Reflection Feb 21, 2022

In the mini-meeting before the lecture, I asked Tracy Smith about how she lets go of the literal translation and allows herself the freedom to (eventually) move away from it. She talked about how sometimes she starts from the last line of a poem and moves her way up, line by line. Although perhaps more suitable for translating poetry, I’m interested in trying it for my own prose translations, as I often struggle with moving away from the literal. 

Even though Smith moved away from the literal—even changing the meaning of lines somewhat drastically—she spoke beautifully about her friendship with and respect for Yi Lei. Often, there exists this paradigm in translation theory between either staying close to and respecting the writer’s meaning or moving the text towards the reader, but in her talk, Smith broke down this binary. Translators can hold and demonstrate deep respect for a text and its author while also making the text accessible and beautiful for the intended reader—these are not mutually exclusive.

Sotiropoulos’ stories “freehand” and “the pinball king” from Landscape with Dog and Other Stories reminded me a lot of stories in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Interpreter of Maladies. Both stories, much like Lahiri’s collection, zoom in on every day, close personal relationships. I wondered if Emmerich had to change anything specific to make the characters seem so “American.” The characters’ dialogue in particular reads as very natural, colloquial American speech which I find can be difficult to get right—I wonder how much she had to change or if she had a particular dialect or voice in mind while translating. 

Despite the dialogue flowing very naturally in this American English, I loved that Emmerich transliterated and left the greeting “‘Kalimera, efharisto’” in Greek on page 16. While “bonjour” or “buenos dias” are highly recognizable to most English readers, this greeting might not be—especially given that Greek uses a different alphabet than English. I hope Emmerich will talk more about her choice to leave these words in Greek and about leaving Greek words “untranslated” in English translation more generally. Has she faced any pushback from publishers? Does she find that most words, aside from food perhaps, are unrecognizable? Does leaving these words in ever make the translation too performatively Greek?

-sharon