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