Boston Translation

To the NYTimes: Remember the translator!

2009-06-21T10:12:00.000-04:00

Ezra E. Fitz, of Brentwood, Tenn., reminds the editors of The New York Times that without the diligence and skill of translators, world literature would largely be inaccessible to English-speaking monoglot readers:

Gerald Martin’s “Gabriel García Márquez: A Life” (June 7) is certainly chock-full of savory facts and hearty commentary, but it is also notable for its near-total lack of another, equally vital literary nutrient: the translator. You can count the references to Gregory Rabassa and Edith Grossman on one hand.

Your reviewer, Paul Berman, notes that García Márquez studied Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner and Proust “in Spanish translation,” but when he raves about the “gorgeous sentences” in “The Autumn of the Patriarch,” lauding it as “a heroic demonstration of man’s triumph over language,” he neglects to mention whether he read those sentences in Spanish or English.

Martin himself reads “The Autumn of the Patriarch” with close scrutiny, counting the number of sentences in each chapter and noting the subtle changes in narrative voice, before ultimately concluding that the novel “stands as the decisive oeuvre of García Márquez’s career” because “it encapsulates all his other works.”

Let us remind ourselves that García Márquez’s gorgeous sentences have been encapsulated in English variations thanks to the unheralded work of his translators.

New Russian Poetry at Jacket

2009-06-01T22:03:00.002-04:00

Привет. Jacket Magazine 36 devotes a substantial chunk of space to new Russian poetry in translation, compiled by Russian poets and translators Peter and Tatyana Golub. In a preferatory essay, Peter Golub explains,

I selected the great majority of the poets in this anthology because they belong to the category of newcomers who are not disposed to enter the cycle of simple reproduction, i.e. to recognize the old hallowed literature and do likewise. Many of these poets bring with them dispositions that clash with prevailing norms and expectations.

The poets he chooses are in their 20s and 30s. What marks this generation of poets, Golub argues, is that they "cannot simply resist the dominant field, because the dominant field no longer consists of official Soviet literature, but of legitimate literary figures like Osip Mandelshtam, Gennady Aigi, and Joseph Brodsky, and living writers like Kolya Baitov, Evgeny Rein, and Elena Schwartz." The younger poets' "task is to add new space to the existing field, to carefully balance respect for the older authors and also to challenge the establishment with a call for new literature. This means playing by the rules of the field, and facing competition from its established figures, while trying to be catalysts of change."

In addition to the poems in translation -- and I will leave you to discover the young Russian poets yourselves -- Jacket's special feature includes a handy list of links to organizations promoting new Russian literature, including Argo-Risk projects and press and Interpoezia bilingual poetry quarterly, as well as an interview with Russian literary scholar and editor Mikhail Aizenberg, and essays on poets Anastasia Afanasieva and Nina Iskrenko.

More wet floor signage

2009-05-29T13:31:00.003-04:00

At this late date we have a follow-up to one of our most heavily trafficked blog posts, "The Example of the Wet Floor Sign." In that post we gave as an example of the difficulty in obtaining both semantic and rhythmic equivalence in the transfer of meaning from source language to target, the problem of wet floor signs (native to supermarket aisles and institutional corridors). "Caution: Wet Floor" being an insufficiently musical translation of "Cuidado: Piso Mojado," our PBJ crew suggested "Caution: We're Washin'." Now, Ilya Gutner, our New York City correspondent, suggests an alternative rendering:

Don't forget,
Floor is wet.

This is the nitty-gritty, nuts-and-bolts of translation, folks. It doesn't get more real than this.

Kirsch on new translations of ancient Chinese poetry

2009-05-14T12:25:00.001-04:00

In his twofer review of David Hinton's anthology of classical Chinese poetry and David Young's Du Fu: A Life in Poetry, Adam Kirsch gestures dramatically and divertingly toward the historical and cultural depth which often goes under-appreciated of Chinese poetry in translation. He reminds us of the dubious and charismatic authorships, subversive quality, and truly penetrating clarity and perception (among other qualities we forget are not exclusive to poetry written after 1900) that drew Pound to this literature and which will reward new readers. I would be drawn to the books in any case, but Kirsch's review, informative and erudite as it is, enhances the appeal. One just wants quickly to dig in:

Reading commentaries on Chinese poetry--notably, Stephen Owen's The Great Age of Chinese Poetry, which deals with the High T'ang period of Li Po and Tu Fu--one begins to get an inkling of how many layers of meaning even the simplest, most imagistic poem contained for its original readers. Each genre of Chinese poetry had rules about rhyme, line length, and parallelism so intricate as to make the English sonnet look like free verse. Then there were conventions about how poems should start and end, and what images they could use, and what register of formality was appropriate to different subjects and different readers.

Now, I do take as challenge and invitation Kirsch's claim that many of the expressive features of Chinese literature -- e.g., the immediacy with which single-character ideograms communicate meaning; the shadings available to a tonal language; the paratactic grammar; and, as Kirsch notes, the relative scarcity of grammatical helpers like pronouns -- "are totally untranslatable into English." Tentatively scheduled but enthusiastically hoped for, in the Spring 2009 issue of Pusteblume, is new translation from contemporary Chinese by Eleanor Goodman. Look for the essay paired with these texts, to deflate the familiar argument that in translating Chinese, though something lovely may be transformed into English, much must be left behind.

BU Translation Prizes ceremony

2009-05-01T10:42:00.000-04:00

Winners will be announced and awards presented at the ceremony for the 2009 Boston University Translation Prizes, the Shmuel Traum Prize and the Robert Fitzgerald Translation Prize.

When: Monday, May 4, 2009, at 2 PM
Where: School of Theology Room 625, 745 Commonwealth Avenue

For more information, contact dhabersh@bu.edu.

LeClezio to read at MIT on April 28th

2009-04-26T16:08:00.002-04:00

Talk and reading (in English) by Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, "The Writer and the World: Reflections of an Author."

Date: Tuesday April 28, 2009
Time: 6:00-8:00 PM
Location: MIT Stata Center, 32 Vassar Street, Room 123

In more essential, Boston-based reading news, 2008 Nobel Prize winner Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio will be reading at MIT's Stata Center on April 28th, from 6 to 8 p.m. Few of Le Clézio's works are available in English as of yet; Boston-based press David R. Godine published a translation of Clézio's novel The Prospector in 1993. Listen to an audio clip of Christopher Merrill discussing the novel at PRI's "The World".

Tuesday's talk is sponsored by the Foreign Languages & Literatures Section, Contemporary French Studies Fund and The French Cultural Services in Boston, MA.

Bernardo Atxaga and Ilan Stavans to read on Monday May 4

2009-04-26T15:37:00.002-04:00

Reading at BU Photonics Center
8 St. Mary's Street, 9th Floor
on Monday, May 4, at 7:00 p.m.

Bernardo Atxaga, a Basque novelist, poet, and short story writer who writes in the Basque language (Euskara), will be reading along with Mexican-American cultural critic Ilan Stavans as part of BU's Institute for Human Science's "Imagining Europe" project. The talk will be moderated by Mark Feeney of The Boston Globe. According to the project's website, the intent of the public fora is to "ask artists and writers inhabiting different cultural circles, so to speak, to reflect as Europeans on such questions as what constitutes the European 'we,' what keeps 'us' together, and where do “we” want to go in the future."

Transcripts of the series of conversations -- including Atxaga's and Stavan's contributions -- will be published in a volume by Zephyr Press. Monday's reading will also kick off the launch of AGNI 69 (despite the fact that neither speaker features in this issue). After the reading and discussion at the BU Photonics Center, there will be a tapas dinner at AGNI's offices.

Dr Johnson, making no bones about it

2009-04-14T09:44:00.001-04:00

From today's Wordsmith mailing:

Poetry, indeed, cannot be translated; and, therefore, it is the poets that preserve the languages; for we would not be at the trouble to learn a language if we could have all that is written in it just as well in a translation. But as the beauties of poetry cannot be preserved in any language except that in which it was originally written, we learn the language.

-Samuel Johnson, lexicographer (1709-1784)

2008 Nobel Laureate Discusses Languages

2009-03-25T14:24:00.002-04:00

Translating a Moving Target: Poetry of a New Romania

2009-03-20T09:37:00.002-04:00

Poetry reading and discussion with Romanian poet Liliana Ursu and her American translator Sean Cotter. Moderated by AGNI founder Askold Melnyczuk.

Liliana Ursu is an internationally acclaimed Romanian poet, prose writer, and translator. Ursu's first book in English, The Sky Behind the Forest was translated by Ursu, Adam J. Sorkin, and Tess Gallagher. It became a British Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation and was shortlisted for Oxford's Weidenfeld Prize.

Co-sponsored by the BU Center for International Relations and AGNI, in cooperation with the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA), and Zephyr Press. A reception will follow.

Thursday, Mar 26, 2009, 6:30-8:30pm
Photonics Center, 8 St. Mary's Street (9th floor)
Open to General Public; Admission is free

For more information, contact Elizabeth Amrien: eamrien@bu.edu.

New Paul Valéry biography

2009-03-16T20:48:00.002-04:00

As an accomplished poet, philosopher, and essayist, Paul Valéry is the quintessential Man of Letters, or--as The Guardian would have it--"the ultimate French intellectual."

Michel Jarrety has put together a new biography, published in French by Editions Fayard. In an interview on the publisher's website, Jarrety discusses Valéry as a poet and a man of science, and his great circle of acquaintances, and the process of writing his extensive biography.

Paul Gifford at The Guardian observes:

Valéry’s circle of contacts remains dazzling. He was intimate with leading poets and writers (Mallarmé, Gide, Rilke); he worked alongside Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Thomas Mann, Gabriele d’Annunzio, John Galsworthy and Stefan Zweig; he exchanged ideas with André Malraux, Jean Giraudoux, Colette and Paul Claudel (but also with George Meredith, Arnold Bennett, H. G. Wells and Aldous Huxley); his lectures at the Collège de France were an influence on Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, Michel Tournier, Yves Bonnefoy and Paul de Man. Who else with such a profile could also have had Einstein as trusted interlocutor and colleague, discussed atoms with Niels Bohr, or the crisis of representation in sciences with the likes of Paul Langevin and Émile Borel; compared notes with Ravel and Stravinsky, Degas and Picasso; collaborated with Bergson and Sir James Frazer; interacted with both Pétain and de Gaulle; interviewed Mussolini and crossed paths with an entire gallery of Europe’s interwar power-brokers? To say nothing of the cast list of princesses, duchesses, countesses and other denizens of the cosmopolitan, high-society Paris salons who provided the writer with dinners, contacts, funding, entertainment, country-seat vacationing, confidantes and lovers.

Jarrety's biography can't but be interesting focusing on a busy polymath like Valéry, and it covers the scope of both his public life and his private (love) life extensively.

As of now, Paul Valéry is only available in French and is priced at 52 Euros.

Upcoming readings sponsored by the Institute for Human Sciences

2009-02-24T10:41:00.002-05:00

Dear poets and translators,

In the next few weeks, the Institute for Human Sciences is holding a few interesting looking readings by translators and Turkish-German and Romanian poets and writers at Boston University. Below is the schedule:

Thursday, March 19, 2009 6:30 PM
Poetry reading and discussion: Poetics between Languages: The Turkish-German Experience with ZAFER SENOCAK and ELIZABETH OEHLKERS WRIGHT**

Born in Ankara in1961, ZAFER SENOCAK has been living in Germany since 1970, where he has become a leading voice in the German discussions on multiculturalism,national and cultural identity, and a mediator between Turkish and German culture. The widely published poet, essayist, journalist and editor has won several prestigious literary awards in Germany.**

ELIZABETH OEHLKERS WRIGHT has been translating Zafer Senocak and other contemporary German poets for years. *Door Languages*, a selection of Senocak's poems in her translation was published by Zephyr Press in Fall 2008.**Moderator: ASKOLD MELNYCZUK*Founder and former editor of **AGNI*,* professor at UMass Boston and in Bennington's MFA program, and author of the new Europe-trotting, gripping, noirish family mystery** The House of Widows*

6:30 PM Boston University Photonics Center8 St. Mary's Street, 9th floor
Free and open to the public
Reception to follow

Thursday, March 26, 2009 6:30 PM
Poetry reading and discussion
Translating a Moving Target: Poetry of a New Romania with LILIANA URSU and SEAN COTTER**

URSU is an internationally acclaimed Romanian poet, prose writer, and translator. Ursu's first book in English, *The Sky Behind the Forest* (Bloodaxe Books, 1997), translated by Ursu, Adam J. Sorkin, and Tess Gallagher, became a British Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation and was shortlisted for Oxford's Weidenfeld Prize.**

SEAN COTTER has translated several books of Romanian poetry, including*Goldsmith Market* (Zephyr Press, 2004) and the forthcoming *Lightwall* (Zephyr Press,2009)**

Moderator: ASKOLD MELNYCZUK* Founder and former editor of **AGNI*,* professor at UMass Boston and in Bennington's MFA program, and author of the new Europe-trotting, gripping,noirish family mystery** The House of Widows*Boston University Photonics Center 8 St. Mary's Street, 9th floor

Free and open to the public Reception to follow

A Verse Falls in the Forest

2009-02-05T12:50:00.002-05:00

The Irish Times has an interesting article today on the most recent batch of Irish-language poetry prizes. Given that few people speak the language, even in Ireland itself, the question was raised whether these poets feel they're writing in a vacuum. Áine Uí Fhoghlú, who won the Michael Hartnett Poetry Award for her collection An Liú sa Chuan, responds "sometimes you wonder if there's anybody out there. But like any art form [writing poetry] is not something you particularly set out to do. It kind of comes over you. For me personally, it's as if a poem comes in spite of me and it's my job to shape that into something that I consider art. So it's something that happens. It's like a well that bubbles up and you can't stop it and if you plug it up it comes out somewhere else." It shows an almost Kierkegaardian faith, a propulsion to expression, that could be said to reside in all poets. But the question remains: what can one make of contemporary poets in languages such as Irish? And even more pressing, I think — what happens when the most giften translators of this language pass away?

Translation Fellowships at Vermont Studio Center

2009-01-21T22:53:00.000-05:00

For those of you who are interested, the Vermont Studio Center and Zoland Poetry will be offering month-long fellowships for translators at the VSC's international retreat center in Johnson, Vermont. Applications should be filled in by February, 15. Details are available at: http://vermontstudiocenter.org/vsc-zoland-poetry-fellowships-2/

Call for Submissions from Washington Square

2009-01-19T10:26:00.002-05:00

We've just had word from Martha Collins through a translators' mailing list that Washington Square, the student-edited and -produced journal at New York University’s Graduate Writing Program, is now accepting submissions for its Summer/Fall 2009 issues. They are looking for previously unpublished English translations of (non-English) poems and short stories of serious literary intent.

Manuscripts must be received by March 1, 2009, and accompanied by a SASE and cover letter with author’s name, address, phone number, email address, and title(s) of submission(s). Poetry submissions should not exceed 10 pages/5 poems. Fiction submissions should not be in excess of 20 pages.

Submissions may be sent by post to the attention of the 'International Editor', Washington Square, Creative Writing Program, New York University, 58 West 10th Street, New York, NY 10011, or as attachments by email to washingtonsquarereview@gmail.com.

A Round-up of Translation News

2009-01-05T13:35:00.003-05:00

Poetry International Web has some new writers up for January: Jūkichi Yagi, a "twentieth-century Christian poet" from Japan, Maria van Daalen , a Dutch poet interested in Haitian Vodou, as well as a few Colombian writers: Luz Mary Giraldo and Federico Díaz-Granados--both poets and literary critic--and Myriam Montoya, a Colombian poet based in Paris.

Over at Three Percent, Chad Post is highlighting a book a day from their Best Translated Book of 2008 Fiction Longlist over the next couple of weeks. Today's book: The Taker and Other Stories by Brazilian writer Rubem Fonseca, translated from the Portuguese by Clifford Landers.

At Slate, Adam Kirsch reviews Burton Raffel's new translation of The Canterbury Tales from Middle to Modern English. Kirsch claims the "one big virtue" of this new translation is its utter comprehensibility--taking the "chore" out of muddling out the Middle English on one's own. Kirsch writes:

For those readers who are absolutely unwilling to puzzle out Middle English spelling, or spend time getting acquainted with Chaucer's versification and syntax, Raffel's edition will be a useful substitute. But even Raffel, a poet who has translated everyone from Cervantes to Stendhal, seems a little curious why anyone would bother reading The Canterbury Tales in ranslation. "Native speakers of English, as recently as the first half of the twentieth century, were not particularly uncomfortable with Chaucer's difficulties," he writes in his introduction. Since the English language has not changed much in the last 50 years, he clearly believes that the problem lies with its speakers—that we have gotten lazier and more provincial. No one who embarks on reading The Canterbury Tales, however, can be all that lazy, and any reader who compares the original with Raffel's version will surely agree that the extra effort is worthwhile. For Raffel's translation loses the original's music without finding a music of its own; he is wordy where the original is pithy and bare where the original is lush. Chaucer is in many ways the progenitor of English fiction—he is closer to Dickens than to Keats—but he is also a great master of English poetry; and since poetry is what is lost in translation, why not take the trouble to read the original and avoid the loss? Besides, as the Pardoner says, "lewed peple loven tales olde;/ Swiche thynges kan they wel reporte and holde."

Kafka's Amerika

2009-01-02T23:07:00.002-05:00

I, for one, am looking forward to reading the new translation of Kafka's third--and least read--novel, alternatively called The Missing Person and Amerika. The novel was originally published in 1927, after Kafka's death, by his literary executor Max Brod. A new translation, by Mark Harman, is being published by Shocken Books. Adam Kirsch gives an overview of Amerika--not Harman's translation, as such, but Kafka's story in general--in The New York Times Sunday Book Review.

N.B. In the same NYTSBR, Sarah Fay reviews Tokyo Fiancée by Belgian writer Amélie Nothomb--a semi-autobiographical account of a young Belgian woman teaching French in Japan and falling in love with her student.

Call for submissions: Portuguese Interpreting/Translation Conference

2008-12-24T09:13:00.002-05:00

The Translation Center and the Masters Program in Translation Studies at UMass Amherst will be hosting a conference on Portuguese translation in Amherst, MA on April 18-19, 2009.

The organizers are looking for presentations on a wide range of topics within the field of interpreting, translation and the Portuguese language. Their especial interest is the connection between professionals and academics in the field.

The conference will have a special student panel for graduate students to present their work.

Proposals may be sent to Elena Langdon, treasurer of the Portuguese Language Division of the American Translators Association: elena.langdon@gmail.com.

eXchanges, Icelandish, Freeman on -eth

2008-12-14T09:26:00.002-05:00

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS
eXchanges, the University of Iowa’s online journal of literary translation, will be accepting variations on the theme MIRRORS & MASKS for their spring 2009 issue until March 20, 2009. Short stories, novel excerpts, literary nonfiction, and poetry are all welcome, as well as critical essays on translation.

To be considered, submissions must include the original source text as well as the translation; biographies and photos of both author and translator; a short note on the process of translation; and permission for online publication for both languages. Submissions should total no more than ten pages in length. Electronic submissions -- which are strongly preferred -- should be send as .doc attachments to exchanges@iowa.uiowa.edu. Direct paper submissions to eXchanges, Bowman House, 230 N. Clinton St., Iowa City, IA, 52242, U.S.A. The editors do accept simultaneous submissions; however, they ask that submitters inform them if work is under consideration elsewhere.

HELLO, COUSINS
The Fall 2008 issue, ROOTS & BRANCHES, is online at the journal's website. Browsing through, I saw work from Japanese, Italian, Chinese, and Hindi, but, having recently fallen in with the writing of Halldór Laxness, decided to check out the Icelandic poem "morðsaga" by Sigurbjörg Þrastardóttir, given in German as "moritat" by Kristof Magnusson and as "murder story" by Þrastardóttir's English translator Bernard Scudder.

The title phrase "morð-saga" can be easily seen to mean "murder story," without having to clean off much of that phonetic and orthographic grime that accumulates over time on cognates, in much the same way that that sea corrosion builds up on cannons sunk with a ship-wreck. Oh, but let us be cautious of cognates -- I have in mind the admonition of translator Cola Franzen: that when rely on cognate meaning, we run the risk of ruining the tone of our version. Good advice indeed; but as readers of parallel texts we should be able to relax our vigilance against seeming sameness and faux amis, and have a little fun picking out the connections. As we can with the triplet wafer-thin / hauchdünn / næfurþunnt . Apparently "næfur" corresponds to "wafer" -- that's neat!.

It is thrilling to see clean kinship between English, German, and Icelandic, to feel part (as a native speaker of English) of an extended family of lexical relations. English: Don’t you think? German: Findest du nicht? Icelandic: Finnst þér ekki?

FREEMAN IN THE SUNDAY GLOBE
In today's Globe, Jan Freeman picks up the theme of linguistic cousins in a related (!) way: "Same for run the gantlet instead of gauntlet: The word was gattlopp in Swedish, but it was mangled the moment we borrowed it, almost 400 years ago. Does it really matter which spelling of the French word for "glove" we use to represent it today?" Ha, I laughed aloud; a point for Freeman again literary pedantry. Precision can be pretentious as well as useful. (Finnst þér ekki?) Elsewhere in the same column, Freeman expresses admirable irritation, admirably restrained, toward the use of verbs incorrectly conjugated in the Elizabethan way. She uses the occasion to preacheth tolerance of linguistic change, a cause we would all do well to support with our various energies. While not forgetting that there is a difference between change and degeneration, and that tolerance of the former should not admit comfort with the latter. Ah, but, like, who shall judgeth?

Abusive tendencies of translation

2008-12-11T16:20:00.002-05:00

'Translation is something akin to vivisecting a ghost,' James Stotts tells us in the new issue of the literary journal Reconfigurations. "An analysis of translation, then, would be like the shadow cast by a ghost—pale indeed." Not in this case; Stotts is erudite and informative in this account of reading a clutch of dense lyrics (on the theme of goldfinches) by Osip Mandelstam. Stotts writes:

The problem with translation is that both decent and opportunist professors, both earnest poets and career hackwriters conventionally approach the translation of a body of work as some conquerable task, as if the poetic achievement of Mandelstam could be taken on and achieved again by proxy. Even good writers usually seem to be at their worst as translators. Mandelstam’s own appraisal of translation seems fairer: translations should be tools for approaching the original poem in its original language. The other half of the equation is the use of translations as an alternative mode of poetic production: simply a plagiaristic method for writing poetry. That would allow for the abusive tendencies of all translation, in a way that exposes and counters the apologetics of bad translators. It would also demand the same kind of struggle toward linguistic mastery in English that Mandelstam concerned himself with in Russian. A poem not only draws on its language, but creates new possibilities for it as well, and so a translation must also have that creative, dynamic feature to be worthwhile.

Stotts, a writer and photographer, is translating for a selected poems of Marina Tsvetaeva forthcoming from Whale and Star Press. His "invisible shotgun anthology" of Russian writing" includes such masters as Afanasy Fet, Sergei Esenin, Joseph Brodsky, and, yes, Mandelstam.

Love of Translation

2008-12-03T12:00:00.003-05:00

I'd like to follow-up on Nora's post last month about the NPR featurette on translation, by directing readers to a more extended commentary on the conclusion of that show over at the blog of translator Erica Mena. Over at her Beneath Sense blog, Mena elevates the discussion of translation out of taxonomy and into urgent necessity:

[Translation] is both a science, in the sense of languages being a science, and an art in the sense of creative writing. This bridge that literary translation creates between the critical and the creative, the objective and the subjective, is what perhaps initially drew me into its practice. But it is more than a science and an art, it is and has to be a love.

Emphasis mine. In the same port, Mena recalls her burgeoning devotion to this lovely artful science:

I was told in one of my first translation workshops with renowned poet and translator Martha Collins that there aren't very many young literary translators. It seemed odd to me at the time that any craft would have much to do with the age of its practitioners. But it occurs to me that perhaps it has something to do with that requirement of love. As a creative writer, the love I hold for my own work is somewhat selfish - it's hard to get real distance from it, to separate it from my intentions and emotions. As a translator, the love I bear for the work I'm translating is significantly different. It's not that I don't feel intimately attached to the work - I certainly do - possessive sometimes, proprietary over the original. But that to devote yourself, your creative energies, entirely to someone else's work requires a kind of selfless love that comes with perspective and time.

Too often, in seminars and in discussion with publishers, is lost the vital urges, the devotion and passion, which brings us to literature and which we in turn take from it. My appreciation to Erica for reinforcing the heated feeling beneath the cool surfaces of les belles-lettres.

Pat Holt, with a wail: Where's all the translation?

2008-12-02T20:47:00.004-05:00

Pat Holt, long-time book critic for The San Francisco Chronicle and publisher since 1998 of the estimable book industry column Holt Uncensored, is gobsmacked that more works in translation aren’t published in America. Among the results we suffer, she observes, are a culture a-wither in the confines of literary imprisonment (my paraphrase – but you can see that she’d agree), and a publishing industry suffering by cutting themselves off from an obvious source of new talent:

Wouldn’t any publisher consider it a plus if a prospective assistant editor came to the job interview with a reading fluency in at least one foreign language? During college the candidate could have studied the classics in that language, traveled in that country and read all the promising modern authors. If hired, the new editorial assistant could comb through the foreign country’s publishing lists, acquire advance copies, investigate the U.S. market for prospective works in translation and write up Readers Reports that would be reviewed by a senior editor. This would be good training for the editorial assistant and it would sure breathe new life into an industry struggling to match the literary demands of the world.

Incisive criticism and insightful advice. An example of how this advice can succeed in application is the good idea David Godine had when he picked up Chercheur D’or at a foreign book fair, commissioned a translation, released it on the English-language market at The Prospector, and enjoyed a healthy kick in sales when Le Clézio won the Nobel Prize this year.

To acknowledge the other obvious example at the moment: Farrar, Straus and Giroux can't have any complaints as it keeps on publishing best-selling translations of what seems like Roberto Bolaño's entire ouevre, one after the other, in a feverish single-file congo line of doorstop opus epics of Latin American literary imagination. In Spain, in Germany, in Brazil, in Russia, lurk all kinds of authors, some as accomplished as any of the laurelled Anglo-American set, others as talented as Bolaño and as unknown as he was ten years ago. The oil's there, publishers, so why ain't ya drillin'? As we have learned is important in such endeavors, you better get there before someone drinks your milkshake. Not everyone's asleep: Dalkey, Godine, Open Letter, and Tameme have all got their bendy straws in place.

Holt goes on in some detail highlighting the benefits to be gained if American publishers were to engage a larger portion of international literature; her post is well worth reading in its entirety, as the first of three things she’d love to see (that is, that she’d love to see occur in American publishing). We wait, breath bated, for the third.

Among the many noteworthy points Holt relates in the making of her case:
-a Nobel Prize judge observes that American writers and publishers are too insular
-the NEA literature director describes the decline of published books in translation “a national crisis”
-the chair of PEN’s translation committee concludes that such monoglot practices “prevent authors from reaching readers anywhere outside their own country”

Many thanks to C.M. Mayo for pointing out Holt’s return to commentary on the ALTA mailing list. Mayo is the founder of Tameme, Inc., a California-based nonprofit devoted to the promotion of Spanish-English and English-Spanish translation. You can learn more about that outfit and about Mayo herself at her blog, or by checking out this recent interview in Saint Ann’s Review.

NPR Feature on Translation

2008-11-24T12:43:00.002-05:00

This weekend on NPR's All Things Considered, Rick Kleffel briefly discussed the difficulties and pleasures of translation. Kleffel focuses particularly on the difficulties of translating cultural elements from one time and place to another. For example, on translating 18th century Italian playwright Carlo Goldoni into English for the first time, Italian translator Bea Basso realized: "All of a sudden I was a translator of gestures, traditions, customs, ways of behaving even — how many kisses do you give to people when you enter a room." In translating Gargantua and Pantagruel, Burton Raffel met the same difficulties: "Rabelais, the author of this very strange book, ends the chapter with a sputtering iteration. I believe it's something like 43 different words in French for s- - -," says Raffel. "My problem was finding 43 different words because English is not so plentiful in these things."

Listen to a clip of the radio piece or compare different translations of Victor Hugo's Les Miserables.

Translating Procedural Poetry

2008-11-12T03:12:00.002-05:00

When K. Silem Mohammad came to read with Christian Bök at the De Young Museum, we discussed at length how one could possibly translate his sonnegrams. If you recall, KSM's sonnegrams are more or less line by line anagrammatic poems written from Shakespeare's sonnets. I had been somewhat dismayed by some Italian translations of Google-sculpted poems by Gary Sullivan, which were just reproducing the meaning of the poems in question (mind you, I can read Italian, but I don't really know the language). The translator had basically worked from an artifact, rather than try to recreate a certain moment of writing. Of course, had the translator written the translation by simply entering the translation of the search terms into the Italian version of Google, he would have gotten a wildly different poem. But is it that bad?

My problem with such translation is that it treats more or less the poem as a communicative object. The poem as artifact has something to say. As Walter Benjamin wrote in "The Task of the Translator," translations will always be read under the shadow of their originals, but it does not entail that shadows have to be dull. And so, what is interesting about procedural poetry (Oulipo, flarf, some Language poetry) is not so much what they have to say but rather their gestures and their mechanics. The semantic acrobatics are icing on the cake.

What I proposed to KSM was to take a translation of Shakespeare (in French) and apply to it similar permutations to the one KSM operated on the English text. As KSM put it, it's writing a new poem out of a constraint/procedure. Which in itself is what poetic translation tends to be anyway, writing a new poem within the constraints of a foreign-language text. (Note that I am not planning right now to translate Kasey's sonnegrams)

KSM thought this was somewhat of a novel way of translating, but it's not really. In The Yale Anthology of Twentieth-Century French Poetry (ed. Mary Ann Caws), we find the following poem by Michelle Grangaud, "Isidore Ducasse comte de Lautréamont" (at least the first stanza):

méduse l'auditoire mets sac à côté nord
et mise du crocodile dans ta mare ouest
démode du croissant au court à demi est
toast à taire consomme le décideur sud
sors ta mince camelote du désert oui-da
monte maturité à la corde cuisse de dos

If we had just translated the poem word for word, sentence by sentence (the way Georges Hugnet translated The Making of Americans), this is what we would have gotten:

mystify the audience place bag on the north side
and stake of the crocodile in your western puddle
old-fashioned croissant on the eastern court and a half
toast to shut drink the southern decider
show your narrow crap from the oui-da desert
increase maturity to the rope thigh of back

Like the French, it's still funny and nonsensical, but Grangaud is an Oulipian and the poem is a repeated anagram of its title coupled with the structure of sestina. Here is the translation that Paul and Rosemary Lloyd did:

I am more cursed at close a dent outside
a sluice meet roused a distracted moon
some toadies direct moat clause under
o I must care seamed a rose tinted cloud
lo our coast master educated me inside
so tailed mouse can't deem dour ice star

The translation here in term of gesture is more faithful to the original. Nevermind meaning, there wasn't any to begin with. However, I am not saying this should necessarily be the way to translate procedural poems. This translation is still problematic, in that it is syntactically more correct than its original, for example (there is almost no syntax in the original).

Another interesting translation of procedural poetry is Cole Swensen's work on Pierre Alferi's Kub Or. The original text:

au lieu de moquer marquise
me font vos yeux beaux mourir
penser images secondes
arrangement d'étourneaux
qui vont à la ligne haute
tension battre le flip-book
et revoir le mouvement

cinéma

And as translated in OXO:

rather than mocking marquise
of your eyes so beautiful
die i think frames per second
the arrangement of starlings
aligned on the high tension
wire shuffles the flip-book
and revises the motion

cinéma

Alféri's original is 7 syllables in 7 lines in conversation with 7 photographs by Suzanne Doppelt. What is so admirable about Swensen's translation is that she manages to keep both the structural constraints of the original, but also the dialogue it establishes with the photographs.

The fundamental problem of truth.

2008-11-11T19:20:00.002-05:00

Once, during rehearsals, Stanislavsky told an actor: "You can act well. You can act badly. Act, as you please. I am not interested. It is important to me that you act veraciously."

The problem of truth is primary in the perilous business of translation. There are ever-present battles between those, who argue that a translator should be as close as possible to the original, and those, who say that literary translation is not all that literary if it does not alter the original. Frequently, both fall into pits of their own creation – the former produce unreadable transmissions and the latter create something that resembles the original only in name. Literary translation, as acting, should be veracious, and thus cannot be either/or, it has to be both, literary and honest to the original.

Sarah Glazer in her 2001 essay "Lost in Translation" implicitly makes a strong case for such translation by evaluating the current English version of "The Second Sex” by Simone de Beauvoir. The “founding text of modern feminism” has been inaccurately translated, to the point of distortion, by a person who was least qualified for such an exercise - a biologist with no background in either feminism or philosophy. Albeit a result of a misunderstanding, this work gave English readers a wrong impression of the author, whom they now see as an “incoherent” and “sloppy” thinker, and destroyed the philosophical merit of the treatise. More disheartening is the fact that the publisher refused a request by Beauvoir's literary heir, Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir, to re-translate the work. Thus, the book will remain in its current version and those who wish to read the actual written word of the founding feminist will need to learn French. Perhaps, the argument for verity in “The Second Sex” has more merit – it is crucial to be precise in a work that operates with philosophical concepts, which don’t appreciate misinterpretation. However, Sarah Glazer, addresses a very prominent problem in translation as a whole - frequently, translators are either not part of the world of writing, or confuse the exercise of translating with that of creative writing, or both.

Recently, I have been trying to find “Master and Margarita” for a friend of mine. As you know, there are currently 3 versions of the novel available. I have done my research, and have to admit that Pevear and Volokhonsky’s translation is the best. I know, they are accused of monopolizing the market of Russian translation, but the other two versions took liberties with the text that I cannot forgive. I think this team has the fundamentals for "veracious translating" – a native speaker of Russian, a native speaker of English (both literary gifted) and a degree of honesty to the original that is rare.