Early on in the lecture, Karen Emmerich talked about how translations are often “abandoned rather than completed.” This idea has been echoed repeatedly throughout the MFA program: a translation is never perfect, never really finished. Some days I find that reality exciting, then other days I find it frustrating, beautiful…frustrating. Emmerich talked about how she first translated a novel during her undergraduate years, but she was thankful now that no press had agreed to publish her work back then because she ultimately retranslated and published the same novel twelve years later. I wonder what the primary differences were between the first version and the one she published a decade later; I wonder at what point a translation is “good enough” and how that looks and feels for different translators.
In a similar vein, Emmerich mentioned that she typically sends authors a full first draft and not chapters or parts. This made me curious about how other translators choose to share in the translation process with their respective authors. Do translators ever share just a chapter or two? If a translator shares the first chapter and gets feedback from the author, then the translator could implement those changes for the rest of the project. Still, I suppose the translator runs the risk of scaring the author with any mistakes or mis-readings of tone or style.
The idea that translations are “abandoned rather than completed” resonates with the articles we read about Deborah Smith’s translation of Han Kang’s novel The Vegetarian too. While Tim Parks made thoughtful and poignant critiques about style and voice, I found Smith’s article in the Los Angeles Review of Books far more compelling. She admits openly that the translation was flawed—like absolutely all translations, I want to add—even concluding her article with: “Finally, no translation is definitive — it’s simply a way to ‘Fail again. Fail better.’ I think I failed okay.” If all translations really are “abandoned rather than completed,” then they remain works in progress, eternally ready to be changed or improved upon. Perhaps instead of questioning why the novel received a major award and suggesting that it only won because it fit certain performative, liberal criteria, Parks could focus on constructive criticism. Smith certainly seems more than open to editing her work, especially as an early-career translator; future editions of the book could be made even better, and works in translation might find more space on the bookstore shelf.
-sharon
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