Translationista

It's Festival Time!

2012-02-07T20:16:00.018-05:00

So this is the second year in a row I've been involved with Festival Neue Literatur, the English-language festival of new writing from the German-speaking countries Austria, Germany and Switzerland. Admittedly not all of Switzerland speaks German, so we're just talking about what in a language other than English would be called "the German Switzerland." I think you understand what I mean. In any case, it's been quite a learning process for me, if only because putting together a literary festival turns out to be complicated beyond your wildest imaginings. Venues have to be found, timetables established, catering arranged for, not to mention all the details of transport and housing and food involved with importing authors from distant lands to spend a long weekend in New York. Oh, and budgets. Did I mention budgets? Fortunately most of these matters were none of my concern, as the Festival is put on by a consortium of cultural agencies and institutes, including the Austrian Cultural Forum, the German and Swiss consulates, Deutsches Haus at NYU, the German Book Office, the Goethe Institut and the Swiss arts council Pro Helvetia. All of these entities, thank goodness, have staff experienced in festival production. My job as the curator of this year's festival was in some ways much simpler, and in others infinitely more difficult: It was up to me to select the authors to invite to New York. And so I spent most of last summer blissfully buried up to my nose in German-language books, reading all the authors whose names had been suggested. It was difficult to choose. I wish I could have chosen more. But I am delighted with the group of six authors that will be presented at the festival this weekend: Linda Stift and Erwin Uhrmann of Austria, Larissa Boehning and Inka Parei of Germany, and Monica Cantieni and Catalin Dorian Florescu of Switzerland. Two wonderful American writers, Chris Adrian and Francisco Goldman, will also be joining us for the evening events on Saturday and Sunday.

The first event of this year's festival, on Friday Feb. 10, will be hosted by a partner new to the festival this year: Deutsches Haus at Columbia University. All six writers will be participating in workshop discussions there with graduate students from Columbia's German Department and from the MFA Writing program at the School of the Arts. These sessions will take place partly in German and mostly in English, and are open to the public. 1:00 p.m. - 4:30 p.m.

On Saturday and Sunday evenings (Feb. 11 and 12), we will present groups of three festival authors reading from their latest books and participating in panel discussions with our American guest authors. Both evening events will take place at 6:00 p.m., at powerHouse Arena on Saturday, and McNally Jackson Books on Sunday.

One additional event will be held on Sunday at noon, the Frühschoppen literary brunch, a perennial FNL favorite: In this potpourri of short readings, all six writers read briefly from their books in German, followed by readings of the English translations (we splurged on actors this year, so the readings should be particularly good). Then we'll chow down. It's not too late to RSVP for this, but I'd do so promptly if I were you.

We've also put together a helpful website on which you will find the complete program for the festival, along with information on all the authors (bio notes, book synopses, sample translations). We hope you'll check it out.

And I'm delighted to note also that the Festival has been getting a lot of great press this week. Time Out NY chose it as a "Critics' Pick" for the weekend; Chad Post wrote it up for the Three Percent blog; literary critic Liesl Schillinger (who'll be moderating our Sunday evening panel) wrote about it for Publishing Perspectives; I wrote about it for Words without Borders; Publishing Trendsetters interviewed GBO staff member Brittany Hazelwood on why the festival is so important for young book professionals; and along the way we acquired a Facebook page. I was also somehow persuaded to record a short video welcoming everyone to the festival. Here it is:

And one last note: The festival will secretly be opening on Thursday evening with a private reception where folks in the publishing industry can meet our fresh-off-the-plane writers. If you're in the book business and somehow didn't get an invitation yet, drop us a note ASAP so we can do something about it.

Interviewed by PEN!

2012-02-02T12:40:00.012-05:00

I've spent a lot of time in various capacities at the PEN American Center over the past few years, most recently serving as Chair of the Translation Committee. This year I've also been guest blogging on the PEN blog The Daily PEN American. And now I've been interviewed for the very same blog by Betsy Ribble. The interview just went live, so here's a link to it. I'm not sure how this happened, but somehow I wound up talking to her about the relationship between procrastination and multi-tasking. It must be my favorite topic. We also talk about the Gotthelf book I'm currently working on, and about translation as writing.

Book Party for Berlin Stories Feb. 2

2012-01-28T22:05:00.010-05:00

My translation of Berlin Stories by Robert Walser was many months in the making, and now it's out. To my delight, it immediately shot to the #1 spot on Amazon's German literature list and lingered there a day or two. I don't know what its ranking on IndieBound is, since they don't keep track that way, but of course let me encourage you, as always, to patronize an independent bookstore near you whenever possible. The book has also gotten reviewed in the New York Times already, and it's a positive review at that, and so all signs are pointing to the crucial importance of throwing a party to celebrate these stories written a full century ago that somehow seem just as entertaining and timely now as they did then, if in different ways. Walser was quite concerned with the speed with which modern life was morphing all around him into something unfamiliar and disorienting, and it turns out that this sort of anxiety likes to loiter around the beginnings of new centuries. It's not hard to imagine, for example, that the sudden ubiquity of electrical contraptions came as just as much of a shock to him as the sudden omnipresence of the Internet did/does to us. We like the Web, it makes our lives easier and better, but it also comes with the understanding that there is no going back to the relative innocence of pre-Twitter days, much less the days when if you needed to get somewhere the railway did not go, you would either have to impose upon the patience of a horse or walk. But enough of that. It's time to make merry - there's a new book to celebrate! And celebrate we shall, with (as I'm told) Riesling and pretzels and lots of fine tales, and all these delights will be simultaneously on offer at 192 Books at 192 10th Avenue at 21st Street. Seating is limited, so reservations are recommended: (212) 255-4022. The curtain rises at or shortly after 7:00 p.m.

Attn. Portuguese Translators: 2012 Susan Sontag Prize

2012-01-28T20:54:00.006-05:00

Readers of this blog already know all about the Susan Sontag Prize for Translation, which goes to a young (under 30) translator of a particular language every year. The language for this year's competition is Portuguese. This one comes with a purse of $5000, so it's well worth taking a look at if you qualify. The deadline is March 9, 2012. For application instructions, consult the website of the Susan Sontag Foundation.

PEN Translation Fund Deadline Feb. 1

2012-01-28T20:29:00.007-05:00

Translationista has been remiss this year: I should have reminded you earlier of the upcoming deadline to apply for a PEN Translation Fund grant. The deadline is Feb. 1, so if this is announcement comes as news to you, it's probably too late to start putting an application together unless you already have a translation project underway; the competition for these grants is too stiff for hastily thrown-together applications to have much of a chance. In any case, the most important part of the application package is definitely the translation sample itself - a well-selected, beautifully translated sample is what makes you a contender. For application instructions see the PEN website. And if you do have something in progress, by all means think about applying, particularly if you are not already widely published as a translator; the jury in recent years has tended to favor projects by translators who are not yet well-established in the field.

Banff Centre Deadline Feb. 15

2012-01-27T14:15:00.006-05:00

I miss Banff. It's got to be one of the most beautiful spots on earth, and the three-week translation program the Banff Centre offers every summer is a wonderful place to connect with other translators and writers, get feedback on your work, and really sink your teeth into a project in the most idyllic surroundings imaginable. I've blogged about the program in more detail before, so for now suffice it to say that if you haven't been, you are warmly encouraged to apply for the program. Stipends are available. And if you wind up going to Banff, you'll be able to take some of the most glorious hikes in the world when you step away from your desk for a breath of air. The program is co-directed by Hugh Hazelton and Katherine Silver, and this year's faculty will include Roberto Frías, Russell Scott Valentino, and Lori Saint-Martin.

Young Translators at ALTA

2012-01-27T12:05:00.023-05:00

I've blogged before about the generous ($1000) travel fellowships that the American Literary Translators Association provides to enable "unpublished or minimally published" translators (no specific age requirement) to attend the yearly ALTA conference. At the risk of repeating myself, I'll reiterate that ALTA is the main professional organization for literary translators in this country, and attending the conference is a great way to learn about getting established as a translator and network with potential mentors.

I was especially proud this year because two of my students from Columbia University were selected for fellowships and by all reports had a wonderful time at the conference. If you're interested in learning more about applying for a fellowship to attend next year's conference - which will be held Oct. 3 - 6 in Rochester, NY - see the application guidelines on the ALTA website. The deadline is May 15.

Meanwhile, for your reading pleasure, here's the report on the conference written by Yardenne Greenspan, a student in the MFA Program in Writing at Columbia University's School of the Arts:

* * *
When I opened Maria Suarez’s email, congratulating me on receiving the ALTA fellowship, the first thought that went through my mind was, “finally, something is happening.” Things were moving forward, evolving, and I could feel myself emerging from obscurity with a bang. In my mind, a glamorously professional picture was forming – shaking hands, signing book deals – complete with straight hair and stylish, yet professional, attire.

I was lucky enough to travel from New York to Kansas City with my friends Tara (who had also received the fellowship) and Rachel (a translator of Portuguese poetry). We all attend the MFA program at Columbia University, and we had prepared together for the conference, sharing our hopes and fears. We were each other’s little support system.

“Now listen to me,” I told myself on the taxi ride from the Kansas City airport to the Intercontinental Hotel, adjusting one of the few nice-looking button-down shirts I own, “This is going to be awkward for you. You’re going to meet a bunch of new people, and you’ll want to stick close to your friends the whole time. But don’t – just don’t. This is not about fun, it’s about business.”

Indeed, I came to the ALTA conference ready for some serious business. As a writer and a translator, this was not necessarily my forte. I was much better at sitting at home or at a quiet café alone or with a friend or two than in a conference room full of opportunities. I prepared a fancy folder with my resume and some samples to hand out to what I suspected would be dozens of interested parties (or at least a dozen, according to the number of copies I made). I got my very first business cards. I was ready to hit the big time.

What I discovered differed quite a bit from my expectations. The conference had a much warmer, more intimate air to it than the commodity market I’d pictured. At a reception on the night of our arrival, Stephen Kessler, who was in charge of us clueless fellows and showed us the ropes in his kind and gentle manner, began introducing us to translators, editors and readers, specializing in different languages and genres. That’s when joy and affection began revealing its surprising presence. From that point on, I noticed how ALTA members gathered in every corner of the hotel, doing the thing that until that point I perceived as “bad business” – they were having fun. They were sharing experiences and anecdotes and drinks and sometimes simply being translators together – enjoying the closeness of others who share their passion for words, their desire to make local words known internationally and to be part of a creation greater than themselves.

This atmosphere of camaraderie reached its peak during “Declamación,” in my eyes the most important event of the entire conference. The reason I found this event to be of such significance wasn’t the lovely recitations (though they were, indeed, lovely), nor the participants’ impressive memory and performance. It wasn’t even the fun of the multi-lingual sing-along or the American-Idol-type insanity that followed. Declamación was important because it exemplified what this annual conference is all about – lasting connections, long-forming close ties. A relationship.

Our reading was scheduled on the last day of the conference. I went on stage, thanked everyone and presented my excerpt. The room wasn’t full like I’d hoped, but the many who did show up were completely focused on the readers. I could make eye-contact with every person in the audience, and could identify the origins of each smile of appreciation and burst of laughter. When it was all over, we received comments, compliments and criticism, made plans to get in touch with a few publishers, and shook the hands of many supportive colleagues. While no one wanted to take my neatly-prepared packet of materials, every single person encouraged me to get in touch, send over my excerpts and ask for assistance. They were all willing to contribute important information and tips, ideas for ways to continue my progress in the translation industry, and warm words of support.

On my way back to the airport, early on Sunday morning, I remembered Stephen’s stories about translators, editors and publishers getting in touch and working together after meeting at the conference. What stood out in his stories was the fact that these collaborations formed throughout years of meeting at conferences, discussing their respective projects, hearing each other read their work out loud, and spending nights at restaurants and bars, getting to know one another. I was happy that I did stick close to my friends after all.

I realized then that I expected the ALTA conference to be a quick leap to fame, a storm of glory, but that what it turned out to be was something much more valuable. It was a gateway to a deep and intimate knowledge of the world of translation, a place in which to find lasting bonds and begin building for the future. For me, the ALTA conference signifies the commencement of a journey through a special, gentle and difficult industry – it is a start.

(reprinted from ALTAlk)

Michael Henry Heim in Boston

2012-01-25T23:22:00.012-05:00

Those of you who follow German literature in English surely know of Michael Henry Heim's translations (e.g. of Günter Grass, Thomas Mann, and Hans Magnus Enzensberger), but you might as easily know his work if you follow Russian literature, or Hungarian, Dutch, or Czech. The enviably multilingual Heim was Milan Kundera's translator until Kundera started writing directly in French, and when the Czech Republic split off from what was once the other half of Czechoslovakia, they got in touch with him to ask what they should call themselves in English. True story. I personally am grateful for him for suggesting me as the translator for Jenny Erpenbeck's first book to be translated into English, The Old Child and Other Stories. He knew I loved her book, and when he was offered the job of translating it, he told New Directions to call me up instead. Maybe it was that he didn't have time for the book just then, but I wouldn't count on it. He's just that supportive. Once, on a visit to Los Angeles, I got to sit in on his graduate translation workshop at UCLA, a truly splendid class. I envy anyone who has the good fortune to study with him. And now anyone who happens to be in Boston this coming Friday will have the opportunity to hear him speak as part of the Boston University Lecture Series in Literary Translation. It's a great lecture series, masterminded by Rosanna Warren, herself a wonderful poet and translator, and stellar speakers (David Bellos, David Ferry, Rachel Hadas et al) will be appearing all spring. I spoke about Walser in the series a few years ago and loved the experience. If you're in or near Boson, check it out.

This talk will be held from 1:00 - 2:00 p.m on Friday, Jan. 27, in Room 625 (sixth floor) of 745 Commonwealth Ave on the Boston University campus.

William Carlos Williams, Translator

2012-01-23T10:39:00.010-05:00

This month's Bridge Series event, entitled "American Poetry Between Spanish & English," explicitly draws attention to a phenomenon that was implicitly presented in the Dec. 2011 Bridge featuring Lydia Davis and Anna Moschovakis: Many translators are also writers, and many writers are also translators. This applies to many writers we aren't used to thinking of in these terms. We all know that Richard Wilbur translated, but did you know that Langston Hughes did as well? And what about William Carlos Williams? It turns out that Williams translated so many poems from the Spanish that New Directions has just published a book of them, edited by Jonathan Cohen, who is himself both a translator and a poet. And the January Bridge will feature a reading and conversation between Cohen and translator/poet Daniel Borzutzky. The interrelation between literary translation and other forms of literary writing is a huge and fascinating topic, and this is sure to be a wonderful evening. Hope to see you there!

This event will be held on Monday, Jan. 30, in the usual Bridge venue: McNally Jackson Books at 52 Prince Street in Soho, 7:00 p.m.

Study with Edith Grossman in NYC!

2012-01-23T10:18:00.007-05:00

As readers of this blog no doubt already know, Edith Grossman is one of the most respected translators around, and with good reason. Her new Don Quixote is a thing of beauty, she's won more prizes than most of us have fingers and toes, and she translates a huge and important assortment of Spanish and Latin American authors including Gabriel García Márquez, Julián Ríos, and Mario Vargas Llosa. Her book Why Translation Matters, based on a series of lectures she gave at Yale, created quite a stir when it came out in 2010. Edie is erudite, irreverent, and hilariously funny. We should all be so lucky as to study with her. And the good news is that some of us can: Starting on Feb. 16, she will be offering an 8-session class entitled "Reading Translations" at the 92nd St. Y. Details of the class - including registration information - are available online. If you're interested, I wouldn't wait too long to sign up - I assume the class will fill up soon.

My Year in Translation

2011-12-31T10:53:00.029-05:00

2011 has been an amazing year. It took me to my grandmother's birthplace in Poland, to memories of Hurricane Katrina, and to classrooms at Columbia University and Queens College of the City University of New York. It saw my translation of a book by Robert Walser go into production, and another one follow close behind. It found me publishing my first book of translated poems and studying the language of the 19th century so as to find the words to tell a Swiss horror story about a spider.

Because of my involvement with Occupy Wall Street beginning in late September, I have spent less time writing Translationista than used to be my habit; meanwhile I've been writing about OWS for the PEN American Center and the blog Occupy | Decolonize | Liberate.

As readers of Translationista know, I helped found the Occupy Wall Street Translation Working Group, which participates in OWS outreach, providing translations into many different languages of OWS documents on the official website. We are always looking for new members; you can find more information about us here. We also translate articles for the foreign-language editions of the Occupied Wall Street Journal - individual articles are posted on the OWSJ website.

My work with OWS has been inspiring, heartening, thrilling. I have seen so many people from so many different backgrounds and points of view come together at our General Assemblies to talk about some of the largest problems facing our society - the things that keep so many in this wealthy country from prospering. Whether the issue is education, housing, healthcare, jobs, you name it - most of the answers can be found by following the money trail; and the laws of the United States are currently set up in such a way as to disproportionately favor the wealthy and allow large corporations to exert undue influence over our political process, causing these inequities to persist. Change is desperately needed, and despite all his lovely campaign promises, Barack Obama has not been doing much of anything to end the plutocracy and bring us back to democracy again. He turns out to be just as indebted to the big banks and corporations as the Republicans we voted out of office when we elected him. In fact, a study by the Sunlight Foundation published this October revealed that Obama has received more contributions from Wall Street than any other president in the last 20 years, including George W. Bush. It is time for the people to stand up and demand government accountability; and this is just what has been happening all fall across the country. Don't believe the media reports declaring the Occupy movement dead. The newspapers making these claims are governed by the very corporate interests our movement threatens. In fact, Occupy is alive and well, and our work continues, despite the attacks - including, here in New York, the violent and illegal eviction of protesters from Zuccotti Park by Mayor Michael Bloomberg in November.

In the words of Robert Walser, "When a year stops, another instantly commences, as if one were turning the page." Thanks and hugs to all of you who read their way through 2011 along with me. I'm looking forward to seeing where the story goes next.

A Robert Walser Christmas

2011-12-25T16:32:00.018-05:00

I've fallen behind with blogging on Translationista this fall because of my involvement with Occupy Wall Street (about which you can find me guest-blogging these days at Occupy | Decolonize | Liberate), but I did want to drop in and say a few things this Christmas Day, on the 55th anniversary of Robert Walser's death. This time last year I was celebrating Walser's work with the Robert Walser Society of Western Massachusetts, a Walser fan club made up largely of young poets associated with Flying Object, a store, press and literature think tank in Hadley, Massachusetts. The Society commemorates Walser's death each year with a series of readings and a walk through the woods - a lovely ritual. This year I am celebrating more quietly, by feeling happy and excited about the latest of my posthumous collaborations with Walser, Berlin Stories, which will officially be published in late January. My advance author's copy just arrived, and it is beautiful. This slim collection of stories (the selection was made by Jochen Greven, Walser's long-time German editor) consists primarily of work Walser wrote in Berlin about Berlin, along with a handful of stories written later in which Walser looks back on the seven years he spent in the German capital early in his career. He moved to Berlin to become a writer, just as young American writers still move to New York (or at least Brooklyn), and these stories are vibrant with the youthful enthusiasm with which he wrote his first three novels and participated in the life of the metropolis.

Berlin Stories also reprints two stories translated by Christopher Middleton and one by Harriet Watts, as well as several translated by someone I hesitate to call me since I was still in my early 20s when Masquerade and Other Stories first appeared. I couldn't resist revising my own work, so anyone who's curious to know what sorts of translation decisions I made then and regret now will find various examples thereof.

For those in NYC, a launch party for the book will be held in early February, and I am hoping to have a prominent cultural historian with special expertise in the culture of technology join me in presenting Walser's book, since so many of these stories are devoted to technological advances at the turn of the twentieth century and the mark they made on daily life. Watch this space for details.

And I'm feeling grateful to Francine Prose - whose most recent novel, My New American Life, I really loved when I read it last year. In the New York Times earlier this week, she cited my translation of Robert Walser's Microscripts as her favorite book to give as a gift. It's true that this volume - which contains art-quality full-size facsimiles of some of the tiny manuscripts on which Walser composed his late work - is a beautiful object as well as containing some of his strangest and most challenging work. Berlin Stories and Microscripts bookend Walser's literary career, making them a great pair of collections to have on your bookshelf. Of course, I'm not exactly impartial...

Anna Moschovakis on the Allure of the Adjective

2011-12-10T13:22:00.012-05:00

Friday night's Bridge was a particularly rich one, with challenging, in-depth exchanges between writer/translators Lydia Davis and Anna Moschovakis on questions of style, tone, revision, voice, and even teaching (both said, in effect, that when you teach students to translate, what you're basically doing is helping them hone their skills as writers - which is also how I see it). Davis spoke in detail about her revision process, which sometimes continues even after a book sees print if her editors allow her to make changes for subsequent editions, as happened with her most recent book, Flaubert's Madame Bovary. In particular, she toned down her use of "would" to render Flaubert's characteristic use of the verb form imparfait/imperfect (as in: "In the morning, she would do this, and then she would do that"); in the most recent edition, Davis uses the "would" forms only once or twice to set the context, and then shifts to the less obtrusive simple past form ("then she did that"). Davis finds - and in this I agree with her - that it's easier to experience a book when it's in print, as opposed to in manuscript form; I too invariably wind up making changes to all my translations at the page proof stage, for the same reason.

I was eager to write about this Bridge, but when I sat down to do so, I saw I had an e-mail from Anna Moschovakis, who'd been thinking more about the discussions meanwhile, and voila: a beautiful guest blog. Here's what Anna had to say:

Last night, I told a lie from a panel stage, and I'm here to set it right.

That's not exactly true, either. Here's what actually happened:

It was at the Bridge translation reading series, and I was paired with Lydia Davis for the evening, which caused a certain amount of intimidation even though I've known Lydia for over a decade and she is not the sort to set out to intimidate.

I read from my translation of Albert Cossery's The Jokers, and then Lydia read from—and eloquently spoke about—her translation of Madame Bovary. At the Q&A, the first question posed to me was about Cossery's ample, exaggerated use of adjectives and adverbs, and whether I felt the need to tone it down for the English version.

I should have been expecting this question, since it is the one specifically translation-related issue brought up in reviews of Cossery's work and in James Buchan's introduction to The Jokers, in which he writes: "[Cossery's] style depends for its effect on precise and outlandish adjectives, as in the description here of the terrace of the Globe Café. That is not the very best style in English, which likes verbs and nouns, and presents a challenge to his translator."

So I should have been expecting the question, but I had nothing prepared to say. I stumbled a bit, and then I recalled that my book editor and I went through several drafts of the manuscript, during which it reduced itself in word-count by something like 10%. This was true. Then I found and read an example of one of Cossery's sentences that included a small pile-up of "outlandish" adjectives and adverbs, and suggested that during the revision process I had reduced them in number in order to achieve the desired effect in English, explaining the choice with the idea that the translation needed to walk the same fine line between exaggerated ebullience and straight-up farce as did the original. But my explanation misrepresented what I'd actually done, and I'll get to why in a minute.

The Q&A continued, and I only wish I could have peppered Lydia with questions myself; here was the country's foremost translator of French—also my former teacher and the closest thing I have had to a translation mentor, although we hardly talked about translation when I studied writing with her for three summers at Bard—and I had a flood of questions that I didn't have time to ask. But the audience asked good ones: about the influence of translation on writing and vice versa, about whether and when we consult prior translations of the text we're working on, about how we handle any temptation to "correct" grammatical or other mistakes or perceived weaknesses in the original. Lydia shared specific examples from Madame Bovary to speak to many of these questions, and her responses were enlightening.

One audience member mentioned the forthcoming edition of Murakami's complete works in English and the fact that the two volumes will be translated by two different hands, which she found disturbing. Lydia then got to talk about the recent edition of Proust, in which each of the seven volumes was given to a different translator, and she agreed that this may not be ideal, admitting that she'd heard from some sensitive readers that they found the subtle shifts in voice to be disturbing. I tend to support reading multiple translations of any one author, to triangulate as it were, and to be reminded that the translation is not identical to the original or its replacement, so I had found the idea of the multiply translated Proust to be brilliant. But that said, I have only read Lydia's first volume, so my sensitivities as a reader have not had the chance to be affected by the transitions.

This question related to an earlier question, in which we were both asked whether we recognized our "voice" in our translations, and how we felt about that. Lydia and I seemed to agree that were we to recognize our own writer's voice in a translation, we'd find it disturbing, but the idea that each translator brings his or her vocabulary to a translation, which can give it a certain relationship to the writer's own work, seemed more accurate. I made a note to myself to be more vigilant about knowing my own vocabulary and how it affects my translations.

And that brings me back to Cossery's adjectives.

Here is the short section I picked out on the fly as an example (I've bolded the adjectives and adverbs):

"Karim gave himself up to a feeling of delicious languor, while enjoying the voluptuous vision of his mistress from the night before getting dressed in the middle of the room. From the patronizing smile that played on his lips you would have thought he was observing a procession of dancers, lasciviously swaying their hips for his pleasure alone, instead of a poor creature (picked up on the street) whose modest charms no longer held a single secret for him. Karim's languorous pose was meant to suggest an atmosphere of luxury and decadence, but in fact it hid the state of nervous tension that had been racking him since he woke up."

I suggested that I had removed four or five additional "languorous"- type adjectives from this scene, in order to bring it down to a proportionally purple prose in English. What I was trying to address, I think, was the importance for me of getting the tone right in a translation, of making it sound right. What I probably should have said was that I didn't particularly think about adjectives while I was translating—I just tried to get the translation right, nouns, verbs, adjectives, prepositions, and all. I didn't approach the challenge of translating Cossery as a challenge about adjectives, but a challenge about tone.

So when a few people came up to me after the panel to ask me how it felt to remove Cossery's own adjectives from the book, I was surprised. Had I said that? Had I done that? First of all, on the translation-theory continuum between domestication (making the original sound more English) and foreignization (bringing a sense of foreignness to the English translation), I lean heavily toward the latter position. Second of all, I really didn't remember if I'd removed a single adjective in The Jokers. I just remember that my second draft was shorter than my first; that my perspicuous editor suggested a leaner sentence on many occasions, and on many occasions I agreed; and that I struggled most of all to reproduce Cossery's nimbly ironic tone.

So this morning, l'esprit de l'escalier sent me back to the original to see if, in fact, I had removed any adjectives from that passage I quoted. Here it is in the French:

"Tout en s'abandonnant à cette molle langueur, il semblait goûter un plaisir voluptueux à observer sa mâitresse d'une nuit, en train de s'habiller, debout au milieu de la chambre. Au sourire condescendant qui apparaissait par instants sur ses lèvres, on eût dit qu'une procession de bayadères, aux hanches ondoyantes et lascives, défilait devant ses yeux pour son délassement intime, et non une pauvre créature (ramassé la veille dans la rue) dont les charmes modestes n'avaient plus pour lui aucun secret. Cette ambiance de haut luxe, qu'il essayait de créer par son attitude alanguie et précieuse, cachait, à vrai dire, un état d'extrême tension, auquel il était soumis depuis son réveil."

The French passage has 110 words; the English 111. So I actually added a word. I did drop some adjectives/adverbs (from 12 down to 8), but that was because I converted them to other parts of speech ("aux haunches ondoyantes et lascives" became "lasciviously swaying their hips"). And this discovery, more than a year after the book was published, finally made me understand what James Buchan and other commentators mean when they talk about Cossery's adjectives. I'd been reading Buchan's claim with the wrong emphasis: where I read "[Cossery's] style depends for its effect on precise and outlandish adjectives," I should have read "[Cossery's] style depends for its effect on precise and outlandish adjectives." The challenge he's referring to isn't about properly reproducing the effect of the outlandish adjectives. It's about dealing with sentences in which so much of what happens is happening in that part of speech. My first draft left all the adjectives as adjectives, and what changed in the second draft, and with my editor's notes, was that some of those adjectives were converted to nouns and verbs. Which, as Buchan points out, English likes. As my junior-high-school self might say: Duh.

And what of that reduction in word count from draft to draft? It's actually something that happens with most translations I do from the French, but usually I work it out one or two drafts earlier than I did this time. And it's not about adjectives, it's about syntax: I often start by reproducing the French syntax while preserving the meaning in English, which adds words (and makes for some terrible English sentences). Then I go back and rewrite everything, and it takes as many drafts as it takes.

In hindsight, it's tempting to wish I had retained just a few more of Cossery's adjectival pile-ups, even at the expense of extra awkwardness in the English (I do like awkwardness), even if I'd had to find a way to defend them to those who favor "smooth" translations. And that brings me to the last point of the panel, the question of what advice we would give to students and beginning translators. What I'm doing here is what translators do, sometimes obsessively. It isn't that I've turned on my own translation, or that I'm worried about having made mistakes or "wrong" choices. It's just that translation is an endless process. It's always best, if you can manage it, to build in a long waiting time between the first "final" draft and its publication, since the longer you sit with something, the more you'll find to change (and in contrast to what can happen with one's own work, these changes are often improvements). But once a translation is published, go back and look closely only at your own risk. Unless, of course, there's going to be a second edition.

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Thank you, Anna, for sharing these reflections!

Meanwhile in the World of Translation

2011-12-01T14:06:00.027-05:00

It's been difficult to concentrate on work these days with all the developments surrounding Occupy Wall Street and the issues connected with the NYPD's destruction of the original encampment on Nov. 15. Now that the dust is clearing, the issues of free speech and public space are appearing in greater focus, as are the infringements of civil rights on the part of various public officials. Even the New York Times finally got around to deploring in print Mayor Michael Bloomberg's violations of press freedoms in connection with the raid on Zuccotti Park, though they attribute them only to Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly (who is answerable to Bloomberg), as though Kelly had been acting independently. The press have been bullied and intimidated, and unfortunately most news organs have knuckled under and reported only the City's official version of events. The National Lawyers Guild is working on this and related issues.

Having an encampment was important to OWS because the town square at Zuccotti Park was where protesters shared ideas and made plans, and it is also where others came to check out the movement and learn about the issues. I met a lot of out-of-town tourists wandering around down there. Now Zuccotti Park is fenced off and heavily policed, with private security guards performing illegal bag checks and refusing entry to a large number of people - including many who were regular participants in the movement from the start. All those who carry backpacks containing their possessions are denied entry to the park, and so occupiers who have been spending the night in the sleeping spaces generously provided by several local churches are now shut out of the regular planning meetings held at the park. It is also difficult for occupiers to locate the (now itinerant) stations where the Kitchen Working Group serves donated food to protesters. And so questions of logistics and bureaucracy take up energies once reserved only for the occupation's real work of speaking truth to power. Bloomberg has been quite canny in attacking OWS's infrastructure while pretending not to take issue with its principal tenets (ha). In fact he is fighting a war against the Occupy movement. He clearly thinks he can win via attrition warfare; I am hoping to see him proven wrong. There is a great deal of popular support for the movement, and as long as this support continues, OWS will be able to go on bringing its message to the people.

Meanwhile this has also been an eventful fall in the world of literary translation. I would like to draw your attention to three events in particular that will be taking place over the next week here in New York:

1. Tonight, the wonderful translation publishing house Archipelago Books will be hosting a party and benefit auction at Gasser Grunert Gallery, 524 West 19th Street. Archipelago has, quite incredibly, survived as a not-for-profit publisher for eight years now, during which time they have published over seventy translations from more than twenty languages. It's a classy and simpatico operation. So why not attend their party and show some love? Food, wine and music, plus the chance to bid on an assortment of interesting donated items like rare books and art. Tix are $25 at the door, starting at 6:30 p.m. And when you're done bidding on art, you can head up to Lincoln Center, where star composer Philip Glass will be joining Occupy Museums for a protest at 10:30 p.m. in solidarity with OWS. (In fact, I just got word in that Laurie Anderson and Lou Reed will be in attendance as well.)

2. Friday, Dec. 2: The amazing translation journal Telephone (which specializes in commissioning translations by many interesting hands of poems by a single author) will team up with the gallery EFA Project Space to host a launch event for their collaborative show: Telefone Sem Fio: Word-Things of Augusto de Campos Revisited. There will be a walk-through with artists speaking about their contributions to this unique project, and about the experience of approaching the works of Augusto de Campos. With Bibi Calderaro, Macgregor Card, Deric Carner, Brendan Fernandes, Rossana Martinez, Jennifer Schmidt, Dannielle Tegeder. EFA Project Space, 323 W. 39 St., 2nd Floor, 6:30pm.

3. Friday, Dec. 9: The Bridge Series is back, in one of its most stunning incarnations to date. Lydia Davis and Anna Moschovakis - both incredible writers as well as accomplished translators - will team up to read and speak about their translations from the French. This Bridge will be held at The Center for Fiction at the Mercantile Library. The space is sure to fill up fast, so I recommend you get there early to stake out a seat. The Center for Fiction, 17 East 47th Street (between Fifth & Madison), 6:00 p.m.

From a Square to a Cemetery

2011-11-19T07:55:00.073-05:00

Recently, on a visit to Poland, I made a pilgrimage to the village where my maternal grandmother was born, Nowy Targ, 50 kilometers south of Cracow in the region known as Małopolska or Lesser Poland. The name "Nowy Targ" translates as "New Market," and indeed this large village is where most of the region's trading occurred, with local farmers bringing their produce to market and then spending the proceeds at the dry goods stalls and shops selling housewares. The Jewish cemetery on the outskirts of town resembles an idyllic little forest grove, and the one thing a visitor might remark about it is that there are so few graves to be seen here, only a few dozen, most of them missing their headstones. It seems an obvious case of a Jewish cemetery desecrated during the Holocaust, as so many were. But the cemetery at Nowy Targ harbors an even more terrible secret: Every inch of it is a mass grave. It is here that 2000 Jews from the Nowy Targ ghetto were driven together on August 30, 1942, shot, and buried where they lay. The headstones from the cemetery were removed and later used as paving material after the war.

All of this is unfathomable. Who carried out these murders? The victims' neighbors? Did they personally know the people they were shooting? And even beyond the moral and emotional considerations, how was an operation of this scope even possible in so small a place? Were the victims marched to the cemetery in a grand procession? A few at a time? Were they forced to dig the mass graves in which they and their loved ones would be buried? It is all far too painful to think about. I am so grateful that my grandmother emigrated as a child, nearly three decades before this tragedy.

The number 2000 struck a very different chord in me as well, because on Oct. 14, 2011, not long before leaving for Poland, I had participated in a 6 a.m. gathering at Zuccotti Park, a.k.a. Liberty Square, in New York City. That morning, 2000 of us gathered in and around the park to protect the Occupy Wall Street encampment from forcible eviction by the New York Police Department. Two thousand people were enough to pack every foot of the square - which is about the same size as the Jewish cemetery in Nowy Targ - and create a tight ring around it. And our presence stopped the police; there were too many of us to arrest, and Mayor Michael Bloomberg backed down from his demand that we all stop protesting and leave. So now I can't help wondering what would have happened in Nowy Targ that August day in 1942 if 2000 villagers had come to the cemetery to object to the murder of their neighbors. Perhaps the dissenters would have been killed as well. Perhaps the local population approved of murdering the region's Jews. It's hard to know, even though this was all not so terribly long ago, less than 70 years. The gray-haired Polish woman I saw raking leaves from the sidewalk in front of the cemetery was quite possibly old enough to remember that day. But she and I lacked a common language, so I could not ask.

In New York, the presence of 2000 dissenters on Oct. 14, 2011 made all the difference. But one month later Mayor Bloomberg showed us how far he was willing to escalate the struggle to suppress the Occupy Wall Street protests. The eviction of protesters from Liberty Square on Nov. 15, 2011 was carried out violently, under cover of darkness, and under highly questionable circumstances, via an army of police officers in riot gear, armed and organized like paramilitary troops. In an attempt to protect himself and the New York Police Department from public scrutiny, Bloomberg ordered an illegal media blackout surrounding this event. News helicopters were grounded, and fully credentialed journalists were forcibly excluded from the area despite holding NYPD-issued permits, and beaten and arrested if they resisted this expulsion (which many did, since they had both a legal right and a professional duty to cross police barricades to report the story). Weapons employed against the peaceful protesters in the square - who had been asleep when the raid commenced - included pepper spray, tear gas, night sticks and bulldozers. Many were injured. A dog was killed when a tent was crushed despite the owner's pleas that the creature be rescued. A park open to the public and filled with civilians became a war zone.

My question today is: How can we as a city accept a mayor and a police department that break the law and use violent force to prevent our fellow citizens from exercising their First Amendment rights to free speech and peaceful assembly? The Occupy Wall Street encampment was legal (which is why it was tolerated by city officials for two months); its violent clearing was illegal; the exclusion of the media was illegal; and the mayor's defying the temporary restraining order issued by the New York State Supreme Court in the early hours of Nov 15, 2011 was illegal as well. (See my last post for details of these transgressions.) Are you willing to accept violent and illegal activity on the part of those whose job it is to serve and protect you? Are you prepared to live under martial law?

The words "martial law" are generally associated with parts of the world in which citizens enjoy far fewer rights and freedoms than we do in the United States. But the loss of freedoms always starts small and escalates. If we accept the barring of journalists from places where news stories are unfolding, it's only a small step to a government-controlled media. If we permit a mayor to disregard court orders, we invite him to impinge on our legally established civil rights in other ways as well. If you object to the erosion of your rights, it is time to speak out. There is strength in numbers. Call 311 and leave a message for the mayor; send a letter to your newspaper of choice; write your opinion in large letters on a piece of cardboard and show up for a rally; and make sure all your neighbors know what is going on in their own backyard. It is time to make our voices heard.

Who Has Rights?

2011-11-16T06:49:00.081-05:00

Let's be clear: Legitimate acts of governance are not carried out under cover of darkness with a media blackout.

It's good to live in a country with a free press and elected officials who abide by the laws of the land and rule according to the will of the people. Lots of countries around the world do not have that. Some do. Some think they do. Here in the United States, for example, we used to have a much freer press than we do now. Yesterday's events on the ground in New York City, notably the violent destruction of the Occupy Wall Street encampment in the middle of the night by the New York Police Department on orders from the mayor, followed by the overwhelming failure of the local and national news media to report on the actual issues surrounding the incident, makes it very clear that the news media photo credit ©Bryan Smith
in the United States are not nearly as free as most Americans assume. We as a society are in denial about the gradual erosion of our civil liberties.

Here are some inconvenient truths for you to consider:

1. The mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg, ordered the violent eviction of Occupy Wall Street protesters to take place in the middle of the night, carried out by police in riot gear using pepper spray (and by some reports tear gas) to disable protesters. This is a protest whose legality city officials had previously acknowledged, which is why it had been allowed to remain in operation as a campsite for the previous two months.

2. Properly credentialed members of the press attempting to cover this story were arrested and in many cases driven away with physical violence by the NYPD.

3. Mayor Bloomberg and the NYPD violated a temporary restraining order issued by the Supreme Court of the State of New York that was in effect between 8:00 a.m. and 4:45 p.m. on Nov. 15. This injunction prohibited the mayor and police from barring protesters or their possessions from Zuccotti Park.

And here are some details that you probably didn't see on the news last night:

1a. The eviction was not peaceful. It was planned like a military engagement. Protesters were beaten, over 200 were arrested, any possessions they did not manage to gather in the few minutes' time they were given were seized and probably destroyed. I met one man yesterday who said his dog was taken away from him. The entire infrastructure of the occupation (kitchen, 5500-volume library [UPDATE: here's what become of that], media tent filled with electronic equipment, comfort station stocked with donated blankets, sweaters and underwear) quickly wound up in garbage trucks. The city claims that protesters wishing to reclaim their possessions can do so in the sanitation department's offices over the next two days. I don't assume much will be found there in salvageable condition. NY1 interviewed one young man yesterday who said his backpack - containing his computer and a change of clothes for a job interview this morning - was forcibly taken from him by police. My guess is that he'll never see it again. City Councilman Ydanis Rodriguez was arrested, injured by a police officer, and held for 17 hours before being allowed to speak with his lawyer. He will be holding a press conference to discuss the incident today at noon. Most of those whose rights were violated are not in a position to hold press conferences.

1b. The eviction was part of a nationally coordinated effort on the part of local governments to suppress local Occupy protests at all costs. The mayor of Oakland has admitted this. Whether or not there has been additional coordination of these evictions by federal agencies is currently unclear.

2. Suppression of the Press is a serious matter, and you'd think people would be more concerned about this. News of the beating, arrest and shutting-out of reporters during the eviction was broadcast on CNN and NY1, but not linked on their websites. But there's a brief mention of the issue in the New York Times, which I was surprised to see, since these days that paper has generally been reporting all the news Mike Bloomberg finds fit to print. The NYT said:

Reporters in the park were forced to leave. Paul J. Browne, the Police Department’s chief spokesman, said it was for their safety. But many journalists said that they had been prevented from seeing the police take action in the park, and that they had been roughly handled by officers.

Last night NY1 featured a interview with reporters holding press credentials issued by the NYPD (including Lindsey Christ of NY1) who had been prevented by the NYPD from reporting on the story. The best coverage of the media blackout I've seen thus far is by the smaller local news site DNA.info, and also on The Tech Herald. Cameraman Luke Rudkowski captured video footage of his own expulsion from the park (starting at minute 5:00), and photojournalist Graham Rayman of the Village Voice provides a blow-by-blow account of his nighttime encounter with the NYPD at Zuccotti Park. But even though the major media are not covering the blackout, make no mistake: this is a major story. For related coverage, see Truthout's excellent reporting on the Occupy Wall Street movement in general as well as a number of stories in the Daily Kos.

3. The Mayor broke the law all day on Nov. 15 by defying the temporary restraining order issued by the State Supreme Court. Perhaps you would like to read the injunction he chose to violate? All right, here's a copy. (Note that the restraining order was in effect from 8:00 a.m. until 11:30 a.m. "or as soon thereafter as counsel may be heard" - which was late afternoon). So how do you feel about having an elected official ignore a court order and use physical force to enforce its non-enforcement? In my opinion, elected officials who break the law should be asked to resign. I hereby call for Mayor Bloomberg's resignation.

So now the future of the Occupy Wall Street encampment is in the hands of the heroic volunteer lawyers who will go to court to seek redress for the violations of law and civil liberties carried out yesterday. But Mayor Bloomberg no doubt has a great deal of influence over the decisions of the local court system, and he knew what he was doing when he created a "fact on the ground" in Zuccotti Park yesterday. Even though protesters do have a legal right to occupy this property (including with tents), what use is it to have rights when armed members of the local police force are standing in front of you demanding to search your bags and person for so-called restricted items (such as sleeping bags and tents)? Zuccotti Park, which the major news media are now telling us has been "reopened," is currently surrounded by a fence, and anyone wishing to go inside must submit to a search. Will the people of New York continue to take the erosion of their freedoms lying down? I hope they will not, and fear they might.

Meanwhile, Occupy Wall Street has developed a life independent of its physical campsite, and will clearly persist even if these violations of civil liberties continue. A National Day of Action has been called for tomorrow, November 17, in coordination with Occupy movements all over the world as well as local unions. Keep an eye on the official and unofficial OWS websites for details to come later today.

Oh, and Occupy Wall Street still has a large and active Translation Working Group. We have been translating the documents of the occupation into twenty-six languages (and counting). You can read many of these documents here.

From Tunis to Berlin

2011-11-10T22:19:00.037-05:00

On Monday evening, just before leaving Europe to return to NYC, I stopped by Occupy Berlin one last time to see what had been going on in the week while I was in Poland. When I arrived with a pair of journalist/political scientist friends in tow, we had to look for a while to find the Asamblea in the dark - the lawn in front of the Reichstag is virtually unlit - but were tipped off by a bicycle adorned with a sign reading "The next spring is sure to come." When we joined the group, I was surprised to hear that the Asamblea was being conducted in French, via a skillful simultaneous interpreter. It soon became clear that the crowd of 35 or so that had gathered for the Assembly included a contingent of young North Africans who were visiting Berlin as guests of the Friedrich Ebert Foundation. These visitors, from Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria, were telling stories of the revolutions closer to home (some of them were key players in their countries' protest movements) and offering suggestions to the Berlin occupiers.

One man from Morocco who introduced himself to me a bit later told me he had been surprised to find both the manner and the matter of the protests in Berlin so similar to what he'd experienced at home. At the same time, some of the questions asked during the Asemblea brought differences to light. At least twice, for example, North African visitors asked what the demands of Berlin's Occupy were. Of course, the revolutions of the Arab Spring did come with demands: these protesters were out to depose leaders and topple governments. In New York, on the other hand, the absence of specific demands has repeatedly been cited as a strength, not a liability; lots of people think so, including Slavoj Žižek. My favorite quip about this, overheard on the Internet: "Hijackers make demands; movements get things moving." It isn't clear yet what the desiderata of the Berlin protesters will be, and whether or not actual demands will be forthcoming.

Meanwhile, the Occupy movement does appear to be encroaching on the German mainstream. Newspaper coverage is steadily increasing. I even found an article on politics and the economy in the Nov. 8 Berliner Zeitung that ended with its author, Harald Jähner, tipping his hat to the protesters: "The Occupy movement has so far managed to steer clear of the traditional thought patterns of the old Left and is fighting to save capitalism from capital. This would be doing our democracy quite a service indeed."

As the Asamblea continued, there was a lot of talk about the encampment at Klosterstrasse 66 (on private property owned by a church somewhere in the hinterlands behind Alexanderplatz) and the working groups currently putting together the Berlin movement's ideological backbone. Since the ones doing pretty much all the talking were a core group of loud and well-spoken men, one of the visitors, a Tunisian woman wearing a headscarf, spoke up to ask whether it was the custom in Berlin for only the men to talk. She pointed out that in her country, women had protested hard for the right to be heard, and she certainly expected women to have that right in Germany as well. After this, the interpreter (who had somehow wound up running the meeting, which was thus being conducted without the "progressive stack" generally in use at Berlin's Asambleas) started recognizing more women to speak, including me.

From what I can see, the main order of business in Berlin these days is figuring out what the movement wants to be and what it will stand for. It's clear that economic inequalities will be a central issue, as they are in the U.S.

Occupy Berlin is also clearly committed - more than its American counterparts - to forging alliances with other Occupy movements in other countries. And translation pays an enormous role in this. Early on, organizers began to incorporate simultaneous interpretation into English, Spanish, and French in their Asambleas, providing areas in which visitors can sit to hear the human mike become a bilingual mike. This is certainly something that might be tried out at Occupy Wall Street as well, though at Liberty Plaza a regular spanish-language Asamblea General is held each Sunday at 5:00 p.m. I look forward to watching Occupy Berlin continue to develop and seeing what else we can learn from international Occupy movements here in New York.

Three Four Great Translation Events in NYC

2011-11-02T04:26:00.013-04:00

I’m on the road (currently in Kraków for the Conrad Festival) and not in a position to blog in as much detail as I would prefer, but I wanted to be sure to draw your attention to three excellent translation events coming up in New York over the next week in the Bridge Series (or in collaboration with it). The first one is tonight! I really wish I could attend all of these, but I won’t get back from Europe in time.

1. Wednesday Nov. 2, 7:00 p.m:
Arvind Krishna Mehrotra and Jason Grunebaum, both respected translators from the Hindi, will read from their work and speak at McNally Jackson Books (52 Prince Street). Jason has a smart, thoughtful article on translating Uday Prakash in a volume on translation I’m co-editing with Esther Allen for Columbia UP, and Mehrotra is a distinguished translator of many works. This should be a great conversation. More info here.

2. Thursday Nov. 3, 7:00 p.m:
Did you know that William Carlos Williams translated from the Spanish? Poet and translator Jonathan Cohen has just edited By Word of Mouth: Poems from the Spanish by William Carlos Williams, 1916-1959 for New Directions and will be at the Americas Society (680 Park Avenue) on Thursday to present the book. He will be joined by poet and critic Julio Marzan and ND editor Declan Spring. Admission is free, but reservations are required. More info here.

3. Friday, Nov. 4, 7:00 p.m.:
Three of the most illustrious editors of translations in NYC - Drenka Willen, Barbara Epler and John Siciliano - will be coming together to speak about the process of acquiring, editing and promoting translations. I’ve spoken at length with all three about translation and worked several times with the brilliant Barbara Epler (whose editorial touch verges on the miraculous), and if there’s anything about the topic these three don’t know, it’s probably not worth knowing. This event will be held at The Center for Fiction at 17 East 47th St. (between Fifth and Madison). More info here.

4. Wednesday, Nov. 9, 7:30 p.m.:
The Center for the Art of Translation in San Francisco is having its NYC launch event for the forthcoming TWO LINES volume entitled Counterfeits. Luc Sante (a co-editor on the volume) will be MC'ing, with translators Patrick Philips, Alex Zucker, Alyson Waters, and Adam Giannelli, plus author Magdaléna Platzová reading - a great line-up! This night of literature from Egypt, the Czech Republic, Argentina, and more is being co-produced at McNally Jackson Books (52 Prince Street) by the Bridge Series. Wine reception to follow. Sure wish I could be there. More info here.

Berlin's Multilingual Occupy

2011-10-30T05:49:00.015-04:00

Yesterday I spent the afternoon at Occupy Berlin, an Occupy that's been growing since October 15. Among other things, I learned that the Berliners have made it a priority to provide simultaneous interpretation at their General Assemblies (which they have dubbed Asambleas in tribute to the Spanish protesters who inspired many of the new European Occupy movements). At yesterday's Asamblea, a young Frenchman (to judge by the accent) got up and asked for all the translators present to come see him right away, and three minutes later he had set up areas of the assembly where people could sit to enjoy simultaneous translation into Spanish, French or English. Now, most of the translators who reported for duty said they had no experience with interpreting, so I think they were no doubt faced with quite a challenge (interpreting with the human mike blaring all around); but nonetheless I think the Berlin Occupy is right to make simultaneous interpretation a priority, since so many of the people in attendance were clearly not speakers of German. In fact, I heard a lot of English around me, including at the "Occupy Snack Bar" (where at least one American was serving lunch) and earlier at the "meditation flash mob" run by an American yogini.
At Occupy Wall Street in New York, Spanish-language assemblies are now regularly held, and it is worth returning to the question of whether we should be doing more to accommodate foreign-language visitors to OWS than just - as is currently planned for some time in the near future - making available written materials in multiple languages. The idea is to create an on-site printing station where foreign-language versions of e.g. the Declaration of the Occupation and the Occupied Wall Street Journal can be printed on demand, though I assume it'll be some weeks before this plan becomes a reality.
Meanwhile, if you're curious about what's been happening at Occupy Berlin, you can read my report on it here.

The Ball is Rolling

2011-10-24T20:10:00.011-04:00

Woe is me, I'm about to leave the country for 12 days, and right now is the most exciting time ever to be right here in New York City. Every day since Occupy Wall Street started up has been an adventure. The learning curve for the Translation Working Group has been steep, but now we've learned some things, and our teams of translators are hard at work turning out the documentary literature of the revolution. We're still getting the kinks worked out with regard to getting all these foreign-language materials posted on the brand-new OWS website, but this will be straightened out soon. I just wrote about our current work for the PEN American Center's blog - where, among other things, I point out that we could still use more help, so if you're reading this and can translate well from English into another language, you know what to do: let us sign you up!

Yesterday Judith Butler spoke at the satellite OWS meeting atWashington Square Park, and the General Assembly held there immediately thereafter decided that thrice-weekly GAs would be held at the park until further notice, i.e. until a subsequent GA makes a different plan - one of the principles of this movement being that everything is continually in flux.

I should also point out that woe is not exactly me. I'm about to spend some time in my beloved Berlin and then travel on to Kraków for the Conrad Festival, which is giving some particular love to Robert Walser this year. Since they're flying me over, they're putting me to work, having me speak three times, which should be exhausting but also stimulating and exciting. I love Poland, and haven't been since February 1992, when I made a two-week trek through the country with a friend and, among other things, developed an appreciation for the custom of downing a flavored vodka at 11:00 a.m. Poland is pretty cold in February. The vodka doesn't make it any less cold, but it does make you forget to monitor the progress of your frostbite.

What's in Dovlatov's Suitcase

2011-10-24T19:27:00.010-04:00

Translationista has been receiving a lot of books for review lately, and since I don't have time to write all the reviews myself these days, I'm starting to invite a select group of translation-savvy guest reviewers to speak their minds on this blog. Here is the first such review, from the pen of Adam Z. Levy.
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In March 1989, a short story called “The Photo Album” appeared in The New Yorker, written by Russian émigré Sergei Dovlatov. The story was his eighth to appear in the magazine and the second to recount the less-than-romantic circumstances under which he met his wife, Lena. In this version, it is Election Day in Leningrad. The narrator, also a man named Sergei Dovlatov and no enthusiast of the Soviet electoral process, writes, “I was in no hurry. I had skipped voting about three times already. And not out of dissident considerations, either — rather, out of an abhorrence for meaningless acts.”

If a Dovlatovian ethos exists, perhaps this last line summarizes it to a T, for it is meaninglessness, or perhaps an absurdity that Sergei takes for meaninglessness, that defines and enlivens the odd situations into which he constantly finds himself thrown. In the “The Photo Album,” what finally rouses Sergei from his mother’s apartment and his lazy, bathrobed state is the arrival of Lena, a canvasser. “She looked like a school teacher,” he says. “That is, a bit of an old maid.” Instead of voting, he escorts her to the movies, then to the Writers’ House, where Sergei hopes they will run into someone famous enough to impress Lena. But the evening’s selection of literary celebrities is unremarkable. He recognizes and is recognized by no one. Finally, he spots a writer named Danchkovsky: “In a pinch, he could be called famous.” “I lowered my voice and whispered to Elena Borisovna, ‘Look, Danchkovsky himself! Wild success . . . sure to win the Lenin Prize.’ Danchkovsky headed for the corner farthest from the jukebox. As he passed us, he slowed down. I raised my glass familiarly. Danchkovsky, without a greeting, said clearly, ‘I read your humor piece in Aurora. It’s crap.’”

To those familiar with Dovlatov’s stories, the bullet points of his biography should come as no surprise. Born in 1941 in the Soviet Republic of Bashkiria to an Armenian mother and a half-Jewish father, he spent most of his life in Leningrad, where he flunked out of the University, worked as a prison guard for the Soviet Army, and found “hackwork” as a journalist at various newspapers and magazines, until he was expelled some years later by the Union of Journalists. After failing to publish in the Soviet Union and facing intense harassment from the government, he emigrated to New York in 1979, where he published twelve books before his untimely death in 1990, at the age of 48. One month later, his collection The Suitcase appeared in English, containing a revised version of “The Photo Album.”

After languishing for two decades in relative obscurity, The Suitcase was re-released this year by Counterpoint Press, in an expert translation by Antonina W. Bouis. The collection is Dovlatov at his finest. “I looked at the empty suitcase,” he writes in the foreword. “On the bottom was Karl Marx. On the lid was Brodsky. And between them, my lost, precious, only life.” In the stories that follow, each named for the various items in the suitcase that accompanied him across the Atlantic, Dovlatov offers a wonderfully irreverent, comic view of Soviet life with what his friend and poet Joseph Brodsky called the “muted common sense of his work.” But beneath the humorous surface runs a deep empathy and sadness on which his stories often turn.

At the end of “The Photo Album,” after coming across his own photograph among a box of his wife Lena’s things, Sergei says, “I was morbidly agitated. It was hard for me to concentrate, to understand the cause. I saw that everything going on in our lives was for real. If I was feeling that for the first time only now, then how much love had been lost over the long years?” Such moments, perhaps for their very humanity in the face of alienation and absurdity, give the impression that there is more of Babel coursing through Dovlatov’s work than, say, of Gogol.

What then is the task of the translator of Dovlatov? On first glance, it may seem like a simple one. His sentences are short, his diction colloquial and uncomplicated. And yet, it is all too easy for humorous, economical prose like Dovlatov’s to wind up less humorous and economical than in the original. In this regard, Antonina W. Bouis, who is the second translator of Dovlatov’s work after the wonderful Anne Frydman, does an impressive job. She has also translated Dovlatov’s novel A Foreign Woman, as well as countless other books from the Russian.

In The Suitcase, Bouis manages to give each sentence a certain sturdiness that does not weigh down the reading or render the prose clunky. Rather, there is a fluidity to her translation that maintains both Dovlatov’s deliberateness and comic lightness. (“I stared at the file. I felt what a pig might feel in the meat section of a deli.”) If there is anything lost in the translation, it is only Dovlatov’s tendency, as mentioned in an earlier post, not to use two words in the same sentence that begin with the same letter. But Bouis’ decision to discard this quirky feature of his prose along the way seems like a smart one. What we are left with is a sharp, witty book pulled out from the closet, like Dovlatov’s suitcase, and much deserving of its second release.

Adam Z. Levy lives in New York and teaches creative writing at Columbia University.

Occupy Robert Walser

2011-10-21T12:29:00.007-04:00

Translationista apologizes for the long delay since she last posted - she has been running around organizing a large group of translators for Occupy Wall Street, and it's been a big commitment. Translationista is too tired to write in the first person. No, wait a minute, that sounds all wrong. OK, here I am. Let me try to speak like a person who has two brain cells to rub together. The work for OWS has been inspiring, thrilling, and a continual source of joy. It makes me so happy that a group of us have been able to come together to give voice - LOUDLY - to some of the main things wrong with how our democracy has been working. I'm all for capitalism, but not for plutocracy, and I think the OWS movement has put its finger on the crucial difference between them. The fact that this message is suddenly being picked up in the media and heard, after many years of being marginalized and ignored, feels triumphant.

Meanwhile I've been delving away at projects of my own. Last week I turned in the page proofs for my translation of Robert Walser's Berlin Stories, which will be out this coming January. Watch this space for announcements regarding the launch party. And just this morning I finished a very curious project: A revision (by me) of a masterful translation (by Christopher Middleton) of Robert Walser's long story "Der Spaziergang" (The Walk), originally dating from 1917. Back when Middleton translated this story, in 1955 - when he was much younger than I am now - he didn't realize that Walser had later produced a much-revised version of the same story, published in 1920 in Seeland (Lake Country), a collection of novellas and longer stories. Since it wasn't until the 1970s that the first scholarly editions of Walser's work began to appear, it's quite understandable that Middleton - who was relying on first editions he found at antiquarian bookshops in Zurich, where he was living at the time - didn't know about the revision.

So now I've combed through every page of this sixty-page novella (there are changes to nearly every sentence - tiny ones, for the most part), and have tweaked and adjusted line after line of Middleton's gorgeous translation to make it correspond to the revised version of the story. It was a lot of work, and also fascinating. Middleton is a very different translator from me, but I think his work is stupendously good, so it was wonderful to have the opportunity to "occupy" it, i.e. to study it so closely.

I just turned the manuscript in to my editor at New Directions, along with a preface (or possibly afterword) I wrote about the story and my revision of it. Look for it a few months from now in ND's lovely Pearl Series.

And meanwhile: Power to the People!

David Bellos to Speak at Bridge Series

2011-10-10T13:20:00.010-04:00

Translation aficionados of NYC, you are hereby informed that the illustrious and ever-entertaining translator and translation scholar David Bellos will be appearing in the Bridge Series this coming Thursday to talk about his just-out book Is That a Fish in Your Ear?: Translation and the Meaning of Everything.I just got my copy and can't wait to dive into it, though given the way this week is looking, I probably won't have read much of it before Bridge on Thursday. This week is all about getting a Walser manuscript and a set of page proofs turned in, along with teaching and keeping up with various Occupy Wall Street projects via the Translation Working Group of the General Assembly. But seeing Bellos speak is high priority. As I just heard Esther Allen say of him, "David's on the side of the angels." He knows a huge amount about translation and translation history, and I always learn surprisingly relevant arcane facts from him. He's also just plain fun to listen to. I've discussed this here before. If you still don't believe me, here's some evidence.
So I hope to see you there. There, in this case, being McNally Jackson Books at 52 Prince St., Thursday, Oct. 13, 7:00 p.m.

Translationista Needs an OWS Intern!

2011-10-06T15:13:00.013-04:00

What a week it's been. On Tuesday afternoon a call came in from the editor of the Occupied Wall Street Journal asking whether it would be possible to publish a Spanish-language edition of the Journal over the weekend; to do this, every last sentence contained in the issue would have to exist in edited Spanish translation by Thursday - i.e. today. I wasn't sure it could be done, but I started talking to all the kind and generous Spanish-language translators from all over the world who had volunteered to help out, and, unbelievably, the complete text of the newspaper was ready to go to press a mere 36 hours later. The translators collaborated, checking over and editing each others' work, and the texts prepared by a handful of very dedicated translators from Spain (a country that's seen its own share of economic woes and protests lately) were vetted for Latin American audiences by translators from that part of the world. The product of this miraculous cooperation is scheduled to hit the Occupied Wall Street newsstand on Monday morning. And if you haven't yet seen a copy of the original English-language Journal (with articles by Chris Hedges and other outstanding volunteer journalists), check it out online. Issue #2 should be arriving any day now.
Meanwhile you won't be surprised to hear that organizing a large group of translators is a lot of work, and I wound up doing it pretty much on my own this week because there just wasn't time to arrange to delegate any of the labor. But now that the OWS Spanish Translation Working Group is up and running, it's time to set up the French Translation Working Group, the Arabic Translation Working Group, etc. And to tackle that huge organizational task, I could really use an intern or two. These should be patient, detail-oriented, web-savvy individuals in the NYC area who care deeply enough about the work of Occupy Wall Street to feel good about donating their time to the cause. If you're interested in helping out, drop me a note and introduce yourself.

And if you are interested in joining our ever-growing ranks of volunteer translators able to translate out of English into all the languages of the world, please get in touch! You don't have to be in NYC or even in the country to participate. The more of us there are, the less work there will be for any one person. The Occupy Wall Street movement has gone from tiny to enormous in three short weeks, and the reason it has grown so quickly is that it represents a sort of truth-telling that has been marginalized by the corporate mass media in the United States. For the first two weeks, the mainstream media refused to report on OWS, or did so only dismissively. Now the movement has grown to the point where it cannot be ignored, and it has touched a lot of chords both here and abroad. We are translating its messages both for the sake of foreign-language communities here at home and for our friends around the world. We would love to have you join us.

P.S. Update Oct. 10: I now have an intern helping out with general operations (whew), but still need someone Internet-savvy (preferably with basic website programming skills) to liaison with the Internet Working Group on behalf of the Translation Working Group.

Occupy Wall Street Translations Go Online

2011-10-03T11:35:00.012-04:00

This last week has been a whirlwind of activity. The Occupy Wall Street movement is slowly but surely making its way into the mainstream. The Wall Street Journal reported on it today. I just heard Brian Lehrer on WNYC describe the movement as the "progressive equivalent to the Tea Party." Bernie Sanders has stated his support. And the absurd arrests of 700 protesters (including a lot of union members) marching across the Brooklyn Bridge in solidarity on Saturday has only brought more national attention to the movement. At the end of last week, the General Assembly issued its first official communiqué, the Declaration of the Occupation (which, as Brian Lehrer said by way of praise, reminded him of the Declaration of Independence). And now the first edition of the Occupation's newspaper has been published, The Occupied Wall Street Journal. Not surprisingly, the paper copies went like hotcakes. They're expecting a new shipment in today, so if you want one, better get down there fast. Or, if you're content to partake online, I've uploaded a copy for your reading pleasure.

Over the past several days, the other members of the Translation Working Group of the General Assembly and I have assembled a stalwart crew of translators who are busy translating the Declaration into many different languages; their work is already being posted online on pages linked to the Declaration's main site. But we still need more translators. We still have no one for Chinese, Korean, Japanese or Hindi. We could use more Russian translators. We could use more translators in all sorts of languages. (Note: we need translators who can translate out of English into other languages at this point, not the other way around.) If you'd like to join us, please e-mail me.

The Revolution Will Be Translated

2011-09-29T17:06:00.048-04:00

Those of you who rely on corporate-sponsored media for your news may not realize that a non-violent occupation of Wall Street has been in progress since Sept. 17, 2011. The occupiers, whose number quickly grew from several dozen to several hundred present at any given time, are protesting on a broad platform of interrelated issues. Most (but not all) have to do with the privilege and power enjoyed by large corporations in our current economic and political landscape: corporate welfare (bailouts, enormous tax breaks), disproportionate political representation and the many forms of social, political and economic injustice that result. The General Assembly (as the occupation calls itself, though the handle "Occupy Wall Street" is also often heard), is devoted to the principle of direct democracy and rejects top-down leadership. And so the group's self-definition - as represented by such things as a statement of purpose and a list of demands - is a work-in-progress being collectively composed at twice-daily meetings called GAs or general assemblies.

As the official website of the NYC GA (itself a work-in-progress) explains, "New York City General Assemblies are an open, participatory and horizontally organized process through which we are building the capacity to constitute ourselves in public as autonomous collective forces within and against the constant crises of our times." The assemblies, along with the ever-growing number of Working Groups whose preparatory work feeds into them, are open to the public - in fact the public is encouraged to attend and become part of the process. The easiest way to get involved is just to show up for a GA - they're held daily at 1:00 p.m. and 7:00 p.m. near the northeast corner of Liberty Plaza (a.k.a. Zuccotti Park), a square bordered by Broadway just a few blocks north of Wall Street. You will be astonished by the effectiveness of the "people's mike" (human voices substituting for electrically amplified sound, which would require a police permit) and by the seriousness of the occupation's goals and participants. Many have traveled across the country to take part. And many smart and influential people are taking the occupation very seriously. When I showed up this afternoon, both David Patterson and Cornel West were there. Last night I heard Russell Simmons when he dropped by to visit the General Assembly, and Michael Moore was in attendance as well, filming a program about the occupation for Lawrence O'Donnell's show on MSNBC. The police have taken the movement seriously too, resulting in several horrifying incidents of obvious abuse and brutality last Saturday afternoon (slamming a press photographer's head against the bumper of a car, blasting pepper-spray in the faces of young women standing peacefully on the sidewalk) - abuses carried out largely if not exclusively by high-ranking officers. There is a protest march from Liberty Plaza to One Police Plaza planned for 4:00 p.m. tomorrow. But protesting police brutality is only a small part of the occupation's work.

And now a Working Group for Translation has been created, with the mission of organizing the translation of key GA materials into as many of the languages spoken in the greater NYC area as possible. These materials will then be available both for local use and, via the GA's website, to people around the world interested in what we are doing. I am proud to be a member of this Working Group, which has no leader but, like the rest of the GA, works by consensus. Several of us met today and decided that our most urgent task was preparing documents for the big solidarity march planned for this coming Saturday; it will begin at Liberty Plaza at 3:00 p.m. and end with a donated picnic on the other side of the Brooklyn Bridge, with special guests including Amiri Baraka. A flyer is in preparation for that event, and when it's released we're hoping we can get it translated into at least Spanish and Mandarin in time to be printed up beforehand. But for the longer range we are hoping to assemble a large pool of translators, representing as many different languages as possible, who are interested enough in the work of the occupation to be willing to donate their time and skills to translate at least some of the GA's most important documents as they are released. This is where YOU come in. If you would like to volunteer your services to help the occupation, please e-mail me your contact information as well as the language(s) you can translate. At this point we are looking primarily for translators who can translate out of English into other languages, not the other way around. A web page that will allow for easy downloading and uploading of these documents is in the works.

We would also like - for Saturday's march, i.e. ASAP - to assemble a handbill containing the slogan for the march ("Join the 99% of us who want to take back our country from the 1% who stole it") in as many different languages as possible. If you are able and willing to translate this sentence, please do so in the Comments section below this blog entry (and please specify the name of the language, in case it's one I might not recognize). Your participation is much appreciated. Power to the people!

G.J. Racz at Americas Society Tonight

2011-09-27T14:44:00.010-04:00

Gregary J. Racz, vice-president of the American Literary Translators Association and professor at Long Island University, will be appearing tonight at the Americas Society along with internationally acclaimed Peruvian poet Eduardo Chirinos to mark the publication of Reasons for Writing Poetry (Salt Publishing), the first collection of Chirinos's poems to appear in English. The book includes poems drawn from nearly 30 years of poetic production. Chirinos is the author of sixteen books of poetry in addition to volumes of academic criticism, essays, translations, and children’s books. Racz's previous translations from the Spanish include, most recently, Life Is a Dream by Pedro Calderón de la Barca, published by Penguin Classics.

The Americas Society is located at 680 Park Avenue. The book presentation will take place at 7:00 p.m., followed by a reception. And it'll end in plenty of time for you to get down to Wall Street to join the occupation for an hour or two.

Generation Telephone?

2011-09-24T08:56:00.002-04:00

These days every time I turn around it seems there’s a new literary magazine popping up with a strong translation angle, for the most part run by folks at least half a generation younger than I am. This is so good to see. I’m particularly taken with Telephone, which commissions half a dozen competing translations of poems by a single author for each issue, highlighting the artistry of the translators as well as the poet, but many other new journals are also worthy of note, and I should blog about them soon. Meanwhile, though, I’d like to share a few remarks on the new generation of translators that I just published on The Daily PEN American, the new blog of the PEN American Center. Among other things, I brag on two of my students from Columbia University. To read my thoughts on Generation T (T for Translation, of course), click here.

Onesies and Twosies at the Brooklyn Book Festival

2011-09-18T22:39:00.013-04:00

What a beautiful day it was for a festival. It felt celebratory to walk around in the sunshine among the outdoor tables and booths, a sort of street fair of books. Lots of book swag too. The best item I spotted was the One Story onesie. Get it? Onesie! Like the way each issue of One Story contains only a single story. One Story is one of my favorite magazines these days - I discover a lot of new writers to love by reading it. My recent favorite is Nalini Jones's story "Tiger," which I liked so much I'm having my students read it.

And I learned by hearing Sergei Dovlatov's translator Antonina Bouis speak on a panel at Borough Hall that Dovlatov never used two words starting with the same letter in a single sentence, at least in the books of his she translated. This turns out, she said, to be impossible to replicate in translation, though I wonder what Gilbert Adair, the translator of Georges Perec's lipogram novel A Void, would say to that. But Perec's work is so much more overtly experimental in form than Dovlatov's that perhaps the syntactic contortions necessary to pull off such a feat would change the tenor of the books too much. I wonder if this avoidance of alliteration makes Dovlatov stylistically the opposite of Dostoevsky; historian Solomon Volkov, who was also on the panel, remarked on the preponderance of sibilant consonants in Dostoevsky's work and quipped that translating him is like translating the wind.

Moderator Alla Makeeva-Roylance (filling in for Eugene Ostashevsky) asked Bouis how she went about capturing the cultural, historical, and political context in sentences such as "He was wearing blue jeans made in Poland, just like me." After all, it's hard for an American reader to decode all the connotations, in a Soviet context, of Polish denim. Bouis replied quite reasonably that you can decide to make your translation a scholarly edition of the text, providing copious footnotes for every reference, but that she prefers to do without, even though this means that certain nuances will be lost. "You can't explain everything," she added, but then also pointed out that readers of old books in their own language might run into the same sorts of problems with not understanding the context for certain images and ideas. "If you keep explaining things, they stop being funny." And so every translation is a compromise.

This panel on Dovlatov was the only one of the BBF translation-themed panels I was able to attend, but I was very glad I went. Dovlatov's widow said a few words, and Brooklyn-based Russian-American writer Anya Ulinich spoke beautifully about what Dovlatov's work had meant to her growing up and as a young writer.

And the best news of the afternoon? Antonina Bouis is at work on a new translation of Mikhail Bulgakov's short novel A Dog's Heart. I can't wait.

Translators at the Brooklyn Book Festival

2011-09-17T22:44:00.032-04:00

The 2011 Brooklyn Book Festival will take place all day tomorrow (Sunday, Sept. 18), and it promises to be a beautiful early-autumn day. Pack a sweater and go out to see and hear some wonderful writers reading from and speaking about their work, signing their books, and mingling with the crowd. You can also hear some wonderful translators. Unfortunately the translators' contingent is marginalized in this year's Festival program, so here's your Insider's Guide to Translation at the BBF:

1:00 p.m. Borough Hall Community Room (209 Joralemon Street)
"Walker in the City"
Sergio Chejfec (author of My Two Worlds) will be appearing together with his translator Margaret B. Carson (whose name appears in red here because she was omitted from the BBF program) as well as Teju Cole and Geoff Nicholson. Chejfec and Carson read together this past week as part of the Bridge Series, so this is your second chance to catch their pas de deux if you missed them the first time. Moderated by Edmund White.

2:00 p.m. Borough Hall Community Room (209 Joralemon Street)
"Words and Music"
Israeli poet Shimon Adaf will be appearing together with Alina Simone, Julian Gough, and Kevin Young. It is unclear whether or not he will be joined by his (uncredited) translator. Moderated by David Kaufman.

3:00 p.m. Borough Hall Community Room (209 Joralemon Street)
"Remembering Sergei Dovlatov"
I hope it isn't only because Dovlatov (1941 - 1990) is no longer with us that his translator Antonina Bouis features prominently in the description of this panel. I hope the panel will also pay tribute to Dovlatov's previous translator Anne Frydman, who died in 2009. I met Frydman in the mid-1980s when I was studying with her husband, Stephen Dixon, and found her very lovely and inspiring. She was just beginning to suffer from the multiple sclerosis that would eventually take her life. Bouis will be joined on the program by Anya Ulinich, Solomon Volkov (another of Bouis's translatees), and Eugene Ostashevsky, a wonderful poet who is himself a splendid translator from the Russian.

I would add two others to the list as well:

11:00 a.m. St. Francis Volpe Library (180 Remsen Street)
"Arab Spring and the Seasons Ahead"
Sinan Antoon, an Iraqi-born writer who teaches at NYU, is also one of the English-language translators of Mahmoud Darwish. He will be appearing together with Hisham Matar and Yasmine El Rashidi. Moderated by Adam Shatz.

2:00 p.m. Borough Hall Courtroom (209 Joralemon Street)
"Drawn from History"
Esmerelda Santiago, a Puerto Rican author who writes in English and translates her own books into Spanish, will be appearing together with John Sayles and Terese Svoboda. Moderated by Marlon James.

Complete program here. Enjoy the beautiful day of books in beautiful Booklyn!

The Three Percent Problem

2011-09-16T12:56:00.037-04:00

So Three Percent, the great website and blog devoted to literature in translation and the travails of publishing it, is now four. Happy birthday! As readers of this blog probably already know, 3% is the estimated average percentage of books sold in the U.S. that are works in translation (as opposed to the 30% - 60% typical in Europe, for example). Three Percent is the brainchild of Chad Post (founder and publisher of Open Letter Books), who used to write all the content on the site himself; but now an entire host of bloggers and reviewers have added their voices, making it one of the best single sources of information about publishing literature in translation in this country. Chad is also the mastermind of the Best Translated Book Award, which honors two translated books each year - poetry and fiction - with cash prizes to both translator and author.

Today marks the release of the Big Book of Three Percent (my title), an e-book which is officially being sold under the title The Three Percent Problem: Rants and Responses on Publishing, Translation, and the Future of Reading. This volume collects the best of Chad's posts arranged so as to provide, in the words of the official press release, "an introduction to the contemporary publishing world. Ranging from pieces about the economics of publishing literature in translation, to explanation of the very different publishing scenes found in different countries, to profiles of translators, to mini-rants about book marketing, technology, and 99 cent ebooks, The Three Percent Problem is kind of like Andre Schiffrin's The Business of Books, but with more swearing (and jokes)."

That sounded good to me, as did the $2.99 price tag. I don't own an e-book reader, so I downloaded Amazon's free "Kindle for Mac" software to be able to read (browse, dip into) the book on my computer. They offer this softwarefor PCs and several other devices as well, for what it's worth.
Today is an especially good day to buy this book, since Chad is hoping that a quick rush of sales will bump the book's Amazon ratings up to the point where it will get noticed by people who aren't already interested in translation - meaning, I would say, people who don't yet realize they are interested in translation. In my experience, most people do tend to find the subject at least mildly mind-blowing once they start thinking about it.
Chad notes that, as an added bonus, 100% of the proceeds from the sale of this book "will go directly to paying translators." Now, I can't help finding this a tricky way of putting things, particularly as the subject line of the promotional e-mail he sent around reads "Help Support Translators." It's not as if the money from the sale of this e-book is going into a special welfare fund for downtrodden multilinguals; rather, the proceeds will no doubt go toward paying honoraria to translators employed by Open Letter Books, which would be contractually obliged to pay them for their work in any case. In other words, the money is in fact going to the publisher. But of course this claim about where the money is going does implicitly make the quite valid point that literature can't get translated unless publishers can pay translators, and to do this they need to sell books. Such as this one. Which I would say, based on my long-time enjoyment of Chad's informative posts on Three Percent, will be an important reference work to have kicking around your garret, for whenever you need the inside scoop on how this or that part of the publishing world works. Above all the translation publishing world. Including the dirt. And at $2.99 it's cheaper than a latte. I just bought one. Would you do the same?

Blogging for PEN

2011-09-15T21:47:00.014-04:00

The PEN American Center has just launched its new blog feature - The Daily PEN American - which will offer posts by a number of hands on a range of topics having to do with international literature. I've been asked to contribute entries pertaining, not surprisingly, to translation. I started out with a post about an article from the linguistic journal Language that was recently written up in TIME Magazine. The article describes a study at the Université de Lyon that quantified the speed at which people speak. And something that many of us always impressionistically believed turns out to be empirically true: Certain languages tend to be spoken faster than others. To learn more about why and how, visit my blog on the PEN website, and while you're there, check out all the other interesting things the PEN bloggers are writing about.

The Next Bridge is El Puente

2011-09-13T11:05:00.010-04:00

For the first time ever, the Bridge Series, which presents readings by and conversations between translators in NYC, will be hosting an author/translator/editor trio. Come hear Argentine author Sergio Chejfec read from and talk about his novel My Two Worlds with translator Margaret Carson and the book's editor, E.J. Van Lanen of Open Letter Books. Chejfec, who has published numerous books (novels, poetry, essays) teaches in the Creative Writing in Spanish program at NYU. My Two Worlds is his first book to be translated into English.

Bridge has been going strong ever since it was started last winter by translator Bill Martin and editor Sal Robinson and is an important resource for anyone interested in the art of translation. It brings together outstanding figures in the field in an intimate setting that fosters conversation. This Bridge will be held at its usual venue, McNally Jackson Books at 52 Prince Street. Thursday Sept. 15, 7:00 p.m.

9/11, a Translator's View

2011-09-11T09:01:00.018-04:00

Yesterday morning I wrote on The Berlin Blog - a blog I started writing when I was spending more time in Berlin than I do now - about what it felt like to be living in Berlin on September 11, 2001. Almost immediately after posting the piece, I received a query from the online journal of international literature Words without Borders asking whether I would like to write something for them on the topic. And immediately I realized that I had only begun to scratch the surface of what I had to say about that year spent on sabbatical in Berlin - about the way the sadness of that September became tied up with the works I was writing about and translating, above all in the case of Peter Szondi's Celan Studies. This was a book Peter Szondi began writing out of grief after his beloved friend Paul Celan took his own life in 1970. Szondi, who himself suffered from depression, did not live to see the completion of this project. He died by his own hand in Berlin a year and a half later, leaving one of the book's essays, "Eden," unfinished. "Eden" maps out a reading steeped in despair. It is an essay about Celan's poem "Du liegst im großen Gelausche..." - a poem that is paradoxically, between the lines, an invitation to suicide. Paradoxically: because the argument the poem makes is that one's death will make no difference in the world, in fact it will not even be noticed. The poem concludes with the lines, "The Landwehr Canal will not murmur. / Nothing / stops." The Landwehr Canal in Berlin is where the soldiers who murdered Rosa Luxemburg in 1919 - after holding her for several hours at the ironically named Hotel Eden - dumped her body. And the two last words of Celan's poem come from Georg Büchner's great play Dantons Tod (The Death of Danton) about how the French Revolution, which began in idealism and valor, devolved into murderous chaos; they are spoken by the wife of one of Danton's slain confederates as she expresses her shock and horror that even after his death the world can go on as before. This was powerful material to be translating and writing about in the wake of the terrorist attacks that September. And my year in Berlin ended just as sadly as it began, when my friend and mentor William Weaver - the great translator of Italo Calvino, Umberto Eco, Italo Svevo and many others - suffered a massive stroke. All the sadness of that year brought together personal, professional and political concerns. Here is what I wrote for Words without Borders about this year of loss.

The Translator's Playbook

2011-09-04T00:13:00.049-04:00

One of the many reasons why reading the newspaper has become so depressing in recent years is that one inevitably gets bludgeoned repeatedly with the same fixed phrases that the Republican Party uses to control the discourse around so many issues. I remember when the "Republican Playbook" was leaked around a decade ago and parts were read out on NPR. The political strategists who had dreamed up this playbook, or phrase book, were astonishingly detail-oriented, providing instructions that might go something like this: "Never use the phrase 'stem cell' without putting the word 'embryonic' in front of it." Lo and behold, many of the people who heard this phrase every time they turned on the news became convinced that stem cell research kills babies. And have you ever heard the medical procedure "intact dilation and extraction" referred to as anything other than "partial birth abortion" or, at best, as "the procedure referred to by its opponents as 'partial-birth abortion'"? People on the Republican team stayed on message until the news media decided (shamefully capitulating) that it would be too difficult to use any other term to describe the procedure. The Democratic Party is home to a wide range of diverging views expressed in a variety of discourses, with the result that Team Democrat produces fewer pert sound bites and memes to shape the public imagination ("Yes we can" being a noteworthy exception).

Like the Democratic Party, literary translators are a motley crew who hold a wide range of views on translation and its relationship to writing that, among other things, reflect the views on translation held by the literary establishment at large. I am currently teaching literary translation to graduate students in an outstanding creative writing MFA program in which the conviction that translation is a form of writing is so firmly rooted that translation is one of the "tracks" the MFA students can choose to major in, along with fiction, poetry and playwriting. Most MFA programs in translation in this country are segregated from the creative writing programs at their institutions. But translation is a form of writing, and it is a form that illuminates as well as imitates the text being translated. As I have discussed before in this blog (here for example), the translator has a singular, subjective power to shape and present an author's text, defining style, tone and nuance. There is no such thing as a neutral translation, and I see this as a cause for celebration.

And so it distresses me when translators run around badmouthing their profession in places of high visibility. There's certainly a long tradition of translator disclaimers, since the notion of translation as derivative writing has long produced a certain ambivalence in its practitioners. I still love Friedrich Leopold von Stolberg's comment prefacing his 1778 German edition of the Iliad: "Dear reader, learn Greek and throw my translation in the fire." He's right to point out that reading any given text in the original is infinitely preferable to reading it in translation. On the other hand, reading literature in translation is infinitely preferable to not being able to read it at all. And translators themselves, immersed in the torturous minutiae of their work, are often the first to lose sight of this fact. But even when you, the translator, despair of your ability to create even an adequate - much less glorious - translation of a work you love, please don't allow yourself to indulge in self-doubt to the point of going on record saying that translation is a waste of time. Always check the appropriate page of the Translator's Playbook before you speak to the press.

Because if you snark about your profession, rest assured that the ladies and gentlemen of the press will run with it. How could they resist? I was so disappointed to see the interview podcast and blurb the New Yorker ran this week on their website, featuring Jay Rubin, who translated "Town of Cats" by Haruki Murakami, which appears in the Sept. 5 issue of the magazine. The short text introducing the podcast offers to show us "why Rubin doesn’t recommend reading literature in translation." When I listened to the interview itself, I found that Rubin had gone even farther, saying "I strongly advise people not to read literature in translation, because I know what happens in the process." Now, I don't think that if my colleague Jay Rubin truly believed translation were worthless he would be devoting so much of his time to translating books (and believe me, he's not in it for the money); rather, I think he just got carried away in this interview while expounding on the pitfalls of translation (and believe me, there are plenty). But when you pitch snark softballs like that, you do have to assume they will be caught, fielded, etc. Everyone loves trash-talk. But while Rubin no doubt presumed he was addressing an audience of folks for whom it goes without saying that literature in translation has great value - after all, it's the only thing standing between us and cultural isolation - the message he gave voice to can easily be misunderstood and misused, and yes, it hurts the cause. So I would ask all translators who are in a position to communicate with the press to remember the responsibility inherent in being a spokesperson for your profession. Translation is a valuable contribution to the cultural life of our country; don't lose sight of that message.

P.S. Update: NPR agrees with me.

Decision Fatigue

2011-08-27T16:15:00.024-04:00

It's hard to wait for a hurricane. The constant awareness of danger inexorably approaching creates a slow burn of anxiety that wears on the body, not just the mind. It may well be that New York will be spared the sort of devastation that Irene is currently inflicting on the coastal regions of North Carolina and Virginia, but it's impossible to know what sort of storm we'll get until it's already here. Meanwhile I can't help noticing that the only other residents of my building who seem truly alarmed about what may be coming our way tomorrow are the superintendent, who experienced a major storm in Puerto Rico as a child, and a neighbor from Atlanta. The native New Yorkers seem unconcerned. As for me, having grown up in New Orleans and seen my city ravaged by floodwaters in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina almost exactly six years ago, I have a great deal of respect for the havoc a storm like this can wreak. Maybe you have to witness destruction like this with your own eyes to really grasp it. Even though I spent days glued to CNN in 2005 as New Orleans was flooding (a manmade disaster, by the way), it took returning to the city three months after the storm to fully understand the extent of the damage. Pictures of devastated buildings and even blocks cannot capture what it feels like to stand at the center of an intersection, looking down the street in every direction and finding not a single habitable dwelling as far as you can see. Or what it means to drive down in a U-Haul truck to salvage the contents of your parents' house, only to realize that pretty much everything in a condition to be worth saving would have fit in the trunk of a car. Waiting for Irene is calling up these memories again; you don't know what kind of storm you're getting until it arrives.

Noting the physicality of these feelings reminds me of an article I wanted to blog about when I first read it in the August 17, 2011 issue of The New York Times Magazine, because it made me realize something about the physicality of translation work. "Do You Suffer from Decision Fatigue?" by John Tierney talks about a phenomenon I'd often experienced but never fully understood: Making decisions - like suffering anxiety - is physically as well as mentally taxing. Tierney explores the research in the area of what social psychologist Roy F. Baumeister dubbed "ego depletion," in particular new studies that indicate that we have only a finite capacity for decision-making, and that once this particular store of energy is depleted, we begin to choose randomly, wildly, exhaustedly, or else find ways to put off making decisions. This is why savvy car dealers will barrage buyers with a large array of unimportant choices in the early phases of the car-purchase transaction (what color upholstery? cup holders?) so that, twenty or thirty minutes later, the exhausted buyers will be more likely to allow themselves to be steered towards more expensive optional features. When exhausted, we tend to default to whatever is recommended to us. Fortunately there is a surprisingly simple way to recharge the depleted brain: add glucose. It really seems to be the case that taking a short break from the mental activity - and eating something - can help put us back in a position to think and choose to the best of our abilities.

Now think about what the translator's work actually consists of. The sort of writing we do as translators involves constantly choosing among lists of synonyms and alternative phrasings. Translators tend to be like walking thesauri, highly conscious that language comes sorted into neat little bundles of words and phrases with overlapping meanings. Say "suddenly" to a translator, and she will immediately be able to shoot back the alternates "all at once," "abruptly" and "unexpectedly." A translator, more than writers of other sorts, is someone who sits at a desk choosing between alternatives all day long. And so it makes sense that translators will regularly hit the wall in their day-to-day work. And what Tierney's article teaches us is what not to do when this occurs: Don't just try to muscle through the exhaustion, waiting for your second wind to arrive. Much better is to respect the chemistry of your brain and body and do something that will actually improve your ability to work effectively: Step away from your desk for a few minutes, and while you're at it, have a snack.

I wish everyone who is reading this a safe weekend. May Irene come gently.

Farewell, Dynamic Equivalencer

2011-08-26T18:42:00.059-04:00

Amidst all the frenzy of preparing simultaneously for a new semester and a putative hurricane, I heard today that Eugene Nida had died in Brussels at the age of 96. Newcomers to the field of translation studies may not know his work, but he was indisputably one of the translation theory giants of the mid-twentieth century. I suppose it makes sense that if you live long enough, you will eventually find your ideas discredited. But I for one am still a fan of Nida's work. And within his field of specialization - Bible translation - his theories have never really gone out of style. In fact, one might argue that they have remained in style ever since the sixteenth century: Bible translator Martin Luther's 1530 Sendbrief vom Dolmetschen (Open Letter on Translating) expounds principles that were clear forerunners of Nida's famous notion of "dynamic equivalence" that he describes in his seminal essay "Principles of Correspondence" (1964).

Martin Luther insisted that the translator should observe the way ordinary people speak (dem Volk aufs Maul schauen) and translate accordingly. He rejected the attribute "full of grace" for the Virgin Mary (remarking: "full of grace the way a barrel is full of beer?") and hailed her instead as Holdselige (sweet/dear/gracious/lovely one). Not mincing words, he declared his adversaries who preferred to "let the Latin language teach them how to write German" to be Esel (jackasses). Obviously Luther was successful as a translator - his tendentious translation of the Bible launched a whole new branch of Christianity. And Nida, too - who was ordained as a Baptist minister the same year he completed his PhD in linguistics - was profoundly devoted to communicating the word of God. Nida's notion of "dynamic equivalence" (a.k.a. functional equivalence) was based on the idea that no two languages correspond exactly to one another and that the translator must therefore be attentive to the goals and strategies of the original text, seeking out phrases and concepts in the target language that will achieve a parallel act of communication. This approach makes sense, particularly if you are, say, a missionary who wishes to import religious concepts into a culture in which they are unfamiliar. Local points of reference are then sought to ease in understanding. The ideals of Nida's "dynamically equivalent" translation include clarity and naturalness of expression. He is not primarily concerned with literary translation per se.

Now, translation of Nida's sort stands in direct opposition to the approach advocated by a very different sort of theologian, my hero Friedrich Schleiermacher, and it is Schleiermacher's ideas (centering around the aim of preserving cultural and linguistic specificity in translation) that have dominated late-twentieth century translation theory, particularly as practiced by leading theorist Lawrence Venutiand his followers (myself included). Just this past winter I attended a lecture by Venuti entitled "The Ruse of Equivalent Effect" at the American Literary Translators Association conference in which he attacked Nida's ideas using what wound up striking me as a logical fallacy. Venuti argued that an example given by Nida himself to illustrate dynamic equivalence was flawed, and concluded from this that the principle itself had no validity. It's quite true that the example in question is offensive to our Schleiermacher-schooled sensibilities (Nida praises J.B. Phillips for expressing the notion "greet one another with a holy kiss" in Romans 16:16 as "give one another a hearty handshake all around"). This translation transplants the cultural context of Biblical times to what makes me think of Connecticut in the 1960s. Obviously this is a grievously outdated way of thinking about translation. But at the same time, Nida is right to recognize that this "holy kiss" is something that won't make sense to modern readers and to conclude from this that the translator must find a way to address this discrepancy. As I see it, there has to be some way to communicate the essence and function of the kiss while also communicating something about the context in which it served as a form of greeting. In short, I don't believe that one should have to choose between a Nidean and a Schleiermachian approach to translation as mutually exclusive alternatives. Each of these two theorists proposed goals that are important for the translator to keep in mind. Ideally, I would like to achieve such a high level of skill at Schleiermachian translation that my work will also ring true to an adherent of dynamic equivalence.

Incidentally, religion is not the only sphere in which dynamic equivalence is of crucial importance. The one time I had the fortune to experience Eugene Nida in person - in the spring of 1988 at the University of Zurich, where he had been invited to lecture by Mary Snell-Hornby - he spoke about his most recent project at the time, which involved training translators to work at the U.N. It turns out that in questions of international relations, clarity and naturalness of expression are high on the list of desiderata, just as they are in church.

Shaken or Stirred?

2011-08-26T11:13:00.032-04:00

Translationista has been on vacation for the last three weeks, but now that summer is drawing to a close, I'm ready to get back to my mission of making the world safe for translation. Not that things feel that safe in New York these days. We just got shaken up by an (admittedly tiny) earthquake, and are possibly about to get whirled around in circles by Hurricane Irene, unless she peters out on her way up the coast, as I certainly hope she will.

Meanwhile I was delighted to see my translation of Uljana Wolf's False Friends prominently featured on the website of the Iowa Review, where Erica Mena has written the sort of review every translator dreams of getting. Besides the fact that Mena clearly loved the book, she writes in extraordinary, perceptive detail about the language of my translation, analyzing it both in its own right and with respect to the overall strategies of the original text. I very much like the way she reads, and am thrilled that some of the effects I was hoping to achieve in the translation worked for her. One in particular was estranging the English words used in the original poems, where they by default had an estranging function, just by being in English. I had originally considered just flipping the linguistic equation and translating the words that appeared in English within the German context to make them German within the English poems, but in the end I decided not to (with one exception that I'll leave it to you to find). The German/English relationship is not symmetrical: Most educated Germans can read English, while knowledge of German is relatively unusual among English-language readers (though I am always surprised how many of my American poet friends do in fact speak and read some German). But the bilingualism of these poems was intended to be playful, not scholarly, so I decided to play around with the English Uljana used to complicate the relationship between original and translation in a way that would be in keeping with the overall strategy of her poems. For instance, in the "B" poem Mena cites, I transformed "out of bed" into the more ambiguous "out of hand." And to give credit where credit is due, it was the volume's editor, poet Matvei Yankelevich, who suggested turning "make a bet" into "fake a bet," noting quite correctly that I was letting an opportunity for humorous estrangement slip through my fingers. As readers of this blog know, I love working with editors, particularly ones who are skilled at bringing their own aesthetic savvy into alignment with the spirit of a project; sometimes the slight distance from which an editor views a book (not having just slogged through four previous drafts of it like the weary translator) puts him/her in a position to suggest the most brilliant tweaks. Thank you, Matvei! And thank you to Erica Mena for this close, insightful reading of the poems.

False Friends is also featured in a wide-ranging new essay, "Towards a Conceptual Lyric: From Content to Context," published by the wonderful Marjorie Perloff in the online journal of culture Jacket2. Perloff, too, writes about the "B" poem, and to my delight she describes it as a love poem. As I see it, there is a love story loosely interwoven through most of the pages of this book, which speaks again and again of distance and approach, linguistic divides and other romantic challenges, letters arriving from afar, cohabitation and compatibility. The "O" poem (in which "our lips conjoin without translation") is even erotic. And though in general I don't recommend relying too heavily on the authorial fallacy, I do think it relevant to note in this case that poet Uljana Wolf is married to poet Christian Hawkey, and that talking about poetics is a form of lovemaking.

Rules for Translators

2011-08-06T12:18:00.023-04:00

I was recently invited to guest-blog on M. Lynx Qualey's website Arabic Literature (in English). She's begun asking translators around the world to provide her with a list of ten rules for translating, and since this sounded like a fun assignment, I signed right up. So what are my rules for translating? Click over and have a look. And then you can look to see how some of my translator colleagues responded to her request. It's always good to hear what translators think about when they approach their craft.
Oh, and to elucidate Rule #6: Roget's International Thesaurus is a book that belongs on the desk of every serious translator into English. I've been working with it for years. The great William Weaver used the same one when he was still translating (I know because I saw it on his dining room table, where he liked to work). What separates this reference work from other dictionaries of synonyms is that it is arranged not alphabetically but by category. If you open it up at the beginning and start reading, you'll find the categories "Birth," "The Body" and "Hair," followed some hundred pages later by "Excitement," "Inexcitability," "Contentment" etc. An alphabetical index at the back directs you to the appropriate category, or in most cases categories - you're asked to specify which sense of a particular word you're looking for. Under "inquietude," for example, you're asked to choose between synonyms that fall under the sub-headings "unpleasure," "excitement," "anxiety," "trepidation" and "agitation." Under each thematic category, the words are grouped by parts of speech: nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, phrases. This is what makes this book such a powerful tool for the translator, since it very often happens that an idea embodied by one part of speech in the original text might best be handled in the translation using a different part of speech altogether. "What's that verb that's like the noun 'indolence'?" Roget's has some suggestions for you: "idle," "loll" "lounge," "loiter," "dally," "dawdle" and many many others, dozens of others. "Trifle," "dabble," "fribble," "footle," "putter," "potter," "piddle," "diddle," "doodle," etc. No online synonym finder can come even close. And a shopping tip: the presence of the name "Roget's" in the title does not guarantee an indexed edition; if the words "in dictionary form" appear anywhere on the cover, this is not the book I'm talking about.

Translationista Action Figure

2011-07-29T16:30:00.056-04:00

I was recently given a wonderful surprise gift by my playwright friend Gary Winter: a comic of Translationista portrayed as a superhero. The drawing was commissioned from comic artist/designer Jeremy Arambulo, whose work I recommend you check out. He sketched Translationista busting out the books, each of which, if you look closely, is adorned by a quite-good likeness of the author in question. I'll even prove it with some photographic evidence. Unfortunately the image of the comic I'm posting is itself not of the highest quality; the drawing came nicely framed, and I didn't want to disassemble it just for the sake of getting a better photograph.

Looking at this comic reminds me of my childhood obsession with Wonder Woman. I always chose to be her in role-playing games with the other kids on the block when I was six or seven - I loved how strong and beautiful she always seemed, and also brave, because unlike some of the other superheroes of comic lore, Wonder Woman did not possess actual superhuman powers that could have protected her from attack. All she had was a trio of magical tools: a set of bracelets (good for deflecting bullets and such), a tiara that could work like a boomerang, and a lasso that could compel people to tell the truth, but she was nonetheless vulnerable to attack and capture and did often enough wind up in a pickle. Let me not think too hard about the marketing decision that dictated that the one female member of the original Super Friends clan should regularly find herself in princess-style distress and require rescuing. But maybe having friends who could help her out in a pinch was in itself one of her superpowers.

Wonder Woman is an avatar of the Amazon queen Diana. Of course, in the United States her image had to be cleaned up a bit; for one thing, the actual Amazons of legend cut off their right breasts so as to be able to hunt and fight better with their weapon of choice: the bow and arrow. For the most stunning story about an Amazon ever written, check out Heinrich von Kleist's play Penthesilea (its heroine is an Amazon queen at her most vulnerable), which was written in German but exists in a gorgeous English translation by Joel Agee.

Last PEN Online Translation Slam = Korean!

2011-07-24T20:41:00.011-04:00

For the last few years I have been curating the online translation slam on the PEN American Center website. This has meant selecting a foreign-language poet and a pair of younger translators to produce competing translations of a single work by that poet to be posted side-by-side. This feature was inspired by the live translation slam event, traditionally held at the Bowery Poetry Club, that has become a yearly staple of the PEN World Voices Festival. I know all about what it's like to be part of that one, since I was was one of the participants the first year the event was held at the festival. It's a lot of fun and tends to get a bit raucous. The online slam is somewhat more decorous. Since it's online, the discussion is not shouted but written. But online discussions can be great too, and the more people participate in discussing the translations, the more interesting the slam becomes. I would encourage you to check out the latest slam, based on a lovely work by Korean poet Jeong Kkeut-byeol that has been translated twice, by Sora Kim-Russell and Jae Won Chung. See what you think of the translations, and if you're so moved, post a comment about one or both of them.

Those of you who've been following the slam for a while now will immediately see when you click through to the text that change is in the air. The Korean slam is the first to be posted on PEN's new blog, which is soon to be home to lots of other new content as well. This new content is the explanation for why this Korean slam is going to be the Last One Ever. It's going to be replaced with something even more exciting. But I can't tell you what it is yet. Keep watching this space, and expect an announcement in early September. Meanwhile, do enjoy the last of our translation slams in their current form. I've really enjoyed curating them.

2012 NEA Translation Fellowships Announced

2011-07-22T11:05:00.009-04:00

Yesterday the National Endowment for the Arts announced it was awarding 16 fellowships to literary translators for 2012, totaling $200,000. The NEA has been an important supporter of literary translation ever since it began awarding translation fellowships in 1981. This year's awards are valued at $12,500 pending Congressional approval of the NEA's 2012 budget.

My work on Robert Walser was supported twice by the NEA over the years, so I am personally very grateful for the existence of this program. In particular in the case of the first Walser novel I ever translated - his 1925 posthumously published book The Robber, written during the same period as the stories collected in Microscripts - the translation would never have come about without the NEA's support. I had been unsuccessful in my attempts to find a publisher for the book, and the prestige of the grant, combined with the fact that I had already been paid something for the translation, encouraged Nebraska University Press to take on the project. The novel was published in 2000 and is still in print.

Here's the list of the 2012 NEA Literature Translation Fellows:

• Eric Abrahamsen (Chinese) for Running Through Zhongguancun by the contemporary novelist Xu Zechen

• Ross Benjamin (German) for The Frequencies by Clemens J. Setz

• Lisa Rose Bradford (Spanish) for Oxen Rage by Argentine poet Juan Gelman

• Geoffrey Brock (Italian) for the selected poems of Giovanni Pascoli

• Peter Constantine (Russian) for the stories and vignettes from Anton Chekhov's early period (1880-85)

• Kristin Dykstra (Spanish) for Catch and Release by Cuban poet Reina María Rodríguez

• Michelle Gil-Montero (Spanish) for The Annunciation by Argentinian novelist María Negroni

• David Hinton (Chinese) for the selected poems of Mei Yao-ch'en

• William Maynard Hutchins (Arabic) for the novel New Waw by Ibrahim al-Koni

• Pierre Joris (German) for The Complete Later Poetry of Paul Celan

• Karen Kovacik (Polish) for In What World: Selected Poems by Agnieszka Kuciak

• Brandon Lussier (Estonian) for a collection of new and selected poems by Estonian poet Hasso Krull

• Pedro Enrique Rodriguez Jr. (French) for travelogues and novels by George Groslier, a Cambodian-born French writer

• Jake Schneider (German) for poet Ron Winkler's Fragmented Water

• Archana Venkatesan (Tamil) for the ninth-century poem "Sacred Speech" by Satakōpan (popularly known as Nammālvār)

• Alex Zucker (Czech) for Markéta Lazarová by novelist Vladislav Vančura

For more detailed descriptions of the projects, see the NEA's website. The deadline for next year's competition is Jan. 6, 2012; application information can be found here.

Guest blogging at Women and Hollywood

2011-07-20T10:06:00.007-04:00

Film Forum is celebrating my birthday today by screening an absolutely gorgeous movie about a translator. OK, they don’t actually know it’s my birthday, but I’m delighted that The Woman with the 5 Elephants is opening today, since it’s a movie I dearly love for several reasons. For one thing, it’s beautifully shot and edited. For another, it’s about a translator. For a third, it weaves a multigenerational story all around the life of a single woman (which I guess is possible when you get to be in your mid-80s). I blogged this film last week to announce it was on its way, and today you’ll find me blogging about it again – not just here on Translationista but also as a guest blogger on the Women and Hollywood website, which is devoted to tracking the role of women in the movies on both sides of the camera.

Given the focus and point of view of the Women and Hollywood site, I didn’t want to let my guest post get too nerdy on the subject of translation. But listening to Svetlana Geier speak so beautifully about translation when I rewatched the film yesterday was truly inspiring. She says that when she was first learning to translate, a teacher who was influential in her development liked to say “Nase hoch beim Übersetzen” (Keep your nose up while translating). This meant, Geier explains, that the translator should not just creep her way through a sentence from left to right but rather should take in a sentence as a whole and then think about how to utter the sentence, as a whole, in its new language. In the film, we see her putting this instruction into practice. It’s not clear whether or not this was always her work method (I doubt it), but in the film we see her translating with the help of two skilled assistants: a woman who types up each sentence of the translation as Geier dictates it, and a male friend (a musician, no less) who reads her finished translation back to her so she can hear what it sounds like in order to edit it. I’m just writing an essay about revising translations in which I discuss, among other things, the importance of reading your work aloud. Having someone else read it aloud to you is even better.

The film’s most striking leitmotif is that of woven fabric. Geier shows the camera a beautiful, ornate tablecloth whose lace edging was embroidered by her mother. Talking about the needlework, Geier emphasizes the artistry and meticulous attention to detail necessary to create such a piece. It’s crucial, she says, that each stitch be counted; one thread too many or too few and the pattern won’t work out. To create this lace edging, she explains, you have to destroy the weave of the linen fabric and then fill it out again, a process she describes as “very human.” And in fact this is just the process we see when she picks apart a sentence by Dostoevsky, destroying its weave in order to “fill it out again.” The film ends on a scene in which she and her musician friend tease apart a sentence to determine whether or not horses described in the sentence as having riders are the very same horses hitched to a small carriage that is also mentioned; it would be strange for a horse in harness to also be wearing a saddle, and the two decide that there must be yet other horses on the scene. The impetus for this discussion? The number of horses will determine whether or not the sentence should have a comma at a crucial juncture. A comma, it seems, can make all the difference.

Early in the film, while showing the camera how she does her ironing, Geier explicitly draws a connection between text and textile, and she often uses the word “Gewebe” (weave) when she talks about writing. The film’s attention to the physical materiality of her surroundings shows us that director Vadim Jendreyko believes there is a weave to images as well.

Svetlana Geier died in November 2010. I’m so glad that Jendreyko was able to shoot this film about her when she was still alive. It’ll be playing at Film Forum for one week starting today. See it if you can.

Mónica de la Torre Translating Herself

2011-07-17T21:26:00.016-04:00

Last week I caught an excellent triple reading in the Blue Letter series at Watty & Meg in Brooklyn, and in between wonderful poetry by Geoffrey G. O'Brien and Alan Gilbert, the translating poet Mónica de la Torre presented a fascinating excursus on self-translation. Her comments were taken from an essay on translating her own poetry that will be forthcoming this fall in Translation Review, the official journal of the American Literary Translators Association, but I wanted to give you a foretaste.

For one thing, it isn't hard to imagine the sorts of dilemmas a self-translating poet must face, especially if the poems being translated were written a long time ago. It has to be tempting to just rewrite the poems in the new language with one's more mature voice. Adding to the complexity in de la Torre's case is the fact that she used to be primarily a Spanish-language poet but now writes primarily in English - so the change of language has no doubt influenced her approach to writing as well. But for purposes of her talk, she set herself the task of translating a poem from her first book of poems, Acúfenos, published in Mexico City in 2006 (but written mostly during the 1990s). She decided to use her old diaries and writing notes from the time to help her reconstruct, almost archeologically, what had been on her mind when she wrote the poems, so as to uncover the intention behind them. Now, authorial intention is a notion with a storied and often controversial past - how can we know what an author was thinking, and doesn't what s/he actually wrote take precedence over what s/he may have intended by it? But of course, when the author is the same person as the interpreting translator, one degree of separation is removed from the critical operation.

De la Torre reports that she has used self-translation as a writing exercise with her students, as a way of focussing their attention on the materiality of language itself and freeing them from "the burden of self-expression." I, too, have found in my teaching that students produce the most exciting work when they can be persuaded or tricked (usually via some logistically complicated exercise) into not trying to express themselves. Because of course the most profound acts of self-expression come from the part of the brain that is not consciously thinking about what it wishes to say. But in delving into her own ancient poem from the point of view of intentional fidelity, de la Torre - being the fine poet she is - arrived at some beautiful responses to the original poem, e.g. using the word "flame" to stand in for "llamarada" or "sudden blaze." "Flame" shares the original word's richness of resonance, since it also has emotional/erotic connotations.

As an parallel exercise in non-intentionality, de la Torre called on GoogleTranslate to help her with the poem, and she discovered (along with the usual mishmash you'd expect), occasional flashes of accidental genius, as for example when the computer mistakes the verbs "taste" and "know" (both "saber" in Spanish) to produce the line "A sip of coffee before I knew bitter." This is translation without preconceived notions of the text and its interpretation, and as such it can work like an automatic exercise meant to overrule cognition. But of course it's only on occasion that GoogleTranslate actually produces a line that might strike human beings as beautiful.

And of course the experience of translating her old poem does to de la Torre what one might expect: It prompts her to write a poem, a new one all her own.

2011 PEN Translation Fund Winners Announced

2011-07-15T23:16:00.003-04:00

Earlier today, the PEN American Center announced the winners of the 2011 PEN Translation Fund competition. Out of a field of 130 applicants, 11 projects were selected for funding; each translator will receive a $3000 grant to support his/her work. The Fund was established in 2003 by an anonymous donor eager to support young translators and encourage young writers to try their hand at translation. For the past two years, the Fund has been supplemented by an additional grant from Amazon.com.

As a member of the Advisory Board of the Fund (along with David Bellos, Edwin Frank, Michael F. Moore, Michael Reynolds, Natasha Wimmer, and Jeffrey Yang), I can report that there was a very strong showing of applications this year, in terms not only of numbers but also of quality. I wish we could have funded many more of these projects, but am pleased with the final list, which contains an impressive range of projects. One of these books already has a publisher, and the other ten are still up for grabs. Publishers and editors who wish to express an interest in any of these projects are invited to contact Alena Graedon, Manager of Membership and Literary Awards (alena@pen.org) or Advisory Board Chair Michael Moore (michael.moore@esteri.it).

Here is the list of this year's winners along with Michael Moore's comments on the projects:

Amiri Ayanna for The St. Katharinental Sister Book: Lives of the Sisters of the Dominican Convent at Diessenhofen. A rare glimpse inside a holy community, The St. Katharinental Sister Book offers an intimate blend of biography, mystical poetry, and visionary literature. This masterful translation from Northeastern Swiss dialects of Middle High German is a rich compilation of pious testimonials that illuminate the lives of a medieval sisterhood. (Available for publication.)

Neil Blackadder for The Test (Good Simon Korach), a play by renowned Swiss dramatist and novelist Lukas Bärfus. The shocking results of a paternity test and its moral implications force an agonizing examination into what defines a family. Supple and incisive, The Test is one of Bärfus’ most successful plays, and has been staged at major theaters across Germany. (Available for publication.)

Clarissa Bosford for Sworn Virgin, a novel written in Italian by Albanian writer and filmmaker Elvira Dones. At once sweeping and immediate, Sworn Virgin engages with timely issues of identity, nationality, and sexuality. By rejecting an arranged marriage, Hana, the protagonist, is condemned to life in a double-bind: in the isolation of northern Albania and disguised as a man. Her decision to abandon her homeland for the U.S. coincides with a return to living as a woman that proves anything but simple. (Available for publication.)

Steve Bradbury for Salsa, a collection of poems by the internationally-recognized Taiwanese poet Hsia Yü. Composed during the eight years Hsia lived in France, and regarded by many as her most important work to date, Salsa showcases Hsia’s fascination with sound, movement, and “the erotics of reading.” Bradbury’s translation captures Hsia’s distinct musicality, preserving the liveliness and ingenuity of her verse. (Available for publication.)

Annmarie S. Drury for a collection of poems by Tanzanian poet Euphrase Kezilahabi, an acclaimed Swahili writer whose work is only now becoming more widely available to other readers. Saturated with vivid imagery, Kezilahabi’s poems reinvigorate traditional forms by introducing everyday language and free verse. An active promoter of accessibility, Kezilahabi’s work also offers a subtle social critique of the way language is used by those in power. (Available for publication.)

Diane Nemec Ignashev for Paranoia, a novel by groundbreaking Belarusian author Viktor Martinovich, about a tragic love affair between an idealistic young writer and the captivating mistress of the chief state security officer. Banned in Martinovich’s home country, Paranoia is a wry, dystopian examination of the ruptures between fiction and reality. (To be published by Northwestern University Press.)

Chenxin Jiang for Memories of the Cowshed, a memoir by celebrated Chinese author Ji Xianlin. A rare personal history from China’s devastating Cultural Revolution, Ji’s memoir recounts the painful and deeply disenchanting period he spent in “the cowshed,” an improvised prison for intellectuals and other alleged enemies of the Chinese state. A bestseller in China, Memories of the Cowshed offers an essential window onto this tumultuous moment in history. (Available for publication.)

Hilary B. Kaplan for Rilke Shake by the inventive Brazilian writer Angélica Freitas. Rilke Shake is a milkshake of incisive poetic wordplay and irreverent culture-crossing slang, expertly conveyed by Kaplan’s sharp translation. In this collection, Freitas explores poetic and personal identity formation, influencing a new generation of writers and artists who blend cultures and nationalities. (Available for publication.)

Catherine Schelbert for Flametti, or the Dandyism of the Poor a novel by visionary German writer Hugo Ball. This romp through early 20th-century Swiss low society offers an acerbic picture of class tensions and debasing social conditions. Ball, one of the leading Dadaists, said of Flametti, “It contains my whole philosophy.” Shelbert’s compelling translation—the first into English—is long overdue, and offers readers an essential work in the Ball oeuvre. (Available for publication.)

Joel Streicker for Birds in the Mouth, a collection of short stories by up-and-coming Argentine writer Samanta Schweblin, who was named one of Granta’s 2010 Best Young Spanish-Language Novelists. With Birds in the Mouth, Schweblin stakes a claim on the dark frontier between realism and the fantastic, reanimating everyday experiences often taken for granted. Streicker’s outstanding translation makes this stunning collection—already translated into many other languages—available to English readers for the first time. (Available for publication.)

Sarah L. Thomas for Turnaround, a literary thriller by pioneering Spanish writer Mar Goméz Glez. Published to great acclaim in Spain, Turnaround is set during the environmental crisis following a 2002 oil spill off the Cantabrian coast of Spain. Glez’s suspenseful story tracks the erratic fortunes of Pablo, who is trying to untangle his memories of a traumatic event while searching for his missing girlfriend. Thomas’ translation brings to life a story of how individual and collective destiny can converge and diverge in unexpected ways. (Available for publication.)

Brief excerpts from the prize-winning translations are online here.

Congratulations to this year's winners!

The Elephant Woman

2011-07-15T08:22:00.014-04:00

Vadim Jendreyko's documentary The Woman with the 5 Elephants is quite possibly the most beautiful movie ever made about a translator. The film's protagonist, Svetlana Geier, who died last year at the age of 87, is famous for her translations into German of Dostoevsky's five huge novels (the "elephants" of the title). But this film is no mere biopic - it is a gorgeous essay on the art of translation and the complex and often fraught ways in which the life's work of this talented woman resonates with the self-transformations she herself underwent, having been born in Kiev, where her world was turned upside-down first by Stalin's purges, then by the German occupation.As a filmmaker, Jendreyko is obsessed with the materiality of the world and the way its details (a comma that might be preserved or deleted, the lacework of a tablecloth) provide context and texture that define experience. We see Geier working on her translations, often with the help of a typist or with a scholar-friend who debates with her about every word. We see her cooking and arranging things in her apartment, all the while talking about her life and art, and filmed in a way that makes her world look magical. The way she speaks is extraordinary. "A translation," she tells us in the film's trailer, "is not a caterpillar crawling from left to right." "Why do people translate? It is a yearning for something that keeps escaping, for the unrivaled original."

I fell in love with the film when I saw it at its Zurich premiere in December 2009 and have been impatient to see it subtitled and brought to the States so all my friends could see it too. Now it will be opening at Film Forum for a one-week run, from July 20 - July 26. I urge you to go see it right away. This is one film you'll want to catch on the big screen.

Happy Birthday New Directions!

2011-07-14T09:15:00.018-04:00

New Directions was one of the first publishing houses I actually noticed as a teenager, because of an early obsession with the work of Raymond Queneau. New Directions published six of his books, all in spectacular translations by Barbara Wright. I was able to confirm that she really did translate all six of them because these books are still on my shelf almost three decades later; even more remarkably, four of the six are still in print. That's what makes this publishing house so extraordinary. When the editorial team of New Directions finds authors they believe in, they continue to publish their books and keep them in print far longer than is usual in the industry. I can't imagine that Raymond Queneau's novels ever sold in particularly large quantities, though John Updike reviewed The Flight of Icarus, We Always Treat Women Too Well, The Sunday of Life and The Bark Tree (my personal favorite) in various issues of The New Yorker during the 70s and early 80s. I've seen something similar happen with Jenny Erpenbeck, a German author of exceptional literary quality whom I translate. The first two books of hers New Directions published got good reviews but languished commercially, but because of the conviction that her work was worthy of publication and attention, New Directions persisted in supporting her, and now her third book Visitation has done dramatically better than the other two, selling 2800 copies in the U.S. and 3500 in England in its first six months alone and ending up on some best-of-the-year lists and as a finalist for several awards.
To celebrate its 75th anniversary, New Directions commissioned a new colophon by designer Felix Sockwell (old and new versions above); you can read about its genesis here.
The celebration continues next week with a festive reading and party at Poet's House featuring some of New Directions's star poets and translators: Forrest Gander, Susan Howe, Nathaniel Mackey, Richard Sieburth, Mónica de la Torre and Eliot Weinberger. Also me. I'm so thrilled they invited me to read as well. It should be a very special evening, so if you're around in the New York area, please put it on your calendar. Poet's House is located just south of Chambers Street overlooking the Hudson River. Thursday, July 21, 7:00 - 10:00 p.m.

Iranian Copyright

2011-07-12T11:50:00.006-04:00

I recently received a query apropos of a blog post on copyright law asking what to do in the case of works translated from the Persian/Farsi: “As Iran is not a nation that participates in copyright laws, the copyrights for the works tend to be spread out across the globe (or, in some cases, just don’t exist at all). What, then, would be my process?”

Knowing nothing at all about Iranian copyright, I decided to ask someone with experience in this area, Kaveh Bassiri, translator of Roya Zarrin and Yadollah Royaee. This is what he said:

“It’s true that Iran and the United States don't have a copyright relationship. There are copyright laws in Iran, but Iran doesn’t follow international copyright laws, and that makes things more complicated. Iranians often publish and translate American texts without permission. However, as you know, many U.S. publishers won’t publish a work without permission. In general, the best course is to follow the international copyright laws.

“For older works, there is obviously no problem. It should also be easy to get the rights from most living authors. Many Iranian writers include copyright information in their books and ask that permission be secured before their work is used. Sometimes when you contact them they may also ask for compensation, especially in the case of a famous prose author.

“It is more complicated, however, when an author has recently died. I believe the rights can be retained for a period of 30 years after the death of the author. I would try to see who has the rights – usually a person designated by the author or a family member – but this may be hard to determine and substantiate. For example, for Forugh her sister held the rights and for Shamlu his wife has the rights. You can ask the Iranian publishers for information, and you can even get permission to publish from them, though they may not be interested in helping unless they get paid. Their consent also doesn’t guarantee that they had the permission of the author or the author’s heirs to begin with. I know of anthologies published in Iran that included my friends’ poems without their having authorized the publication, even though there are copyright laws in Iran.

“Publishers determine royalties, but if a work can make money, as with a popular novel, there may be the additional complication of agreeing on what the author’s share will be. I have spoken with Persian authors who complained about not receiving any royalties from their Iranian publishers after their books were published in the U.S.”

This sounds much more complicated than dealing, as I most often do, with German copyright law, which works much the same way as in the United States except in the question of when works enter the public domain. In the U.S., all works published before 1923 are in the public domain, but under German law, published works of literature remain under copyright until 70 years following the death of the author. Now I’m wondering which law should apply to the works of Roland Barthes…

Trial Continues for Turkish Translator

2011-07-07T17:43:00.042-04:00

As EurasiaNet.org reports this evening, a date has now been set for the continuation of the trial against İrfan Sancı and Süha Sertabiboğlu, the publisher and translator of the Turkish edition of William S. Burroughs's novel The Soft Machine. Both - as I reported yesterday - are accused of publishing pornography, an offense which can carry a prison term of six months to three years. The trial, which opened in Istanbul on July 6 and is expected to last a year, will resume on October 11, 2011.

The trial is being postponed by so many months in order, ostensibly, to allow both sides to prepare their arguments. But as National Translation Award winner Aron Aji remarks, "Unfortunately,

Sertabiboğlu and Sancı

delays and postponements result in a prolonged state of unease and uncertainty, while charges such as this one contine to enjoy certain currency in the media debate." By repeatedly harassing the publishers and translators of works that go against the grain of the literary and moral mainstream, the "activist prosecutors" (Aji) responsible for this and similar cases appear to be looking to create an environment in which publishing professionals will be more likely to take the more comfortable route of avoiding all such projects - something the Turkish Professional Organization of Translators deplores as "self-censorship." The translators organization has been posting regular updates on the case (in Turkish) on its Facebook page.

How sad, and how alarming, to think that agencies of the Turkish government - which is explicitly secular and committed to becoming part of the European mainstream - can still be hijacked by some within it who find value in the suppression of artistic expression.

Turkish Translator Charged with Obscenity

2011-07-05T20:19:00.025-04:00

The Guardian reported this afternoon that İrfan Sancı, head of the Turkish publishing house Sel Yayıncılık, will be brought to trial starting tomorrow on charges of obscenity in connection with his January 2011 publication of William S. Burrough's 1961 novel The Soft Machine (Yumuşak Makine). The translator, Süha Sertabiboğlu, is being charged as well. Despite the fact that the novel is clearly not intended for children, it was submitted for evaluation to the Turkish Prime Ministerial Board for the Protection of Children from Harmful Publications, which found the book to promote "attitudes [...] permissive to crime by concentrating on the banal, vulgar and weak attributes of humanity" as well as displaying "incompliance with moral norms."

As the Guardian reports, Sancı was sued last year as well on similar charges related to three other books, including Guillaume Apollinaire's Les exploits d'un jeune Don Juan (The Exploits of a Young Don Juan), but was acquitted in December. Burak Bekdil, a commentator in the Turkish English-language newspaper Hürriyet Daily News who regularly publishes remarks critical of the Turkish government, expressed optimism in a column published on May 3, 2011 that these new charges will not have serious consequences. I very much hope that he is right. His commentary was written before it was announced that Sancı would be prosecuted in connection with these latest charges.

Yet another Turkish publisher of Apollinaire, Rahmi Akdaş,was vindicated in February 2010 when the European Court of Human Rights ruled that the Turkish government's 1999 ban on the publication of Apollinaire's erotic novel Les onze mille verges (The Eleven Thousand Rods) in Turkish translation violated Article 10 (Freedom of Expression) of the European Convention on Human Rights.

The Turkish Professional Organization of Translators has issued the following statement:

As the Turkish Professional Organization of Translators (Çevbir; Çevirmenler Meslek Birliği) we are faced with circumstances in which books are forbidden and censored, in which self-censorship is incited and in which our profession is readily turned into a criminal offence, and thereby we, the translators into criminals. The legislation which forces restrictions on art, literature, a free press and the profession of translators is in urgent need of change. The honour of our profession is based on conveying a work into another language without sacrificing it to our personal opinions or feelings, nor to any given societal pressure. It is a disgrace to a society if publishers, translators and, in case they cannot be apprehended, even printers are taken to court. We hereby declare that we shall support the publisher İrfan Sancı and our colleague, the translator Süha Sertabiboğlu, and we urge the legislative and judicial system to take the necessary steps to do away with this legislation.

I would like to join my Turkish colleagues in asserting that it goes without saying that translators should not be prosecuted - or otherwise persecuted - for practicing their art, nor should the publishers who print their work. I will keep watching this case and let you know about any further developments.

Despite the gravity of the situation, I cannot help noting with some amusement that the name of Burroughs's translator, Süha Sertabiboğlu, is not mentioned even once in the Guardian's article about the case but is printed front and center on the cover of the Turkish book. In one country, the translator is having his work acknowledged - no doubt to a much greater extent than he might prefer - while in the other, his name and role are suppressed as a matter of course. I think there's something the British publishing world could learn from Turkey.

NBCC Stands Up for Translation

2011-07-05T12:59:00.018-04:00

The 2011 PEN World Voices Festival that took place in New York this spring (see my earlier blog reports here and here) featured members of the National Book Critics Circle recommending some of their favorite reads of the past year. These "stand-up critics" took the stage before each event in the festival to highlight their choices in each of five categories:

1) a contemporary novel
2) a translated book
3) a classic
4) a small/indie press title
5) a surprise

I was, of course, particularly glad to see translated works singled out for attention, and it was also great to have independent presses specifically highlighted as well, especially since such a large percentage of the works appearing in translation these days are published by smaller presses.

The featured NBCC critics at PEN World Voices were Roxana Robinson, Laura Miller, Lev Grossman, Jane Ciabattari, Rigoberto González and Eric Banks, and the translated works they chose were:

Madame Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert, translated by Lydia Davis
(Viking)
Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy, translated by Richard Pevear and
Larissa Volkonsky (Viking)
The Indian Bride, by Karin Fossum, translated by Charlotte Barslund
(Houghton Mifflin)
2666, by Roberto Bolano, translated by Natasha Wimmer (Farrar,
Straus and Giroux)
Without Blood, by Alessandro Baricco, translated by Ann Goldstein
(Knopf)
The Black Minutes, by Martin Solares, translated by Aura Estrada and
John Pluecker (Grove)
A Tomb for Boris Davidovich, by Danilo Kis, translated by Duska Mikic-
Mitchell (Dalkey Archive Press)
Seven Years, by Peter Stamm, translated by Michael Hofmann (Other
Press)

There are more than five books on this list because some of the critics picked translated works in more than one category.

For more information about the books selected (such as which critic chose which books and what s/he had to say about them), see the NBCC's blog. I very much hope that this tradition will continue at PEN World Voices in future years.

Robert Walser on The Marketplace of Ideas

2011-06-26T09:47:00.018-04:00

I was recently interviewed by Colin Marshall for his show The Marketplace of Ideas, which is broadcast on KCSB in Santa Barbara and can also be listened to online or downloaded for free from the iTunes store. Colin specializes in the hour-long interview format, which allows him to explore a topic at length with his guests. In my case, we talked about Robert Walser for the first half-hour of the show and most of the last fifteen minutes, with an interlude in which we discussed Yoko Tawada, Kobo Abe and the uses of literary hybridity. The show's title, "The Literary In-Between," actually comes from a Yoko Tawada quote.

One of the great things about being interviewed is that it helps you focus your thoughts on some of the ideas that are most important to you even if you've never sat down and consciously formulated them. In conversation with Colin, I found myself speaking about what it is that draws me to the literature I most love, which tends to features authors that can be described in some way as straddling two different worlds. Here's what I told him:

I think the in-between is a great place to actually open your eyes and see something. When you’re hovering between two spheres of reference, the very geography of your condition forces you to actually see where you are. I think so much of our everyday lives is so unmindful and involves not noticing things and not seeing things and not understanding what’s around us. I love literature that puts me in the position of asking me to actually see what it is I do when I speak, when I understand something, when I hear another person, when I think that I’m communicating with another person and hearing them talking to me. I think being made conscious of these things and how miraculous it is that we have languages we can use to communicate with each other – how great is that! I think there’s so much we take for granted that literature written in these in-between spaces invites us to notice and appreciate. For me there’s a lot of joy there.

Working with Editors of Translations

2011-06-23T14:34:00.036-04:00

I recently received a call for papers for a conference entitled "Authorial and Editorial Voices in Translation" that will be put on in early November by the Voice in Translation research group based at the University of Oslo. The organizers are Hanne Jansen and Anna Wegener at the University of Copenhagen, which will be hosting the conference. The call for papers touches on some extremely important points that are often overlooked when people speak about translation:

It is not only translators who are involved in translation. This symposium “Authorial and Editorial Voices in Translation” seeks to explore the role of other agents – authors, publishers, editors – in the work of translation. Translators will sometimes receive “translation briefs” from authors either offering to assist with, or seeking to interfere in the process of translation. Publishing houses have considerable power in selecting translators and in obliging both parties – authors as well as translators – to acquiesce in their decisions. While it is well-known that translations are often censored in totalitarian regimes, less attention has been paid to the way in which, in 'free' societies, commercial interests can be allowed to interfere with the work of translation.

People do generally assume that every decision made about a translation was made by the translator. Maybe this is because so many reviewers of translations are associated with universities and academic presses, where authors (professors) generally do have unfettered artistic license. But in the real world of commercial publishing, editors (and sometimes even publicity departments) also have a substantial role in shaping a work - and the more lucrative the enterprise, the more likely the translator is to be disempowered if it is deemed beneficial to a book's commercial viability. Almost all Stieg Larsson's books, for instance, were renamed in their English-language versions and the translation "prettified" so much the translator took his name off the project in protest, adopting the pseudonym Reg Keeland. And Marilyn Booth, translator of Rajaa Alsanea's novel Girls of Riyadh, had her translation reworked by an editor against her will at the request of an author who wished to see the story presented in more universal terms that would minimize its rootedness in Saudi Arabian culture. Booth writes about the experience in her essay "Translator v. author (2007): Girls of Riyadh go to New York," published in the July 2008 issue of Translation Studies.

Nothing like this has ever happened to me, I am pleased to report, though I have been asked to sign contracts giving an editor artistic control over my translation (I refused). In fact, I have been fortunate enough to work with editors whose interventions vastly improved my translations, such that I was delighted to accept their editorial suggestions. On one of the first books I ever translated, the memoir Anecdotage by Gregor von Rezzori, published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 1996, I had the privilege of working with legendary editor Elisabeth Sifton, whose skills were so justifiably celebrated that Rezzori had given her carte blanche to change anything she wanted in his book, and her edits (tightening up a sentence here, a paragraph there) most definitely improved both the book and my translation. Barbara Epler, the publisher and editor-in-chief of New Directions who somehow still finds time to edit my Robert Walser translations, has a downright uncanny sense of how to tweak a sentence, rearranging words and clauses or swapping out a synonym to make the prose live and breathe. And I will be forever grateful to Declan Spring, the senior editor at ND who helps me with Jenny Erpenbeck's voice, for discovering a slew of 1970s song titles hidden in a freeform bit of prose in a crucial scene in The Book of Words. No one reads a book manuscript more meticulously than a good editor, and so there is no better ally and interlocutor to help a translator tease out the crucial details of an author's style. Having a smart second set of eyes can be invaluable.
In short, publishing translations inevitably entails close collaboration with editors, a relationship that can be either highly beneficial or highly detrimental to a translation and book, depending on how it is handled. So far I have been blessed always to work with editors who saw their job as helping me be better at what I was trying to do (rather than disputing or even negating my vision of a project). I'm so glad there will be a conference specifically devoted to the interactions between translators and their editors and authors; I very much look forward to hearing what comes out of it.

Letter to a Reviewer of Translations

2011-06-11T08:39:00.024-04:00

A friend of mine - an accomplished writer in his own right - recently asked my advice about writing a review of a translated book. He had compared the translation with the original at certain points (how wonderful that he was able to do so!) and had questions about some of the choices the translator had made though he thought the translation was very good overall. He wanted to know if I thought he should discuss these quibbles in his review. Since I think this same question must come up for a lot of reviewers of translations, I'll share my response:

Hey there, it's a really good question - I've written about this on my translation blog and recently co-authored a page of guidelines for reviewers of translations along with Edith Grossman and Jonathan Cohen.

I would encourage you not to try to compete with the translator in terms of linguistic expertise (let's assume he knows the original language better than you do) or complain about the "mistranslation" of individual words, because if there's a more obvious translation for any one of them, he surely knew that and nonetheless made an informed choice to do something different - though you might decide that the results of this informed choice are something you think isn't effective in English or doesn't sound like the author as you understand his voice, and these are things that would be really good to write about. If you think the translation is basically good, do these bits stick out like a sore thumb? Or is the translator trying something daring that isn't quite working? If you like the translation for the most part, what do you like about it? It's really great that you want to write specifically about the translation when you review the book. That's so useful, and there are so many things you can say about it without turning into the translation police. I hate reviews in which a critic declares a translation bad because it doesn't render word X with word Y - believe me, if you think of word Y, the translator probably thought of it too, so the real question is: why did he decide not to use it, and was that a choice that panned out well in the context of what he is doing in the translation as a whole? Think of the translator as someone possessed, like yourself, of a critical and aesthetic intelligence and engage him on that level, and you're guaranteed to come up with an interesting assessment of his work.

Nineteenth Century Spiders

2011-06-08T10:48:00.013-04:00

Back when I was translating Friedrich Schleiermacher's great essay on translation, which dates from 1813/15, I spent a lot of time reading around in Samuel Coleridge's Biographia Literaria. Coleridge is such a wonderful prose stylist, and I used him as a resource for my translation. In particular, I looked at how he put his sentences together, what sorts of opening gambits he used to introduce ideas, and I borrowed a phrase here, a structure there, just enough to mark my translation of Schleiermacher as belonging to an earlier period. I wasn't trying to "fake" an older text, but to keep the reader aware that this text belonged to the early 19th century. I was inspired to do this after reading an earlier translation of the same essay by Douglas Robinson that throws around 20th century translation theory terminology like "source language" and "target language," with the result that Schleiermacher winds up sounding hideously naive. Reading Schleiermacher in this translation, I found myself wondering why he was writing as if he'd never heard of Saussure.

So now I'm just starting work on a wonderful horror story from the 19th century, Jeremias Gotthelf's «Die schwarze Spinne» (The Black Spider), which will be published next year by New York Review Books Classics. This is one of the most frightening stories I've ever read. In it, a young woman brings calamity to her community by accidentally - oops - promising a newborn to the Devil. Gotthelf was a minister, and I get the feeling he wrote the story to frighten his congregation into keeping the faith. The spider of the title is like Freddy in the Nightmare on Elm Street movies - it's everywhere at once, it can be as big as a cottage or disintegrate into a swarm of infinitesimally tiny beasties. It is the embodiment of everything in us that is wicked or weak. Did I mention than I am pretty severely arachnophobic? I still remember the giant-spider nightmares I had as a child. So this is the worst possible, i.e. the perfect book for me to translate. I'm hoping that my fear will make the descriptions of the spider particularly graphic. We shall see. Meanwhile, I'm priming myself for the project by reading up on some period literature. I started with Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto, which is gothic in all the worst ways but quite nicely written on the sentence level, which makes it a good model for me. And now I am rereading one of my favorite books of all time, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and keeping a log of useful phrases that might help me with Gotthelf. Here are some of them: "the want of," "repair the faults of," "he is remarkable for," "made me desirous to," "unallied to the dross of human nature," "madly desirous of," "compassed round by," "body forth," "obliged us to the inclemency," "I might have X but that Y," "yet he might [=could] not have X, had she not Y."

It's astonishing to me how much the English language has changed in the last 200 years. These phrases now seem so quaint by contemporary standards. And I'll have to be careful not to use too many of them in the translation - just enough to signal to the reader that the story she is reading comes to us from another age.

Who Shapes la langue française?

2011-06-03T20:17:00.018-04:00

Last night I attended a group reading at Alwan for the Arts featuring francophone Algerian poet and translator Samira Negrouche, who presented her beautiful poems along with translations mainly by Martin Sorrell but also by Barbara Ungar with Beth DellaRocco and Stuart Bartow. (Negrouche will be reading again this Sunday afternoon at the Bowery Poetry Club, so if you're free at 2:00 p.m., I highly recommend you stop by.) In the post-reading discussion, the question of translations-by-translators versus translations-by-poets came up. Negrouche drew a strict distinction between the two and was clearly convinced that translators approach texts only "academically and analytically," whereas translator-poets enjoy writerly freedoms in their approach to their translations. After some confused discussion, poet and translator Anna Moschovakis (who had just read gorgeous work: an essay on difficulties with approaching the foreign and a long poem) was able to sort things out helpfully by pointing out that the activity of translation is professionalized in France to the extent that many (though not all) translators who wind up translating literature are also - and above all - translators of legal, business and other non-literary texts. I was surprised to hear this, since I do know a number of very literary literary translators working in French, but Negrouche confirmed Anna's point. And this attitude toward translation in the francophone sphere (well, in France in particular) is powerfully backed up by an article just published by Bernard Hoepffner in the May 27 Times Literary Supplement entitled "Proxy Literature." Hoepffner, a literary translator into French, describes his adventures in the worlds of French and English dictionaries. It turns out that English-language dictionaries, above all the Oxford English Dictionary, quote translations as examples of usage far more liberally than their French counterparts (Grand Robert, Trésor de la Langue Française, etc.) Hoepffner notes, for example, that "The OED cites Rabelais more than 2,000 times in Urquhart's translation (1693)" and "Montaigne (903 times) enters English only eleven years after his death," including with the lovely word "abecedarian" coined by his translator John Florio. Even my hero Barbara Wright shows up with some coinages from her pioneering translations of Raymond Queneau. The great French dictionaries, on the other hand, are largely silent on the subject of words and usages contributed by even the greatest French translators unless they also happen to be prominent as authors. This lexicographically enforced invisibility of the translator is particularly ironic given the relative numbers of translations into English and French: in English, only about 3% of books published in a given year are translations, while in French the figure hovers around 30%. What's more, reviews of translated French books do not mention (much less discuss) the merits of the translation nearly as often as reviews in the English-speaking world, which many of us already find on average woefully inadequate. Hoepffner's essay is a call both to the French literary world to open its eyes to the contributions of its translators, and also to the translators themselves to remember who they are and what their calling is: as Hoepffner admirably remarks, referencing the Schleiermacher-influenced French translation theorist Antoine Berman, "Translators should never forget that, despite their constitutive invisibility, their task is also to alter the complexion of their language for its own good."

This Month's Bridge is il ponte

2011-06-03T08:20:00.009-04:00

Just three months after its founding, the Bridge Series seems to have established itself as the premiere translation-themed reading and discussion series in New York. So far, organizers Bill Martin and Sal Robinson have brought us evenings devoted to Spanish and Greek literature as well as an afternoon session on Robert Walser featuring Christopher Middleton and me. Up next is an Italian Bridge with Michael Moore (Quiet Chaos by Sandro Veronesi, The Day Before Happiness by Erri De Luca, and The Drowned and the Saved by Primo Levi) and Patrick Barron (Selected Poetry and Prose of Andrea Zanzotto and Italian Environmental Literature: An Anthology). It will also serve as a launch event for Chicago Review's “New Italian Writing” issue, due out later this month.

The Bridge will be held at its usual venue, McNally Jackson Books, at 52 Prince Street. Wednesday, June 15 at 7:00 p.m..

Science Fiction & Fantasy Translation Awards

2011-05-31T12:52:00.011-04:00

To state the obvious: genre fiction of all sorts, regardless of quality, is generally underrepresented if not outright neglected in the world of literary awards, and it's no different with awards for literary translation. Given that many publishers of genre fiction do what they can to downplay the fact that the books they publish in translation were not written originally in English, translators of these works tend to get very little recognition indeed. So I am very happy to see a new award established specifically to honor translators of science fiction and fantasy. Hey, I grew up on Stanislaw Lem and was thrilled to discover that Michael Kandel, translator of many books I devoured as a teenager, was my colleague on the PEN Translation Committee here in New York. Obviously genre literature and the the "literary mainstream" overlap, sometimes even in the world of prizes, as is clear when you look at the list of finalists in the "long form" (book length) category of the newly-established Science Fiction and Fantasy Awards administered by the recently incorporated Association for the Recognition of Excellence in SF & F Translation based, not surprisingly, in California. One of the finalists for the new award, Edward Gauvin's translation of A Life on Paper: Stories by Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud, was also a finalist for the 2011 Best Translated Book Award.

Here are the complete lists of finalists:

Long Form

The Golden Age, Michal Ajvaz, translated by Andrew Oakland (Dalkey Archive Press). Original publication in Czech as Zlatý Věk (2001).

The Ice Company, G.-J. Arnaud [Georges-Camille Arnaud], translated by Jean-Marc Lofficier and Randy Lofficier (Black Coat Press). Original publication in French as La Compagnie des Glaces (1980).

A Life on Paper: Stories, Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud, translated by Edward Gauvin (Small Beer Press). Original publication in French (1976 -2005).

Four Stories till the End, Zoran Živković, translated by Alice Copple- Tošić (Kurodahan Press). Original publication in Serbian as Četiri priče do kraja (2004).

Short Form

“Wagtail”, Marketta Niemelä, translated by Liisa Rantalaiho (Usva International 2010, ed. Anne Leinonen). Original publication in Finnish as “Västäräkki” (Usva (The Mist), 2008).

“Elegy for a Young Elk”, Hannu Rajaniemi, translated by Hannu Rajaniemi (Subterranean Online, Spring 2010). Original publication in Finnish (Portti, 2007).

“Bear’s Bride”, Johanna Sinisalo, translated by Liisa Rantalaiho (The Beastly Bride: Tales of the Animal People, eds. Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, Viking). Original publication in Finnish as “Metsän tutt” (Aikakone (Time Machine), 3/1991).

“Midnight Encounters”, Hirai Tei’ichi, translated by Brian Watson (Kaiki: Uncanny Tales from Japan, Vol. 2, Kurodahan Press). Original publication in Japanese (1960).

It's curious to see Finland so heavily represented on this list; will the next international bestseller of genre fiction be a Finn? Otherwise the finalists are French, Japanese and Eastern European, i.e. from parts of the world with longstanding international reputations in this area.

The winners will be announced at the 2011 Eurocon in Stockholm the weekend of June 17-19.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Update: The prizes went to the following works:

(Long Form) A Life on Paper: Stories, Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud, translated by Edward Gauvin (Small Beer Press). Original publication in French (1976 -2005).

(Short Form) “Elegy for a Young Elk”, Hannu Rajaniemi, translated by Hannu Rajaniemi (Subterranean Online, Spring 2010). Original publication in Finnish (Portti, 2007).

For honorable mentions, statements about the winning works by members of the jury, and acceptance speeches, see the SFFTA website.

Apply Now for Vermont Studio Center Residency

2011-05-27T14:34:00.013-04:00

The Vermont Studio Center has been offering annual residency awards for translators of international literature into English in collaboration with Zoland Poetry since 2009. These four-week competitive residencies include private studio space in the VSC's Maverick Writing Studios building and the chance to enjoy all the resources of the Center, including the other current fellows in various genres and visiting writers who offer readings, craft talks and individual conferences.

Each fellowship includes:
• a private studio in the new Maverick Writing Studios building,
including a networked printer and wireless Internet access
• two Visiting Writers per month, each of whom gives a reading and a
craft talk and offers optional individual conferences
• access to the Mason House Conference Room & Library
• the opportunity to share work at one of three monthly readings
• publication in a forthcoming Zoland Poetry annual

To apply, visit the Vermont Studio Center website. Although the application instructions currently refer only to poetry submissions, the VSC staff assures me that translators working in all genres are eligible and encouraged to apply.

Application deadline: June 15, 2011.

Edith Grossman honored with 2011 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize

2011-05-26T21:28:00.010-04:00

I blogged about this year's Independent Foreign Fiction Prize with particular excitement because my translation of Jenny Erpenbeck's novel Visitation was included on the six-book shortlist, and of course I would have loved to be able to announce that Erpenbeck's book had taken the gold. But I am almost as pleased to share the actual results of this year's competition: The prize has gone to the remarkable Edith Grossman's translation of Santiago Roncagliolo's novel Red April. Roncagliolo is the first Peruvian author to win this prize, as well as the youngest prize-winner to date (he's 36). Grossman, who describes Roncagliolo's language as "clean and sharp and perceptive," notes in her remarks on accepting the prize that "the better the writing, the more satisfying the challenge for the translator." Certainly she has shown herself in her many wonderful books to be a great master of even the most difficult translation challenges. Congratulations, Edie!

Poets Translating Poetry

2011-05-21T14:13:00.018-04:00

I'm so far behind with blog postings that I am only now writing up my notes from a translation panel that to my mind was one of the highlights of this year's PEN World Voices Festival: the inimitable Rosanna Warren moderating a discussion between Jonathan Galassi - president of Farrar, Straus & Giroux and also a translator and poet - and Joachim Sartorius, a prominent German translator-poet who has a diplomatic career behind him and for the past decade has served as director of the huge festival Berliner Festspiele. The panel, held at the New York Public Library, was ostensibly devoted to a discussion of Galassi's new/old translations of Giacomo Leopardi's Canti ("new"

©Beowulf Sheehan
because the book came out just last fall; "old" because Galassi says he began translating Leopardi at age 23). But by the end of the panel, the discussion had ranged far beyond the work of any one poet.

Galassi and Sartorius began by making short work of Robert Frost's infamous dictum about poetry and translation: both believe that the translation of poetry is indeed possible. As Galassi put it, "There may be specific features of poems that cannot be translated, but the poems themselves can." Sartorius quoted French poet Michel Deguy: "The more a poem is itself, the more it cannot be translated; the more it is linked to a location, the more it cannot be transplanted," but then he pointed out that the supposed untranslatability of poems has been disproved by a thousand translators over the years. The successful translation, he said, is based on a universal dimension contained in all poetry that becomes "a wire on which we perform the high-wire act of translation" - a universal idiom of sound and feeling. Translation, he said, is an x-ray image of the original.

There is a tradition of translator-poets infusing the works they translate with their own sensibility; I wrote at length about this phenomenon in my book Foreign Words. Sartorius cited Ingeborg Bachmann's translations of Montale, and Paul Celan's translations of Osip Mandelstam, which tended to come out 50% Mandelstam, 50% Celan. Ted Hughes, on the other hand, who published translations from several languages, said that introducing anything from the translator's medicine bag was out of the question. I wonder how he managed to avoid doing so.

Sartorius then elaborated on the notion of difficulty in poetry translation by talking about translating Wallace Stevens, whom he considers the hardest poet he's ever worked on. As he sees it, there are 4 levels to a Stevens poem:

- the level of thought/thinking and philosophy
- music
- organization/form/syntax
- cultural context

If you're lucky, Sartorius says, you can capture 2 or maybe 3 of these 4 levels in any given translation of Stevens' work.

Sartorius has also translated two books by John Ashbery (one in collaboration with Christa Cooper). Ashbery being himself a translator from the French, Sartorius tried to ask him questions about his poems, but the responses were never much help. Their conversations would go like this:

JS: What did you mean when you wrote X?
JA: I can't remember.

But in the end, Ashbery - who doesn't know German - did wind up participating in the translation of his poems. Sartorius would read him the lines of the German translation, and the two would discuss the musical properties of the lines. For Galassi, this process recalls what he refers to as "rhythmic equivalence" in poetry translation: "You can replicate the movement of the sentences" he says, since poetry has a "rhythmic subtext that is translatable." This subtext, he believes, "provides the baseline for a successful translation." For Rosanna Warren the baseline is even more basic: she describes poetry translation as "an exercise in recombinant DNA."

In the Q&A, both Galassi and Sartorius reported that their own development as poets was influenced by their translation activity. In Galassi's case, Leopardi entered his writing life when he was still quite young. He says he always did translations as a way of "doing poetry," and was always conscious of the need to create poems that worked as objects in their own right in English - "faithful, but not too faithful." For Sartorius, too, translating a poem always meant writing a poem, but he cited a much more specific influence that translating Ashbery's work had on him: it helped him move from abstract formalism to what he describes as a more "relaxed" mode of writing related to parlando that made him "more narrative and easy-going" in his work. As for the rest, he declared that translation is the best training a poet can have. And this is something I tell my students all the time.

For a complete audio recording of the panel, visit the website of the PEN American Center.

New Russian Poetry Translation Contest

2011-05-20T15:12:00.012-04:00

Usually when translators apply for prizes and awards, they do so by submitting excerpts from their works-in-progress, i.e. bits of whatever they happen to be translating at the moment. This means that the jury members reading submissions for such prizes constantly wind up comparing oranges and apples, and generally judges are asked to take into account the quality not only of the translation itself but also the selected work. But I'm fascinated by prizes that have everyone translating the same text. This is a completely different approach to the competitive or sportive side of translation and allows the most skilled translators to show off their chops while also highlighting the power that any one translator's personal style and interpretative panache have to shape a text. You can see these principles at work both in the on-line translation slams I curate on the PEN American Center website and the live slams that have become a staple of the yearly PEN World Voices Festival. The new Gutekunst Prize for young translators from the German assigns a single passage to every translator wishing to participate in the competition. And now a new prize for Russian poetry translation is using a variation on this approach. Applicants for the new annual Compass Award for Russian poetry in English are required to submit work by a single poet. In its inaugural year, the competition will center on the work of poet Nikolay Gumilyov, born 125 years ago. Gumilyov was married as a young man to the great Anna Akhmatova (they later divorced) and was known for poetry inspired by the literature of childhood and the flora and fauna of Africa while also preserving a strong focus on literary craft. Gumilyov co-founded the Acmeist school of poetry, and in 1921 was executed by forces of the new Bolshevist state on allegations of monarchist conspiracy.
To compete for the 2011 Compass Award, follow the instructions on the website of the journal Cardinal Points which is sponsoring the award. All entries must be received by July 15, 2011.

Translation Extravaganza Tonight

2011-05-18T13:47:00.010-04:00

For those of you in NYC who can make it out to the Queen Sofia Spanish Institute, which is housed in a beautiful mansion at 684 Park Avenue, don't miss this evening of great readings to celebrate the publication of the Hudson Review's Spanish issue, which is about to be released. Just look at the list of featured readers:

Novelist and memoirist Antonio Muñoz Molina reading from A Double Education, a tale of coming of age as a writer as Spain itself emerged in the post-Franco years;

Edith Grossman, translator of “The Solitudes,” a 17th-century lyric poem by Luis de Góngora;

Esther Allen, translator of Jorge Luis Borges’ “Course in English Literature,” in which Borges tells us about how the Norman Conquest made Britain a world power;

and Jonathan Cohen reading newly-discovered translations of Spanish poems by William Carlos Williams, which will appear in the compilation of Williams's work Cohen is editing for New Directions, By Word of Mouth: Poems from the Spanish, 1916-1959 (forthcoming fall 2011).

The event will be moderated by Tess Lewis. If you can make it, RSVP on the Queen Sofia Institute's website.

Favorite Authors or Favorite Translators?

2011-05-12T10:57:00.000-04:00

Overheard on the Volume 1 Brooklyn website (with thanks to Edna McCown for the heads-up): What does your literary tote bag say about you? Here's a mildly snarky analysis by Jason Diamond and Tobias Carroll. If you carry a Strand Bookstore tote, what does it mean? "You probably don’t really live in New York. Either that or you’re a freshman at NYU." That classy orange and black Penguin bag? "You had a really enjoyable time flirting with the idea of working in the publishing industry. This tote bag is all you have to remember those times by." But what about the PEN American Center carryall with its iconic fountain pen logo? "You don’t have favorite authors, you have favorite translators." Thank you, snarky Brooklyn boys, for putting your finger, perhaps inadvertently, on the very point I keep making about PEN and its projects: If you love international literature, you are loving the work of literary translators, and it is impossible to separate out the two. PEN's single largest membership group is comprised of literary translators, and without their work, nothing PEN does would be possible. Thank you, Brooklyn, for the eloquence with which you drive this point home. Oh, and while you're at it, please join!

Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Copyright and Contracts

2011-05-09T11:26:00.017-04:00

Things have been hectic for me lately, so I didn't get this posted as quickly as I was hoping to, but here finally is the video of the panel Translation Rights and Translation Wrongs that I moderated at the PEN World Voices Festival on May 1, 2011. The panel featured Erach Screwvala, who specializes in publishing law - copyrights and contracts in particular - and who appears to have a soft spot for translators, as one of his subspecialties is the translation contract,
that odd hybrid between original and derivative work. A translation is subject to copyright like any other creative work, but its copyright is linked to that of the original on which it is based. Things can quickly get confusing. But here Screwvala lays out the basic issues clearly and comprehensibly. He is joined by two writers who are also translators, Evan Fallenberg of Israel and Monika Zgustová of Spain, and I devote part of the panel to asking these two translator-authors about their double careers and the ways in which their writing and translating inform and nourish one another. The panel begins with me giving a two-minute summary of the role translation and translators play within PEN and ends with a Q&A session. If you want to skip directly to the section about translation contracts in the United States, it begins at minute 17:35.

And if you'd like to read more on the subject, check out the transcript of the intellectual property workshop for translators with Erach Screwvala that was hosted on Dec. 9, 2010 by the PEN Translation Committee at the PEN American Center.

Indie Booksellers Choice Awards Finalists

2011-05-06T15:42:00.005-04:00

I was disappointed to see that not a single work in translation made the cut from the 36-book longlist for the Indie Booksellers Choice Awards to the 13-book list of finalists published this week. The longlist included seven works in translation. But since I reported at length on the award earlier this spring, here's the shortlist for your delectation. I'm happy to see Barbara Comyns and Anne Carson still on it. And it's good to have these recommendation of favorite reads voted on by the staff of independent bookstores across the country. Also: how great that so many independent publishers are represented in this list of faves.

The Black History of the White House by Clarence Lusane (City Lights)
Contingency Plan by David K Wheeler (TS Poetry)
The Instructions by Adam Levin (McSweeney’s)
The Lonely Polygamist by Brady Udall (W.W. Norton)
Matterhorn by Karl Marlantes (Grove/Atlantic)
Nox by Anne Carson (New Directions)
The Orange Eats Creeps by Grace Krilanovich (Two Dollar Radio)
Orion You Came and Took All My Marbles by Kira Henehan (Milkweed Editions)
The Report by Jessica Francis Kane (Graywolf)
The Singer’s Gun by Emily St. John Mandel (Unbridled)
Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead by Barbara Comyns (Dorothy)
The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi (Night Shade Books)
Wingshooters by Nina Revoyr (Akashic)

If you work for an independent bookstore, click here to vote on these finalists. The award will be announced May 23 at a ceremony at Housing Works Bookstore, indie par excellence.

P.S. - added later - here's the list of winners.

Tibetan Literature Comes to You

2011-05-06T08:47:00.006-04:00

Coming up ~~this weekend~~ next month, a chance to hear one of Tibet's most influential poets, Jangbu (Dorjicering Chenaktsang), in dialogue with his translator, Heather Stoddard, head of the new center for Tibetan studies at the National Institute of Oriental Languages and Cultures in Paris. This presentation celebrates the publication of The Nine-Eyed Agate, a collection of Jangbu's poems selected and translated by Stoddard, who will be speaking about Jangbu's poetic vision, style, and process, as well as the art of translation. This event will be held at 3:00 p.m. on ~~Saturday, May 7~~ Saturday, June 11 at the Trace Foundation's Latse Library at 132 Perry Street, which will also be hosting a screening (at 5:00 p.m.) of an excerpt from Jangbu's new film-in-progress, Yartsa, a documentary about the social and environmental implications of the harvesting of yartsa günbu - the much sought-after caterpillar fungus - on the Tibetan plateau.
For more information, consult the website of the Trace Foundation.

2011 Best Translated Book Awards Announced

2011-04-29T23:53:00.024-04:00

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

2011-04-29T14:13:00.024-04:00

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

2011-04-20T11:33:00.013-04:00

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

2011-04-19T16:31:00.013-04:00

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

2011-04-19T10:10:00.010-04:00

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

2011-04-13T09:54:00.014-04:00

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

2011-04-11T18:13:00.015-04:00

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?

2011-04-10T21:24:00.015-04:00

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

2011-04-07T13:30:00.001-04:00

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

2011-04-06T21:16:00.008-04:00

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

2011-04-05T23:33:00.024-04:00

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

2011-04-04T11:55:00.022-04:00

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.

How to Review Translations

2011-03-25T08:59:00.013-04:00

Lord knows it isn't easy to review books - there's so much to be taken into account, often in cripplingly limited space and on deadline. And when the book is a translation, this circumstance adds an entire new level of complexity to the enterprise. The result: many reviews of translated books acknowledge the translation only in passing, with a minimalistic epithet like "ably translated by [translator's name here]." And while this is slightly better than ignoring outright the fact that a work of literature is a translation - as, regrettably, still happens all too often - it is woefully inadequate considering the gigantic impact the translator's skill and aesthetic decisions have on the reader's experience of a book. Every translation is written twice: first by its author, then by its translator.

Recently I was bemoaning this state of affairs in conversation with my illustrious colleagues Jonathan Cohen and Edith Grossman, and we decided to sit down and write up some guidelines for reviewers. This is our contribution to the project of improving the overall quality of reviews of books in translation. And since Words Without Borders recently started running a new series of essays on reviewing translations, we thought this would be the ideal place to publish our little missive.

You can read our guidelines here. Hope you find them helpful!

Visitation is a 2011 BTBA Finalist!

2011-03-25T00:57:00.012-04:00

Well, I was certainly excited in January to find myself (twice!) on the fiction longlist for the 2011 Best Translated Book Award, and now the shortlist has just come out, and I'm on it with Jenny Erpenbeck's wonderful novel Visitation, which I love so much I've already blogged about it repeatedly, so I won't start with that again, though I'm tempted. It's such an honor to appear on this 10-title shortlist, which is filled with wonderful books that all deserve to win a prize. The two publishers I've been working for recently (New Directions and New York Review Books) are each represented with two titles; my Columbia University colleagues Idra Novey and Anna Moschovakis are on the list as well; as is the illustrious David Bellos, recently featured on this blog; as well as several friends. It's going to be hard for me not to feel celebratory if any of them wins the prize this year. Looking at this list, I am above all feeling gratified and delighted to see what excellent translated books came out in 2010. There's a lot of good reading here. And what would the point of the BTBA be if not to draw our attention to all the wonderful books in translation published every year for our reading pleasure? All you have to do is visit a bookstore or library, and the prize is yours.

I am reproducing below the lists of 2011 BTBA Fiction and Poetry Finalists as they appear on Three Percent:

The 2011 BTBA Fiction Finalists (in alphabetical order by author):

The Literary Conference by César Aira, translated from the Spanish by Katherine Silver (New Directions)

The Golden Age by Michal Ajvaz, translated from the Czech by Andrew Oakland (Dalkey Archive)

A Life on Paper by Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud, translated from the French by Edward Gauvin (Small Beer)

The Jokers by Albert Cossery, translated from the French by Anna Moschovakis (New York Review Books)

Visitation by Jenny Erpenbeck, translated from the German by Susan Bernofsky (New Directions)

Hocus Bogus by Romain Gary (writing as Émile Ajar), translated from the French by David Bellos (Yale University Press)

The True Deceiver by Tove Jansson, translated from the Swedish by Thomas Teal (New York Review Books)

On Elegance While Sleeping by Emilio Lascano Tegui, translated from the Spanish by Idra Novey (Dalkey Archive)

Agaat by Marlene Van Niekerk, translated from the Afrikaans by Michiel Heyns (Tin House)

Georg Letham: Physician and Murderer by Ernst Weiss, translated from the German by Joel Rotenberg (Archipelago)

The 2011 BTBA Poetry Finalists (in alphabetical order by author):

Geometries by Eugene Guillevic, translated from the French by Richard Sieburth (Ugly Ducking)

Flash Cards by Yu Jian, translated from the Chinese by Wang Ping and Ron Padgett (Zephyr Press)

Time of Sky & Castles in the Air by Ayane Kawata, translated from the Japanese by Sawako Nakayasu (Litmus Press)

Child of Nature by Luljeta Lleshanaku, translated from the Albanian by Henry Israeli and Shpresa Qatipi (New Directions)

The Book of Things by Aleš Šteger, translated from the Slovenian by Brian Henry (BOA Editions)

J. Hillis Miller on Benjamin on Translation (cont'd)

2011-03-23T22:23:00.013-04:00

Last week I posted an announcement of a presentation on Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Task of the Translator” by star deconstructionist critic J. Hillis Miller, and since I loved hearing him talk, I’m posting a brief report. Miller is a remarkably lucid speaker, capable of expressing even the most complex concepts with clarity and communicable understanding. Unfortunately, he spent most of this presentation speaking not about his own views on Benjamin but those of his late colleague Paul de Man. De Man famously lectured on Benjamin at Cornell in 1983, and a transcript of this lecture appears in the posthumous collection of de Man’s writings The Resistance to Theory. This lecture contains de Man’s famous suggestion that we read the “Aufgabe” (task) of the title in the sense of “aufgeben” (to give up) – an idea de Man borrowed from Benjamin scholar Carol Jacobs’s 1975 essay “The Monstrosity of Tranlsation.”
De Man lectured on Benjamin at Yale the same year as his Cornell talk, and the two presentations apparently differ significantly enough that Miller is now planning to publish de Man’s notes for the Yale lecture. Miller had been so taken with this lecture when he first heard it that he asked de Man for a copy he could read, whereupon de Man handed him the spiral notebook containing his notes for the talk – which is still in Miller’s possession. These lecture notes will obviously be a must-read for de Man fans everywhere when they come out next year. I personally, though, would rather listen to J. Hillis Miller’s ideas about Walter Benjamin than Paul de Man’s; in fact, a few pages of my book Foreign Words are devoted to debunking him. Miller, too, pointed out various weaknesses in de Man’s argument – for instance, he sets up the ideas of Hans-Georg Gadamer and Geoffrey Hartman in such a way that he can easily tear them down in the course of his lecture, making them “fall guys” (Miller’s term) for all humanistic/messianic/phenomenological readings of Benjamin. Well, sorry, deconstructionists, but these are exactly the sorts of terms in which Benjamin himself was thinking, so why not read his work that way?
I did ask Miller in the Q&A what he himself would focus on if he were teaching Benjamin’s essay, and he replied that for him the most interesting part is Benjamin’s discussion of “pure language” (die reine Sprache). I couldn’t agree more. This is a huge topic, since there’s so much confusion as to what Benjamin actually means by the term. Miller’s understanding of it is based on thinking about Benjamin’s use of the word “meinen” in the essay to mean “mean” in the sense of “point to.” Miller didn’t call this “intentionality,” but that’s the term I’d use for it (borrowing from G.E.M. Anscombe’s writings on Wittgenstein, whom she translated). In fact, in the universe of Benjamin’s essay, the mode of intentionality is what defines and differentiates languages from one another. Each language has its own individual characteristics, but all languages point to the world of things and ideas, which lies outside them. This mediation (it’s still me talking, not Miller) takes the form of pointing. Pure language, on the other hand, no longer entails mediation of any sort. What is said is what is.
So you might think this pure language sounds pretty handy. I bet you’d like to have some of it around the house for your own use. Well, you’re out of luck, because at this point it exists only as potentiality. For Benjamin, pure language is a form, not an actual active language: it is the intersection of all the world’s individual, human languages – making it, in a sense, post-human. It doesn’t exist yet in actuality, but it will some day, eventually, in the messianically distant future (pace de Man) when the borders separating all the languages of the world from one another have become so blurry that they all merge into one. Translators are the ones doing the blurring, in case you were wondering.
Critical theorist Emily Apter, who was sitting in the audience at Miller’s talk, asked a question about translations from this pure language, but I think the very question misses the point: pure language exists in a post-translation sphere; once it exists, translation will no longer be either necessary or possible. Gayatri Spivak was in the audience as well, but unfortunately she didn’t participate in the discussion, though I’d have loved to know what she was thinking. Apparently a podcast of the talk itself will be made available in the coming days, and I promise to post a link here. Don’t expect to be able to hear the Q&A though: Miller rambled around the auditorium while answering questions, so much of what he said may well not have found its way into the microphone.

Translator for a Day: A Workshop for Beginners

2011-03-20T22:40:00.023-04:00

Have you always wanted to try your hand at literary translation but didn’t know where to start? Here’s your chance. Next month I'll be offering a one-session introductory workshop intended for absolute beginners, to be held at McNally Jackson Books at 52 Prince Street in SoHo. Prerequisites are a love of literature and at least a slight knowledge of one of the following languages: French, German, Spanish, Italian. (Definition of “slight knowledge”: you are able to decipher a literary text with the help of a dictionary and patience.) This workshop, which is designed for native speakers of English, is free of charge, and is limited to 25 participants, each of whom will be sent a short text to prepare the week before the workshop. Preregistration is required.

To register, send a brief e-mail stating which language(s) you wish to work in to rsvp {at} susanbernofsky {dot} com with "McNally Jackson" in the subject line. Registration closes at 5:00 p.m. on April 20, or when capacity is reached. The workshop will be held at 7:00 p.m. on April 26.

This workshop is sponsored by the American Literary Translators Association with the generous support of the National Endowment for the Arts.

Lecture: On the Translations of Lorca

2011-03-17T22:01:00.009-04:00

There's something about the work of certain poets that makes later generations of writers want to translate them again and again. Think Rimbaud, think Rilke, think Neruda and Lorca. Often enough it is these most iconic poets whose work is most radically transformed in translation, as generation after generation weighs in on the question of who these poets really were. In 2009, Jonathan Mayhew of the University of Kansas published a book entitled Apocryphal Lorca: Translation, Parody, Kitsch, examining the ways in which the English-language translations of Lorca's poetry turned him into a specifically American poet, adapted to American cultural and ideological concerns. Next week, Mayhew will come to the CUNY Graduate Center to speak about his book with poet David Shapiro and translator-poet Mark Statman. This event will be held at 7:00 p.m. on Wednesday, March 23 in the Martin E. Segal Theatre and is open to the public.

J. Hillis Miller on Benjamin on Translation

2011-03-15T23:02:00.013-04:00

Walter Benjamin's seminal essay "Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers" (The Task of the Translator) is no doubt the most widely read theoretical essay on literary translation of all time. Benjamin published it in 1921 as the foreword to a collection of his own translations of Baudelaire's Tableaux parisiens (part of Les fleurs du mal), a circumstance all the odder for the apparent disconnect between the theoretical views on translation expressed in the essay and the way he went about translating the poems. I should write a blog post about Benjamin's intriguing and often obscure essay one of these days, since I do have some thoughts on it and its usefulness to translators even today, but I am supposed to be on vacation right now, so I will confine myself to announcing that the august literary critic and scholar J. Hillis Miller will be speaking about Benjamin's essay in conversation with Kyoo Lee next week. The event is entitled "What’s Left to Translate? Re-reading Benjamin’s 'The Task of the Translator'" and will be held on Monday, March 21 at 6:30 p.m. in Room 9204 at the Center for the Humanities at the The CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue.

P.S. I've been getting queries as to whether there'll be an audio recording of this event for those who are unable to attend, and it seems there will be. I'll post a link when it's available.

Translators Love Libraries

2011-03-15T21:18:00.012-04:00

Think about it: You can always drop by a friend's house to borrow something to read, but what if your friend's collection of great books in translation is no match for your current cravings? You've got a much better chance of getting your itch scratched at your local public library. And did you know that New York's public library system is so well networked that you can request to have any book from any of its branches shipped, free of charge, to the branch nearest you, where you can pick it up at your convenience? Really, what's not to love? Oh yes, the fact that the budget of the NYPL keeps getting slashed as the city's finances go from bad to worse. The library's book-buying budget was reduced by a staggering 26% this year. That cuts down significantly on the number of new books the library can purchase. But right now there's a way you can help out a great deal with even the most modest contribution. One of the library's trustees, Timothy Barakett, along with his wife Michele, has just announced that they will triple every dollar donated to the Friends of the New York Public Library's book fund this week. That makes it possible for a relatively small donation to have a major impact. Please consider contributing now, even if you can't afford to give much. And please remember that the library is here for you. For those of us who can't afford to buy every book we want to read, having a well-stocked library is a true blessing.

Lush Breezes

2011-03-11T10:46:00.015-05:00

The incomparable John Ashbery read last night at Dia Beacon along with Queens poet laureate Paolo Javier, of whom I am also a big fan. Paolo, who writes really interesting work, is one of the initiators of the exciting new QUILL Translation Prize. And John Ashbery, besides being one of the foremost poets of the English language, also translates from the French. His latest translation project, the entirety of Rimbaud's cycle of prose poems Illuminations, is forthcoming later this spring from Norton. If you have a New Yorker subscription, you can see one of the poems entitled "Cities" on their website, a reverie apparently based loosely on London, though one of the students in my translation workshop remarked yesterday that the fanciful descriptions ("copper footbridges, [...] stairways that wind around covered markets and pillars") reminded him of Calvino's Invisible Cities. The translation is elegant and also marked by effective shifts in tone (one sentence begins, journalistically, "For today's tourist") that remind me of Ashbery's own poems. At its most lyrical, the writing here is breathtaking. Listen to this: "The upper zone has inexplicable parts: an arm of the sea, with no boats, unrolls its layer of blue sleet between quays weighted with giant candelabra." I love the rhythms of the phrases, the opulently interwoven assonance of parts/arm, sea/sleet/between, zone/no/boats/unrolls and layer/quays/weighted, as well as the handling of the image "unrolls its layer of blue sleet," inviting us to think of the sleet as somehow resembling a bolt of cloth. Can't wait to see the book itself when it comes out. Meanwhile I was struck by the phrase "lush breezes" in one of the other Rimbaud poems Ashbery read. I myself would have written "luxurious breezes," feeling that "lush" and "breeze" don't quite go together. But Ashbery has built an entire oeuvre around putting together words that don't quite seem to fit ... until that moment when he juxtaposes them in such a way that the combination is instantly convincing. Come to think of it, I really do like my breezes lush.