After three vists to Earls Court in consecutive years, the London Book Fair starts to feel familiar: stunning stands up front, English PEN’s literary café and the welcome haven of the Literary Translation Centre at the very back, the distractingly fleshy covers on the S&M stand posted at the crossing-point between the halls, that ubiquitous downward-and-sideways glance of eyes to badge that precedes almost every conversation, folk riding the escalator to the International Rights Centre like so many Chosen Ones being  elevated slowly to an unseen apotheosis…

And the sheer grim awfulness of the IRC itself: a Piranesi-esque prospect of row upon row of tiny desks and flimsy coat lockers, dimly-lit, utterly unadorned and closely guarded. Like passing from the vast spaces, gilded glamour and frescoes of the Doges’ Palace in Venice, to the harsh workaday reality of the tiny, plain offices behind the panelling. Kind of…

I enjoyed just one busy afternoon meeting fellow translators at the LTC, clients and contacts at the Bureau International de l’Edition Française and the IRC, then more clients and contacts entirely by chance on the steps outside, before heading to the exceedingly pleasant King’s Head pub in Hogarth Place with translators from French, Russian, Japanese and more.

The Venice comparison was no doubt prompted by the book I was (mostly) peddling this year – Gabrielle Wittkop’s novel Sérénissime Assassinat, a dark tale of murder, decadence and corruption of every kind in the declining years of the Serene Republic. My translation comes with a French Voices award for publication in the US, and I left the Fair grateful for contacts supplied by the book’s French publisher Gallimard.

Nicholas Lezard hailed Wittkop’s The Necrophiliac (ECW Press, 2011) as a masterpiece (in Don Pabst’s translation) last year. The latter is clearly from the (very) far side of her work, but there’s much to enjoy in her more mainstream writing, too. More anon – and news of a US publisher, perhaps.