Ronkainen, Jonika -- 4/25 Comments

Friday's lecture:

I really enjoyed getting to see Joanna's work-in-progress pieces on Friday! I forgot who is was from our class, but I also appreciate whoever asked her at the end what her planned next steps were -- I don't quite remember her response, but I remember that it was interesting so I might have to go back and look at the recording once it's uploaded. It was striking to see how much effort Joanna had put into trying to get to know Ginczanka, and Ginczanka as a translator herself, so she could almost read Ginczanka's poems through who Ginczanka was because evidently, I think, Joanna saw Ginczanka's poetry to be very intimately tied to who Ginczanka was as a person, and the life that she led. I also really enjoyed hearing her talk about the actual/political use that poetry for Ginczanka (the works she translated) and Ginczanka's own poetry got put to. I loved hearing her talk about this subversive ability of translation as in the case of the war-poem she talked about (I unfortunately cannot remember what the poem was even though I know it was by someone very well known) to slip under the radar of censorship authorities -- I think that anecdote speaks to something universally true about translation which is that because a translator has to believe that their text can in fact be translated, at some capacity (and so is not merely particular to the language it was written in), it always has the potential to be subversive to bigoted/xenophobic causes that want to see people who speak other languages in different cultures as fundamentally different. This, I think we've already talked about a lot, but I think Joanna's example concretizes this kind of abstract idea well. 

I loved the Kafka quote, "I, who am not even the pawn of a pawn in the great chess game, fat from it, now want to take the place of the queen,, -- I, the pawn of a pawn, a piece which doesn't even exist, which isn't even in the game-- and next I may want to take the king's place as well or even the whole board"  in the context of "Revenge of the Translator" but I'm not quite sure how I feel about the book itself -- I think the setup reference to Kafka gave me higher expectations. I wasn't expecting the second-person introduction, but I'm really really curious how the second-person might differ in the original French. Of the two, I think In Concrete was definitely my favorite. I also think I am an annotations supporter -- I really liked the footnotes here

Diya's comments

 Lecture: I truly enjoyed the talk with Joanna Trzeicak Huss as she was so transparent with us about her translation projects and then ones she is working on now. Being an avid reader, I love the idea that an author/translator would leave there notes all over a book as it builds depth and helps guide or perhaps add to your thoughts while reading. It’s not something that I’ve seen often and despite the effect on the readability, I think its a great idea! It was so insightful to see her process of translation and why she makes specific literary choices even if they stray from the literal meaning of the word but simultaneously preserve the intention behind the original line. 

Reading: Emma Ramadan's translation of Anne Garréta's In concrete was such a fun read. I loved everything from the incredibly sweet and wholesome storyline to the creativity that Ramadan used during her translations especially how punny she is. The narrative digresses frequently, it’s anything but linear which is so refreshing and Ramadans literary choices fortify that. She used so many literary devices from alliteration to onomatopoeia that really brings her translation to life and bridge the gap between the literary choices that are only possible in her source language. Overall, the text is masterfully translated and is an enjoyable read.

 

Diya

Reflections 4/25

 To me, the poems by Ginczanka related to human nature were a fresh addition to the talk. The metaphors and the subjects invite dwelling and deciphering. I found it interesting that her poetry was viewed as self-centered, and I think it was both true and natural given her age. At the same time, it is also a fact that her poetry displayed mastery of the form and imagery. I wish more was explored about how these two aspects of her poetry interacted together and why. It was helpful for me to learn that the original last line of the last poem by Ginczanka did not mention birds or implied the author was anyone's prey - it looks like this was one of the instances where some translators tried to make the poem what they wanted it to be, i.e. the poem of victimhood or martyrdom, rather than tried to understand the poem itself. I feel like there was also a level of fetishization that got inflicted on this poem because it was written during WWII and because it talks of material possessions. It is familiar and relatable - imagine someone set you up and went through your things - that's not too hard to imagine. Slashing a pupil to hit an empty socket empty as zero - not so much. Yet it seems that most or a lot of Ginczanka's poetry was more of the latter kind.
I disagree that someone's last poem must be their greatest one, or that someone's death means they would have written much more great poetry otherwise. I believe it is possible to value Ginczanka's art without making such assumptions, and that the less such assumptions we make, the more we can unbiasedly pay attention to what the author has written. 

"Revenge of the Translator" seems to be the author talking to himself, and I am not sure what made it important to listen. He talked of removing something because it "uselessly hinders the reader", yet to me his entire talking had the style that uselessly hindered following him. It felt like he enjoyed torturing himself over the text he didn't like, calling another writer "my author" to compensate for the lack of power he feels, excusing himself before an invisible judge with double negations like "this is surely not insignificant", and other things reflecting him being caught in mind games with his own self. If he wanted to write books instead of translate, he could do that. If he doesn't have respect for what he does - then why do it, let alone flaunt it and make it into a book? I feel that there is a normalization of disrespect in society.

"In Concrete" had a more lighthearted and clear narrative style, it was easy to follow and didn't weigh on the mind. There were some mentions here and there that made me wish to learn more about, that absorbed me into the picture and intrigued me. Even though the author does largely talk to herself here, too, she and their mind don't take the entire space and leave room for the reader to engage. In fact, the author's engagement with her own story works in a contagious way; it's clear she likes what she is writing about and likes writing about it. And so one wishes to be part of it. 

-Ksenia

Reflections 4/25

     I really appreciated that Joanna Trzeciak Huss was open to showing us her works in progress, and open to questions/opinions from the audience. She was so sweet and seems like a curious, intelligent, open-minded translator. In particular, I thought her translation of the "burning hands" Polish idiom into English as "many hands make light work" was genius, and definitely my favorite choice out of the other four (which were stuck on keeping the burning aspect, which just doesn't make sense translate literally). However, the line crossing-out and added notes that she was going to publish with her translations seems like a bad idea, in my opinion. I think this would only be beneficial to other translators, and it may turn readers off from reading translations (even more so than they already are) because there is too much going on/it is too difficult to read. 

    Revenge of the Translator was not my favorite read. I think the concept behind the book is too kitschy for my taste, and it's something I'd never pick up off a shelf in my spare time. I thought it was well-written, and the moments that made me think about the translator's creative control over the source text (and therefore how he's responsible for the perception of the source text in the eyes of thousands of readers from another language) were extra valuable to me. It's just that the reading experience was a 1/5 for me; there is a lack of flow, and a constant sense of starting-and-stopping that drives me a little crazy, but that *is* the book's premise, so how can I complain about it? :')

    On the flip side, I loved In Concrete! The voice is so witty and fun, and I was smiling through a big portion of the first 50 pages. I am so impressed with the translation, as well, and how Emma Ramadan plays with words and sounds. "It's all a bladder of time", "wasn't being fuelish" (foolish), "premuddernization", "no grout about it". Ramadan seems like she'd be a clever, funny, creative genius of a person to have come up with such a masterful translation. It was awesome! I also loved the dynamics between the main character and Poulette, because I have three sisters, and their relationship was nostalgic and sweet to read. 

 Sarah

4/25 Reflections

     I greatly enjoyed having Joanna here for a talk, especially prior to her actual talk when we had an interesting discussion about context, and how much and what sort should be given to the reader to enjoy a poem. After reflecting upon the collaborative part of her talk, I feel like I'm getting closer to understanding why I don't like translating poetry. To her there are so many possibilities and readings that are all possible, but I find it difficult to settle on any one answer. The incredibly wide berth of information she had on Ginczanka also makes the task of translating a poem so much more daunting; there's just so much work that goes into not only making the choices that create the translation, but so much research needed to understand references and context.

    I am also really looking forward to the talk this week, seeing as I enjoyed Translators Revenge quite a bit. After looking through the original French, it's striking that the formatting of the original text isn't quite like the translation. I find changing the format like this results in a more enjoyable experience, the translators notes always being on the bottom, below a bar that separates it from the rest of the translation. I'd love to hear about what sort of thinking led to this more drastic format, and what the translator felt as they attempted to translate this particular book, and maybe about what themes the translator thinks is present in the original, how well they transferred over given the many levels of meta Translators Revenge operates on.

Steven

      Likewise, In Concrete was also a very fun read, but what particularly stood out to me was the frequent use of alliteration and sound matching. I know she writes about it at the end of the book, and she touches upon how the feelings evoked by the original text are due to what is possible in the source language to begin with, but she does also state that there is always a way, a sentiment that I find hard to immediately reconcile with. I'm looking forward to asking Emma about it on Friday.

    

Ginczanka Wrap-Up and Muddern French Translation

It was wonderful of Joanna Trzeciak Huss to show us unfinished translations during her talk, and I think it's a brilliant idea that she plans to publish some of her translations with cross-outs and margin notes. As someone who's new-ish to translation, it's really refreshing to hear a seasoned translator talk through her trouble spots or her dissatisfactions in a draft. I think it's a good reminder to all of us that there isn't a magic moment where translation suddenly becomes easy or where you stop having doubts. Translation is problem-solving, and new problems crop up constantly. Huss mentioned changing singular "catkin" to a plural in subsequent versions of her translation of Ginczanka's "Senses" in order to link it to the counting in the following stanzas, and then she told us it's important to pay attention to the logic of a poem. I am often intimidated by poetry translation, but Huss's comment helped demystify the process for me. Poetry has a logic, just as prose does. Translating a poem prompts a series of questions, but the poem also has answers embedded within it: we just have to look closely for them. 

Emma Ramadan's translation of Garréta's In Concrete is a masterclass in compensation. There's a lot in Garréta's original that a translator would be hard-pressed to render in English (Ramadan touches on the homophonic language and misspellings in her translator's note, for example, and I have lots of examples to show everyone in class tomorrow). I loved Ramadan's description of how she took advantage of "linguistic blurriness" in her translation in order to make up for the lost language play. To me, this translation drives home the point that, in order to successfully translate the Oulipo, traditional ideas of "faithfulness" need to be thrown out the window. Since the point of oulipian literature is to challenge boundaries of language, translations of oulipian texts need to challenge their respective languages in different ways than the original does. Ramadan takes every opportunity she can find to add a pun, and her willingness to shape the translation into its own text with its own peculiarities makes it an exhilarating read. I found myself laughing out loud (or groaning at a pun) every several pages. 

Ramadan's linguistic ingenuity is on display in her translation of Matthieussent's Revenge of the Translator too, though she deals with fewer constraints. One thing that struck me last week when we read this book for Professor Vincent's class is that there's a lot of machismo in this text, both in the power struggle between author(s) and translator(s), and in their relationships with women. The author is not particularly kind to his female characters. I wonder what it was like for Ramadan to work on a project like this. In any case, reading these two books back-to-back proves just how versatile Ramadan's translatorial voice is. 

-Maggie

Reflections 25/4/2022

 

Before the talk, Joanna Huss talked a little bit about the importance of mentors, particularly for women (translators) in academia. She talked about a bad experience she had had, and how after that, she made it a priority to actively see and support those coming into the field after her. I thought this idea of mentorship—particularly women mentoring other women—resonated beautifully with the way in which she talked about Ginczanka. She did not shy away from saying that Ginczanka was beautiful, curious about sex and humanity and the metaphysical universe all at the same time. I felt that she saw Ginczanka on so many different, important levels without fixating on one singular moment or facet. Huss took into consideration Ginczanka’s youth, her family life, her physical appearance, her early poems, her later poems, photographs of her, the material that remains from her life, the material that was either lost or yet to be found. The way Huss discussed Ginczanka’s work reminded me very much of the concept of “herstory,” a feminist history that includes memory, stories, dreams, poetry, and multiple, sometimes even contradictory narratives rather than a linear, chronological, patriarchal History.

 

Emma Ramadan’s translation of Anne Garreta’s In Concrete is just a brilliant breaking down. Of course, the title In Concrete, suggests a sort of fixed-ness, stuck foreverness. But then Garreta and Ramadan do just the opposite. The text is, as we have seen throughout the course of this semester, a flexible, always changing, always moving thing. Almost immediately, In Concrete breaks down the very flexible boundaries between written and spoken language—the young narrator’s words constantly shifting between the two and peppered with wordplay. Perhaps more importantly, the novel breaks down fixed notions of storytelling and… novels themselves. Instead of a highly linear narrative, the novel somehow establishes an all-at-once slowed down and sped up understanding of time. The family is constantly in motion, with things moving and breaking and needing repair, and then a narrator who is side-tracked, distracted by this or that digression. 

 

I found Ramadan’s translator’s note at the very end particularly helpful and moving. On page 178, Ramadan calls the book “a feminist inversion of a domestic drama” (178) and I agree—the voice of a young, female narrator who knows a hilarious and jaw-dropping amount of information about machinery, concrete mixers, glands, and electricity is enough to suggest this—but regardless, I’m curious to hear Ramadan speak more about how she sees feminism operating in this text.

-sharon

French & Polish, Polish & French

 Translations from Polish

One practical consequence of agreeing that any text is unstable is accepting that every translation is indefinite and no translation is ever done.  The idea of a finished translation—polished, packaged, and prepared for publication—, while an inescapable, a necessary convention of the industry, needn’t pigeonhole the evolution of a literary text.  A published translation is like a photo, a record indexed in time rather than an exhaustive description of where a text is or how, through translation, it evolves.  JTH’s willingness to share the process in addition to the product seems in concert with translation’s deeper structure.  The unpretentious humility with which she presented her work still under construction and credited a “network of actors” reminded me of the modest gratitude with which Michael Cooperson spoke of the numerous persons who helped him achieve the diversity of voices/registers in his Impostures.  Even if a translator has the appearance (or the airs) of working alone, that translator’s work nevertheless issues from an invisible network of precursors, constituted at minimum by the indirect collaboration of the authors that translator has read and the study that translator has done.

Speaking as a reader and a translator of prose, I suspect that one challenge of translating poetry is capturing the development, the maturation, and the tonal changes of a poet’s voice.  I’d venture that a poem is translated on at least two levels: as a coherent art object in and of itself, with its internal coherence and aesthetic uniqueness, and also as a synecdoche for a poet’s corpus.  Describing herself as a translator of Ginczanka interested in learning form Ginczanka, JTH posited translation as the fruit of the closest possible reading, impracticable without also investigating the multitudinous and often overlapping contexts which inform an artist’s production.  Ginczanka’s literary antecedents and the particulars of her historical moment are, along with the fact she emigrated to Poland and chose Polish as her literary language, indispensable for a close reading and, in turn, a fitting rendition of her poetry.  The literary, the historical, and the biographical—JTH presented all three in tandem, suggesting that downplaying or even silencing aspects of the latter in order to avoid a fetishized misrepresentation is to trade one skewed portrait for another.

Translations from French 

Opposed to the thesis of untranslatability, I must nevertheless admit that Emma Ramadan has valiantly translated two books that could have qualified as such.  The incessant verbal play of In Concrete, so dependent upon mechanisms particular to French, often lacks an English equivalent, obliging the translator to find a comparable effect or to create a homologous voice.  The situation needn’t be considered a loss.  As ER describes in her endnote, by permitting herself the puns, the phonetic misspellings, and the verbal splendor unique to English, more than compensating for a lost meaning, she discovered a new one.

In this novel, language is invariably cognizant of itself, every use of words complicating an ongoing inquiry into the production and etiology of meaning.  If this young narrator of purposefully ambiguous gender grew up pouring cement and running electrical wire, surely those experiences would shape the range of that speaker’s vocabulary and the rhythm of that person’s speech.  The novel’s farfetched case, testing the boundaries of verisimilitude, isn’t exclusively for diversion: Anne Garreta’s hyperbole, like a distorted mirror, surprises the reader with vestiges of her/his own reflection.

The earliest example of the metanovel, of nested layers of fictionality, is perhaps Don Quixote, a collection of tales allegedly written in Arabic and translated into Spanish before Cervantes collated them in a novel in two parts.  Both the Arabic source text and the pending translations are Cervantes’ inventions, part of his multilayered fictive universe.  In Revenge of the Translator, BM pushes the format to the nth degree.  And ER’s translation of this novel already located at the interchange of French and English adds yet another layer of complexity.  The best I can surmise (given my command of French is functionally zero) is that the last turn of the screw, when ER herself appears, implicated on the level of the narrative, is a device present in the original and reworked for the English translation: the fictional translator Mike Kirkfield ceding to the fictionalized translator Emma Ramadan.  I’d like to know how ER and BM arrived at this captivating last note.

 

-Josh

4/20 reflections

 Zuzanna Ginczanka’s poems are definitely of a different kind than what I am used to reading. Her poems are heavy, rhythmic, and serve historical documentary purposes, like mentioned in the Irena Grudzinska-Gross article, “[h]er poem was realistic enough to serve after the war as documentary evidence at a trial of a couple of her tormentors – quite an unusual role for a piece of literature.”

I am used to reading poems that are not as dense in the historical information it carries–the Hyakunin Isshu, my bread an butter anthology, has a word limit and is traditionally only made to express the astonishment one feels towards a certain natural scenery or their burning longing for someone. I tried my hands at translating some of these poems and the main difficulty that I had encountered was balancing the preciseness and conciseness–do I want it to be as accurate as possible or as terse and sweet as possible? 

In the discussion of translating Ginczanka’s poemsi in Eve Bigaj’s article, she mentioned that some translations of her poems “don’t necessarily have to be bad” to “not sound well in [her] ear”. It isn’t just the rhyme that is intricate woven in a Slavic language a challenge that translators have to face, but also the emphatic beat that is hard to carry over. I do not read polish but from the poems translated by Joanna Huss, I was able to enjoy the beats of the poem that adds a lot of power to the poetry covering topics such as life and death, victory and defeat, and heart and passion. I can’t very well what type of beat it is that is employed in these English translations, but the sentences roll off the tongue and are very rhythmic to read. 

With that, I will end with a question for Professor Elliot. In the poem “physiology”, there is a line that goes like: “I am happy: this is life! (exclamation point)” Why does there need to be a “(exclamation point)” when there is one “!” already? 

 

Jiayi 

Thoughts on Ginczanka and Polish Poetry

 I first encountered Zuzanna Ginczanka's poetry in Alissa Valles's class last semester, when we read her translation of "Non omnis moriar." I remember how impressed I was by the poem, and how powerfully Ginczanka managed to harness the beauty of these images in order to condemn her neighbor's denouncement. Now that I have read a few more of her poems, I see that this blend of gravity and beauty is a trademark of hers. I was especially struck by the line in "Physiology:" "yet I am impaled on the stake of my own spine," juxtaposed with "I am happy: this is life! (exclamation point)." Ginczanka's poetry is so mature, and she is able to acknowledge both the beauty of life and the inevitability of her own mortality in a way that is wise beyond her years (and what a tragedy it is that war and genocide make people come to this realization so young). 

I was particularly excited about Huss's comment on Ginczanka's "archaisms disguised as neologisms." Huss pays close attention to the linguistic sources that Ginczanka draws from, and her meticulousness and research is a concrete way for her to acknowledge and honor not only Ginczanka's role in modernist poetry as well as put her into conversation with the traditional Polish poets of whom she so hoped to join the ranks. 

Regarding the question of multiple translations, I really don't understand why it would be an issue for two publications to publish the same poem in different translations at once. We can only benefit from having many translations, and I wish journals and magazines weren't so focused on literature as a commodity for them to have ownership owner. Though I realize I'm an idealist... Finally, regarding Cavanagh's essay, I thought it was a wonderful rallying cry to continue to translate poetry! Yes, it may be impossible, but this is exactly why we must keep trying to capture its beauty and expressivity. And this is especially where I believe multiple translations can come into play, each bringing a different aspect of the original to light. 

-Maggie

Ronkainen, Jonika -- 4/20 Comments

    With the  "Competing Poems by Nobelist" piece, it’s really hard not to want to reconcile the two translations, and I wish I could see how they might have been reconciled in the original piece. For instance, the difference between “redemptive handrail” and “saving banister” feels massive to me, but they provide so much clarity to each other: I love the extra meaning Trzeciak creates (or maybe preserves?) with “saving banister”  where it evokes the sense of there being a staircase, as though the poet, or even the reader of poetry, has to try and clamber up some grueling staircase with a failing support in order to get at the “sort of thing” that poetry is, but I’m not sure I would’ve understood this kind of fail-safe quality of the insufficient answers to the question “what is poetry” without Baranczak and Cavanagh’s “redemptive handrail,” nor do I feel I would’ve gotten the same meaning solely out of Trzeciak “clutch” as I do looking at it in conjunction with Baranczak and Cavanagh’s “cling.” I also love the way Baranczak and Cavanagh’s description of “tumbling” fits precisely with Trzeciak’s staircase and the idea of climbing/falling, even though that idea does not seem elsewhere present in their translation. I would almost be persuaded that the best-poem might have been a secondary franken-poem of the two translations, where “saving banister” was simply the better choice for a closing line, where what you lose from the word "redemptive" is regained in the substitution of “saving banister” by the pervasive idea of climbing, falling, and reclimbing, but there are other points where the measure of difference between the choices seemed itself to display best the essence of the poem. Basically, I think a very good argument is made for competing translations, whether that takes the form of a franken-poem, or reading between the lines of multiple translations.

I think I'm too bad a reader of poetry to appreciate Ginczanka's on my own -- I need someone else to talk about it before I can figure out how I feel about it (eg. I was neutral on Julia Nemirovskaya's poems until I Dralyuk talked about them, and perhaps this is simply a merit of Dralyuk, but now I think he and Nemirovskaya are absolutely the greatest). However, this sequence in Physiology: 

I am happy: this is life! (exclamation point) I follow the orders of my breath, 

that allege: I am seventeen, 

that allege: I am happy,

 yet I am impaled on the stake of my own spine

was striking even to me. The last line in particular conjures such a poignant idea, and I wondered if the phrasing was more, or less, idiomatic (less creative? and I don't mean that to be derogatory) in the original Polish -- from what I could tell from google translate, "the stake of" was an addition from Trzeciak (the literal translation perhaps being "yet I am impaled, on my own backbone"), so I was curious whether that was because there was an idea of/word for impalement in polish that in itself capture this idea of there being a stake (instead of any other impaling object, i guess) that Trzeciak was trying to redeem.

4/20 Reflections

    Non Omnis Moriar, a poem that my fellow students in the MFA should know well, and now that I think about it, a large reason for why I decided that I would never willingly translate poetry in a language that I can understand. Knowing explicitly that in order to mimic the rhyming structure and meter of the original, things must be changed or added, or to maintain the semantic meaning and word order structure and meter had to be thrown aside, in a way almost completely dampens the joy I would have had reading it, the same way I enjoyed reading Boris's poems earlier this month. A thought that is only amplified by reading The Art of Losing, and the admittance that the translation of poetry is impossible. The ignorant reader who has no idea about the source material or the context it was written in is divorced from the struggles of the translator who is forced to make difficult decisions time and time again, repeated over each word of a poem. Then there is also the issue of necessary information; how wildly important context is in the case of Non Omnis Moriar, and even haikus, for that matter. How does the translator convey in a translation everything that is needed to be conveyed, while juggling decisions about what must be left behind? 

    Likewise in the Times article where two different translations were published in the same time frame, did the reactions to first time readers of Zuzanna truly differ that much? There are of course other ramifications of this double publishing, but without the context of the original poem, details about the structure and the context, I find it doubtful that any reader can make a precise judgement on either translation greater in detail then just stating that these nouns in this line elicit a certain emotional response, or relate to these lines here. It speaks to the reversed relationships between the informed translator who must bridge all these gaps between the reader and the writer, the language and the meaning, and the reader, who oftentimes does not even know there is a gap in their knowledge to begin with, happy to keep on walking forward through the translation blissfully unaware. A translator is lucky when they do not need to think about traversing the long and thorny path of translating a poem and all the problems it entails, and a reader is lucky when they know enough to enjoy a translation, but not enough that they would empathize with the problems the translator faced.

Steven 

Reflections 4/20 (Ginczanka, Joanna Huss)

    I found the article “Competing Versions of Poem by Nobelist” a little funny this week. Last week in Professor Vincent’s class, we read the first 100 pages of Kate Brigg’s (incredible) book This Little Art, and in the text, she suggests that actually, we probably aren’t getting any better at translation—we’re just making new ones, different ones. I love this idea because it allows for any number of different translations of a given to text to exist. One translation does not have to be written off as “bad” or “wrong” in order for someone to make another. One translator can translate the same text as another translator in a different way, a new way—one doesn’t necessarily have to be better or worse. The versions need not “compete.” And the two publications, The New Yorker and the New Republic, can certainly publish two different translations of the same poem. They should do so, in fact. The space for translations should not be finite.

     I liked Joanna Huss’ translations of Ginczanka’s poetry. I was particularly struck by the poem “Physiology” and the lines:

I am happy: this is life! (exclamation point) I follow the orders of my breath,

that allege: I am seventeen,

that allege: I am happy,

yet I am impaled on the stake of my own spine

(inevitable death is in me, like a needle circulating in the veins)

this is not subject to negotiation,

this is not subject to supplication:

The use of punctuation is striking, especially the exclamation point followed by the words “exclamation point.” The end rhyme with “negotiation” and “supplication” reads beautifully too. 

    I first encountered Ginczanka’s poetry last semester in Professor Valles’ class when she very kindly shared with us a few beautiful translations she was working on. We read a few different renditions of “I Shall Not Wholly Die.” I like the version shared in the article “Something or Other” translated by Irena Grudzinska-Gross and her students, as well as the one in the article “An Angel Against Her Will,” but there are other translations I preferred. Although usually I prefer keeping non-English words from the source text in their original language, I like when translators of this poem in particular render the very first line, the Latin “Non omnis moriar,” as “I shall not wholly die” in English. They are so immensely powerful in English. The translation of the material objects is particularly important here too. For example, while the translation that appears in “An Angel Against Her Will” writes of “jugs” and “candles,” Grudzinska-Gross’ translation uses the words “goblets” and “candlesticks,” establishing a haunting opulence that feels essential to this poem.

-sharon

4/20 Reflections

 I found the abstract imagery in Zuzanna Ginczanka's poetry to be vivid, poignant, and complete, especially in the translation by Joanna Huss. The fact that this quality of imagery is delivered in a distinct and neat rhyming form in Polish makes it a timeless poetry, indeed. I look forward to reading more poems by this author, and in different translations to catch all the reflections of their beauty. 

In the article "In Translation", quite a few parallels and metaphors were drawn. I would like to pose a question: "What would be the most useful and helpful metaphor for translation these days and why?" One of the parallels was drawn between translation, losing, and fleeing in the historical context of persecution. I believe more meaning lies not in this parallel but in the fact that parallels such as this can be made. Everything is interconnected to one degree or the other or, perhaps, to an equal degree altogether. Inventing or discovering such connections does little at this point, in my opinion - to me, a deeper question lies in what the existence of webs of connections mean in the grander scheme of things. It seems like at the moment these webs are used to define translation for themselves. There is always the question: "What is translation?" and there is restlessness in the search for answer. I believe the larger question is: "What makes us need to know what translation is? What makes us uncomfortable with ambiguity?" 

Articles about Zuzanna Ginczanka's poems sometimes mentioned possibility and impossibility to translate something. Possibility/impossibility can be seen as a duality similar to perfection/imperfection. Perfection is something that is accepted and desired. Imperfection is something that is rejected and deemed as undesirable. Possibility is something that is commonly believed to exist. Impossibility is something that is commonly believed to not exist. The reason for creation and maintenance of these artificial distinction is, in my opinion, human discomfort with what is vague. There is a need for labeling, definition through characteristics rather than function, and assortment into categories. An example of the latter would be: "Is this a precise or an imprecise translation?". Such question first and foremost exposes discomfort with not designating something as either precise or not precise. 

Thus, a path to progress for translation may be in becoming comfortable with what is seen as imperfection and imprecision, seeing beyond them and then abandoning such categories altogether. Similarly, when it comes to translation as a practice, going beyond the need to define and characterize it and instead exploring its potential as a tool and broadening the horizons of what this tool can be used for. 

-Ksenia

Reflections 4/20

     I love Joanna Huss' translations of Zuzanna Ginczanka's poems! Or perhaps it's more fitting to say that I love the poems themselves. The imagery and use of language is exquisite. I wondered about the line "With eyes like safety pins / I safely pinned myself onto the world", because the words in the Polish version don't look similar, like they carry the same wordplay. Of course, I don't speak Polish, so the wordplay might be there and it's just unrecognizable to a foreign eye. The line "amidst matters of overt color and covert, obscure content" made me wonder if "overt" and "covert" are rhyming antonyms in Polish, as well, but it's hard to tell just looking at it. "Niejawnej / niejasnej" could be the original equivalent. Overall, it seems the translation stays true to the punctuation of the original. I would love to hear the Polish read out loud so I could compare the sounds of the translation to it, and see if Huss took the aural quality of her translation into account or tried to be more literal.

    After reading the "Competing Poems by Nobelist" piece, I can honestly say that I prefer Joanna Trzeciak Huss' translation to the competition, and not just because she's the one who will be visiting us on Friday haha. "Mr. Baranczak, referring to Ms. Trzeciak, said, ''My translation clings to the uncertainty; she clings to poetry itself.''", but the excerpts just seem antithetical to that statement? Baranczak and Cavanagh's language seems very awkward and doesn't have much flow. It seems like they were the ones clinging to the original poetry, while Huss finessed the language of the translation to sound much more natural.

    The first paragraph of the "Something or Other" piece is gold and sums up our class so well. I re-read it ~three times to soak it in. I love, love, love the way Grudzinska-Gross puts it. I love the ten-syllable per line meter that the translation at the end has, but it did make me curious what the other one sounded like, and what perhaps this translation had to sacrifice in order to make the meter work in English.

    Okay! After reading the translation in the "An Angel Against Her Will" piece, I'm stumped. I love the meter and rhythm of the former translation, but there are rhymes missing from it that I love in the latter (namely the initial sheets / replete rhyme). I also really love the "May they serve you and yours. For why should it be / Outsiders? Neighbors, you – that’s more than empty name" line that seemed to have been cut from the former. Maybe reading multiple translations and forming some sort of hybrid/best of both worlds version in one's own mind is the way to go? There is certainly a give and take, depending on what the translator values, and I can see pros and cons to both sides. 

     Overall, Zuzanna Ginczanka sounded like an amazing woman and I cannot wait to talk about her poetry on Friday!

Sarah

Polyphonic Polish Poetry Put Into Translation

Any translation of poetry—and the translation of these poems in particular—seems to corroborate the thesis Gregory Rabassa advanced with respect to prose: if literature is a metaphor for experience, literary translation is a metaphor for a metaphor, a word for a word.  Therefore, rather than the “competing versions” juxtaposed by Dinitia Smith—a metaphor in itself which likens concurrent translations to a sports contest, to a vying for supremacy in which one must necessarily prevail—I’d favor the idea of complementing translations, neither of which, as Clare Cavanagh describes, is a facsimile for the original.  Each accentuates a distinctive feature of the source.

In a similar spirit, it’s not exactly clear—or, at best, it’s arbitrary—by what criteria Grudzińska-Gross identifies bad translation.  The test, seemingly, is olfactory.  If she, as a reader of at least Polish, Russian, and English, detects a whiff of the original wafting through, the poem is a success.  One sure way to stifle this aroma is, for example, to make the “tragic” mistake of translating into white verse when rhyme or meter are a hallmark of a Russian or Polish original.  This facile argumentation mars the writer’s point by turning personal preference into the highest trump card, foreshortening the poetics of translation by applying the vapid, totalizing heading of good/bad precisely when Grudzińska-Gross wishes to amplify their dimensions.

But despite the glaring paucity of her rationale, Grudzińska-Gross confirms the importance of situating a text in literary, historical, and biographic contexts.  In this case, if a translator does not identify the allusions to Polish literature, or position the poem against the backdrop of the Nazi invasion, or know that the author was pursued, imprisoned, and finally murdered by the German war machine, that translator would likely deliver a skewed or diluted representation of the original.

I, for my part, admire Grudzińska-Gross’ translation.  The irony, reinforced by the rhythm and the meter, is sharp, even jagged, culminating in the enigmatic last line.  The angels exist on two planes.  They represent, on the one hand, the horror, the injustice, and the deprivation of the poet’s circumstances transmuted into the eternal, ethereal space of literature.  She will perish, the historical circumstances will expire, but her symbolic rendition will continue, immutable, in the realm of verse.  On the other, the supposedly good neighbors who betray her out of envy, greed, or cowardice wear their maleficence like a badge upon their arms.  The traitors are as conspicuous as angels walking the surface of the earth, and in effect, the woman who informed against Ginczanka is, after the war, singled out and sentenced for her crime.

Eve Bigaj’s translation, although blunting the poem’s acerbic irony, culls out a meaning whose echo is very faint in Grudzińska-Gross.  Here, we have a poet who not only proposes literary patrimony as a formula to outstrip her material circumstances but also to transcends the vindictive pettiness of bitterness.  The clarion call for justice exists alongside the moral prerogative to forgive.  The atmosphere, the tone, and the timbre of the poems, so distinct each from the other, only together approximate the texture and the thematic compression of the original.

Finally, Joanna Huss, completing this eclectic portrait of the divergent but equally successful emphases in translation, finds vivid images in abstractions and extracts the poetic marrow from the often eschewed Latinate contingent of the English lexicon.  My hunch is that her choices, far from an imposition on the translator’s part, respond to the poems’ unique necessities.  The variety of forms and the breath of voices present in the translations probably stem from the differentiated complexity of the poet herself.

-Josh

Jiayi's reflections

 

Boris Dralyuk’s talk on his translations of Julia Nemirovskaya’s poems on Friday was absolutely enthralling. On top of being super knowledgeable and skillful in translating, he was also humorous in the way he delivers the speech, which made the entire event all the more enjoyable. From this speech, I gleaned a couple of enlightening perspectives and the methodology of translation that he brought up. First, he asked us a question. “What does this poem in Russian sound like to you? Have you heard of anything similar in English?” Then he gave us a hint that it isn’t anything we would expect to hear at a funeral, and indeed sound a little like a nursery rhyme. I was first shocked by his direct mentioning of “nursery rhyme” because I have deemed nursery rhyme sounding poems as a failure in my translation which made me extra cautious and scared to use rhyme in poetry translation. However, he would let the rhyme guide his translation instead of avoiding it. He points out that if you can’t very well resolve the pun and carry it over into English, you would go through “isolation and combination”. Feel the poems’ general atmosphere and interpret it in your own way, and then intuitively come up with the translation that rolls off the tongue the way it does in its original, and then go back to the translation to fine-tune word choices. I think this is the main takeaway of how to translate poems I learned from his talk. Indeed, an example of him using this is the use of the third “O”. There were only two Os in the Russian poem, but he used a third O to compensate for the untranslatable Russian phrase that encompasses both meanings of “oh if only time were to work differently” and “oh if only there were time” that cannot be achieved in English. I also loved how he said, “compared to any other objects, human is the hardest thing to empathize with.” Perhaps this is precisely why poetry is hard to translate–it is so densely intimate and personal, and any attempt to translate such a condensed piece could seem inadequate. 

In Bassnett’s piece, the analogy that the Uruguayan writer Cristina Peri Rossi used to define translation was very intriguing and reminded me of how Boris approaches poetry translation. Rossi described translation as “an act of love, as a kind of obsession where the translator pursues an unobtainable object, unobtainable in that no one can entirely possess another’s text, ‘just as one cannot rewrite it without changing it.” (Peri Rossi, 2002: 58). And Bassnett continues to tell Rossi’s argument: “as in love, absolute fidelity is impossible, as is total textual identification.” This analogy indicates the free-spirited and intuitive nature of translation that Boris takes on, where the perfect translation is almost unattainable, and that the translation is a creation that stands alone. 

Through the Bassnett piece, I have come to realize for the first time how the translator is viewed by some as “a servant or handmaiden of a superior original.” Not being a translator myself made me think that translation is a fair industry for everyone to fairly participate in, but as argued in the Godayol piece, it is important for us to recognize the effort and unease in translating work and treat the translation with the same amount of respect we pay the original author and see the translator as an author too. This leads me to the debate on Gorman’s translator. I personally didn’t find Rijneveld’s appointment as Gorman’s translator problematic, and I think that as long as a translator is qualified and skilled enough, they deserve the appointment. Janice Deul, though, points out that the appointment was “really ridiculous” and “incomprehensible” because “this is not about who can translate, it’s about who gets opportunities to translate,” and listed 10 Black Dutch spoken-word artists who could have done the job but had been overlooked. I think she does have a point there, where it is important to give young and lesser famous translators chances, but I still am not sold on how not being black would disqualify Rijneveld in the professional front as a translator. 

 

Jiayi