File under: More US literary translation programs (!!)

A small bit of happy news:  University of Rochester has officially announced its new MA in literary translation studies program on the university website.  The program offers a stand alone MA in literary translation studies (aka MALTS), as well as certificate programs at both the graduate and undergraduate levels.

The program is further bolstered by the fearless editing of Chad Post at Open Letter.   This is very very exciting.

–dt

Visual Proust

Untitled (page 1)

Here’s a literary adaptation as innovative as the Dante Xbox game discussed on this blog a couple of days ago, although it will probably appeal less to 13-year-old boys.

In today’s San Francisco Chronicle,  Kenneth Baker attempts to describe artist Molly Springfield’s visual renderings of Marcel Proust, on exhibit now at the Steven Wolf Fine Arts Gallery in San Francisco through March 21 [scroll down]:

She set out to copy cipher-for-cipher photocopies of closely corresponding pages from the several English translations of Marcel Proust’s “À la recherche du temps perdu.”

Springfield’s ultimate concern may be the loss and gain of information that any translation, even a copy, involves. In drawing the photocopied book pages, she carefully rendered the “gutter” shadows created by the copy machine, the striations of the unexposed pages’ edges and the margins of seeming nothingness that surround the books splayed on the copier glass.

You can see the images and read a fascinating discussion of Springfield’s project at the gallery’s website.

Like Proust’s narrator, who begins In Search of Lost Time by musing, “I had gone on thinking while I was asleep about what I had been reading but these thoughts had taken a rather peculiar turn,” Springfield takes us through her transcription process to a twilight place where the comfortable solidity of meaning and location breaks down. This is enhanced by stylistic elements in the drawings themselves. They look empirical at first glance, but the nuances of value and abstraction produced by the quirks of the copier machine and the magic of the toner grant them a dark and mysterious air. The center of the drawing channels Lawrence Weiner, the margins Agnes Martin. Technology and the hand collaborate in odd ways.

As a book, Translation will be more than a catalogue of the drawings. The ostensible subject becomes Springfield’s claim that we consider her work a viable new translation of Proust. On the wall the drawings are viewed, in book form they are more likely to be read. As rewritten by Springfield, Proust’s familiar words should sound different and signify differently. The reader will have to sort out whether the action in the book takes place in the imaginary village of Combray, in Proust’s cork lined room, in Springfield’s well-lit studio, or the place in which they are reading it. Time is out of joint.

Sounds amazing. Lucky San Franciscans.

-ar

Translation fest in the Guardian

Both Three Percent and the Literary Saloon have expressed delight and amazement at the suddenly increased number of translation-related pieces in this weekend’s New York Times Book Review, but check out The Guardian!

• John Banville reviews a new translation of Stefan Zweig’s Post Office Girl.
• Adam Thirlwell, author of The Delighted States, meditates on eminently hateable Italian author Curzio Malaparte.
• James Buchan considers, via Jonathan Lyons’s new book, The House of Wisdom, the influence of Arab mathematics, geography, poetry, etc. on European intellectual culture in centuries past.
• And, of course, James Lasdun reviews the omnipresent The Kindly Ones by Jonathan Littell, which the Complete Review and La Kakutani of the New York Times roundly panned. It comes off somewhat better in Lasdun’s account, but I can’t say I’m eager for a 938-page slog if it’s even half as bad as other reviews have said.

All right, so the Arab history isn’t a translation, but it certainly speaks to the importance of cultural exchange. Could it be that translations are finally getting more traction and visibility in the mainstream publishing industry?

-ar

Mamet in Japanese

There was a very interesting article in The Daily Yomiuri yesterday about actor and first-time translator Toru Emori, who tackled David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross, apparently with some success. There are some interesting discussions of translation choices:

“When you translate the word ‘I,’ beyond the gender difference, you must choose between words such as ‘boku,’ ‘ore,’ ‘uchi’ and ‘washi,’ for example,” he said.

“And the other interesting thing about Japanese is [even in the same character], the way they use pronouns changes. For example in English, ‘you’ will be still ‘you,’ but the tone of voice used when saying ‘you’ may differ based on the character’s emotional state. In Japanese, on the other hand, the words can be switched from ‘anata’ to ‘anta’ as the speaker becomes enraged. These subtle changes can completely influence the feeling of a conversation,” he said.

The interviewer, Ikuko Kitagawa, says he “found Emori’s 135-page Glengarry script elegant and old-fashioned,” and it apparently evokes “stylish, aggressive men from a period drama.” That’s not how I remember Glengarry Glen Ross on stage or on screen, but if that’s what it takes to make the translation seem like “it was written in Japanese, not diligently converted from English,” so be it.

The article brings up the interesting question of who is best qualified to translate a piece of literature. Emori says he was frustrated by translations where his “lines sounded like they had been translated,” and decided to translate “based on [his] experience as an actor.” It is certainly often said that good translators of poetry must be poets themselves, whether they’ve actually written poetry or not — although I’ve always thought that was splitting hairs. How is it any different from saying the person must be a good translator of poetry, which is tautological? Or maybe I’m doing the hair-splitting here?

Anyway, putting aside my irritation with that tendency to position poetry as an otherworldly, mystical craft, the idea of an actor as translator is intriguing to me. Could the demands of theater be different enough that something entirely else might be required? Actors study dialogue and human speech in a way that I, as a translator, do not. This is not to say there aren’t translators-who-are-just-translators who have a knack for spoken dialogue — of course there are, as well as playwrights, who we can assume probably have a pretty good handle on the field. But theater is anomalous is so many ways; the closest equivalent to this issue you could get with prose is to wonder whether a books-on-tape reader might have special insight into the wily ways of a written text.

I don’t really have any amazing conclusions here. Just something to think about.

-ar

eXchanges Spring 2009: Mirrors & Masks

Just a reminder that eXchanges is accepting submissions for our Spring issue until March 20, 2009. Details below. You can take a look at past issues here.

Call for Submissions

eXchanges will be accepting variations on the theme MIRRORS & MASKS for our spring 2009 issue until March 20, 2009. Short stories, novel excerpts, literary nonfiction, and poetry are all welcome, as well as critical essays on translation.

Submission Guidelines

To be considered, submissions must include:

•Both the original and the translation
•Biographies and photos of both author and translator
•A short note on the process of translation
•Permission for online publication for both languages
•Submissions should total no more than ten pages in length

Electronic submissions are strongly preferred. Please send both original and translation as .doc attachments to studorg-exchanges@uiowa.edu.

Direct paper submissions to eXchanges, Bowman House, 230 N. Clinton St., Iowa City, IA, 52242, U.S.A.

We do accept simultaneous submissions; however, please inform us if your work is under consideration elsewhere.

Bernardo Atxaga: The Accordionist’s Son

In the Barnes & Noble Review, James Hannaham reviews Margaret Jull Costa’s translation of Basque writer Bernardo Atxaga’s 2003 novel, known in English as The Accordionist’s Son. The translation into English is actually a translation of the Spanish translation of the original, a layering of language paralleled in the theme of the book:

[T]he sprawling epic concerns a Basque activist named David Imaz, from Atxaga’s imaginary town of Obaba, who lives in exile in California and dies leaving an unfinished memoir behind — written in Euskera. His wife, an American named Mary Ann, gives the manuscript to José . . . In turn, José decides to write a book himself, “based on what David had written, to rewrite and expand his memoir…in the spirit of someone finding a tree, on which some long vanished shepherd had left a carving, and deciding to redraw the lines so that … time will so blur the difference between the old incisions and the new that eventually there’ll only be a single inscription on the bark.

Hannaham has a couple of minor complaints about the translation (what does “it’s too plainspoken” mean, without a comparison to the Basque or Spanish texts?), but since I’ve been refusing to mention book reviews that don’t seem to notice that the book in question is a translation, that’s actually a welcome change.

-ar

Europa Editions

Nice writeup in the New York Times on Europa Editions, which made a splash last year with Muriel Barbery’s The Elegance of the Hedgehog. Their recent success, despite the fact they only publish literary translations, stands in stark contrast to current conditions in most of the American publishing industry.

Some larger publishers are starting to envy Europa’s selection and its frankly retro publishing model. Mr. Carroll “finds things, picks things up for a little bit of money and makes a lot out of them,” said Jonathan Galassi, publisher of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. “Most of publishing was once that way. It wasn’t about big money so much. He’s sort of preserving the old values of it’s-all-about-the-book and connecting the book with readers.”

It’s all about the book, huh? Amazing that this appears to be a revelation.

-ar

Foreign fiction longlist from Arts Council England

The longlist for the Independent Foreign Fiction prize has just been announced, to be winnowed down to a six-title shortlist in a few weeks, with the winner revealed in May. The prize is specifically for titles translated into English. It’s interesting how different the list is from the Melville House/Open Letter list a while back. I wonder how much of that is different publishing schedules in the U.S. and U.K., and how much is different judges’ tastes.

Anyway, the list:

• My Father’s Wives by Jose Eduardo Agualusa, translated by Daniel Hahn from the Portuguese (Arcadia Books)

• The Director by Alexander Ahndoril, translated by Sarah Death from the Swedish (Portobello Books)

• Voiceover by Celine Curiol, translated by Sam Richard from the French (Faber)

• The White King by Gyorgy Dragoman, translated by Paul Olchvary from the Hungarian (Doubleday)

• Night Work by Thomas Glavinic translated by John Brownjohn from the German (Canongate)

• Beijing Coma by Ma Jian, translated by Flora Drew from the Chinese (Chatto)

• The Siege by Ismail Kadare, translated by David Bellos from the Albanian (Canongate)

• Homesick by Eshkol Nevo, translated by Sondra Silverston from the Hebrew (Chatto)

• The Diving Pool by Yoko Ogawa, translated by Stephen Snyder from the Japanese (Harvill Secker)

• The Armies by Evelio Rosero, translated by Anne McLean from the Spanish (Maclehose Press)

• The Blue Fox by Sjon, translated by Victoria Cribb from the Icelandish (Telegram)

• Novel 11, Book 18 by Dag Solstad, translated by Sverre Lyngstad from the Norwegian (Harvill Secker)

• How the Soldier Repairs the Gramaphone by Sasa Stanisic, translated by Anthea Bell from the German, (Weidenfeld)

• A Blessed Child by Linn Ullmann, translated by Sarah Death from the Norwegian (Picador)

• The Informers by Juan Gabriel Vasquez, translated by Anne McLean from the Spanish (Bloomsbury)

• Friendly Fire by A B Yehoshua, translated by Stuart Schoffman from the Hebrew (Halban)

Abandon all hope.

Translators of the Inferno into English have ranged from founding father of American letters H.W. Longfellow, to detective novelist Dorothy Sayers, to poet Laureate Robert Pinsky, to Marcus Sanders, author of a more recent illustrated version set in 20th century Los Angeles (“Dante the Pilgrim wakes from a stupor to discover that he’s lost in a dark forest and can’t remember anything from the night before…”)

But the latest version ups the ante a bit: the canonical medieval text has now been “translated” into the 21st century form of… Xbox.

Dante is now a burly helmeted poet with a scythe, and Book 1 of the Commedia has been boiled down in the trailer as follows: “a man who fears no death/in the 9 circles learns quickly/ to fear his own sins.”

Gamer responses on the sites where the news has been posted range from: “only nine levels, hopefully it isn’t too short” to “I would love nothing more than to see that they pulled off the ninth level well….The ninth level of Hell in Dante’s Inferno is a place that has never seen light and is covered in ice since there is no warmth in it. I’m picturing a completely black background with icebergs floating in nothingness. …That would just be cool to see.”

Abandon all hope, & etc:

trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lw3DXLgrQj4

description: http://www.gamespot.com/xbox360/adventure/dantesinferno/news.html?sid=6205196

The Creative Spark Outside All of Us

TED.com (which is a fantastic place to learn new things and hear intriguing ideas, if you’ve never visited) has put up a video of Elizabeth Gilbert giving a lecture on creativity. I haven’t read Eat, Pray, Love — I have been petulantly resisting its overwhelming bestselleriness, despite being a sucker for travel memoirs in general — and I’ve heard very conflicting reports on the book, but her talk was a lovely meditation on the nature of genius. I can’t say her proposal — that we remove the locus of genius from the artist and place it instead outside the artist, as the ancient Greeks and Romans did, thus divesting the artist of the excruciating and even destructive responsibility of being a genius — convinced me. Gilbert herself acknowledges that what she is suggesting is “basically fairies who follow people around, like, rubbing fairy juice on their projects.” But the talk itself is still thought-provoking and even beautiful.

At one point Gilbert talks about the poet Ruth Stone, and her experience of writing poetry:

She told me that when she was growing up in rural Virginia, she would be out working in the  fields, and she said she would, like, feel and hear a poem coming at her from over the landscape, and she said it was like a thunderous train of air, and it would come barreling down at her over the landscape. And when she felt it coming — because it would, like, shake the earth under her feet — she knew that she had only one thing to do at that point, and that was to, in her words, “run like hell.” And she would, like,  run like hell, and she’d be getting chased by this poem, and the whole deal was that she had to get to a piece of paper and a pencil fast enough so that when it thundered through her she could collect it and grab it on the page.

I won’t ruin the ending of the anecdote for anyone who wants to watch the lecture, but I will say it gets even more wonderful.

So, not really translation related — except for her discussion of the Moorish origins of the Spanish word olé — but it is about art and the creative process. I really do recommend listening to the lecture if you have 20 minutes to spare.

-ar