony in North America and India—hence, eventually, the world dominance of English. “Poor France,” Voltaire wrote, “has neither navy nor money, nor plate, nor fame, nor wit.” In 1761, he published his Appel à toutes les nations de l’Europe sur des jugements d’un écrivain anglais, in which he declared Hamlet ridiculous and Shakespeare a man with no taste who ignored all the rules of theater—certainly no match for Corneille and Racine. Even if France was losing the war, it would maintain its cultural supremacy, Voltaire claimed. Baretti rushed to Shakespeare’s defense with a two-hundred-page book. In detail, he trashed Voltaire’s translations from Hamlet, showing convincingly that the philosopher’s English wasn’t up to it, then went on to undermine the whole idea of world literature, even before Goethe pronounced in its favor in 1827. Voltaire’s notion of a universally applicable taste, Baretti thought, was simply French taste applied to cultures with quite different mindsets: a form of imperialism. Even if Voltaire had had better English, Shakespeare wouldn’t come across in French. Different countries had different tastes and always would. Shakespeare’s English was so dense and brilliant that the only way to appreciate him was to learn English. “Yes, my French messieurs, to know Shakespeare you’ll have to come to London.” In this view, literature is predicated on belonging; it requires you to be part of a community. You can’t decide who wins between Shakespeare and Corneille, because there is no common measure of artistic achievement. Literature is not a playing field, let alone a battlefield. You can’t expect to appreciate the literary achievements of every nation in the same way.

The following evening, somewhat weary, I go to my main festival event, a conversation with Daria Karapetkova, a prominent Bulgarian translator and professor of literature. The crowd is encouragingly numerous and attentive. Later I discover that many of them are Karapetkova’s students, aspiring writers and translators. She asks me about the Nobel, recently won by Han Kang. Was it simply time to give the prize to a Korean? I say that all I know about Kang came from writing about her novel The Vegetarian and discovering, after feedback from Korean critics, that the English translation departed in very many ways from the original. The translator, Deborah Smith, had declared that “ ‘faithfulness’ is an outmoded, misleading, and unhelpful concept.” When the prestigious Italian publishers Adelphi Edizioni, having read the book in English, had it translated into Italian from the Korean, they rejected that version and, to get the book they thought they had acquired, had it translated from the English.

“Perhaps they should have given the Nobel to the translator,” Karapetkova teases. Why not? Translators are eager for visibility, too. They like to insist a translation is an original work in its own right. However, I point out, we don’t know which translation the Swedish judges read. The French version, for example, which I dipped into, is quite different. Perhaps in the end world literature gives us the version of the world that suits us—that we can feel knowledgeable for having consumed.

“What advice,” Karapetkova asks, because it’s the inevitable closing question, “would you give to Bulgarian writers?”

I would love simply to shake my head. But they’ve paid to bring me here. “Write to the community you live and move in,” I say. “That’s where the reading experience will be most intense. If your compatriots are enthusiastic, sooner or later someone will translate you, since the modern globalized individual cannot accept the idea that there is something excellent out there that they don’t have access to, or can’t turn into money, or measure against the other excellent things they already have, so as to hand out a prize. Even if translation is impossible, they will translate.”

In the audience a hand goes up. A young man says he is translating a thriller that is not very good. Should he improve it?

“That’s your call,” I tell him, glad of the chance to mention the curious case of the Iranian translator Zabihollah Mansouri, who, from the Twenties to the Eighties, claimed to have translated fourteen hundred books, including many of literature’s great masterpieces, systematically “improving” them with his own additions and reflections to suit an Iranian public. “He became very popular.”