Ronkainen, Jonika 1/31

I really loved reading through Allen’s discussion of silence and “the omnipresence of noise,”

and how she finds the author grappling with these contradictions of silence as both a

mechanism of oppression and of resistance, and of the contradictions encountered

in the translation of silence, which is at once something universal, and also it seems

the most personal, like the most subjective part of a particular language, or a

particular utterance.

It reminded me a lot of what we talked about in a class I took on

Postcolonial Realism last semester – we did the Achebe-Conrad pairing

as expected (Things Fall Apart and Heart of Darkness, respectively) and

one of the things we ran through were how they approached this silence-noise contradiction

– I remember Achebe having these few great lines about a silence “intensified by the

universal shrill of a thousand insects” – and it was good to have the piece of

background Allen brings in about the trend towards treating silence and

noise as a post-war phenomena because the books from Achebe and Conrad

were not precisely post-war books, but books on a similar kind of trauma – where silence,

understood in its contradiction, quilts together/secures the narrative of a trauma.

I can’t entirely place the conclusion that proceeds from this, I just hope

Allen talks about silence on Friday. 

--Jonika

1/31 Thoughts on texts and the Friday talk

 Two ideas struck me out that were mentioned in the texts: 

1. The building of the story through what is unsaid, rather than what is said. Lines being drawn to contour out empty spaces with recognizable shapes.

2. The sense of being intruded upon by noise, and other newly perceived things "in the air".

With the first one, I find it to be an interesting and at the same time tricky approach - what I sometimes see happening is the author trying to point at what is not spoken through words, therefore still laying the gist within the text rather than outside of it. It would have been interesting to discuss this literary style more from a creative standpoint, as well as its potential function and impact in conveying stories of tumultuous or uncertain times - which is the nature of all times, in fact; this seems to be more a matter of perspective on a certain period of time than the essence of timings itself, and it made me think of possibility of writing similarly-styled reflections on life in Kazakhstan as what Di Benedetto wrote.. The usual Kazakhstani narrative is very much driven by "right and wrong", "us and them", "then and now" dichotomies and by the aim of crafting an illusionistic image rather than developing more angles into what actually is. Introducing "empty" spaces could be an important transition to pointing out what might at the moment feel uncomfortable to name bluntly.. Reading "Ace" and the articles made me ponder quite a bit on how Spanish literature could positively influence the development of Kazakh one, as there looks to be some directional overlap that I cannot pinpoint yet, but will think of how to flesh it out of hunch-vagueness. 

-Ksenia

1/31 Reflections

    Esther Allen's "And Not Towards Peace" spanned a broad scope: from Di Benedetto's life, to the fictional world of Zama, The Silentiary, and The Suicides, to the political history of Argentina, to her personal take. I think it was well-written, albeit a little dense, and it was very informative. "Thirty thousand others were disappeared during the Dirty War. (One of the methods used—drugging prisoners and dropping them into the ocean from airplanes or helicopters—has lately been celebrated on t-shirts proudly sported at political rallies in the United States.)" from Allen's piece is shocking and I wanted to know more. I tried to Google it, and found some links about death flights, but I couldn't find where this cruelty has been celebrated. If so, that's terrible, and I wonder if anyone in class will know more about it? Or maybe I'll have to ask Allen herself? Not sure. 

    "The Crazed Euphoria of Lucrecia Martel’s ‘Zama’" succeeded in its mission to make me want to both read Di Benedetto's novel and watch Martel's movie. Though, to say that "Martel’s... understanding of Zama’s original language—the sorcerous power of the exact sequence of those letters and words in that particular order—is entirely betrayed by any translation" seems very contrarian to the point of translation, and undermines translators' work. The idea is to get more people to read translations, right? So insinuating that no translation could hold a candle to the Spanish version, in a Spanish-speaking person's eyes, seems to go with the mainstream view that translations can't be as good as the originals. Side note, I loved the photography in this article. 

    Reading the final piece, "Ace", I could see Allen's point of leaving what is unsaid, unsaid. The story's style uses many, many pronouns, and hesitates to name main characters (initially and after their introduction). I think this ambiguity creates a relatable, easy-entry piece, even perhaps giving the story an ominous undertone. I think it enhances the dialogue, but by the middle of the piece, I wished the prose was more specific, in order to keep me from scrolling up and having to figure out who was being referred to. While I found that annoying, it wouldn't deter me from reading more, and I realize that that style may be authentic to the original. Reading different ways of writing (even if it is more work) may enhance my worldview and enrich my lexicon, I just have to give it a chance.

 

Sarah

    

Thoughts on Esther Allen readings (and Friday's talk)

One quote from Esther Allen's article on Lucrecia Martel's Zama particularly struck me: "Martel's Zama offers a passionately informed and intuitive reading that is at once a reply and a carrying forward, a fusion that brings Di Benedetto's novel into entirely new territory. Taken together, book and film bring new understanding to one another, and come to form a single work of art." It seems to me that Allen's evaluation of the cinematic adaptation also lends itself to talking about the translation of literature. Isn't translating a text also at once a reply and a carrying forward? The translator enters into a dialogue with the original and creates a new text in its likeness, then 'carries forward' the text by giving it a new life in another language, allowing it to reach a new audience. 

I also like her assertion that the film and the novel together form one work of art. When I look at multiple translations of the same text, the translations interlock and provide a more dimensional view of the original—like several photographs of a single subject all taken from different perspectives. I suppose that’s one argument for retranslation, an issue we discussed in class last week. Being able to hold up translations next to each other paints a more complete picture for the reader. 

I was really encouraged by Gabriella Page-Fort’s lecture on Friday. How wonderful that Amazon Crossing pays royalties to their translators! Overall, getting to hear from someone on the editorial side of things made me feel excited (and less scared) about sending my work to journals or pitching projects to publishers. 

-Maggie

Readings Reflection for 1/31

Esther Allen writes, “As I adapted the novel from Spanish to English, though, what I struggled with most were not words but silences: the imperative that the translation not say what the original leaves unsaid.” This idea of the silence or translating in a way that leaves salient ideas left without being expressly explained is one I’ve heard explored by other translators such as Robert Alter and recently by Berman. Alter deplores the new Bible translations which explain the reader into exhaustion, foregoing any sense of the need for room for interpretation let alone for the beauty of language. We have recently read Berman’s thoughts on expansion, and how translators can fall into the trap of adding extraneously to a piece. Allen seems to ascribe to this line of thought based on her writings about her work with Di Benedetto’s novels. It’s one thing for a translator to overinflate the ideas and wordage in a piece, but it’s another in cases like this where the style of the original piece highlights especially the use of empty space or silence.

This concept comes up in other mediums as well. Chinese premodern landscape art for instance featured this kind of consideration for the (ma 間) or “negative space.” It was a major consideration when crafting a work and I’m sure still is today. As Esther Allen points out, it’s hard to say what an author felt when writing the text, but it’s clear Allen had her finger on the pulse of Di Benedetto’s style. It’s a closeness of reading I think we can all aspire to as translators. We too should have the foresight to pick out not just those things that are universally important, but those that are important to our pieces specifically. 

Lecture with Page-Fort

Beyond gaining new books for my must-read list, I felt I got vital information about the publishing world from Friday’s lecture. It’s valuable I think, to hear from someone on that side of the process and Gabriella Page-Fort graciously offered us her perspective. I’ve been reflecting on her words, that Amazon Crossing seeks to make translated works “wildly accessible.” With that in mind, it’s easy to feel optimistic about the future of translation readership. Page-Fort described a rosy future where readers might speak one language to each other to discuss a book read in two separate languages. That’s the level of accessibility she is aiming for. Is this where the translation publishing industry is headed? Or is this simply a mind frame needed to work in an industry which can sometimes feel like running uphill?

Valuable too was her practical advice on how to approach potential publishers. And it was encouraging to hear that the best way to sell a piece, is to be enthusiastic about it yourself. It seems as if there are a few ways a project can get off the ground. Page-Fort mentioned agents around the world seeking new and exciting texts. A translator may be sought for specific projects and end up translating that way. Whether through an email pitch or recognition of previous work, it’s clear the literary translation world depends on the opinions of the publisher.

-Cheyenne Bolt

 Reflections (week of Jan 31, 2022)

One question Page-Fort asked during the lecture on Friday stuck with me in particular: with what should we replace the term “native speaker”? Page-Fort asked our thoughts about the word “fluent,” and then the lecture quickly diverged into a conversation about the words often used to describe translations and which words we like or dislike. My gut reaction is to say that I don’t want the notion of “native speaker” replaced by anything at all. The notion falsely suggests to language learners that there is a point at which one becomes perfect, but that point is forever out of reach if you were not born in the “right” place. It keeps intelligent, thoughtful learners, translators, and teachers from doing certain projects or jobs. As the world grows increasingly bilingual, it leaves many lost as to which language really is their so-called “native” one. I wonder what alternative words there are, but mostly, I wonder: Do we really need this notion at all? Could we think not of an alternative term but rather an alternative approach altogether? 

Page-Fort also mentioned the Netflix series Narcos and talked about how its international success spurred Netflix to invest more in the production of “foreign” series and films. She pointed to how this might spur the translation of more books in translation (if people like a “foreign” series that is based on a book, for instance). In Esther Allen’s article “The Crazed Euphoria of Lucrecia Martel’s [film] ‘Zama,’” she touches on a somewhat similar idea, writing: “Taken together, book and film bring new understanding to one another, and come to form a single work of art.” Often when a book is made into a movie, people will ask: which was “better,” the book or the movie? I like how Allen eschews all comparison here and says instead that the two works inform and complement one another, even becoming one. On top of that, I like how translation here is not limited to translation of written text: translation can be moving from one culture to other cultures, one language to another language, one medium to another medium.

Finally, I hope that Esther Allen will talk more about silence in her upcoming lecture. She discussed the importance of silence in Di Benedetto’s work in the articles we read this week, but I wondered how she would actually translate silence. I see how silence is built into “Ace:” the girl, Rosa Esther, keeps quiet for her safety, and the man who teachers her chess and his daughter speak minimally to each other, a sign of their strained relationship. Dialogue throughout the story is brief and unaccompanied by any “he said” or “she said” clauses. Still, I’d like to know more about the ways in which Di Benedetto and Esther create and translate silence in writing.

-sharon

be-musing (reflections 01/31/21)

 

And Not Towards Peace

I admire the exquisite ease and the lucid prose with which EA moves between different genres in the compressed space of this afterword.  Political history, literary history, biography, prophecy, literary criticism, even her personal report of the text by E.B. White she stumbled upon in Havana—I find myself almost overlooking the scope of her material because of the seamlessness and deceptive ease with which she transitions between these multiple inputs.

 

I’d suggest, moreover, that by beginning the essay with the reflections of a fictionalized Don Diego and ending it with the dream of a nameless narrator, EA invites the reader to circle back and to juxtapose these moments.  That is, the man who sees merely his one impulses reflected in the vastness and diversity of America in turn mirrors the speaker who trips over and is finally incarcerated by the inability to express his own words.  What is louder than perfect silence, a “desolate paradise”?  Or what experience is more vexingly raucous than being unable to say what’s on the tip of the tongue?

 “The Crazed Euphoria”

Is it against the rules to use the word admire twice in three paragraphs or does panegyric impose a quota?  In any case, reading this review on the heels of the afterword, I’m impressed by facility with which EA recalibrates her prose voice.  Here we have more commas and hence a different rhythm, a tactile figurative expressions such “stabbing madly,” a more colloquial but equally adept voice.

 

On translating Zama into English: inasmuch as Di Benedetto is interested in the meanings which resound in silence, we could note how English, in its nouns and adjectives, silences the gender Spanish necessarily articulates.  We could also mention the risk of articulating in translation what the author has purposefully left unsaid.  More words, as occurs in Hemingway, could signify not more meaning but less.

 

On translating Zama into film: speaking from the prodigious ignorance of someone who’s neither read the book nor seen the film, I think an obvious challenge of moving from the novel to the screen is the non-negotiable forfeiture of interiority—of, that is, the absolute necessity of externalizing a character’s head space via images, gestures, and words.  From what I gather, Martel’s technique calls for, paradoxically, articulating silence via sound.

“Ace”

EA’s thesis that silence is an integral element to Di Benedetto’s language could equally be a description of this story’s structure.  That is, Di Benedetto, by displacing the narrative toward Rosa Esther’s immediate family and away from  that of the shopkeeper, creates and subsequently undercuts the expectation that the two threads will factually unite, beyond the symmetry of repeated images and thematic coherence.  His is a story sans denouement, by authorial design.

 

Call it a footnote: Leyes, translated literally into English, would mean Laws.  One interpretation would be that Di Benedetto’s character violates the natural law, the civil law, and, making his demands upon Rosa Esther’s family, espouses his word and his wish as a law in itself.  Di Benedetto exposes an arbitrariness which debases the equity of the law until it is no law at all.

An afternoon with Gabriella Page-Forte

Although calling the translator at once the “beating heart” and the “turning wheel” of the literary translation world first struck me as a dubiously mixed metaphor, GPF aptly highlighted the complex, multifaceted space the translator inhabits.  If on the one hand the translator is the amongst the closest readers of a text, enabling an exchange of stores and ideas which wouldn’t otherwise have taken place, the translator can be, on the other, a book’s most fervent advocate before an agent, an editor, or a publisher.  I recall the consummate translator Michael Henry Heim who, despite his critique of the excesses of capitalism, saw the marketplace as a mechanism able to facilitate his deep-seated wish for languages and literatures to enrich one another via translation.

 

So at the risk of being presumptive, the translator is both the blood-pumping organ of an organic process and a cog turning a mechanical one.  Indispensable in either case.  Who else if not the translator has the lingual skill, the cultural awareness, and the practical acumen to reduce the woeful inequity revealed by that graphic of north/south publishing?  Given GBF’s hypothesis that young American readers are increasingly interested in world literature, our humble contribution could allow these new voices to take center stage.

-Josh

Comments on readings

 I find it very sarcastic how someone, especially an author, would say that “translators are like ninjas. If you notice them, they’re no good.” Jennifer Croft’s article was written in a powerfully eloquent way that conveys how important a role translators play in the international and inter-linguistic exchange of literature. Having most of my background reading translated literature coming from Japanese works, I am used to seeing Dennis Washburn, Meredith McKinney, Edwin McClellan, and Jay Rubin’s names on book covers. Being in the department where Prof. Elliot is a respected lecturer as well has made me think that translators are just as well-known as the authors. This article brought me to see some unfortunate reality about the translated literature industry—that it really isn’t granted that translators get to stand under the spotlight. However, every word in the translated work is the translator’s!

Indeed, Jhumpa Lahiri’s article “The book that taught me what translation was” also gave me an idea of what translation is. It is truly incredible that one single connecting word, “invece,” can have so many layers of meanings and significance to a book. Although I haven’t done too much translation beyond translating wakes here and there for projects and my own interest, I can resonate with this article in that It is really through the reading, contextual interpretation, word choice, forming sentences, re-reading the translation in comparison to the original, adjusting the sentence structure and searching for better words, and repeating this process that makes translation an art form in and of itself.

It truly is a shame that translators aren’t receiving the recognition that they deserve, and that American readers aren’t as interested in reading works from overseas in its translation. I have two thoughts reading the “Why do Americans read so few books in translation” article. The first thought that came to my mind is: maybe the diversity in the American population is working in reverse—people think that they have enough diversity in america so they feel sufficient reading literature produced by the local diverse groups of writers. This is not helpful, however, because all Americans, regardless of the ethnical or religious background they come from, as long as they identify as American, there’s a homogenous cultural norm (e.g.political favoritism of a democratic society) that they all fall prey of without realizing. This makes the seemingly diverse group of American writers not so diverse as the readers might think. Another thought that I had but wasn’t sure was: do you think that because of the large number of immigrants present in america who are likely to have proficiency in a non-english language and hence can consume oversea literature in its original that’s making translated literature from abroad not as well-sold here?

Jiayi

Ronkainen, Jonika -- 1/24 Reading Comments

The article Why do Americans Read so Few Books in Translation to me seemed to follow a bit the form of the question “Why don’t they/we engage the “other?” (Why do Americans read so few books from non western-european countries, essentially) which invokes a kind of tautology – it was an article where, aside from the specific numeric details, it felt like you might be able to guess rather closely what the article would say from the title. I thought Page-Fort had a great subtitle however in “We Live in a Globalized World – It’s Time to Start Acting Like It,” I wished it would have interrogated the act a bit more/had come down on something a bit more specific. I think it wants the article wants to say that reading more works in translation means “cultural cross-pollination” and increased “compassion” and connection, which I think in turn kind of flattens the value of foreign literature to simply being foreign, playing precisely into what Gitanjali Patel and Nariman Yousseff talk about in All the Violence It May Carry on its Back: A Conversation about Diversity and Literary Translation – if something valuable about the literature is contained in the form of its being translated, then I think the question should simply be why is the act of translation undervalued (not for its product, but for what’s gained in the act) instead of why don’t Americans want the products. I think it's unquestionably correct that the miniscule number of translated works Americans read indicates a problem, I just don’t think the inversion (the case that Americans read more translated work) tracks to a resolution. 

I think the quoted line in All the Violence It May Carry on its Back, "I grew up bilingual and can't relate when people say translation is a bridge. How can it be, when for me both languages reside in the same place?” gets well at the problem in thinking of globalization as kind of an aggregation of localities – that it avoids grappling with contradictions in favor of finding oppositions, similarities, and differences. The Book That Taught Me What Translation Was by Jhumpa Lahiri was definitely my favorite of the articles we read where it brought up the contradiction of substitution/standing in – that, as is present in the line “Invece invites one thing to substitute for another,” the original already accounts for the substitution/has within it the predicate conditions for the copy, and further in capturing a form which is transformed the instance it is captured (“How easy it is for words to change the shape of things”) and yet this changed form evoking a better sense of the original ("That forma takes us straight back to Ovid, and to the opening words of the Metamorphoses"). 

These are the first things I’ve read about translation, so overall this was a really interesting introduction! 

– Jonika R. 

Comments on readings

 Why translators should be named on book covers

I think the answer here can be quite simple: too many names on the cover - especially when let’s say a book had two or more authors and more than one translator - will make it look overloaded and take the attention off of the title. A reader is a consumer, and they want the product to appeal to them. They want the product to be about them, to a fair extent. Drawing focus to more people for every single book that the reader comes across, draws the attention away from the reader and their reading experience. I do not see it as disrespectful to translators. I also do not believe it is a question of “ownership”. The translator owns the words in a translation just as much as the author owns the idea that they picked up from life. 

All the Violence It May Carry on its Back: A Conversation about Diversity and Literary Translation

I find the ideas about the gatekeeped standardization of the English language expressed in this article to be especially valuable: indeed, such gatekeeping limits rather than diversifies literature. I find a lot of books translated to English being written as if they were originally composed in English, just with some foreign italicized words. In Russian, for example, the language of translated works differs; there is “Westernized” prose, and other kinds of acceptable prose. Something is considered to sound “weird” only when it does not fit into the overall context or style of the text. Otherwise, there is quite a lot of room for freedom with how ideas can be expressed, as long as words exist to describe them (Russian has much fewer words compared to English). So, the issue does exist and needs to be addressed, the main question is how. 

 

Ksenia

1/24 Reflections

Lahiri's piece, as well as Croft's, were very educational for me, as I have no background in translation. I would never have guessed that translators' names aren't written on the covers of most books; being American, I admittedly don't read many books from across cultures, a trend Page-Fort points out. The few that I have read are poetry books-- one in particular is a collection by Federico García Lorca, and the translator is written on the cover, and has a foreword to discuss why he made certain decisions. I can't believe how "undercover" translation work (and even a book's status as "translated") is. I whole-heartedly agree that translators should be recognized on the cover of these books, and would even go a step further and argue for translators having a foreword/preface where they can talk about their perspective on the original piece. Since there could be multiple translators for one language of a book, I think it is only fair to let readers hear their point of view before deciding whose translation they'd like to read, rather than choosing blindly (or even unknowingly reading a translation). Out of curiosity, I looked up the authors of the pieces that Lahiri and Croft translated, and Domenico Starnone and Olga Tokarczuk are both still alive. You would think there'd be a relationship between them, even if it was just to ask questions about the intention of a passage or word, but it appears there is none. I am very surprised by this. 

Given that I don't know much about translation work, it seems a bit unfair for me to disagree with Lahiri's statement that "to write... is to choose the words to tell a story, whereas to translate is to evaluate... each word an author chooses," but it seems a little too calculating. Reading, for most, means comprehending a plotline and meeting new characters. But I have been creative writing since I was very young, and line-editing comes second nature to me. I imagine translators reading like writers; they seek out the tiniest detail, the most unnoticeable repetition of a word, so that they form a deeper, more complete connection with the text. It's not just about the big picture, but about every stroke the author took to paint it-- versus evaluating words like singular entities, which is what Lahiri's quote made me think of. Patel and Youssef's repeated questioning of "whose English?" in response to "this is what works in English" supports my point; it is not really about the words an author chooses, but about where they come from, and why they may have chosen those words, and how that impacts the broader meaning of a story. 

-Sarah Yohe

Patel and Youssef (and the many translators who contributed quotes to their piece) draw our attention to the need for translators, editors, and publishers within the literary community to not only make space for heritage speakers, translators of color, and translators of "minority" languages, but to actively challenge the structures that devalue and discourage their contributions. They mention the descriptor "fluent," which reviewers often attribute to "good" translations and which, to me, is a coded way of saying that it adheres to white, educated, upper-middle class standards of English language and literature. I feel the same way about the word "seamless" as it is used to describe translations. 

In addition to the changes that must occur on an individual and interpersonal level within the translation community, it is only possible to decolonize the field of literary translation once translators are properly recognized and compensated for their work. This is where Croft and Page-Fort's advocacy for the role of the translator comes into play. For those of us in the MFA here at BU, we've been repeatedly told that it is near-impossible to make a living as a literary translator and that we certainly shouldn't be pursuing it for the money, but rather for the art of it. I can't help but speculate that this makes the pursuit of literary translation inaccessible for a lot of people, and when Patel and Youssef point out that many translators are white and come from a certain privileged background, it makes sense, knowing that it is both 1) difficult to break into the field and 2) difficult to sustain oneself on the work alone. Things like getting royalties (as Croft points out, she received none for her work on Olga Tokarczuk's books), an end to the hierarchization of languages and literatures, and, yes, names on the covers of books can do a lot to make the translation community more supportive of its translators. Diversification efforts can only go so far if publishing as an institution isn't prepared to support those efforts. 

These articles, specifically the one by Patel and Youssef, made me think back to this series of tweets by Nick Glastonbury (translating from Turkish), which got a lot of attention when it was published back in April 2021. It touches on some of the themes from this week's articles, specifically the translator's role as an advocate for the text, the hierarchy of languages in world literature, and the inhospitality of the publishing industry. 

-Maggie

 

Page-Fort puts numbers to American disinterest in translation, urging readers to pick up translated works, to expand their horizons. Croft wants to encourage readers by putting translators’ names on the front cover for reasons of transparency and trust. Those are both valid causes, yes, but I think translation will only really thrive when the issues raised in Patel and Youssef’s “All the Violence it May Carry on its Back” are genuinely and recurrently addressed.

Patel and Youssef write: “An ethical approach to translation requires understanding enough about linguistic power hierarchies to take chances on destabilizing dominant forms of English, and deny them the unquestioned privilege of making the whole world in their image.” Translators should not only be aware of English’s oppressive, colonial history but prepared to acknowledge it, to wrestle with it. Translators should be eager to destabilize—willing to break—dominant, oppressive, “standardized” forms of English; to lean into new ways of saying things, into things that “sound weird” to some readers. Maybe some translators will overlook the inherent power dynamics and do this simply in order to bring something different to English readerships. But I hope that others will do so because they “feel the same debt to the source language, the same desire to do it justice,” that one translator in the article mentions.

Translation has catered to English for so long that many English translations offer little new and nothing exciting. Not surprisingly, very few are interested in reading them. Perhaps the way to create real interest in translation is to take down the standard-English border control and finally let another language freely, truly sound.

-sharon

Reading Reflection for January 24th

I was quite struck by Jennifer Croft’s idea of the translator as an untrustworthy guide and how the publishing industry perpetuates this distrust. It is true in psychology that the more something goes unspoken or unexposed, the more misunderstanding occurs. I can see how the unnamed and unlauded translator becomes murky in the eyes of the reader. I agree with Croft in that part of the solution is in the approach. It’s clear from the other articles we read as well that the approach could use updating in a myriad of ways. This includes the issue brought up by Page-Fort of English-speaking audiences lacking exposure to foreign reads.

 

Through all the ideas collected from these articles I can’t help but connect the dots between an issue of publication and cultural paradigm. We’ve read a bit about the concept of direction in language from Bellos, and the idea of English as an “upward” language. I believe we can strike the problems discussed here to this cultural idea and how it allows for a sort of lazy approach to reading selections. English is everywhere so why reach? Globalization seems to have permeated most industries; it makes me wonder how much longer the literary translation world will escape its influence. Globalizing and the literary translation field seem a natural fit, it’s only by the furious upholding of old paradigms that the current structure is allowed to escape its effects.

-Cheyenne Bolt

Croft, “Why Translators Should be Named on Book Covers”

My take is that in her haste to elucidate the ways the translator is not like a ninja, Croft overlooks those in which the able translator does indeed function as such.  That is, while we may, as she does, challenge the suggestion the translator is a kind of dubious, shifty character, practicing his art with subterfuge or deceit, I think we can also recall that a translation often succeeds because it doesn’t read like translation (customarily a pejorative expression), because the translator has achieved in the target language a transparency in the prose, clarity in the tone, or in a word, aesthetic excellence.  In this respect—that of a translator delivering almost invisibly the effects and the product or of his craft without manifesting the leavings or the labor—I think the analogy holds.

 

One other note.  Accustomed to considering a work in translation a surrogate or next-best substitute for the original, I like the idea that the reader of translation is actually in the privileged position of having two guides, as if both Virgil and Homer showed Dante the way…

 

 

G. Patel, N. Youssef, “All the Violence It May Carry on Its Back”

Fascinated as I am by the thrust and the format of this piece, I nevertheless must quibble with one flat, categorical statement: “English is a colonial language.”  That English, along with Spanish, French, and Portuguese, was the mother tongue of Europeans who imposed a foreign culture upon the lands they forcibly inhabited and that this model of ransacking or of conquest operates as a paradigm for how translation into English has been and continues to be practiced is beyond dispute.  But making such an act a descriptive feature or an intrinsic element of the language itself overlooks the variety of Englishes that are spoken, the multiplicity of their use, and the possibility a translation into English could stem from admiration and humility.  Colonialism, diagnosing an inequity in interpersonal power, defines a political relationship, not a linguistic feature.

 

 

J. Lahiri, “The Book that Taught Me what Translation Was”

The assertion that the translator’s work consists in “evaluat[ing], acutely, each word an author chooses” bifurcates into a twofold process, the translator being a careful reader of the source language and an adept writer in the target language.  One other observation: using “acutely” where “accurately” may have been expected, Lahiri not only better captures the care, the sympathy, and the imagination with which the translator plies his trade; she also, in an essay which traces substitutions, effects one more.

 

If the idealist in me is ready to suppose that any book worth reading leaves the reader different at the last page than he’d been at the first, I’d add that good translation, necessarily underpinned by a close reading, transforms the translator along with the book.  We could thus say the process of translation is, amongst other things, the translator’s metamorphosis into a clearer, more distinctive, and less narrow version of himself.

G. Page-Fort, “Why Do Americans Read so Few Books in Translation?”

Maybe prior to advocating for reading in translation we need to talk about the habit of reading in and of itself.  I can safely say that the numbers of persons in my circle, both friends and family, who read literature is decidedly smaller than the number of person who don’t.  And at the risk of finding a & pattern in my personal, provincial circumstances, I wonder: if the pool of American readers grew, the number of published translations could increase commensurately, although still representing the same diminutive percentage of the whole.  To use Page-Fort’s statistics, 633 translations out of 300,000 could signify 1,266 in 600,000, not a percentage or a structural change but a commendable place to start…

Josh