Ronkainen, Jonika 3/14 Comments

 Cooperson’s Intro:

    I loved the way Cooperson framed the author’s play with language as tooling with a linguistic memory of the eternal – it feels like the call for the reader to learn how to read what is inarticulable in direct terms, and I really like that as a starting point for reading this kind of translation – that is, to read the memory of the original in the work – I really like the idea that the memory of the original might register itself negatively (in the sense of absence) in a translated text. I’d really like to think more about his description of language as “powerfully in excess of material reality” as I’m not quite sure which way he means it: if it is to gesture at an excess of material reality within material reality, or if it posits an immateriality of language, or whatever else if I’ve misfired in both of these interpretations. And further, his description of this overwhelming the "agreed-upon relationship of word and object" – by which I would assume he means a sign–referent relationship, making signification the excess of language over material reality, which I don’t know that I agree with (or disagree with, to be clear). 

(Also, Cooperson pulled together a great assemblage of language-games quotes, big fan of that)

Impostures: 

    I think I almost liked Cooperson’s introduction so much that the actual work was bound to let me down, and it definitely did on my first read through. It was almost like because Cooperson had such a good theory of how to do the translation, the translation couldn’t rise to the level of the theory because it would be a perfect translation, but only for an audience of one (or the set of people who would be reading in this in English, with the same knowledge of esoteric Arabic biblical referents – which I’m thinking is a pretty small group) because it didn’t sacrifice very much. While reading the first imposture, I wrote up a whole memorandum on how great it would be to have annotations or a side-by-side literal translation, googling “boghaleen” and “kippen” and some other words not to even get a glimpse of what the word meant within a full page of search results, only to find the glossary on the backend :) So I went for a second readthrough and now I think it’s great because it makes the sacrifice of convenient reading, meaning it’s not going to offer something for everyone (because not everyone is going to be keen to take up the inconvenience), but it can be everything for anyone (whomever is enticed to take up the inconvenience). 

Preposterous? (Cooperson)

In Michael Cooperson’s introduction to Impostures, he makes several strong points about untranslatability; about non-standard English; and about the futility of translation rules and binaries. First, he very eloquently demonstrates how untranslatability is a modern and European idea—“the product of early-modern European notions about the spirit of peoples being embodied in their languages” (xxxvi)—an idea that arguably has no place dictating whether or not an Arabic manuscript from 1111 gets translated. He also justifies his inclusion of non-standard English dialects eloquently, acknowledging openly his thought processes about how to respectfully include them as part of his translation and why. He ultimately explains: “But I also take seriously the arguments of linguists and writers, many of them members of the same communities, who point out that ethno-specific forms of speech are fully developed forms of language and therefore no less deserving of serious study than, say, classical Arabic or Standard English” (xlix). Given Arabic’s general (mal)treatment of non-standard language and dialects, I think Cooperson’s position is particularly noteworthy: all forms of language, standard or otherwise, are valid, important, and useful. Finally, I also liked how Cooperson admitted to changing his mind about Kroll’s essay at the end of his translator’s note. Cooperson writes: “Before I met al-Hariri, I would have agreed with everything Kroll is saying here. Having now learned something about the Impostures and its reception in various languages, I cannot imagine carrying it over honestly without self-display” (1). As many of us grapple with questions about how much our own voices should appear in our respective translation projects, I found this part particularly relevant. This is not a one-time decision but rather a choice that translators make repeatedly, depending on the text, the passage, and the author.

I found Cooperson’s introduction far stronger than the selected impostures themselves. Cooperson writes openly that not everyone will enjoy every imposture, and perhaps I did not enjoy these three because I am not very familiar with twentieth-century Irish/Hiberno-English nor Jonathan Swift nor James Joyce. Moreover, the glossaries and notes at the end of each imposture demanded that the reader essentially go back and re-translate the entire section themselves if they really wanted to understand what Cooperson was doing. For a text that was supposed to be about word play, that simply did not feel much like “play.” That being said, I found, for example, imposture 27, "The Wild East,” which is written in the language of the American West, more accessible and engaging. I wonder if impostures 22 and 32—“Leveraging the Flow” and “Jury-Rigged”—which are written in “management speak” and “legalese” respectively might also be easier for a general American readership to access. Although Cooperson discusses the issues that arise when referencing the styles of more recent writers, I wonder if that would have made the impostures more accessible to a modern readership. 

-sharon

In-postures, Cooperson & Kroll

Maybe we could call untranslatability a spurious ontological description of a source text, one which stems from a previous and often unanswered question: who is defining a text in terms of its putative untranslatability and why?  Cooperson masterfully exposes how the concept is a belated addition to the field of translation, rooted more in political than semantic or artistic interests.  Seeing the translator as fundamentally a writer and the practice of his craft as an invitation to creativity, I’d willingly fit within the parameters of translation works which a more Procrustean thinker (Kroll, for example) would probably exclude.  The poems of Tracy Smith, for example.  Or the Genji of Arthur Waley.  Kroll, praising an elite squadron of persons who can maintain a rigorous allegiance to form while writing deft English verse, presents a narrow objective criterion which, so it seems, stands upon an even narrower subjective one.  Above all, Kroll touts what he likes and only afterwards finds an intellectual rationale—in the language of theory and criticism—for this spontaneous, affective response.  Since I happen to like Waley enormously—at least the fragments I’ve encountered—and consider him a consummate prose stylist, I’m willing to call his performance a translation, despite his fondness for transporting the action to an English drawing room, and could probably, if tasked with writing an essay, drum up enough intellectual verbiage to legitimize my preference.  By the same token, when Kroll cites the stilted verse of intellectuals or reduces Waley’s Genji to a work for incurious readers by an imperious writer, he’s building an intellectual exoskeleton around his personal taste.  My hunch is that if he likes a text as an autonomous work in English, any scholarly case against wooden poetry or free translation would dissolve, if not transmute into encomium.

By which I hope to segue to an admission.  I admire but do not care for Cooperson’s Impostures.  For me, they inhabit an esoteric plane near Finnegan’s Wake, their lingual virtuosity—the chief triumph of the work—making that same work almost inaccessible.  It’s ironic, moreover, that after citing in his introduction the ponderous chore of reading previous translations overladen with explanatory material, Cooperson’s own Impostures would be deeply impoverished without the glossaries and endnotes by which the reader must, as it were, translate his translations into English.  Following Kroll’s lead, I could point to the gulf between the source text and Cooperson’s translation, arguing the latter is an adaptation at best, but such an intellectual formulation would only reiterate the point.  Cooperson’s text, as a work in English derived from Arabic, doesn’t move me.  Any argument concerning literal/free, foreignization/ domestication, is and has always been secondary, an effect rather than a cause.

-Josh

 

Post from Jiayi

 

Last Friday, we had Greek author Ersi Sotiropoulos and her translator, professor Karen Emmerich from Princeton University come and speak to us about their work together. It is impressive to be able to hear the two of them together, and one can tell from the way they interact that their synergy is amazing and their ideologies about translating the same. In the rare chance of having both the author and the translator present, I wanted to ask them about word choices. I picked the “perfect pleasure” and “absolute sensual pleasure” to ask for further elaboration on how minutely different words in Greek are carried over to English. It turns out that they liked the translations in English, as they check back with the Greek original, nodding and verbally agreeing that it is indeed accurate. I think this interaction reflects their translation style pretty accurately: they want to preserve the original text and carry over the cultural aspects and elements of Greece to the English language as fine as possible. This is very different from what Tracy has done. It is admittedly a whole different story translating poetry than prose, but I noticed one very crucial difference between these pairs that I am comparing listening to Ersi and Karen’s talk. Both Ersi and Karen speak both Greek and English–there is no communication blockade. When you learn a language, you also are naturally exposed to their culture. Thus, Ersi has a decent amount of knowledge of how certain English words sound in various english speaking worlds, while Karen, being a professor of comparative literature who also studied Greek literature extensively, knows the importance of certain Greek elements in Ersi’s work and thus has more reverence for Ersi’s intricate placement of words and objects in Greek and more loyalty to carry them over to English. On the flip side, not only Tracy doesn’t speak Chinese, Yi Lei also doesn’t understand English. What is lost isn’t just the direct communication between the author and translator on the surface level of the language, but Tracy doesn’t know the cultural significance of certain Chinese elements in the flow of that poem, and Yi Lei doesn’t know the connotation of certain words in English. When explaining the cultural effect of words, Tracy and Yi Lei might have run into Tracy over-stigmatizing how certain words from Chinese culture sound in English, and Yi Lei downplaying how much the word means in the flow of her poem, direly wanting her poems to be translated and published in English. Listening to Ersi and Karen’s talk made me realize that the translator really should speak the language they translate from and that it is ideal for the author to know to a certain extent the target language where their work is being translated to.

Readings: 

I have so much to say in response to the articles we read today. An overarching theme that I am reflecting on is really the “meaning” of translation and the “evaluation criteria” of translation. First of all, Charles Yun talked in his article about the “gains” of translation. 

Moreover, the “gains” of Smith’s effort, clearly a labor of love, have so far greatly outweighed any “losses”: Readers and critics have enjoyed the work immensely, South Korea has been placed on the world’s literary map, sales of both the original and the English version have exploded, and interest in Korean literary translation has soared. 

Well, what is considered “gain” in translation? In my opinion, not just blindly an award or bringing the original author to a larger, more global audience with perfectly English literature sounding proses, but that introducing the author’s writing while preserving the authentic voice written in another language. Otherwise, what is the point of reading foreign literature? Several articles brought up the point that modifications to a certain extent didn’t prevent English readers from enjoying the book. If all English readers want is to read more splendid English prose, why don’t they just read more English literature then? What is the point, then, of translating in the first place if you domesticate cultural elements, language convention, and writing style? A couple of other quotes also astonished me. To list a few: 

“[L]ike ‘Cathay,’ it has morphed into a ‘new creation.’” 

Again, is something that morphed into a ‘new creation’ translation? If so, to what extent can we tolerate alteration? 

“Another translator could have produced a more accurate version, but I find it extremely doubtful that anyone could have matched the virtuosity of Smith’s work. As a first-time effort, Smith’s translation is still a stunning achievement.”

A stunning achievement from what standard? Maybe she is a stunning writer, but I think a stunning translator should be otherly judged. 

“Sometimes you have to block off “one eye” just to focus on the target language.”

“For me, I can still admire the translation. I just have to keep one eye closed.”

My response to this is: just go read more English literature then if you’re not ready to expose yourself to an authentic writing style carried over to English from Korean. 

Smith herself also tried to explain away her critiques quite a bit in her article. I am going to respond to a few quotes that really blew me away (in a not necessarily positive way). 

One of the biggest critiques of Smith’s translation is her “poetic, embellished prose” in English. She counters those critiques by pointing out that Han Kang’s original writings in Korean is also “poetic”, 

And Han Kang’s Korean readers have always singled out her “poetic” style. A 2011 article introduces her as having “received attention for her lyrical style and detailed structuring”; a 2017 article in the Kyunghyang Shinmun comments that Han’s fiction “resembles poetry,” 

Nice try. I am not at all convinced. Poetry resemblance does not equate to florid, flamboyant construction of sentences and paragraphs. Poetry could be plain, simple, and powerful. It is quite unbecoming of a translator to be ignorant of the wide variety of poetry styles and use “resembles poetry” to explain away her disloyal addition of florid content in her English prose. 

Connecting back to my reaction to Yun’s article, what is the criterion of a good translation? And what do we translate for? Smith pens that it is important to take into consideration the following. 

What styles are used by this author’s contemporaries? What’s the mainstream? What tends to garner praise, get labeled “modern,” “original,” “experimental,” or even just “literary”? 

I’m glad to have brought the work of a brilliant writer to an international audience, in sufficiently faithful a way for a qualitatively, if not quantitatively, similar reception. 

Well… I guess it depends on different ideologies of translation. In my opinion, if you have intentions of garnering praise and pleasing an international audience too much in the back of your mind, your translation cannot steer too clear from hyper-domestication.

Last but not least, Smith also stated, 

“[C]hange is not betrayal.”

This is a bold generalized sentence. There must be a degree to tolerable change. Otherwise, there would be no difference between translation of writing and new creation of writing.

Reflections 02/28

 When it comes to the book "The Vegetarian", I believe when the question cannot be properly answered and results into back-and-forth exchanges of equally valid perspectives without any resolution on the horizon, then the question is simply not posed right. In my opinion, a useful, reasonable and worth-the-time question is the one that leads to integration of angles into a complex multidimensional figure that represents subtleties and nuances of a concept that is full of energy of creation. The question about whether or not translation should be faithful to the original does not seem to be of that kind because it presumes reality in which only one of the perspectives merits to survive. I.e. it comes down to "Did that book need to be translated faithfully or with greater liberty?" "Is it the original or the translation that deserves the prize?". This "either or" feels quite meaningless to me because attempts to answer such questions do not expand our understanding of certain concepts and mostly come down to personal preferences and assertions of certain routes of thinking. I think one of the articles pointed it out correctly that the actual issue with the book is that it is stylistically incoherent - and some of these incoherencies get attributed to the translator and some - to the author. Moreover, the readers didn't seem to have an issue with stylistic unsoundness and that is also telling, to me - it is precisely this translation that "peppered" a story with fancy words that weren't there and that didn't feel suitable to the context that actually brought the book acclaim among English speaking audience. Yet, the book won the prize and criticizing literary tastes of the public would be unethical. At the same time, the "straightjacket" of stamps like "Splendid" and "Breathtaking" on the cover of every bestseller reveal the aimlessness of the market. The market exists just to exist, as long as stuff sells, it's all good. Why is it important that "The Vegetarian" got translated in a way that attracted attention in the West? Because it introduced Korean literature to the market. So what? That question does not get answered. There are over 200 countries in the world and many more cultures, countless books and works, and why for example literature need to be attached to a culture or a country in the first place and not be considered shared heritage of humanity as a whole? Why do people prefer reading works in translation rather than learning more languages (an average human has the capacity to speak fluently ~7 languages)? Why do people prefer to buy what they know already sells well, what some magazine called "a must read" or what won an international prize? What does sell well and what makes for a good book? Is it what is interesting to read and is entertaining? (after all, the translation was so successful because it changed the dry and unembellished style of the original) Why is this and that entertaining and why is it important for something to feel attention-catching? What catches the attention nowadays and why? Where does the reader want to progress toward, if anywhere? What are the consequences of the market and the reader having no direction? Answering this would involve deep reflections on the current culture and its nature, on the habits and mindset of a modern consumer, their source and their impact. 

"Ideologically, it champions the individual (woman) against an oppressive society (about which we know nothing, except that it seems “worse” than our own)" - this sentence made me think a lot, too. I see a skewed preference in the Western bookstores toward "foreignness = struggle", and in a large sense I get an impression that this fuels the Western identity, and in the case of the US, it provides a neat contrast with the American dream narrative. Just as how questions over the validity of the translation of "The Vegetarian" distract from asking more helpful questions related to its success, the works about "different cultures struggle" distract from taking a closer look on the culture of one's own - this doesn't mean that works in translation are bound to serve this purpose, yet I believe they are used that way today to a rather great extent. Instead of being seen as treasure chests where art gives frame to experience from which we can extract insight, they often become colorful faraway objects to point finger to - and if it's not colorful, it gets lost and blended with the surroundings in the distance. 

The talk on Friday and the fact that "What is left of the Night" is a fictional imagining of the real person's thoughts - the way some translations can be called "fictional" when they stray too far from the original - reminded me of the phenomenon of the many "inspired by" books written by the Soviet authors, where what was initially supposed to be a translation of The Wizard of Oz inspired seven books about that magical world, with intense action and intricate storylines, sort of like Lord of the Rings. One question I wish I asked on Friday but did not because it occurred to me only later is whether or not the translator should be able to write texts in the language from which they translate - so that they can perhaps "feel" it better by feeling it actively rather than passively. 

-Ksenia

2/28 Comments

Raw and Cooked:

I was surprised firstly at how quickly I could be convinced that it was easy to spot a lineage of translation, and secondly that it was a distinctly bad translation (especially considering the work's level of accreditation) -- and then how quickly hearing Smith talk about herself, I wanted to retract that judgement (perhaps mostly because it feels much harsher to call it bad when she talks about how much it means to he). Last week Karen and Ersi got asked whether or not they’d encountered something generative about improper register (Karen said there was nothing improper or that translation could not be a "betrayal" of the original -- Ersi said yes) and I think this article has a good example of each in that the pervasion of the higher register, I agree with the article, undermines the narrator – but contrary to the article, I think makes the woman totally more interesting as a character because she gets to occupy this kind of empty space, so having her have this contradiction/inconsistency between her register and her background I think is just utterly compelling.

Ersi and Karen:

I really liked this lecture, but it was a little bit hard for me to wrap my head around since most of our prior speakers have had like a central question they're working through, and as Karen and Ersi intended it, this was more of a conversation, which I wish I would have oriented myself to the format of more quickly so I could have gotten to work trying to find the central focus in the conversation there were having instead of kind of waiting for them to hand it to me. 

Jonika 

Reflections 2/28

 The talk given by Karen Emmerich and Ersi was amazing. In comparison to Tracy K Smith who alters her translations as per her interpretations, I noticed how Ersi and Karen tried to capture the original essence of the work to present it as is. This was an interesting observation to make as it emphasizes upon the different routes taken by different authors to hammer home one specific point. 

In the LA Times piece on The Vegetarian a word that stood out to me was ‘betrayal’ Karen also talked about it in her talk on Friday. To me it just seems like a very emotion driven word or a strong word to put forth ones opinion. 

As far as Smith’s work on the Vegetarian goes it seems like she’s received significant criticism for it however since it was her first work she must be given more space to work on her mistakes. In her talk she also made points about taking an action concerning her mistakes instead of just pointing them out. If she had not translated the Vegetarian at the time she did it is likely that the audience must have never got a chance to see it for themselves. 

-Tanishka