Cooperson and "Not Knowing" 20/03/2022

 As summer approaches, and several of us anticipate finishing the MFA program, there are a lot of unknowns, and so I was, perhaps, most struck by Michael Cooperson’s ability to admit, accept, and even thrive on not knowing. He admitted openly that he could not have translated such a text without the internet or without the help of many colleagues and friends. He talked about reaching out to people who spoke different dialects for their help, support, and knowledge. He acknowledged how some of his colleagues would have produced different, perhaps even better, translations. He told us that he no longer feels inclined to translate from Arabic anymore, although he might change his mind later. When Professor Litvin asked him why he did not render an imposture in “Arabeezi” he ultimately said that he didn’t really know why. When asked with which authors or dialects he was familiar before he started the project, he told us that he hadn’t known any of them that well. 

I think “not knowing” is central to translation, and perhaps we don’t talk about it enough. Time and time again we come up against words, authors, styles that we don’t know or haven’t heard before. We think of not knowing as a constraint. But Cooperson’s talk was a good reminder that it’s okay not to know. It’s anything but a constraint; it’s an opportunity to take the time to learn, to ask, and to ultimately give it a try.

 

Relationships between translator and author similarly seem to pivot on this notion of “not knowing.” Vanderschelden explains how “translation collaboration can sometimes shift the decision process from translator to author” (26). In other words, when a translator is unsure about something and asks the author, the translator can simply avoid this “not knowing” process which, as Cooperson demonstrated, can be central to thoughtful, analytical, creative translation. Moreover, while “not knowing” often enables translation to proliferate discourses and allow for many different interpretations of a given text, Vanderschelden explains that “collaboration of the author with the translator can be perceived as a way of controlling the proliferation of meaning” (26). This proliferation of meaning is perhaps one of the most profound and beautiful aspects of translation.

 

That being said, I think this question of collaboration between an author and translator may also depend on the languages and cultures in question. For example, given the power dynamics that exist between Arabic and English, I believe it is important for translators from Arabic—especially American English speakers like me—to communicate with the author when possible and, at the very least, make sure that the author has given their approval on any liberties taken in the translation and the overall translation produced. English/American culture has already cherry-picked and distorted so much from Arabic that this seems like a basic act of respect for the author, their work, and the Arabic language. If they do not want something represented or translated in a certain way, I should, at the very least, ask, understand, and respect why. Their name will be attached to the translation too, after all.

-sharon

C is for translator

 

To invent under constraint, I’m curious what could be said about translation using words that begin with c.  Creativity (first a consummate reader, the translator is also an adroit writer, his inventions tethered to, derived from, and always harkening back to the source text).  Confidence (because if the translator doesn’t believe he can produce a sound translation, the most likely outcome is that he will not).  Commitment (because to hear Cooperson talk about that strata of revisions and to read how Carpenter and Mizumura labored over every word is to suppose translation is as much a show of talent as a feat of persistence).  And finally collaboration (a c word correlative with the last).

 

I’d be amongst the first to plant a theoretical flag in the domain of Roland Barthes and to suggest that the death of the author entails, a priori, the ousting of authorial authority.  How many translators in how many languages have brought a question to the venerated personage of the author, only to hear, “I didn’t mean it that way, but now that you say it, you’re absolutely right”?  An author is the best writer but perhaps not the best reader of his work. Once a text leaves his desk, it enters a web of associations whose gamut no writer, however perspicacious, can foresee.  One of the most careful readers a text will ever enjoy, a translator is thus uniquely positioned to detect the depth and nuances of a text, one of the persons best qualified to maximize the meanings which transcend authorial design.

 

In theory.  And I say “in theory” because economic and personal interests quickly complicate any metaphysical web of associations.  As Vanderschelden points out, in contrast to the evolution of literary theory, an author can veto or authorize a translation (e.g., Kundera) in accordance with how he’d like his work to be perpetuated or perceived.  The model, although it feels like an anachronism, underpins the mercantile construct surrounding translation.  Unless the death of the author signifies literally the death of the author, for a translator working on a modern text, the author is inevitably in the room, able to say yea or nay.  That is, collaboration is implicit in the structure of contemporaneous translation.

 

The practical expression of this tacit collaboration hinges upon a multitude of factors.  The author’s command of the target language (Kundera could never micromanaged a translation into Zulu), the translator’s fluency in the source culture (not just the language), the preoccupations and personalities of writer and translator (Nabokov seems to prefer an amanuensis to a translator, Sotiropolous was generous with her time but exacting in her methods, Yi Lei gave Tracy Smith great latitude)—these are some of the determinants shaping the nature and degree of the collaboration between author and translator.

 

Personally, as a land mammal loth to speak, I would be discombobulated by direct collaboration.  While I hope to enjoy a positive rapport with (if not the friendship of) the writers I one day translate, to ask for clarification and to discuss textual choices, I’m speaking to revisions.  The generative process, for me, calls for hermetic concentration, that I immerse myself completely and without competing priorities in the field of the text in order to hear its tone and to catch its rhythm.  My first draft, in the best of circumstances, is a product of this elusive flow, and I suspect that the author’s physical presence would stifle my creativity in favor of the author’s own.

 

In closing, despite the weight of the author’s veto and the swiftness with which it may fall, it’s befitting to recall that, in the end, both parties want the same thing:  the best possible text in the target language.  Differences of opinion about what constitutes that text—and how to achieve it—arise later.  I’d expected Cooperson to burnish his lingual tour de force, but rather than a translator quick to shine his merits, we heard one willing to air the frequency with which he asked for help and to credit (even financially) those who gave it.  Humility is another trait characterizing the translator.  Although obviously, the word doesn’t begin with c.

 

-Josh

On Impostures

 Cooperson’s introduction revealed so much more about Impostures than I would’ve got from reading the text itself. I think that the cultural context and history that he provided truly enhanced my understanding of the reading, which I found tedious to decipher. Whilst the translation by Cooperson was so clearly in English, the work seemed almost foreign to read. The glossary shed a lot of light on the language used and it was interesting to note how the majority of vocabulary was recognised to be typically unfamiliar to the reader. The theory of translation that Cooperson states seems immaculate and whilst the resulting translated work showcases so much of his notions concerning translation, it seems distant due to its complex language.

The transduction of dialects seems to be less efficient than he proposed and the entire piece loses the tradition fluidity that a poem has. However, I feel that Cooperson is of course completely aware of the complexity in his finished work and that he perhaps chose to translate the source work in this fashion as it pays respect to the his personal theory of translation and maintains a very literal language transfer through cultures rather than grasping the essence or feeling. I was left with this feeling of intangible roughness that doesn’t usually precede poetry in my experience but I am sympathetic to the fact that the work is being converted from the incredibly deep and complex Arabic language.

Diya

On Impostures

 

I realized after reading the imposter that this week’s readings are my very first exposure to Arabic literature. After reading Michael Cooperson’s imposter, I am left with an overflowing sense of respect for him as a translator. As told in the introduction, notes on translation, and the long lists of a glossary, we know that Arabic is an extremely dense language. When I learned some Arabic from my suitemate when I lived in global house sophomore year who happened to have been the Arabic cluster leader, I was amazed at the complexity of the language and felt a vague sense of resemblance shared between Arabic and Chinese–that texts written in these languages are so dense that it’s almost impossible to explicate in English, preserving the original literal beauty of the source language. 

In my own translation, I am often faced with that stylish vs. faithful translation conundrum. And as professor and some of my peers know, I am obsessed with rhymes and I love poetry more than prose. Nascent a translator I am, this conundrum was solved skillfully by Professor Cooperson in his translation of the imposter. Just like Kroll has argued in the essay, translation needs to be fluid and adapt to the original text’s objective and need. When the imposter being such an enchanting work that largely attributes to its wordplay, a successful translation of such work needs to preserve the wordplay in its original.

I truly enjoyed reading Cooperson’s translation and also have a great impression of Arabic literature now, and I can’t wait to ask some of the rhyme questions I have to our Arabic representative in class. 

 

Jiayi 

Cooperson/Al-Hariri's Impostures

I thought Paul Kroll's essay "Translation, or Sinology" was fantastic, and it was able to articulate some of my frustrations with translation theory. The following quote, to me, was the most important part of the piece: "I do not believe that good translation can be the product of declared precepts or avowed manifestos that are created in a theoretical safe-space apart from actual practice...If one looks closely at the actual work of any translator who pronounces on tenets ex cathedra, one invariably finds that sooner or later he perforce violates his own principles. This really is not to be wondered at: language and the meanings it carries are too febrile and mercurial to be controlled by rules, no matter to what end of the spectrum of translational possibilities one leans. We all end up, most of the time, working mainly in the vast middle ground between extremes" (564-5). 

Kroll's assertion that translators most often work in the "middle ground" connects to his assertion that "faithful translation" and "stylish translation" are set up in a false binary, and that it isn't necessary to reject one method in favor of the other. Similarly, I think it is much easier to make sweeping proclamations about domestication versus foreignization when one theorizes about, but does not practice, translation. When I translate, I never work from either extreme, nor do I ever really begin a translation project with a clear intention to completely domesticate or to completely foreignize a text. Translation, to me, is problem-solving, and a rigid approach never serves me when I actually come up against these problems in practice. Many of my decisions in the moment simply come down to what feels or sounds right within the broader scope of the piece, and I don't assign these binary labels to it until I've finished the translation and am able to evaluate it as a whole. 

In the same vein, Kroll recognizes that it is possible to write both faithfully and with style. I think the two qualities have often been falsely set in opposition. I thought back to Tracy K. Smith's Yi Lei translations a lot while reading this essay, because this piece has helped me pinpoint what exactly I disagreed with in her work. To me, Smith created a dilemma for herself where there was none: either produce a faithful translation or create a powerful, pleasing poem.  I don't see why it isn't possible to do both! Replacing a lotus with a rose, as Kroll writes (or in Smith's case, changing it to a cloud) is an unfortunate result of the idea that two languages or cultures are too "distant" from one another to be able to represent each other faithfully in translation. 

Now, with regards to the Impostures, and in keeping with my opinion that these broad generalizations are unhelpful when talking about translation, I'm going to throw what I just said out the window and praise Cooperson for his innovative translation of Al-Hariri's text. It may seem contradictory to dislike Smith's departures from the text but admire Cooperson's, but I think it comes down to context; Al-Hariri's text was meant to play with and stretch the Arabic language, so a successful English translation must do the same.  Different texts require different approaches, and if Cooperson were to translate the Arabic "faithfully," the text would lose its ludic quality, the very thing that makes it remarkable (as we saw in his examples of previous Maqamat translations). 

Cooperson's Impostures were a delight to read, especially because I'm currently writing about the translation of Raymond Queneau's Exercices de style for Professor Vincent's class and I can very clearly see the text's influence on Cooperson's translation. It's amazing to me that, since the French translation of Al-Hariri didn't retain the language play of the original, that Queneau, Perec, and other Oulipians presumably came up with their constrained writing without any awareness of the resemblance it bore to his work. It's easy to see this resemblance through Cooperson's translation, since he openly admits to using Oulipian writing as inspiration for his version. Independent of the English translation, though, the trick of writing with only dotted words vs. undotted words reminds me a lot, as Cooperson said, of Perec's La disparition, written entirely without the letter E—as well as the follow-up, Les revenentes, in which the letter E is the only vowel. You can see Perec's influence on Cooperson as he renders the dotted/undotted sections as poems both excluding the letter O and using the O as much as possible. 

Maggie 

3/14 Reflections

 Paul Kroll's paper on the sinologist as translator hits upon what I find to be the fundamental problem in translating poetry, that being whether to translate for the purpose of "imparting information or in the hope of giving pleasure". To me, the most interesting feature of this paper was the discussion of a need for balance, between creating a literal translation or one that strays too far from the original. Particularly I enjoyed the passage in which Kroll critiques those who have their own strong tenents on translation, that within a large enough body of their work they are more likely than not to have broken their own rules, something that I am also forced to admit I do, despite my own thoughts on what constitutes a proper translation. It was also nice to read someone who so openly points out that much of translation criticism is done with an air of superiority, blankly pointing out flaws with no intent to do anything other than that. 

Impostures I found was interesting, that is really the only word I feel like I can use with any degree of sincerity. It was difficult to read, and I often wish I had a glossary until I got to the end and found out there was in fact a glossary, except the glossary was about the length of the entire passage. I'd be very interested in hearing about what sort of mindset you'd have to be in to be able to translate something like this, and resist the urge to just explain, like in the piece by Murakami we were supposed to retranslate; the striped shirt being explained in the English translation as being the Hanshin Tigers shirt. The way the accent is in the English also makes for some reason think of Westerns and cowboys.

Steven

Reflections 3/14

 "A real translation is transparent; it does not cover the original, does not block its light, but allows the pure language, as though reinforced by its own medium, to shine upon the original all the more fully" 

I found Cooperson's introduction to be more interesting than his translation itself. He revealed many crucial details about the original text and its background, and they made the work memorable to me without even reading it - I wish the introduction was made into a separate book itself, I would have loved reading it. His introductions to each of the Impostures felt engaging, too. I think Cooperson is skilled at introducing and describing and perhaps assumed that understanding a work descriptively would be sufficient for re-creating it in translation, hence he gets an idea of transferring Arabic dialects into English ones because in theory the concepts seem similar. In practice, however, I do not think those can be equalized at all, and that is proven by the fact that the translation feels difficult and confusing to read - the complete opposite of how the original is supposed to be. It felt like the idea was cumbersome and loaded to the point that it obscured the light of the original - and well, that makes complete sense because it seems that Cooperson attempted to sort of create a "new" light to begin with. He invested a lot of effort into his endeavor - effort that I believe was unnecessary and was more akin to trying to fit a square into a triangular opening. I think both the creation of a work and its translation are to be done with ease, catching and following the flow, feeling the poem rather than swimming against it - like how the article on sinology mentioned, one needs to feel the taste of poetry to translate it, to know how to feel the taste of the work to translate it in a way that does not come off as bland. Sure, Cooperson's work is not bland on the surface. At the same time it still left a bland aftertaste and felt more like a script rather than poetry. It also did showcase his erudition to a high degree, like another article pointed out. But in this case equalizing Cooperson's erudition with that of Al-Hariri would be the same as equalizing English dialects with Arabic ones. Moreover, the point of translation was in conveying Al-Hariri, not showing off Cooperson... And now only those possessing a similar level of erudition as Cooperson could have a chance to enjoy his works.. It gets way too confusing following all the contradictions that arise! 

I read those three Impostures in Russian - which were called Maqamat like the original work - and it felt a pleasure to follow the rhyming within sentences that appeared rhythmically and without fail. My mind felt at ease and I had fun reading. Maqamat had a childhood feeling to it and were like playing with toys - the meaning is precisely to not have an explicit, practical purpose to such activity as reading and writing rhyming prose. Through this translation, I could see why Al-Hariri became famous and his works got copied a lot right away, I also could imagine how they looked like in the original. I even felt like I could almost hear them recited in Arabic even though I do not speak the language. Russian does not have distinct dialects so everything was written in a uniform style - yet it left space to imagine variations in the original, and served as a window into it rather than its replacement.

--

I think the "translatability" of Al-Hariri comes down to how important it is to translate him - is he important enough to twist and bend the English language a little (or not little) to relay his style? Is he and other authors important enough for readers to willingly grow accustomed to literary inventions and welcoming them? It seems that the English language is not flexible when it comes to syntactical innovations. Should it remain this way? Why or why not? 

-Ksenia