2011 Best Translated Book Awards Announced

The fourth annual Best Translated Book Awards were announced tonight in a ceremony held at the Bowery Poetry Club as part of the PEN World Voices festival, and the winners are...

In fiction,The True Deceiver by Swedish-Finnish author Tove Jansson, translated by Thomas Teal. I've never read anything by Jansson, but I'm looking forward to it. The description of the book on the New York Review Books website makes it sound fanciful but also dark, and Ursula K. Leguin said it was the "most beautiful and satisfying novel" she read all year.

In poetry, the prize went to The Book of Things by Aleš Šteger, translated from the Slovenian by poet Brian Henry, editor of the journal of international poetry Verse. The publisher of Šteger's book is BOA Editions, which is based in Rochester, NY and has been in operation as an independent press since 1976.

The author and translator of each book receive cash awards of $5000 provided by Amazon.com. The Best Translated Book Award is sponsored by Three Percent at the University of Rochester.

What I Found in Translation at the Guggenheim

I really wish I hadn't been too busy to write up this blog entry sooner, because the Guggenheim's current show "Found in Translation" is a truly challenging and compelling collection of works, and now you have only another two days to go see it. If you're in the NYC area and can squeeze in a visit, do. Curated by Nat Trotman, the show presents works that critically engage the notion of translation on a number of thematic levels. Video works predominate. Here are a few of my favorites.
• "Once Upon a Time" by Steve McQueen (2002) presents images borrowed from the "Golden Record" sent into space in 1977 aboard the Voyager 1 & 2 spacecraft. The soundtrack spliced together out of samples of glossolalia (babble spoken in a trance-like state of religious fervor) underscores the incomprehensibility-out-of-context of these cultural and scientific artifacts of life on Earth (images depicting everything from the Great Wall of China to the fertilization of an egg cell).
• Patty Chang, "The Product Love" (2009) - This one is so surprising! In the first part of this video, Chang has three different translators spontaneously translating for the camera an essay Walter Benjamin wrote in 1928 about Chinese silent film star Anna May Wong; in the second, we see two actors being made up meticulously to play Benjamin and Wong in a sex scene that we then watch them film. Fascinating and strange. The makeup scenes are unexpectedly riveting. (The competing Benjamin translations produce a sort of translation slam, much as you can experience live at the Bowery Poetry Club tonight, by the way.)
• Brendan Fernandes, "Foe" (2008). I saw this stunning video piece at the EFA Project Space last year and was delighted to see it again. Fernandes, who was born in Nairobi to Goan parents but raised in Toronto, films himself being guided by a speech coach (offscreen) in speaking with African, Indian and Canadian accents as he reads from J.M. Coetzee's novel Foe, whose main character is the Friday of Robinson Crusoe fame. We hear Fernandes practicing over and over the phrases "They cut out his tongue" and "That is why he does not speak" as the camera focusses on his teeth and lips. Spooky.
• "Cathay" by Lisa Oppenheim (2010). This is the most overtly beautiful work in the show. Oppenheim uses a pair of syncronized projectors to show filmic "slides" of a poem by Li Bai about moonlight in plum trees that Ezra Pound adapted in his 1915 volume Cathay. Each word or phrase is accompanied by an iconic image that correlates with it either directly or indirectly (images all shot in Chinatown); e.g. the image for "snow falls" is a snowglobe; and that for "appears" is a pile of stirring crabs. As the poem and its images are repeated over and over, Oppenheim gradually replaces the words of Pound's version with those of a contemporary translation of the Li Bai poem, and adjusts the images accordingly. Eventually the entire poem has been transformed.
• The show's most disjunctive work is "Godville" by Omer Fast, who radically edited taped interviews with actors who impersonate the original residents of Colonial Williamsburg for the benefit of tourists. This jarring collage of voice and image (using snippets often only a single word long) makes the speakers appear to comment on social issues while their images morph before our eyes, such that e.g. the one woman Fast interviews appears to oscillate between wearing gloves and holding them in her lap.
Some of the works in the show treat overtly political themes more directly (I am thinking of the pieces by Paul Chan, Carlos Motta and Sharon Hayes), but I was most fascinated by the ones that used the theme of translation to conflate language and image with questions of personal identity. The results are often poetic in the best sense.
The show runs through May 1, and the associated Guggenheim Forum feature Word for Word (which I blogged about two weeks ago) should remain accessible online for the foreseeable future.

An Abecedarian

Some of you probably already knew this long before I did, but an abecedarian (sometimes also called an abecedary) is a poem or sequence of poems structured around the letters of the alphabet. In the original sense of the term, words beginning with particular letters would be used to organize individual lines or stanzas. More recently, it's been more common to see this alphabetical strategy applied to entire cycles of poems, with each individual poem governed by one letter, as was the case with Jeffrey Yang's debut, An Aquarium, which won the PEN/Osterweil Award for Poetry in 2009. Another example is Harryette Mullen's Sleeping with the Dictionary.

An abedearian particularly close to my heart is German poet Uljana Wolf's Falsche Freunde, which in an earlier incarnation was known as DICHTionary, an interlingual pun based on Dichtung, the German word for "poetry." Each of the alphabetically inspired prose poems in Wolf's collection is based on words that exist in some form (homonymic, homophonic and/or homographic) in both German and English. Take for example the German word Mist, which translates as "manure." Or Igel, which is pronounced "eagle" and means "hedgehog." In her poems, the words flip back and forth between their English and German meanings, always on the cusp of signifying both at once. This approach results in a wonderfully playful book that also tells a hidden tale: there's a love story secreted between the lines of these poems, which - although written in prose - often slip into an iambic cadence. I liked the book so much that I translated it, even though much of the book's original bilinguality becomes invisible in English, replaced by wordplay of other sorts.
Anyhow, the main point of this blog entry is to announce that the resulting English-language book is about to be published by the wonderfully adventurous Ugly Duckling Presse of Brooklyn, NY. And since there's no point launching a book without a launch party, we're throwing one. If you are reading this, you are most cordially invited to join us. The party will be held on Thursday, April 21, 8:00 p.m., at 380 Broadway, 2M. Hope to see you there!

P.S. The book just got the loveliest write-up on the New Directions Tumblr.

Translation at the PEN World Voices Festival

The PEN World Voices Festival was co-founded by a translator (Esther Allen, then Chair of the PEN Translation Committee, in 2005), and since then, literary translation has always been an essential element of this festival devoted to international writing. The 2011 Festival will be held from April 25 through May 1 in New York City and features dozens of writers from all over the world. Many of the festival events are free and open to the public, so do check out the program and get ready to hear some local celebrities share the stage with new discoveries.

One perennial event of the Festival is the celebrated Translation Slam held at the Bowery Poetry Club; this year's slam will be held at 7:00 p.m. on Friday, April 29. I participated in the first slam, held in 2008, translating a poem by Michael Krüger. At the translation slam, two translators offer competing translations of a single poem (in the presence of the foreign-language poet); typically, hilarity and heated audience discussion ensue. Good times.

This year I'm going to be moderating a discussion at 3:00 p.m. on Sunday, May 1 with a lawyer specializing in intellectual property (think copyright and contracts), who will enlighten us as to the legal status of the translation process and translated texts in this country. We will be joined by two international writer-translators who will fill us in on the situation of translators in Israel, Spain and the Czech Republic, by way of comparison. This event would make a great double-header with one that immediately proceeds it (in a different location, but there's half an hour to travel from one to the next): a conversation between illustrious German poet-translator Joachim Sartorius and Jonathan Galassi about Leopardi in particular and the role of poets as translators in general. This event will be moderated by poet Rosanna Warren.

This year's festival also includes a panel about the translation of American literature into other languages and a so-called Global Book Swap, in which panelists discuss the works of translated literature that have meant the most to them for their own writing. Both events will be held April 29 at Scandanavia House, at 12:00 p.m. and 2:00 p.m.

Speaking of double-headers, the Translation Slam on April 29 will be immediately followed, at 8:45 p.m., by the presentation of the 2011 Best Translated Book Awards sponsored by Three Percent. I can't help being especially curious about the outcome this year since I'm one of the finalists. Wish me luck!

Oh, and please note that the printed program for the festival does not contain the final iteration of the festival schedule; several events have shifted places, times and participants, so be sure to check the Festival website to confirm the time and place of events you'd like to attend.

MLA Embraces Translation as Scholarship

Here's some exciting just-out news from the Modern Language Association (MLA), the main professional organization for North American college and university teachers of language and literature. The MLA has just adopted a new document entitled "Evaluating Translations as Scholarship: Guidelines for Peer Review." Those of you who have been following the acceptance and non-acceptance of translators in the academy over the past few decades will understand what a revolutionary step this is. It wasn't so long ago that tenure-track academics were routinely publishing their translations under pseudonyms out of fear that their interest in work of this sort might count as a strike against them in their tenure evaluations. But now the MLA's new guidelines, co-authored by 2009 MLA President Catherine Porter and UCLA Professor Michael Henry Heim, translators both, not only enunciate a very sound rationale for evaluating translation work as scholarship but also offer practical guidelines for both the candidate under review and her/his evaluators. "Every translation is an interpretation," the document eloquently states; "each one begins with a critical reading, then expands and ultimately embodies that reading." The guidelines for reviewers draw attention to the different sorts of scenarios and objectives that might govern a specific translation project. Poems for a reading edition might be translated to preserve characteristic features of the source text ("rhyme, assonance, meter, imagery, and so on"), while a bilingual edition for language-learners might emphasize the semantic content at the expense of the poem's poetic devices. Translators of lengthy scholarly works, on the other hand, are sometimes asked by publishers to decrease the total word count, requiring the addition of "bridging material and clarifying information" as well as judiciously applied cuts. Most importantly, the MLA statement proposes that a translation in the academic context be understood as a contribution both to the scholarly conversation in a field and to the cultural and intellectual life of a a community.

Guggenheim Forum on Translation

In conjunction with its current show Found in Translation (which will be getting its own blog entry here soon), the Guggenheim museum is currently hosting an online discussion of translation entitled "Word for Word" as its current Guggenheim forum. Robert Lane Greene, author of You Are What You Speak, is moderating a panel of translation scholars including N. Katherine Hayles, Anthony Pym and Biljana Scott. The choice of panelists shows an interest not so much in the literary side of translation as in its communicative function in the real world of diplomacy and the media, but the central question being explored, "How does translation find its role as an essential tool in a globalized world?" will resonate to many with echoes e.g. of the presidential theme of the 2009 Modern Language Association Conference, "The Tasks of Translation in the Global Context." And in fact the sorts of examples cited by Greene in his opening remarks (e.g. the problematic political consequences of the fact that the etymological root "cross" in the word "crusade" appears more emphatically when this word is translated into other languages) are very much of interest and concern to literary translators as well. The conversations on "Word for Word" will be continuing all this week, with a special live chat taking place on Thursday, April 14, at 2:00 p.m. EDT. This chat will feature Robert Lane Greene with Anthony Pym, who is both a scholar of translation history and theory and actively involved in the training of translators at the Monterey Institute of International Studies. Should be interesting, so check it out on the Guggenheim website.

Independent Foreign Fiction Prize 2011

The Independent Foreign Fiction Prize was established in 1990 by the London newspaper The Independent to draw attention to contemporary international fiction in the U.K. After a seven-year hiatus between 1995 and 2002, the prize was revived by the literature-promoting charity Booktrust. Past recipients include many notables of world literature, among them Orhan Pamuk, Milan Kundera, José Saramago and W.G. Sebald, so it is a particular honor to be included on this year's just-announced shortlist as the translator of Jenny Erpenbeck's Visitation. Jenny's book also happens to be shortlisted for the Best Translated Book Award and longlisted for the Indie Bookseller's Choice Award; in other words, her wonderful novel is having quite the spring.

Here's the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize shortlist in full:

•Santiago Roncagliolo, Red April, translated by Edith Grossman (Atlantic Books), Spanish;
•Marcelo Figueras, Kamchatka, translated by Frank Wynne (Atlantic Books), Spanish;
•Alberto Berrera Tyszka, The Sickness, translated by Margaret Jull Costa (Maclehose Press), Spanish;
•Jenny Erpenbeck, Visitation, translated by Susan Bernofsky (Portobello Books), German;
•Orhan Pamuk, The Museum of Innocence, translated by Maureen Freely (Faber), Turkish;
•Per Petterson, I Curse the River of Time, translated by Charlotte Barslund with Per Petterson (Harvill Secker), Norwegian.

Such an incredible list. I'm very proud to be on it.

Is Greek Poetry All Greek to You?

There's been a lot of talk lately about early 20th century Greek poetry, what with the buzz surrounding the new translations of C. P. Cavafy's Unfinished Poems published this winter by author and cultural critic Daniel Mendelsohn. So much buzz, in fact, that one might easily forget for a moment that there have been a large number of other fascinating poets writing in Greek in the nearly 80 years since Cavafy's death in 1933. This week the Bridge Series will be introducing us to a number of these poets with the help of two translators of their work, continuing in the Bridge tradition of pairing an older, well-established translator with an emerging one. Edmund Keeley is the distinguished translator of Cavafy, George Seferis, Yannis Ritsos, Odysseus Elytis, Angelos Sikelianos and others; and Karen Emmerich, while much younger, has already produced a very impressive body of work and reaped accolades for her translations of Amanda Michalopoulou (which won the NEA's International Literature Prize), Eleni Vakalo, Ersi Sotiropoulos, Maria Crossan, Miltos Sachtouris, Margarita Karapanou and others. Don't you want to know about all these wonderful Greek writers you may never have heard of? You'll have your chance this coming Thursday, April 14, at 7:00 p.m., at the Bridge's usual home: McNally Jackson Books.

Un/Translatables Conference at U Penn

Following up on the 2009 Modern Language Association Convention, the official theme of which was literary translation, the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Pennsylvania is hosting a conference that brings together literary translators and scholars and theorists of translation along with author Yoko Tawada, who was born in Japan but writes in German (as well as Japanese) and has made cultural translation of various sorts a central motif in her work. The conference kicks off tonight with a keynote address by Azade Seyhan, author of Writing Outside the Nation, and will continue on Friday and Saturday with various translation workshops (including one run by me, on translating Yoko Tawada) as well as a second keynote address by theory star Lawrence Venuti, a reading by Tawada, and various panels on topics ranging from translation in the early modern period to the semiotics of cross-cultural representation to the Cold-War Chinese translations of Rilke and Goethe. I'll be speaking about my translation of Tawada's novel The Naked Eye on a panel with Bettina Brandt, who has translated Tawada into Dutch, and Leslie Adelson of Cornell University will be presenting a paper appealingly entitled "Rusty Rails and Parallel Worlds: Trans-Latio in Yoko Tawada's Das nackte Auge." Translator-poet Charles Bernstein is on the program as well, presenting Shadowtime, an opera libretto he wrote on the subject of Walter Benjamin. This is a particularly rich program for an academic conference, so if you're in the Philadelphia area, do check it out. The full program with panel descriptions, locations, etc. is available on the conference website.

A Postscript on Independent Publishers

Just as I was posting this morning about the Indie Booksellers Choice Award, the German news site Deutsche Welle was launching a story on independent publishing in the U.S. for which they interviewed me last week. It seems the trend of independent publishers taking the lead on printing literature in translation has now become so pronounced as to attract international notice. Just this afternoon I heard the wonderful Christopher Middleton (about whom I'll post more soon) pointing out that the first book of translations he ever published, The Walk and Other Stories by Robert Walser, printed in London by John Calder in 1957, would never have seen the light of day if it had not been for a subsidy provided by the Swiss cultural agency Pro Helvetia. And indeed, subsidies from international cultural agencies continue to play a significant role in the promotion of translated literature in this country. In fact, these very subsidies have contributed greatly to the rise of translation-oriented independent publishers, by making it financially feasible for small presses to put out books whose production costs (including translation and copyright fees as well as the costs of editing, printing, distribution and marketing) would otherwise send them directly to bankruptcy court. Meanwhile the rise of social media and the blogosphere has made it easier for smaller firms to spread the word about their books in innovative ways that don't require huge outlays of cash. This has reduced what used to be - even as recently as ten years ago - an enormous differential in visibility between large and small publishing houses. In this new publishing and marketing landscape, readerships for books by independent publishers can sometimes seem to come out of nowhere, as was the case with the Hans Fallada surprise bestseller Every Man Dies Alone.

With all the talk of book-killing Kindles and mind-numbing reality televsion, it's good to be reminded of ways in which technology can actually work in the service of literature.

Visitation Longlisted for an Indie Booksellers Choice Award

Independent bookstores are so crucial. Where else can you actually enjoy the luxury of browsing through all the new books of the season, reading a page here, a paragraph there to discover which of all the latest offerings most appeal to you? Big chain bookstores tend to offer more the appearance of choice than actual choice, with the books on the front tables just inside the automatic glass doors selected according to marketing contracts, which obviously favor larger publishers and often exclude the smaller presses that tend to bring us the bulk of translated books published in any given year. There's a big difference between a stack of three hundred copies of the latest Dan Brown bestseller and a table containing three copies each of one hundred different books. Market realities being what they are, small press books cannot survive without the small bookstores that regularly make them available to readers who are inclined to value smallness in both presses and shops. The sorts of books I love most will not be long for this world if the independent booksellers that promote them ever cease to exist. And yes, the multimedia giant Amazon.com is doing everything in its power to become our sole provider of books by offering ever bigger discounts and ever bigger convenience. It's so much quicker and easier to order a book over the Internet than to make a trip to the store. But Amazon's practices hurt publishers, especially smaller ones: they are able to offer their big discounts because they force publishers to sell their books to them at a lower price than the one other bookstores get (a tactic long used by major chain bookstores to corner the market). So buying smaller publishers' books at the Amazon discount price helps these publishers far less than if you buy their books in a real, in-the-flesh bookstore. And if we don't keep patronizing these smaller stores, they will soon cease to exist, leaving us with only the behemoths. Do you really want to be telling your kids someday about how it once was possible to browse the shelves in something called a "bookstore"? And I wouldn't be too sure those great Amazon discounts will continue once the competition is gone. So do keep in mind, next time you find yourself about to click on the "add to cart" button, that you could be giving your business to a local bookstore instead, helping to keep it around. Provided, of course, that you live in a town where independent bookstores still survive. Here in New York City, we still have quite a few of them. The ones I most often find myself patronizing are Idlewild Books (which specializes in foreign and travel literature, sorted by continent and country), St. Marks Bookshop and the relative newcomer McNally Jackson - all three of them regularly stocked with an outstanding selection of contemporary literature and great for browsing. To find a independent bookstore near you, visit the IndieBound website, and note that most indies will put a book in the mail to you on request, just like Amazon.

In honor of independent bookstores, a new book award was recently established, the Indie Booksellers Choice Award. This is an award for the best book from an independent publisher published in 2010 as decided on by staff members at independent bookstores nationwide - only they are allowed to vote. This is truly a quirky and beautiful longlist, and it is a great honor for me to have my translation of Jenny Erpenbeck's Visitation included on it. Voting will continue until April 30, when the shortlist will be announced, and then the finalist will be chosen in May. I'm curious to see which books from the list will prove most popular with the indie voters. I was delighted to see Barbara Comyn's 1955 novel Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead on the list; it's long been out of print, for which reason I've been clinging tightly to my ancient paperback copy, but now I see that a tiny publisher called Dorothy, A Publishing Project has reprinted the book. If you've never read Comyns, do have a look; I think she will amaze you.

Reading with My Hero

I'll never forget reading Christopher Middleton's translations for the first time. This was in New Orleans in 1982 or 1983, and the life-changing book that a teacher at the school for the arts I attended had just assigned to us was entitled Selected Stories of Robert Walser and had just come out, with a foreword by Susan Sontag and a jacket cover sprinkled with crudely magnified images of Walser's microscript handwriting. In her foreword, Sontag described Walser as "A Paul Klee in prose - as delicate, as sly, as haunted. A cross between Stevie Smith and Beckett: a good-humored, sweet Beckett." He was, she wrote, "a truly wonderful, heartbreaking writer." And in Middleton's translations, he really was. I remember how thrilled I felt reading the sentence: "I am thrilled to be writing a report on such a delicate subject as trousers, and thus to be licensed to plunge into meditation upon them; even as I write, a desirous grin, I can feel it, is spreading over my entire face."

Since I had been studying German for two years at that point, my teacher helped me find some of the texts in German, and so I found myself sitting in the damp heat of a New Orleans afternoon out on the tiny interior patio of our house (walled in by blond bricks in all four directions beneath a postage stamp of sky), attempting my very first translations ever. I was assisted in this endeavor by the venerable Cassell's German Dictionary, printed in 1909, that my father had once used to learn German as a young biochemistry student; I am eternally grateful to that dictionary, which taught me to read German Fraktur script before I realized that it was hard.

The translations were quite another matter. I would plod through sentence after sentence with the dictionary, arriving at English renderings that were invariably devoid of charm. "How beautiful it is that to the winter every time, spring follows," I would write, then turning to Middleton to find this ungainly assertion replaced by an exclamation of delight: "How nice it is that spring follows winter, every time." Of course this "every time" should come at the end of the sentence: that's the very wonder of it, that year after year this same miracle occurs.

Or this one: "The songbird songs that already a long, long time ago were heard by people!" Yes, the sentence really did end with an exclamation point. I worked particularly hard on that one, and was unable to find any way at all to twist its words into a statement that seemed in any way meaningful or moving. But yes, Middleton understood just what the speaker was saying: "All the songs of singing birds heard by people such a long, long time ago!" The songbirds suddenly came back to life as "singing birds." What's more, the assonant spondee "birds"/"heard" produces a caesura that gives this line of prose a cadence that helps us actually to hear and feel what is being said. The sentence is brilliantly, virtuosically translated.
Christopher Middleton is first and foremost a poet, and he goes on writing poetry when he is translating - a circumstance under which it is particularly difficult to do so. His own poems are breathtaking (a favorite of mine ends "with a wicket gate of muscle / to shield from shock his hungers"), and his translations show us, over and over again, how to make the ostensibly impossible look easy. For this I am infinitely grateful.

I never studied formally with Christopher Middleton, but of all the many, many things I have tried out in my long (and ongoing) quest to learn how to translate, none has been more useful or enlightening than those early attempts of mine to copy his translations, like a child trying to walk in the footprints stamped out by a grown-up in knee-deep snow.

And so I could not be more thrilled that the organizers of the Bridge Series have invited me to read this week from my translations of Robert Walser on a double bill with my translation hero. This event will be moderated by Edwin Frank of New York Review Books Classics, and will take place at 1:00 p.m. this Wednesday, April 6, at the Swiss Institute in SoHo. I hope to see you there. You will also have a second chance to hear Middleton the following evening, reading and speaking about his work at Poet's House in conversation with John Yau.