Thoughts on Smith and Sotiropoulos/Emmerich

Tracy K. Smith’s Friday lecture was wonderful. I thought her analogy of the translator being “ a guest in the author’s imagination” was lovely. She also mentioned that she felt translating from a language she didn’t know meant “thinking beside” the poem rather than reenacting it. In the translation seminar with Professor Nelson, we have been translating short poems and excerpts of longer works from languages we don’t speak, and I’ve had this feeling too: of trying to emulate the poem without feeling I can quite get within it, and feeling that my product resembles the original on a surface level, but that there might be linguistic significance or references underneath that I missed. I was so glad she was able to put that feeling into words. I also felt that some of the poems I hadn’t connected with on paper really touched me when I heard them read aloud. I didn’t have much of a response towards “Red Wall,” for example, but when Smith read the poem on Friday, I could hear all those adjectives form a wall in a way I hadn’t understood simply by looking at it. 

I thought both Ersi Sotiropoulos and Karen Emmerich have a great stylistic range in the Landscape with Dog stories and What’s Left of the Night. One thing I admire in Emmerich’s translation—something I find to be a challenge in my own practice—is her ability to give each character a distinctive voice in dialogue. It’s easy to get so caught up in translating the literal language that you forget to locate each character’s personality within their dialogue, but I noticed that Emmerich does a great job making each character sound distinct. I noticed this specifically every time Mardaras spoke in What’s Left of the Night and I felt myself rolling my eyes at everything he said. Both author and translator capture his pompousness brilliantly. When they come speak to us on Friday, I’ll be interested to hear about the translation process from the author’s perspective, as we haven’t yet heard much about it from the author’s side. What is it like to be translated? How does it feel to have a translator contact you and show such a deep interest in your work? How does the author view the translator-author relationship, and does she feel the same ownership over her work once it's been transformed, translated into another language?

Maggie