Posts filed under 'Cornell University Press'

Among the Drift Ice: Larissa Kyzer on Modern Icelandic Literature in Translation

May 15, 2024  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

A lot of the best outlets for Icelandic literature in English translation are actually based in Iceland.

Larissa Kyzer translates from the Icelandic works in a wide range of genres, including novels, short stories, and poetry; microplays and film scripts; picture books, chapter books for young readers, and YA fantasies; essays and nonfiction; daily news, and more. Her recent projects include the Impostor Poets’ Manifesto; “A Radio Operator Goes Hunting,” a stand-alone excerpt from art curator-turned-author Steinunn G. Helgadóttir’s first, as-yet-available in English novel; “Bookworm in a Chrysalis,” an essay reflecting on immigration, language-learning, and a lifelong love of books by Natasha S.; and “On the Edge,” a special issue of new and timely writing from Iceland, which she curated for Words Without Borders in 2021. She’s also a writer herself, and has published book reviews (mostly focusing on contemporary Nordic and Icelandic literature), travel writing, personal essays, and articles (most while working as the staff journalist for The Reykjavík Grapevine). 

In this interview, I conversed with Larissa about the changing landscape of contemporary literature and literary translation in Iceland, her translation process, and her work to build a more inclusive literary world. 

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): Before the First World War, translations of Icelandic writings were mostly into German, English, and Scandinavian languages. Eventually, the translations expanded to other languages such as Chinese, Georgian, Gaelic, Esperanto, Slovenian, Macedonian, Uzbek, and even French, Dutch, and Japanese. But this was the landscape of literary translation until the mid-70s through the early 90s, according to Cornell University Press’ Bibliography of Modern Icelandic Literature in Translation. What’s the scene of literary translation in Iceland these days like? 

Larissa Kyzer (LK): Thanks to Iceland’s fabulous landscapes and nature (not least its volcanic eruptions, which the country has had four of in the last four months), its perennial popularity as a tourist destination, and its status as a small, European island nation of many listacle-able quirks, there is always at least some demand for Icelandic literature in translation, although the scales still tilt towards crime fiction, as they do for most, if not all, of the Nordic countries. Per the Publishers Weekly Translation Database, which covers first-time English translations “distributed through conventional means” in the United States, there have been 93 Icelandic books translated into English since 2008, when the folks at Open Letter Books started collecting this data. 44 of them (that is, nearly half) are crime novels. Consider that in 2019 (the most recent year data was collected), 1,712 books were published in Iceland, whereas in 2008, at the height of the country’s boom years, we saw the publication of 2,125 books—in a single year. For a country with a population currently hovering around just under 400,000, that’s pretty impressive. But we’re only getting a fraction of this wealth in English.

A sidenote, because I think it’s interesting, and also worth highlighting: the figures for Icelandic literature in English translation are still way more heartening than you see for many so-called minority languages, including ones that have far more speakers. For example, there are about 5.4 million speakers of Finnish worldwide; according to the Translation Database, only 88 Finnish books have been published in English translation since 2008. Thirteen million people speak Greek; only 70 Greek books have been published in English in the same time period. Almost 40 million people speak Thai worldwide; only 3 English-language translations of Thai titles are listed in the database. Hindi has over 600 million speakers; only 14 Hindi-language books have been translated into English in the last 16 years. There’s a lot that can be inferred from these numbers—not least that there is obviously a significant Eurocentricity in English-language publishing—but the baseline point is that as English-language readers, we’re only ever getting access to a tiny sliver of the literature that exists in the world.

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Texts in Context: Glynne Walley on Kyokutei Bakin

August 29, 2022  |  in Texts in Context  |  by Katarzyna Bartoszyńska

Hakkenden represents a whole other side of premodern Japan: big, messy, intellectually sophisticated, verbose, and populist.

Welcome to our new monthly column, in which Katarzyna Bartoszyńska seeks out academics who contribute to and elucidate the world of literary translation, revealing their deeper studies into texts both well-known and overlooked!

The following interview, conducted with Glynne Walley of the University of Oregon, spans Walley’s unprecedented efforts in bringing a titanic work of classical Japanese fiction to light. In his monograph Good Dogs: Edification, Entertainment, and Kyokutei Bakin’s “Natso Satomi hakkenden” (Cornell University Press, 2018), Walley explores the oft-ignored popular literature of nineteenth-century Japan, and how Bakin’s master epic foregrounds fundamental questions of morality, virtue, and the functions of fiction in society.

Katarzyna Bartoszyńska (KB): Tell me about your book, Good Dogs: Edification, Entertainment, and Kyokutei Bakin’s “Natso Satomi hakkenden.” Can you briefly describe the central idea or argument?

Glynne Walley (GW): Essentially, I’m looking at how a mid-nineteenth-century popular writer with aspirations toward capital-L Literature used a rhetoric of didacticism to satisfy both the demands of entertaining readers and his own desire to turn the novel into something Serious. The writer in question, Kyokutei Bakin (1767–1848) was one of Japan’s first professional authors of fiction, and he accomplished that by being acutely aware of what audiences wanted. At the same time, under the influence of masterworks in Chinese vernacular fiction, he had an idea that fiction, which his society considered beneath intellectual notice, could be a vehicle for serious ideas. It was a negotiation that other novelists in other places were also engaged in, but since Japan was operating largely outside their influence at that moment, Bakin makes an interesting case study of how the tensions between commerce and Art played out in a different and very specific context.

KB: What led you to this topic?

GW: The novel I focus on—Nansō Satomi hakkenden (Hakkenden for short, and Eight Dogs in English)—was hugely popular in its day, acutely influential on the next couple of generations, and remains crucially important to literary history, both for its intrinsic worth and for the role it played in debates over the modernization of fiction at the end of the nineteenth century. Despite this, it has been almost entirely neglected in Anglophone scholarship—mentioned, but seldom analyzed. It was time for a monograph on Hakkenden, I felt, and if nobody else was going to do it, I figured I might as well give it a shot.

KB: I’m burying the lede here a little bit because you are also, of course, the translator of Bakin’s Hakkenden! This is a monumental task—Hakkenden is massively long, immensely complex, and challenging to translate. What were the particular difficulties that this translation posed?

GW: Hakkenden is a massively long work! The modern edition I work from is nearly six thousand pages. The biggest challenges relate to that—and no doubt that length is one thing that kept the work largely untouched by Anglophone scholars and translators. Perhaps the smartest thing would have been to come up with a volume of highlights (a few short excerpts had already appeared in anthologies), but since the scale was part of the point of the work, I really wanted to see the whole thing in English.

The other big challenge is the language. It’s written in classical Japanese, which is grammatically and syntactically quite different from modern Japanese. The author writes in a wide array of styles within classical Japanese, drawing from literary masterpieces from Japan and China as well as the popular theater and fiction of his day, making for a really diverse stylistic palette. And he’s also incorporating a lot of elements of vernacular (as opposed to classical) Chinese writing, which adds a distinctive flavor, but which is, in a way, much harder for the modern reader than classical Chinese. Understanding all these registers, which are freely mixed in virtuoso ways, is hard enough, but the translator, of course, wants to try to capture them in English . . .  READ MORE…