Interview with Olha Seniuk

In The Day, an interview with Ukrainian literary translator Olha Seniuk. Some of the issues seem to be shared between the American and Ukrainian publishing industries:

We know that you are trying to share your professional experience with young translators and that you taught at a school for translators in Yaremcha. 

“Sharing this experience is easier said than done. Sometimes I think that there is no continuity left in the realm of literary translation here. The impression is that the younger generation has categorically discarded everything previously achieved in Ukrainian literature and that these young people are starting from scratch.

“Furthermore, if there were market demand for literary translations in Ukraine, you could make demands on young translators. Literary translations are adequately appreciated [sic?!], so they have nearly dropped to an amateurish level. Besides, our publishing companies keep economizing and no longer hire style editors, so translations are publishes with a multitude of mistakes.”

People talk about a surge of interest in translation and I get all giddy and optimistic, but my inborn cynicism responds to statements like Seniuk’s. Here’s hoping the giddy optimisim is right on this one!

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That’s Doctor Traditore to You

Since getting a Ph.D. in translation studies is something I still idly consider from time to time, I was very interested to read B.J. Epstein’s description of her doctoral program in Wales. Coming from an M.F.A. program, however, which by definition focuses on the practice of literary translation, I find this statement incomprehensible:

I have met many people who study or work in the field of translation studies and yet have never translated and have no intention of doing so.

I’ve heard people say this before, and can’t really fathom it. Myself, I have no particular insights into moviemaking, despite having seen hundreds of films over the years . . .

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Margaret Schwartz and Macedonio Fernández

Margaret Schwartz, whose translations of Macedonio Fernández we published in an earlier issue of eXchanges, has been working on the Argentinian writer’s most famous work, The Museum of Eterna’s Novel, which will be published by Open Letter Books next January. The latest issue of The Quarterly Conversation includes an excerpt:

Horrible art and the accumulated glories of the past, which have always existed, are a result of the following: the sonorousness of language and the existence of a public; without this sonorousness, only thinking and creating would remain; without a clamoring public, art would not be drowned. Under these conditions, Literature would be pure art, and there would be many more beautiful works than there are at present: there would be three or four Cervantes, the Cervantes of the Quijote, without the stories, Quevedo the humorist and poet of passion, without the moralizing orator, various Gómez de la Sernas. We’ll be liberated from the likes of Calderón, the Prince of falsetto, from lack of feeling, which is poor taste itself; from the likes of Góngora, at least from time to time, with his exclamations of “Ay Fabio, o sorrow!” We’d have three Heines, each of sarcasm and sadness, or D’Annunzios to limitlessly versify passion. Happily, we would have only the first act of Faust, and in compensation various Poes, and various Bovaries—with their sad affliction of loveless appetite, despicable and bloody—and this other, lacerating absurdity: Hamlet’s lyric of sorrow, which convinces and breeds sympathy, despite the false psychologism of its source.

Good stuff! Congratulations, Margaret!

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Donald Duck Giving David Hasselhoff a Run for His Money

Susan Bernofsky has a wonderful article in the Wall Street Journal in which she describes Donald Duck’s runaway popularity in Germany (including a group called the German Organization for Non-Commercial Followers of Pure Donaldism, or D.O.N.A.L.D.), and attributes it largely to the translator, Erika Fuchs, and her reworking — some might even say shameless improving – of the comic books. Whereas in English the language is straightforward and even plain, Fuchs made Donald a literary, philosophical duck, “a bird of art and letters,” as Bernofsky puts it, who quotes Schiller, Goethe, and Hölderlin.

Dr. Fuchs raised the diction level of Donald and his wealthy Uncle Scrooge (alias Dagobert Duck), who in German tend to speak in lofty tones using complex grammatical structures with a faintly archaic air, while Huey, Louie and Dewey (now called Tick, Trick and Track), sound slangier and much more youthful.

Fuchs applied alliteration liberally, as, for example, in Donald’s bored lament on the beach in “Lifeguard Daze.” In the English comic, he says: “I’d do anything to break this monotony!” The über-gloomy German version: “How dull, dismal and deathly sad! I’d do anything to make something happen.”

Fuchs also inserted political and ethical issues into the comics that were mostly absent in the original. Bernofsky describes, for example, what happened to The Golden Helmet, a childhood favorite of mine, which is about a treasure hunt for a legendary Viking helmet that conveys possession of the United States upon its owner. While the human (or duckly) lust for wealth and power certainly drive the plot of the English original — I recall Donald fantasizing about charging for breathing (“a sigh, a nickel; a gasp, a dime!”) — Fuchs makes the tale a metaphor for German nationalism:

In Dr. Fuchs’s rendition, Donald, his nephews and a museum curator race against a sinister figure who claims the helmet as his birthright without any proof—but each person who comes into contact with the helmet gets a “cold glitter” in his eyes, infected by the “bacteria of power,” and soon declares his intention to “seize power” and exert his “claim to rule.” Dr. Fuchs uses language that in German (“die Macht ergreifen”; “Herrscheranspruch”) strongly recalls standard phrases used to describe Hitler’s ascent to power.

The original English says nothing about glittering eyes or power but merely notes, “As the minutes drag past, a change comes over the tired curator.” Even the helmet itself, which in German Donald describes as a masterpiece of “Teutonic goldsmithery,” is anything but nationalistic in English: “Boys, isn’t this helmet a beauty?” is all he says. In an interview, Dr. Fuchs said she hoped that a child who “sees what power can do to people and how crazy it makes them” would be less susceptible to its siren song in later life.

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Most Influential Literature in Translation?

James Marcus at Critical Mass has posted a summary of the results of their survey of members of the National Book Critics Circle that asked, “Which work in translation has had the most effect on your reading and writing?” As most of you have probably already surmised, a lot of the usual suspects — Camus, Mann, Proust, the Bible — appear in the results, and some of the respondents’ descriptions of the literature are compelling in and of themselves:

Camus’s style is spare and simple—a Gallic Hemingway, if Hemingway had done his writing, not just his drinking, in French. . . . L’Etranger, La Peste, and La Chute still stun me, like a pistol shot on a sunny beach.

What I noticed most, though (I know, I know, I am very predictable), was how infrequently readers mentioned the translator responsible for providing them with access to these stunning works of literature — or, assuming that all of them wrote at length about the translator, that it was those sections of their responses that were deemed least worthy of reproduction at Critical Mass. Of course there is occasional praise given to Moncrieff for his Proust, Singleton for his Dante, King James for his Jesus, and so on, but in fact the most effusive praise given to a translator is of the sort I find really upsetting:

“I guess the best measure of a translation,” he wrote, “as with any work of art, is that you don’t notice the work that went into it. It just is. So I had to think about this question a little. What translated work was so good that I never noticed that it was translated? That would be The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Kundera, who writes in Czech and in French, is concerned about the missed connections between human beings, the trap that our world has become. His prose comes across so clearly in English that it’s impossible to imagine it written in any other language.”

Not to be all Venuti or anything, but doesn’t “invisible” in this case just mean that the translator’s skill was on dazzling display? That Heim never misstepped, unlike even many authors, and that his performance should be appreciated as a display of grace and beauty as extremely visible – there it is, after all, right on the page — as a Baryshnikov routine. Others have objected to the positioning of “invisibility” as an ideal in translation, so perhaps this row doesn’t need to be hoed again, but it is still amazing to me that people can read a translation and feel that the translator has somehow stepped out of the way, allowed the author’s original words to somehow be transmitted unmediated (and even more extraordinary that they view this claim as a compliment). It’s not just a lack of recognition of translators’ achievements, it’s a fundamental misconception of what it means to read these canonical works in English.

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A Translation Smorgasbord

That end-of-semester chaotic etc. is upon us, but there have been some worthy and interesting translation happenings that deserve some mention:

- First, the Suzane Adam/Becka McKay reading at the University of Iowa, cosponsored by eXchanges, which was a delightful evening with delightful people.

- Also, U. of Iowa professor and translator Russell Valentino — who is also the man behind Autumn Hill Books, which published Adam’s Laundry last year — has written the first of what is sure to be a thoughtful series on translation and education for Words Without Borders:

Some translation scholars see the question of placing or not placing translators’ names on the covers of books as a sort of teaching moment for the general reading public, envisioned as myriad Ma Fergusons willfully ignoring the fact that Jesus didn’t speak, nor Tolstoy nor Dante write, in English. It may be such a moment, but even so it is a terribly minor one, misplaced, I would argue, in the retail bookstore, and in any case unlikely to have much consequence when pursued in isolation. The relative neglect of translation in the educational system is the larger and much more fecund teaching territory I would like to focus on, by suggesting key domains in which engaging translations—reading them and writing them—can serve a fundamentally transformative role in people’s reading practices in general, both inside and outside the classroom.

- In Semana, a wonderful profile of translator Anne McLean:

“Those of us who have been very lucky to have been translated by her end up with the embarassing impression that she makes our books better. Anne is, so far I know, the best that can happen in England to those of us who write in Spanish.”

(Via The Literary Saloon.)

- In the New York Times, Christopher Hampton discusses translation:

I think translation is very underappreciated and under-rewarded. I feel quite strongly that translation is performing an incredibly valuable service for us all. As often as not, when you read a translated novel, you have to search to find the name of the translator. Of course the translator is the person who is directly mediating the language to you and giving you access to all these worlds that you otherwise wouldn’t be able to enter.

(Via Beyond Words.)

- In an interview in Columbia’s Spectacle, William Gass comments on translation in the United States:

We don’t translate enough.  That part is true.  But we are getting better.  And we don’t buy translations.  That indicates our provinciality.

Unfortunately, his response gets a little incoherent after that. Turns out it’s actually the Europeans who are insular. Except for Robbe-Grillet, maybe? Hard to tell.

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Looking Back on FitzGerald’s Rubaiyat

In the Telegraph, Tony Briggs considers the place of Edward FitzGerald’s once-beloved Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, and laments how far it has fallen. He suggests a number of possible reasons for its dismissal by the “literary establishment”:

Has the poem proved too popular for its own good? Is it perhaps lightweight doggerel quickly seen through by experts? Does its origin (in translation) invalidate it as an independent work? Is The Rubaiyat affected by the way poetry is taught nowadays, with a ban on learning anything by heart?

He rejects all of these reasons, however, suggesting instead that the popularity of the verses in the first decades after their publication in 1859 — I memorized a few stanzas myself, as a child — has doomed them to obscurity, since “the academic world tends to be suspicious of anything that is widely enjoyed.” This seems to me a rather facile reason; Dickens and Shakespeare have suffered no such fate, although I suppose Briggs might argue that their work is of a genius surpassing FitzGerald’s, and thus exonerated from accusations of accessible mediocrity. Still, the popularity argument is a dubious one for me because it neatly lets the poetry itself off the hook. There is absolutely nothing about the stuff’s quality or content or cultural project or anything else, apparently, that would push FitzGerald’s work into obscurity.

This may be the undue weight of my well-ground ax pulling me in a predictable direction, but I do think the third question — “Does its origin (in translation) invalidate it as an independent work?” — also deserves some consideration. As Briggs notes, “For decades the poem was bedevilled by the question of translation. FitzGerald was castigated for having distorted the original verses through ignorance.” This sort of portrayal would inevitably influence our cultural memory of a work’s role. And anyway, what other work of translation have we welcomed into the English-language canon, besides maybe the Bible (the exception that proves all rules, it seems)? Keats may have attempted to induct Chapman’s Homer into the English-language poetic canon, but I’ve never encountered Homer studied as poetry in English.

FitzGerald’s verses start out at a disadvantage because of their status as translations, however liberal, and are then “bedevilled” by claims that on top of that they are bad translations. Given these handicaps, I hardly think that if even Briggs, the poem’s great defender, calls FitzGerald a poet “of the second rank,” the Rubaiyat would be a shoo-in to the English-language canon.

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Constantine Cavafy: Collected Poems

In the New York Times, James Longenbach reviews Greek poet Constantine Cavafy’s Collected Poems, translated by Daniel Mendelsohn and published by Knopf. So often in mainstream reviews of international literature, translation itself is only discussed in any depth in instances where multiple translations exist and can be compared. Longenbach sees in Mendelsohn’s translation an illuminating new reading of Cavafy’s work:

Earlier translators have, to varying degrees, rightly emphasized the prosaic flatness of Cavafy’s language; the flatness is crucial to the emotional power of the poems, since it prevents their irony from seeming caustic, their longing from seeming nostalgic. But as Mendelsohn shows, Cavafy’s language was in subtle ways more artificial than we’ve understood.

I can’t speak to whether Mendelsohn is actually revealing something in Cavafy’s language or instead contributing something of his own, and I don’t know whether Longenbach has the background to gauge that, either. But that’s one of the things that’s useful about multiple translations: they can free us from a sense of slavish obligation to the original text, in which a translator, especially one working with a heretofore untranslated work, often feels a responsibility to provide a version as “accurate” and “faithful” as possible to represent the original before an audience with no access to it. But that is a social and cultural sense of responsibility, not a literary one — I would argue, at least for the moment — and does not have to guide our approach to a work of literature.

I was intrigued by Mike’s earlier argument that it is not works of literature we are protecting with our demands for fidelity, but instead a translation tradition that has prized it. Not that fidelity vs. infidelity is an innovative point of debate within the field of translation, but I think there is still more that could be discussed and pushed further.

Back to the Cavafy, at any rate: Longenbach judges it a rousing success.

Mendelsohn thinks like a poet, which is to say he inhabits the meaning of language through its movement. Listen to his translation of the famous concluding lines of “The God Abandons Antony”:

Like one who’s long prepared, like someone brave,
as befits a man who’s been blessed with a city like this,
go without faltering toward the window
and listen with deep emotion, but not
with the entreaties and the whining of a coward,
to the sounds — a final entertainment —
to the exquisite instruments of that initiate crew,
and bid farewell to her, to Alexandria, whom you are losing.

The final line embodies the fortitude the poem recommends. While the preceding lines falter, breaking the syntax into edgy pieces, the final line is syntactically complete. As a result, the poem does not pronounce but arrives at its wisdom, making it happen to us. It is an event on the page.

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Suzane Adam and Becka McKay to read in Iowa City

Laundry by Suzane Adam, tr. Becka Mara McKay

Prizewinning Israeli novelist Suzane Adam and translator Becka Mara McKay will be embarking on a cross-country tour in celebration of the publication of McKay’s translation of Adam’s first novel to appear in English, Laundry, published last fall by Iowa City’s Autumn Hill Books.

One of their stops will be in Iowa City on the 21st of April, when they will give a reading at Shambaugh House on the University of Iowa campus. eXchanges is pleased to announce our co-sponsorship of the event, along with Autumn Hill Books; the university’s International Writing Program, School of Art and Art History, Department of Cinema and Comparative Literature, and International Programs; Words Without Borders; and the Israeli Consulate in New York.

Other events will be readings in Minneapolis, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Riverside, as well as the “Women Translating Women” panel at the Center for Literary Translation in New York on the 29th.

McKay got an M.F.A. in translation at Iowa and was the editor of eXchanges for several years, so we are very excited to participate in this event. Laundry is also a book close to our heart. You can read thoughtful reviews of it at Three Percent and at Words Without Borders, which also has an excerpt.

Please come by Shambaugh House on April 21st if you’re in the area. We are offering delicious food, wonderful literature, and scintillating company, starting at 7 p.m.

Greek Language Destines Nation for Financial Ruin

The “No Word for X” claim that I mentioned in my last post (and so thoroughly explored by Language Log) showed up less than 24 hours later in an article by Manfred Ertel in Business Week, “Greece on Verge of Bankruptcy”:

In Greek, there is no direct translation for the verb “save” in a monetary sense. And that is precisely the way the Greeks live.

In reading the entrails of the Greek language, I find that their cultural downfall was also foretold in their invention of “hedonism.”

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