Ronkainen, Jonika -- 4/11 Comments

Dralyuk:

I absolutely loved Dralyuk's lecture -- in my comments from last week, I asked how the writing style we saw in the article we read, which was so exacting and creative in its descriptions, would translate to his speech, and I honestly believe his spontaneous descriptions were just as, if not more, poignant than the ones he put in writing -- I don't know that I really have anything much to say about this, just that his descriptions/explanations of Nemirovskaya's poetry were so excellent, and it almost always felt like he was just completely hooked into what was essential about each poem, and because of that was also maybe even more tuned into the thread/common theme that bound them all together. It just felt super theoretically rich.

Nemirovskaya's "Eves" and what Dralyuk had to say about it, or maybe the whole schema of discarded objects or objects and empathy, I think lends itself so nicely to the topics we have for this weeks readings. I think the implication there in her poems and in Dralyuk's translation and talk, (or the theoretical implication I believe is there) that in order for one to see another as a subject, they must also see them as an object, is really pointed for a discussion about gender and translation. I wish I could refer to a more specific implication, but I can't really make out more of a relation between gender and translation than stating that there is one still -- I think the turn to Derrida and a deconstructionist approach in a lot of the readings is giving me a hard time trying to piece it all back together to put out a coherent thought about gender and translation, and overall I don't feel that I have very much to write about our readings for this week because I couldn't parse out a core question or problem, so I'm excited to see if I might be able to find something of that semblance in our discussion today. 

Reflections 04/11

I found Boris Dralyuk's relationship with Julia Nemirovskaya to be a desirable translator-author relationship. He puts his knowledge and skills to the service of the meaning that he sees polished out by Nemirovskaya's verses - he believes this meaning is worth distributing and "furthering" into other languages and audiences. The impression that I got is that this is something he would have done regardless of whether he would have been payed to do it. I believe everyone should be payed for their time and effort, and at the same time I believe the type of effort that should be there is the one that would be there either way; I don't see payment as needing to inspire effort but rather as rewarding and honoring it for already existing. There is also humility in Boris' attitude that I find admirable: "She wrote it and the least I could do is to translate it". He does not seem to be trying to create a space or a name for himself with his translations. Instead, in this case he tries to create more space for Nemirovskaya, through himself. He spoke outside of political agendas and academia narratives. If a subject, theme or topic is not supported by places where the money brew, will people still talk about it? It felt refreshing to hear someone speak from their heart about what they believed mattered. I often feel like academia is like a balloon that pumps itself from the inside, like it reinforces its own structure from within to continue existing the way it wishes to exist. There was also a mention of intuitive translation, and I wanted to add on it that like with everything, the use of intuition also requires honing and practice - on which a lot can be said and written, as well. 

In my opinion, the escapism from meaning was illustrated perfectly by the controversy over the skin color of a translator. The meaning of the poem and its promotion seemed to be secondary at best, it was its social and political significance that was attempted to get "translated", with the constant looking over the shoulder so that those who hold the strings of the mainstream narrative "approve" of whatever needs approval nowadays. If the value of the poem lied not in its message of unity but in the fact that it is a person of color who composed it, then to "translate" this value, it must be a person of color who recreated this poem in another language, as well. That is why it does not matter if a white person can or cannot translate something - in my eyes, this debate isn't about the quality of translation at all. Any art ceases to be art when it gets political. 

In regards to sexual metaphors, it makes absolute sense why the discussions over "faithful/unfaithful" translations lead nowhere and are like rolling the ball back and forth - because I think such discussions serve as a covert outlet for the power dynamics or power narratives that already exist in society. I would prefer to think of any concept as androgynous and having both female and male components, to an equal degree. When we treat something as strictly feminine or strictly masculine, we deny the yin and yang makeup of it, create an imbalance and ascribe to the reality that we want to see, rather than the reality that is. The result is stagnation, as can be seen in literary circles as much as elsewhere. The androgynous model would show that both the original text and the translation have an equal purpose of serving meaning by exploring the nuances of various insights. Whichever comes first is irrelevant because these are mere tools and lenses and pieces through which a bigger, newer picture is assembled. There is no hierarchy, only the path upward, toward higher truths. 

-Ksenia

Reflections 4/11

     Boris Dralyuk was such a sweet, passionate, funny, and interesting speaker! I think he was one of my favorites so far. I loved hearing him read the poems in Russian and in English, and the way he talked about his translational choices was extremely personal and heartfelt. He expressed his feelings very clearly; I particularly enjoyed him talking about the poem Neighbor, and how the images ruminated on the pain of the actual images (for example, the boiling water) vs. the person in the boiling water. How the pain of objects translates to the pain of being human, and how poets and children share in a worldview that is somehow naïve and profoundly mature at the same time. It was such a good talk!

    Reading the S. Bassnett piece on Translation and Gender, I was struck by the line "the risks of cultural appropriation through translation," and how many translators include prefaces to "remind readers of the complex interlingual and intercultural processes that the text has undergone before reaching them." This seems like an obvious fact to me, and if it were included in a preface of a translated book I was reading, I can't promise that I would take the time to read it :') The piece mentions Ambai complaining about the ways English translators have shaped Indian writing to fit their own preconceptions, but sadly, no examples are given. I'm curious how this affects other cultures as well. I know we talked about changing the Lotus flower imagery in class (which I disagreed with), as well as the egregious use of women in kimonos/cherry blossoms/etc. on Japanese-translated book covers, but I want to see more examples of the actual content of the work being culturally appropriated? Unless the translation could be considered cultural appropriation in and of itself? This topic fascinates me. Also, why the alliteration was more important than the meaning of the title Tres Triste Tigres, I couldn't understand-- but I also haven't read the piece or know what it's about.

    The Metaphors, Women, and Translation piece made me wish that there was another Greek translator coming to discuss Greek plays and translation. They mention Athena and Medusa, but famous Ancient Greek women like Clytemnestra, Medea, and Jocasta were coming to my mind, and how translators go about translating not only the ancient texts, but all sorts of writing that references these famous plays. Although maybe I should've just asked more questions when Karen Emmerich and Ersi Sotiropoulos were here?

    The news article raises an important question: is it more important that one's intentions when translating are in the right place, or their lived experiences are shared with the original author? I see no issue with Marieke translating Amanda Gorman's work, as her intentions are to spread Gorman's message, and a translation is not intended to be Marieke's take/opinion on the original. However, I don't know if I have the right to have an opinion on this as a white woman, myself. The NYT piece was also really interesting to read, and I think having a translation controversy this big is in itself a huge win for the translation community. If problems are arising, it means people care, and people caring is good! I agree with the sentiment that limiting only black people to translate black people, only women to translate women, only trans people to translate trans people etc. etc. is harmful, but at the same time, if black translators were overlooked when seeking people to translate Amanda Gorman's poetry, clearly that may be signaling a systemic issue.

 Sarah

    

4/11

 I as usual, had a great time meeting the speaker before the talk, but I do wish I had thought of the questions I now have after the talk, mostly about more technical issues Boris might have faced during the transfer from Russian to English, things like the change in rhyme, the loss of word order, and other issues of the like, but in hindsight those questions would have likely detracted from the impact of the talk as a whole. It was an entertaining and enlightening look into the mind of a translator of poetry, who clearly loves the original work more than I could imagine. His more intuitive approach to the translation as a whole seems to run along similar rails as another poetry translator that we had the pleasure of listening to earlier this semester, although I suppose in his case that the end result is less influenced by the personal experiences he himself has had, and more of replicating the feeling that he received from his own reading of the original text. In a sense perhaps, the difference lies in the alchemy of the translation, and the ingredients used to make the translation. It certainly gave me a lot to think about.

Of the articles I found Bassnett's article the most interesting, as I find myself enjoying the more technical aspects of translation lately, while the other article by Derrida, which I recall having read last semester, seems to elicit the same response in me; I enjoy the eras described and for the most part agree, and that is mostly it. On the translation "controversy" however, I find myself having very split feelings. It's hard to envision what I would personally do if I was ever in such a situation, and it seems as if being in such a situation in the first place would be something I would almost certainly never find myself in, but I can't help but feel as if there isn't an answer to the problem as it were. At the end of everything, I can't help but feel that none of what anyone says matters so long as the author wants a particular person to be their translator. It is my very simple and extreme solution to an unfortunate and complex issue, one that I hope I never find myself facing, and one that I will do my absolute best to avoid. 

 Steven

Dralyuk Wrap-up and Identity in Translation

Boris Dralyuk gave a super entertaining lecture on the poems of Julia Nemirovskaya on Friday. One thing that stuck out to me is that he is clearly a very intuitive translator. He gave a great piece of advice with regards to translating poetry, which is to let your poetic voice take over first, and then come back to the translation with a critical eye second. Then, you can decide what to keep and what to take away. He also spoke of translation choices occurring to him and “ringing a little bell of rightness,” which I really related to. I can’t say I adhere to a specific translation philosophy when I work; I feel it out as I go. I also liked what he said about sticking the landing of a translated poem. Last week I mentioned that I found some of his free verse translations a bit rhythmically difficult, but I’d like to take that back after hearing him read them aloud!

The only thing I found a bit frustrating was a question from an audience member positing that perhaps Nemirovskaya wants to be under-read or under-studied (he cited another female poet whose name escapes me). It's reductive to assume that if any woman poet isn’t famous, it must be because she doesn’t want to be. But I thought Dralyuk fielded the question as gracefully as he could have and helped redirect that thinking a bit.

I found both Bassnett and Godayol’s articles really valuable. Bassnett’s text got me thinking about how, in addition to the gender embedded in the French language, the word for authorship and the word for paternity are the same: la paternité. I am as desparate for a new French word as I am desperate for new metaphors for translations. I have heard the gendered analogies that Godayol highlights in her text many times, and it seems we can never escape the binary of faithful and unfaithful. I had a male professor in undergrad who spoke to us about the act of translation as touching a virgin, which not only managed to alienate and upset a class entirely made up of women, but also perpetuated really harmful ideas about virginity and purity: following the analogy to its logical conclusion, that a source text is pure, virtuous, valuable, and the translation is sullied, impure, worth less than its source text. Yes, Derrida challenges the hierarchy of original over translation, but Godayol also points out that “he does not break entirely free from the sexual language of the dominant discourses” (104). This is why we need that Third Age, and why we urgently need metaphors not created by cis white men. That professor, despite being the biggest Derrida fan I’ve met, could not move beyond analogies that reinforced sexist notions both about translation and about women.

Regarding the Gorman translation articles, it was disappointing to see some translators seize Rijneveld's resignation as an opportunity to cry "cancel culture.” I think Rijneveld understood, as a lot of people have, that this isn't so much a "canceling" as it is taking the poem as an opportunity to welcome new voices into the translation world.

-Maggie

on gender, power, identity

While I thought Boris was a charismatic and personable speaker, I found myself somewhat frustrated with certain things he said too. He shared the story of how he first found out about Julia Nemirovskaya’s work, and while he was telling it, I thought: okay, like so much else in translation, it happened just like that—by some almost magical chance. But on second thought, that wasn’t really chance, and it wasn’t really funny either. It was yet another example of how white-male-dominated academia is hostile to women’s writing. It underlined how women’s work is often dismissed, not taken seriously, and chosen last. I found myself wondering if Nemirovskaya—a deeply feeling, sensitive poet—was okay with him sharing that story in a room full of people, set to be recorded forever. Moreover, at several points during the lecture, both Boris and people in the audience mentioned how Nemirovskaya’s work was “marginalized” or “relegated to the margins.” I find myself frustrated by these terms—they seem to suggest that poof! She, and other women poets, just existed in the margins. Men have marginalized women and continue to marginalize women, denying them the space, the attention, the recognition, the funding, and the time that their voices deserve. This is no coincidence.

 

I think that Derrida’s elimination of the power relations between source text and target text is spot on. For Derrida, when a text is written into another language, it becomes an entirely new text, and thus the translator is fundamentally (also) an author. By considering the translator an author in her own right, Derrida upends the traditional author-male/translator-female power dynamics at play. The only way to finally rid translation of these misogynistic power dynamics is to upend the entire power structure; it's not enough just to change the metaphor. Though new metaphors are welcome too. I like the liminal, border space. I like Pandora, Medusa, Athena.

Lastly, I think identity politics absolutely has a place in translation. I think identity politics can be an important way for “marginalized” groups to locate power, to create and share opportunities for members of their community that they otherwise might not be able to access. Building a more equitable translation culture means making sure that others (generally those not part of the longstanding elite white men’s club) have more access, more space, and more opportunity than they have had before. This shift is inevitably uncomfortable for some. That being said, I don’t think texts must necessarily be translated by someone who shares a certain identity with the author, but really it depends on how crucial that identity experience is to the text at hand.

-sharon

A feminist named Boris?

I was especially interested in a pair of things Boris said in passing.  The first (to paraphrase from memory, aided by my notes) is that the translator of course enriches the text wherever he can.  It’s a view contrary to what Gregory Rabassa calls the silk purse mistake, the error of rather than translating a text, trying to improve it.  While Rabassa seems leery of any intervention proceeding from the translator’s imagination without a point of reference or at least a warrant in the in the source material, perhaps a partial reconciliation is available on the basis of the verbs, enrich vs. improve.  For me, improve connotes making up for a text’s supposed insufficiencies via translation, putting the original in the inferior position of a text needing correction from the translator’s hand, whereas enrich implies a kind of discovery, accentuating a tendency already present in the original, making the source text more decidedly itself via the act of translation.  In fact, this second verb seems to fit squarely in the sturdiest framework of our feminist theoreticians who, collapsing the binary relation of text/translation, refusing to prioritize one over the other, and exposing the myth of an immobile, definitive source, approach translation as the next in a series of successive gestures, an invitation to reread and to rewrite.

 

Reflecting on the poem Julia wrote following the fires which threatened outer Los Angeles, Boris voiced his admiration for her ability to locate the emotional unrest of the moment in the field of her poetic imagination and concluded that his translating it was “the least I could do.”  Here in contrast to the translation theory advanced in Bassnett and Godayol, Boris—a male translator—places his work in a secondary role with respect to Julia’s verse.  Rabassa, for his part, likens his contribution to that of the armor bearer, a humble Sancho Panza following (but also grounding) the inventions of Don Quixote.  Quick as I am to defend the translator as a writer and to champion the indispensable creativity of his work, I’d also suggest that the translator’s art is structurally a derivative one, and not merely because our go-to analogies have inscribed it as such.  It is the writer and not the translator who unites the disparate threads of discourse as they haven’t been synthesized before, the writer who, in Nietzschean terms, stares into the abyss.  The translator, whose challenges and dangers are manifold, never faces the terror of the blank page.  The constraint of the word already written yes but the monumental undertaking of making something where there was nothing—or merely the inchoate suggestion of something—no.

 

At least twice, Boris said he translates by intuition, evaluating critically only after the fact.  To Godayol’s search for new metaphors, we could thus add the Boris bell, a ding which registers in the translator’s aesthetic consciousness after he, semi-unconsciously, has got it right.  I too prefer to work intuitively, perhaps to my ruin.  That is, if my translator’s apparatus tinkles deliciously one evening, I proceed with caution the following morning, the sound indicating that I quite probably got it wrong.  Rabassa too speaks of working by instinct, trusting his hunches, and I’d like to suppose the more I practice this art, the better tuned and the more reliable my Bois bell will be.

 

Translation seems not only infinite but infinitely complex.  I’m thus grateful for any analogy which discloses a new facet of the inexhaustible polygon that is translation.  A relation of love and intimacy, a mediation across arbitrary borders, a cloud reflected on a placid surface such that water and sky are symmetrical—all are revelatory.  A collector of analogies, I’m thus leery of any systematic effort to legitimize or to prescribe one over another, as Godayol, at least implicitly, seems to do.  It seems hasty and ill-advised to summarize two centuries of translation history in a scant twenty pages and to opine categorically on the basis of a paucity of examples which distort rather than manifest the complexity of the issue.  Where Bassnett, nuanced in her claims and detailed in her examples, makes an illuminating argument and delimits a defensible terrain, Godayol slips into predictable, empty tropes which detract from her marvelous rereading of Athena/Medusa and succumb to the ease of propounding a model no less hierarchical—and no nearer the ontological complexity of translation—than that which she attempts to overturn.

 

-Josh