Deanna Cachoian-Schanz on the Mania of Translation

November 20, 2023 | in Interviews | by Xiao Yue Shan

I felt the dance between author and translator: each disentangling the other as she tried to understand her(self).

Deanna Cachoian-Schanz was awarded one of the prestigious PEN Translates grants earlier this year for her work on Shushan Avagyan’s Girq-anvernakir: a rich, experimental novel that speaks to repressions, literary legacy, and the expansive collisions between disparate writings, voices, times, and lives. Soon to be released as A Book, Untitled through Tilted Axis, Avagyan’s work is emblematic of literature as an act of congregation and communality in giving voice to the silenced, and in this following interview, Cachoian-Schanz speaks on how translation furthers that textual power.

Xiao Yue Shan (XYS): Shushan Avagyan is also a translator; did this affect the way you worked with the text, and were there conversations between you two about how this translation should be approached?

Deanna Cachoian-Schanz (DCS): Of course! As I intimated in the Translator’s Afterword, my translation style tends to keep as close to the text as possible, prioritizing the words on the page and not what I imagine as the “author’s intent.” As Barthes famously declared in 1967, “the author is dead!” However, when working with contemporary literature, the elephant in the room is that the author is still speaking! How can we not, as responsible translators, take the authors’ voices into consideration, especially when they are fluent in the target language?

In the final instances of the English-language text, Shushan and I were in close and caring contact to make the final touches, together. When I first started to translate the book back in 2010, it was a way for me to work on my Armenian—to carefully improve my vocabulary and language skills through a text I was invested in knowing deeply. However, because Book is in part a translator’s diary, sometimes I felt as if the author was already telling me how to translate her work, or even trolling me, her future translator. It’s hard to not take certain lines to heart when you’re that deep into the text; when you’re translating, you really get into that mindset, as if the author is speaking directly to you, for you. Perhaps translation is in part some kind of mania. . . READ MORE…

Contributor:

Xiao Yue Shan

Language:

Armenian

Places:

Writers:

Deanna Cachoian-Schanz
Shushan Avagyan

Tags:

Our Top Ten Articles of 2022, As Chosen by You: #6 An interview with Maureen Freely

December 24, 2022 | in News | by Matthew Redman

To translate [Pamuk] was to fall under a spell that took me several years to break.

2022 was a bumper year for fascinating interviews, and one of the best of the bunch, in this humble editor’s opinion, is also our sixth most read article of the year. For our Summer issue, Assistant Interview Editor Rose Bialer sat down with acclaimed translator Maureen Freely to discuss her upbringing in Istanbul, the craft of translation, and the state of literature in Turkey today.

It takes two to make an interview really work: Bialer has a knack for perceptive questions, and Freely is lyrically articulate about her unusual upbringing. Unsurprisingly, the conversation is full of gems, such as when she talks about working with Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk as the English translator of his novels. Their relationship is complex, delicate, respectful, and as Pamuk’s star rises, it grows increasingly strained. The two are “exact contemporaries” and grew up in similar parts of Istanbul, and when he writes about his childhood in the city, his memories, so different from her own, start to crowd out hers:

I love that chapter he wrote about hüzün, and the black and white city that it veiled so hauntingly. To read it is to go into a trance. To translate it was to fall under a spell that took me several years to break. I could no longer see the golden Istanbul I’d known as a child. As for the campus where I’d grown up and he’d gone to school, he passed over it in just a few paragraphs. He wrote about the library, and he wrote about skiving. When we were going through that part of my translation, I pointed to the gap between two of those paragraphs, and I told him that my whole life had vanished into that blank space.

If you’re curious about some of Freely’s output, read Irmak Ertuna Howison’s review of her translation of Sevgi Soysal’s Dawn from the Asymptote Blog.

And if her interview piques your interest in Turkish literature, don’t forget that our twelve-year digital archive is a veritable treasure trove of gems waiting to be discovered.

DISCOVER OUR SIXTH MOST-READ ARTICLE OF 2022 READ MORE…

Contributor:

Matthew Redman

Language:

Turkish

Places:

Istanbul
Turkey

Writers:

Maureen Freely
Orhan Pamuk

Tags:

Translation Tuesday: “Constantinople” by Flavia Teoc

July 31, 2018 | in Translations | by MARGENTO

More fragrant are the grapes slowly growing sour on a vendor stall in Yerebatan

We are thrilled to feature Flavia Teoc’s poetry for the first time on Translation Tuesday. Teoc’s lines visit Yerebatan—the magical site in Istanbul where the Basilica Cistern hides a special sighting of Medusa. Under the dim lights of Yerebatan, Teoc’s fragrant lines shine brighter.

Constantinople

More fragrant than the righteous ones perfect in all of their ways
Are the grapes slowly growing sour on a vendor stall in Yerebatan.
Under their cracked skin a sweet potion of sounds is distilled,
Memories from back when they were early sour berries or less,
An equal proportion mixture of screams from a woman flogged
Up against their vine, the bell of a leper who took shelter in the split leaves’
Shadow one late afternoon, and a stray dog’s quick nap nearby.
I’m telling you—
More fragrant are the grapes slowly growing sour on a vendor stall in Yerebatan,
For those perfect in all their ways will never touch them.

An Interview with Guest Artist Gianna Meola

July 13, 2016 | in Interviews | by Berny Tan

Sketching is mostly about trying and failing and trying again.

Illustrator Gianna Meola is our guest artist for the April issue. Her effortlessly succinct images capture poignant moments in sixteen of our texts in the Fiction, Nonfiction, and Drama sections, as well as the works of our Close Approximations Contest winners. I interview her about her experience contributing to Asymptote, and delve into her processes as an illustrator.

Berny Tan: I really appreciate how you were able to distill every text into one distinct image. Could you take us through your process of conceiving and executing each piece?

Gianna Meola: I’m pretty straightforward—I read the text and thumbnail any ideas that come to me as I go, and then add notes and corrections before moving on to cleaner sketches. I also like to do some research into what I’m drawing if I’m not familiar with it; for instance, I ended up learning some truly useless information about constellations while researching ‘Anathema.’ It was great.