NPR Features Translation as Artistic Partnership

NPR has just launched a new series of features on artistic partnerships to be included in their All Things Considered broadcasts, and I was delighted to see that they chose to lead off the series with a segment on literary translation. For the segment, Lynn Neary interviewed star translators Edith Grossman and Lydia Davis, both of whom reported finding aspects of collaboration in their work. For Grossman, who is celebrated for her retranslation of Cervantes’s great novel Don Quixote, literary translation is a matter of shared authorship, and she imagines sitting down to chat with Cervantes over a drink. Davis, who says her goal is “speaking in the voice and in the manner, as much as I can, of the original author,” read Flaubert’s letters while working on her retranslation of Madame Bovary to get a sense of what was on his mind while he was writing the novel. Whereas Grossman says she intentionally refrained from looking at earlier translations of Don Quixote, wanting nothing to interfere with her own sense of the novel’s voice, Davis did consult other versions of Flaubert’s novel while she was in the process of revising her own translation. She says she felt she and the earlier translators were “sitting in the room together wrestling with the same problems,” and she would have liked to collaborate with them to achieve “the final, definitive, wonderful translation.” A podcast of the program is available on the NPR website, as is a somewhat abridged print version.

Translation and Intimacy

After the Robert Walser event on Christmas Day, I wound up having a conversation with poet Dara Wier about translating and reading. People are always talking about how translating is a form of reading, and I suppose that’s true, but its actual relationship to reading is more complicated than the simple assertion of the relationship implies. Everyone reads a bit differently than everyone else. We all have our own private histories and associations and reading and listening backgrounds, so certain words (all words?) will resonate differently for each of us than they do for other people. In any case, any given word can have a range of meanings, and usually when you translate you are selecting one (or if you’re lucky, two) and excluding all the others. This means that any given translation provides a permanent record of the way the translator read the original text. “But reading is such a private thing,” Dara said, “and you’re letting everyone see you doing it.” Which raises the question: Are translators exhibitionists, constantly reading, and constantly showing off the fact that we’ve been reading and what we saw? It’s certainly the case that reading a translation puts you at the mercy of the translator’s subjectivity. As a translator, I’ll pretend to be showing you the text as objectively as I can—and in fact that’s just what I’m trying to do—but nonetheless you have no choice but to read as I read the original when you read my translation. How you read the translation itself, however, is entirely up to you.

Christmas Rebus

The world is full of things that bear some resemblance to translation between languages while being different in certain ways. The question recently came up at the PEN American Center of whether someone who has translated (into English) poetry composed originally in American Sign Language should be eligible to apply for a PEN Translation Fund grant. I argued that he should be, a position influenced by my experience this past semester of working with a student whose participation in my class (a translation workshop, no less) was facilitated by a pair of ASL signers who translated back and forth everything that was said. Signers always work in pairs because the work is so demanding that they must spell each other every 20 minutes, much like simultaneous interpreters at the United Nations. At one point I had asked a student to read aloud a long list of synonyms from the thesaurus, and I noticed that the signer seemed to be having no trouble keeping up. "Really," I asked, "you can sign all those different synonyms?" "You have no idea," she replied, "I'm just getting started." Sign language does not have written characters, but it is definitely a language, and so I don't see why a translation from ASL into written English shouldn't count as a translation. Sure, ASL is a very different sort of linguistic system, but I think the similarities outweigh the differences. On the other hand, a translation into ASL would not be eligible for a PEN grant, because the grants are for translation into written English as opposed to a visual/physical medium. There must be people who translate between ASL and the sign languages associated with other spoken and written languages, but I don't know anything about that. Yet. But I have recently been re-introduced to a very different sort of visual translation - the rebus, which I had not encountered since childhood - by my friend Mike Gonnella, who among other things is the owner (and baker) of Tivoli Bread and Baking in Tivoli, New York. He also happens to be an accomplished designer of rebi rebuses, puzzles that represent words pictorially, using images whose names homophonically resemble the words. A successful rebus is not only accurate but visually interesting. If you haven't had the opportunity to try your hand at solving a rebus recently, here's your chance. I am appending below a series of rebuses Mikee composed this winter based on the lines of the song The Twelve Days of Christmas. He drew one a day on the chalkboard hanging in the bakery. If I presented them sequentially, that would make things too easy, so instead you'll find them in random order below. But to help you get started, I'll point out that the first rebus is based on the line "Five gold rings." Click on any image to see it larger. Happy puzzling!

P.S. I should point out that one of the rebuses contains a Tivoli insider joke: it presupposes knowledge of this local bar.

Robert Walser Died on Christmas Day

In 1956, the great Swiss author Robert Walser went out for a walk in the snow after eating Christmas lunch at the sanatorium in Herisau where he had been a resident patient for 23 years. He apparently suffered a fatal heart attack while ascending a hill, and he was found there some time later by two children out walking their dog. I won't reproduce the photograph of his body lying in the snow, since I wish that distressingly ubiquitous image had never been made public. Every time I look at it, I feel I am participating in a shameful violation of privacy, of the right to be dead unscrutinized, unobserved. But I will share an image created by the great artist and Walser-lover Maira Kalman which beautifully captures the sad mystery of the death in that snow-covered landscape, the sense that the image of the great writer in death conceals more than we can ever know.

I would also like to invite you to participate in a celebration of Walser's life and work on the anniversary of his death, an event that will be held in various locations in and around Amherst and Hadley, Massachussets on Christmas day and will include readings by various hands and, yes, a walk in the snow.

P.S. We got written up in the local paper!

Guest-blogging at Words Without Borders

Back in September, the foreign-literature-and-translation website Words Without Borders invited me to write a guest blog for their "Dispatches" column about teaching in the MFA Program in Creative Writing and Literary Translation at Queens College, which is part of the City University of New York system. I had just arrived at Queens and was filled with excitement about their program - one of only two in the country where students can apply to study literary translation within the context of an MFA in creative writing program. Not surprisingly, I had a wonderful semester teaching there, and you can read all about how proud I am of my students and why in the follow-up guest blog that just went live this morning. A big thank-you to Words Without Borders for its support of the art and teaching of literary translation!

Two Three More "Best-of-2010" Listings

I was so excited to see that John Ashbery had selected my translation of Robert Walser's Microscripts as one of his top picks of 2010 in the Times Literary Supplement that it didn't even occur to me that any further mention of the book might have been included in the TLS's Dec. 1 print edition - it turns out the on-line version I saw contains only some of the content from the print edition. And in fact Microscripts was selected by a second writer as well, the extraordinary Paul Griffiths, who recently composed, oulipo-style, an entire novel from the point of view of Ophelia using only the 481-word vocabulary Shakespeare allots her in Hamlet. Griffiths praises Walser's "sense of the strange, moving beneath a wry, ingenuous surface."

Meanwhile Jenny Erpenbeck's Visitation showed up on the Seminary Co-op Bookstores' (Chicago) Best-of-2010 list, where a staff member writes, "In this dense little translation, we move through time but we never move in space. We are spectators to the grand passage of Germany's twentieth century in this one spot: a wood that lines the shore of a small lake. The physicality of experience weighs on Erpenbeck's words, tying human action to land, to rooms, to objects and to views. With no explanation of outside forces or political changes, "history" becomes nothing more than the vicissitudes of productivity and ruin."

I'm so grateful for all the attention these two books have been receiving.

Breaking news on Dec. 21: Microscripts has just made one more "best-of" list, courtesy of The Devil's Accountant.

2010 Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize Goes to Breon Mitchell

Last week the Modern Language Association announced that this year's Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for an Outstanding Translation of a Literary Work would go to Breon Mitchell for his retranslation of Nobel laureate Günter Grass's masterpiece The Tin Drum. This hefty tome (nearly 600 pages of quite dense prose) includes a Translator's Afterword in which Breon discusses particular problems he faced in reworking the earlier translation by Ralph Manheim. Günter Grass is famous among translators for his revolutionary practice of convening an Übersetzertreffen or "translators' summit" whenever he has a new book out. He invites all the translators working on the book to come spend several days discussing the book's most difficult passages with each other and with him. If only all authors did this! But think of the expense - it's probably really true that only an international bestseller like Grass could pull off such a utopian project. Still, it's heartening to see an author so aware of and interested in the translation of his books.
An amusing story about Grass and his translators used to circulate at the Europäisches Übersetzer-Kollegium (which deserves its own blog entry), a translator's colony in Germany near the Dutch border where I spent a lot of time in the early 1990s. At one of the early translators' summits that was held there, translators reported having difficulty with Grass's description of a man mounting a bicycle in an idiosyncratic way. "Not possible," the translators protested. "But I see it clearly in my mind's eye," Grass reportedly responded, "that's how he gets on the bicycle." Whereupon the translators wheeled a bike in from the courtyard (I did say this was near Holland) and challenged the master to show them how it was done. And, yes, the great Günter Grass fell on his tuchus, not once but twice, after which - or so the story goes - he gave his translators carte blanche to alter the passage as they saw fit.
Congratulations, Breon!

Banff International Literary Translation Centre Now Accepting Applications

Having spent three weeks on the faculty of the Banff International Literary Translation Centre in June 2009, I can report that Banff is one of the most beautiful spots on earth. Nestled in the heart of the Canadian Rockies, surrounded by dazzling snow-capped peaks, mountain meadows, eerily blue lakes, glaciers and strange totem-pole-shaped rock formations called hoodoos, it offers spectacular hiking possibilities. And the Banff Centre, situated on a hillside just above town, is an ideal place to spend a residency working on one's music, dance, painting or writing. As of 2003, the Centre has welcomed literary translators as well.
Every June, the Banff International Literary Translation Center invites 15 translators to participate in a three-week residency program that gives them time to work on their projects-in-progress while also participating in regular seminar meetings with the other residents to discuss their work. Several experienced translators serve as "advisors" each year and are available to read and critique work or consult in other ways, as are the program's co-directors, Katherine Silver and Hugh Hazelton. In some cases the Centre is even able to invite some of the authors being translated by current participants to come spend a week at the Centre and meet with their translators. In 2011, star poet and translator Anne Carson will be in residence for the final week of the program. Financial aid to cover the entire cost of the program is available for all accepted participants. Detailed program and application information is available on the Banff Centre website. The deadline for the June 2011 session is Feb. 15, 2011.

Christian Hawkey's Beating Heart

Christian Hawkey has written an extraordinary book about Georg Trakl, the great German Expressionist poet: Ventrakl, recently published by Ugly Duckling Presse. All the time Hawkey was working on this project, all I ever heard him say about it was that he had been trying his hand at translating some Trakl poems, and so I was in no way prepared for the book itself when it arrived. Yes, it does contain translations of Trakl's work, but far more than this it is a compilation of original poems (many of them composed using experimental translation techniques), open letters and short essays resembling prose poems, and each of these documents can be read as a declaration of ambivalent but nonetheless deeply heartfelt love for this most talented and troubled of German poets. Young Trakl, trained as a pharmacist, served in the First World War and found himself left singlehandedly in charge - without benefit of drugs or any other medical aid - of a tent filled with 90 wounded soldiers, many of them dying and some in such pain that they shot themselves to end it. The experience broke him - though it seems he was troubled even before this; his early history included incest, for one thing, and some of the most touching passages in Hawkey's book are devoted to Trakl's youngest sister, Greta, Gretl, Margarethe, who like her brother struggled with addiction and took her own life several years after her brother's suicide by opium at age 27.

In Hawkey's short essay on a photograph of Trakl as a toddler, we learn that 19th century mothers tried to cheat death of the sons who were said to die more often than daughters by dressing all their infants as girls, producing an early childhood that remained ungendered until the "breeching" of boys at the age of 4 or 5. In another, this time addressing a photograph that shows the poet as a grown man, Hawkey notes a sense "that your [i.e. Trakl's] feet are not quite touching the floor." The essays on photographs scattered throughout the volume are some of my favorite parts of the book - they are at once fanciful and informative and display both a depth of research and the ever-changing tactics Hawkey tries out as he approaches his subject, alternating between apparently objective description, questioning, speculation and plea. These ekphrastic pieces are interspersed with Hawkey's readings of particular poems and lines by Trakl - notably the opening of "Grodek," one of Trakl's best-known poems ("In the evening the autumn woods resound / With deadly weapons") - which Hawkey explicates as standing in for the experience of the moment when the entire pastoral tradition of the nineteenth century was blown apart by the mechanized/dehumanized violence of World War I. We tend to think of Trakl as the sort of Nature-drunk Expressionist whose work shows him to be heir to the late-19th-century French symbolists Rimbaud and Baudelaire, and he was that; but his poems also bear witness, in highly abstract form, to the anguish of the generation that saw modernity roll into the Black Forest on tank tracks. Hawkey shares bits of this background with us throughout the book, so that by the time he presents his own translation of "Grodek" as an epilogue, he has convinced us of the context in which the poem is asking to be read.

Hawkey's main engagement with Trakl, though, comes in the form of the poems in many different forms scattered throughout the volume. These tend to be much more Hawkey than Trakl. "I am unfolding a moth into a fluttering mouth," begins one poem entitled "You Bent My Megahertz"; another asserts: "Voles hump under the Holland Tunnel; wonder follows / A white hand down blue holes." Hawkey has borrowed from Trakl, most obviously, the use of color to define a field containing otherwise dissociated objects, and less obviously the sense of an overarching design knitting together weirdly assembled objects in a list - the strategy that always makes Trakl's nature poems seem so odd, as there are invariably items on his lists whose inclusion renders an entire scene uncanny, such that we sense the inner jangledness of the point of view assembling these tableaux. Hawkey's own work has always been about using language to startle the mind out of its habitual patterns of perception, and in this sense, Trakl is his strategic ally. And in fact it becomes apparent over the course of the book, with its many poems that are so clearly Hawkey's own while also being curiously Trakl-inflected, how deeply Hawkey's work has perhaps always been indebted to that of the older poet. Trakl's infatuated symbolism, in which desire always appears to quiver about blue trees and black lakes and red skies, jolts in startling ways oddly akin to the visual inventiveness of Hawkey's work.

At the same time, the engagement with Trakl also forces the younger/older poet into territory not previously charted in his work. The last thing anyone would think to call Christian Hawkey is a confessional poet; he generally appears in his poems wearing not so much a mask as a full-body wetsuit. In Ventrakl, however, he shows a new side of himself as a poet, because it soon becomes clear that his study of Trakl is profoundly, passionately, even tormentedly personal. In passage after passage he speaks to Trakl directly, in the second person, in what eventually starts to seem a desperate effort to connect with this poet who lived a century ago and died when he was far younger than Hawkey is now. Beyond all notion of tribute and homage, I sense a hidden undercurrent of anxiety trembling in the interstices of this book: What does it mean, Hawkey appears to be asking between the lines of every page, to discover oneself to be the kindred spirit of a man whose life appears to have been bracketed by eternally insatiable hungers, violence and despair? Trakl is an odd bedfellow indeed. And yet his life and work have exerted a hypnotic fascination on so many writers. Hawkey's memorable book shows us why.

Two Translation Awards from the Academy of American Poets

The New York-based Academy of American Poets - which provides one-stop-shopping for everything poetry: readings, festivals, prizes as well as on-line poems, essays and interviews via their website - has just announced two translation prizes for 2011:

The Raiziss/de Palchi Fellowship for the translation of modern Italian poetry is awarded every other year to an American translator for a work-in-progress. It comes with an award of $25,000 and a six-week residency at the American Academy in Rome. This year's judges will be Thomas Harrison, Jane Tylus and Paolo Valesio.

The Harold Morton Landon Translation Award, given for a book of translated poetry published during the previous year, comes with a $1000 award. This year's judge will be David Hinton.

Postmark deadline for both awards is Jan. 31, 2011.

If you're competing this year, good luck!

Oh, and I'll leave you with a fun fact about the Academy of American Poets: Their website was originally designed by my friend Bruno.

Translation and Memory

The other night I was talking with a translator friend, Bill Martin, about the similarities between translating and groping for submerged memories. The conversation went something like this: Bill started telling me about the experience of translating the transcript of an RAF terrorism case aloud for a filmmaker wanting to get a quick overview of its contents, and he said that any time the words weren't coming quickly enough, he found himself physically acting out whatever gesture was being described. I do this too when I'm translating (or writing, for that matter) - it's as if the muscle memory you call on when you perform the physical gesture can help summon up the words. I told Bill this reminded me of the moment when you've just woken up from a dream you can't quite remember but feel as though you're on the verge of remembering: you don't know what happened in it, but the shape of the feeling its mood created is somehow there as a sort of abstract solid, something vaguely physical. This in turn reminded him of the way long-submerged memories sometimes make their way back to the surface, as he had experienced not long before when he ran into someone who remembered having met him at a dinner party in Paris a dozen years before. Bill couldn't remember the evening in question, but then the man e-mailed him a photograph taken at that long-ago party, and even though the man himself wasn't in the photo (he was holding the camera), looking at the picture brought back Bill's memory of the evening and the stories of the other people who had been present at the dinner. He described this "coming back" of the lost memories as feeling like a physical return. And I, too, had experienced something similar just the night before when I met a man from Minneapolis - a town I visited many times in early childhood when my family was living in Rochester, MN. Minneapolis exists in my memory primarily in the form of a daycare center containing an indoor slide shaped like an enormous gray or light blue elephant housed in a large department store called Dayton's (you climbed up stairs set into its back, and the slide was in its trunk). Well, if you went to Dayton's, this man now said to me, you must also have seen the glass box of monkey musicians in the toy department - Dayton's was famous for them. And as he described them, the memory of these mechanical musicians dressed in little red suits began coming back to me. I remember the feeling of looking up at them in their box and watching them perform, and am utterly convinced that I did see them as a child, though I cannot quite remember what they looked like. Composing this sentence, I find myself making the hand gesture that accompanies this memory, clapping my two fists together with their imaginary cymbals.

P.S. Bill just reminded me that the link between the two parts of our conversation was that we were talking about the search for the right word in the translation process in terms of embodiment. This is something I've been thinking about a lot lately.

(Photograph of Bill and me © Beowulf Sheehan but cropped by me)

Two New Reviews of Visitation

I was delighted to read Phillip Witte's thoughtfully detailed review of Jenny Erpenbeck's novel on Three Percent this week; it's one of those reviews that really show the reviewer took the time to get inside the book and process his thoughts about it before sitting down to write. Witte even cites the recent interview with Jenny in Vogue. And then, just as I was about to blog it, a second new review came in, done by Ron Slate on his blog On the Seawall. Slate, who also goes into a wonderful amount of detail, quotes quite a lot from the novel, so if you're interested in a preview, this is a good place to get one.

Translationista Under Construction Today

Translationista is being translated today into an improved Blogger format to provide for better searchability and access to older posts. So if you happen to stop by and find things looking strange, it just means that you are witnessing a transitional moment in the history of this blog - please come back later!

Translationista Turns One (Month)

One month ago today I decided to start blogging about literary translation and in the process have discovered how much I love writing about it. I can't stop. And I'm grateful that readers have been tuning in: the blog has had over 2100 visits thus far. So until further notice, I plan to keep chattering away about translation problems, translation triumphs, translation prizes and more. Right now I have a backlog of topics I want to write about, so please do keep checking back for updates. Some technical updates are in the works as well. My wonderful web guru Timothy Schneider, who recently rewired all the coding on my professional website, is working on creating a better archive for Translationista so that it won't be so difficult to locate older posts, and we're also thinking of relocating the blog to www.translationista.org - I'll keep you posted. Also, since it's been brought to my attention that people have been tweeting some of my blog entries (thank you!), I've decided to celebrate this blog-birthday by inaugurating the Twitter handle "uebersetzbar," which I will use to slingshot blog posts into the ether. Übersetzbar (ü is a German spelling convention for "ue") means "translatable," and I've picked it as my handle as an affirmation of my belief that there are no works of literature that are not translatable; there are only works whose translator has not yet been born. Oh, and if you're wondering why the word übersetzbar shares an ending with wunderbar, which everyone knows translates as "wonderful," it's because wunderbar actually means not "full of wonder" but "wonderable," i.e. such that one might well marvel at it. There is so much about translation that is wonderable, and I hope you will find it übersetzbar as well in this little blog. I thank you for reading me.

(And a big thank-you to Polly Jones for the use of her cupcake painting.)

Translation Challenge of the Day: Eiweiß

It's the strangest thing, but it turns out that authors like to play with language. And more often than not this playfulness translates directly into translator migraines. Today I'm working on a fun little food-themed essay-story by Yoko Tawada entitled "Okonomiyaki," and she leads off with an exchange about protein - which in German is most commonly referred to as Eiweiß or "egg white." There's a historical explanation for this: albumin from egg whites (which themselves are also called albumen - both from "albus," the Latin word for "white") was among the first proteins discovered back in the 18th century. In the Tawada piece, she describes an exchange in which her narrator informs a German interlocutor that, gram for gram, tofu contains more protein than chicken. That's impossible, he responds: Soybeans don't lay eggs. Where's the Eiweiß supposed to come from?
So the question for me is: Where's the humor supposed to come from? Explaining a joke is a surefire way to kill it, but without explanation this joke would be stillborn anyhow. The easiest way around the problem would be to add an explanatory footnote, but no one likes footnotes in translations, particularly when the thing being footnoted is the punch-line of a joke. My strategy in cases like this is generally to smuggle into the translation just as much additional information as is needed to allow the reader to follow; ideally, the interpolation will be seamless, elegant and unobtrusive. In this particular case, I am considering two different lines of approach, one that is more historical, and one that is more linguistic. The latter is more obviously justified here, since other forms of linguistic playfulness show up elsewhere in the essay. For example, there's a bit where Tawada describes a "Kammmuschel" (queen scallop) in such a way that it soon becomes clear she's describing the word itself: it "has two pillars and three ms in its shell." In my version, that bit now reads: "The scallop has two pillars in the middle of its shell." It doesn't really matter that my scallop loses the "queen" in its name - it's not a queen in German anyhow, it's a comb - since the only reason Tawada chose that particular form of scallop was the unpronounceable three ms in the middle of its name. It's only fairly recently that one finds triple consonants in German words: only since the national spelling reform of 1996 (which served primarily to make the written language uglier, if you ask me). Before this, whenever the creation of compound nouns produced triplets, one would always be pleasantly elided, so that e.g. the word "bedsheet" (Bett + Tuch) would be written Bettuch and not - as it is now - Betttuch, which to me looks like something that belongs in a cemetery. Because these triple consonants are relatively new in German, you really notice them when they turn up, which is why I think Tawada was inspired to riff on the structure of this word. But I digress. Here are my two just-now-brainstormed options for handling the Eiweiß passage:

A.
Human life is a coming and going of proteins. Once I remarked to an acquaintance in Frankfurt that 100 grams of tofu contain more protein than 100 grams of chicken.

He shook his head in denial and said: That’s impossible. Soybeans don’t lay eggs. The most important proteins are albumins. Albumins come from albumen, the white of the egg. Where is this albumin supposed to come from?


B.
Human life is a coming and going of proteins. Once I remarked to an acquaintance in Frankfurt that 100 grams of tofu contain more protein than 100 grams of chicken.

Since Germans use the word Eiweiß (egg white) to mean "protein," he shook his head in denial and said: That’s impossible. Soybeans don’t lay eggs. Where is the egg white supposed to come from?

I'm leaning toward the second option. What do you think?

Reading at Unnameable Books in Brooklyn, Thursday Dec. 9

Again and again I find myself crossing the East River to visit that mecca of literature that is Brooklyn. It does seem that this is now the borough with the highest concentration of writers, particularly younger writers, and thus also of readings. One apparently also finds independent bookstores galore on NYC's rive gauche. One of them is called Unnameable Books, and I'll be reading there tomorrow night at 7:30 p.m. along with Idra Novey, a talented young translator from the Spanish and Portuguese. If you're in the neighborhood (Prospect Heights, to be precise), please stop by to hear us! The address is 600 Vanderbilt Ave., between Prospect and St. Marks.

The FT Picks Visitation

After all the kind reviews my translation of Jenny Erpenbeck's Visitation received in England this fall, I am not so surprised (but nonetheless thrilled) to see it appear in the Financial Times's end-of-year fiction round-up. FT critic Ángel Gurría-Quintana calls the book a "minimalist masterpiece." Also delightful is the fact that the FT's "best-of" lists include an entire column of books in translation. Maureen Freely's translation of The Museum of Innocence by Orhan Pamuk also made the list, as did To the End of the Land by David Grossman, translated by Jessica Cohen.

Paris: A Translator’s-Eye View

The moment I arrived at Charles de Gaulle yesterday afternoon, I heard a Frenchman’s iPhone ringing with the sound effect of a vintage American telephone—something no French landline ever sounded like. Shortly afterward, my Algerian cab driver was explaining to me why Arabic was superior as a language to French or English: It contains six consonants that are spoken in the throat rather than the mouth (he performed each of them for me, pointing to his beard), and one that even involves the solar plexus. Arabic, said he, is a language you speak with your entire body; and so using these other languages—he also has some German and Italian—always makes him feel he isn’t truly speaking. I like that way of looking at language, tracing its path through the body, the shape it makes. This morning I visited the Théâtre La Bruyère to hear the staged reading of a play by Canadian dramatist Morris Panych that my friend Blandine Pélissier had translated into French. This reading of La fille dans le bocal à poisson rouge—featuring five excellent French actors including Blandine herself—turned out to be a sort of audition. The play’s would-be director, Jean Bouchaud, had arranged this reading at the theater in the hope of convincing La Bruyère’s management to engage the show for a run. This was the sixth staged reading of this play at La Bruyère, a case of apparently quite exceptional indecisiveness. This particular play has been falling through the cracks between the large, publicly subsidized Parisian theaters like the Comédie-Française and the smaller independent ones. The former, Blandine explained, favor overtly intellectual fare (like the comedy by Nikolai Gogol I saw at the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier this evening), while the smaller theaters depend on audience-luring comedies more guffaw-inducing than Panych’s play—though the small audience at the staged reading was giggling throughout. In short, French theater translators like Blandine find themselves doing large amounts of work on spec, translating plays in the hope of finding theaters willing to put them on (and retroactively pay for the translations). This isn’t easy, given the resources that must be invested to make a theatrical production possible, even for a translator of Blandine’s standing—she just did a new translation of Romeo and Juliet for the Théâtre Jean-Arp. Translating Panych’s play itself was not without its difficulties, particularly with regards to the slang Panych puts in his characters’ mouths. The term “fish,” for example, is apparently used in Canada for a freshly incarcerated convict, and so when the term came up in the play, Blandine had the character explain instead “je suis plongé,” since “to dive for something” in French is a way to speak of serving time. Apropos: why do the French think that goldfish are red? Well, I guess they’re almost as red as most American redheads or my red mackerel tabby. By the way, both the posters and the program for Gogol’s Le mariage prominently feature the name of the translator, André Markowitz, which I was very glad to see. The production was directed by Lilo Baur, who collaborates with Peter Brook as well as being a founding member of the excellent company Théâtre de Complicité—based, of all places, in London. I found the vehement realism of the stage sets a bit too much, but the farcical acting and choreography were superb, particularly in a long slow-motion rebuffing-of-the-suitors sequence that reminded me of a motif from Théâtre de Complicité's masterwork Mnemonic.

Thank you John Ashbery

It's always exciting and gratifying to hear that a writer you revere likes your work, or, in this case Robert Walser's work. The ever astonishing John Ashbery has just selected Walser's Microscripts as one of his favorite books of 2010, as reported in the Times Literary Supplement. I'm blushing. I'm also very honored to be mentioned along with Margaret Jull Costa, a truly extraordinary translator whose translation of The City and the Mountains by Eça de Queirós was one of my own favorites this year.

And in late-breaking news, I just learned that Ruth Franklin also included Microscripts in her end-of-year roundup in The New Republic. The Walser love is flowing!