Posts filed under 'language learning'

Across Genres, Across Cultures: An Interview with Wendeline Hardenberg

July 10, 2024  |  in Interviews  |  by Sarah Gear

I want to spend my time working toward getting projects I care about out into the world. . .

A frequent contributor whose thrilling rendition of Gwenaëlle Aubry’s La Folie Elisa recently appeared in Asymptote’s Spring 2024 edition, Wendeline Hardenberg translates contemporary French literature across a spread of genres—from the aforementioned prose to Marie-Claire Bancquart’s poetry, children’s books, and even genre fiction by authors such as Jacques Vandroux. In the following conversation, conducted via email, Wendeline spoke to Assistant Interview Editor Sarah Gear about the challenges and pleasures of translating across the literary spectrum, bookshops as a source of inspiration, establishing her career as a translator, and her ‘Oulipian’ approach to language-learning.

Sarah Gear (SG): What led you to literary translation?

Wendeline Hardenberg (WH): During my first year of college, I was for some reason already thinking about what I might do for an honors thesis later on, and my first idea (I was a Comparative Literature major) was to write a piece of short fiction in English and then translate it into French. I was taking a course called “The Novel Now” that semester, and I brought this idea to the English professor who taught the course. He told me that they didn’t do “creative theses” at Smith. I was a bit deflated, but I immediately decided that meant I had to find someone else’s French text to translate into English instead, and I made that my mission while studying abroad in France during my junior year. Even though at the time there was no Translation Studies concentration at Smith as there is now, the department was supportive of my project and connected me with Nicole Ball, who had taught me French in my first semester and turned out to be a translator herself, as my thesis advisor. It’s hard to say where this intense desire to translate came from in the first place, though I think it may have something to do with my lifelong fondness for words, and my youthful sense that learning more languages meant more opportunities to play with them.

SG: How do you choose the texts you translate?

WH: Many of my translation projects have been chosen by other people, which is unfortunately the best way to make any money. When I’m choosing texts myself, though, I’m always looking for something that I actually want to read, which tends to lead to idiosyncratic and serendipitous choices. My favorite thing to do is to physically browse bookstores in foreign countries and look for what catches my eye. I discovered Vincent Ravalec in 2004 because I saw a bright green book with my name on it (Wendy ou les secrets de Polichinelle) from across the room at the Tschann Librairie in Paris. My relationship with Gwenaëlle Aubry is entirely because I spotted her Perséphone 2014 (with its first chapter numbered 0 and a totally black page two thirds of the way through) in the FNAC at Les Halles in 2016. It’s hard to know in advance whether the things you like will be things that publishers and readers also like, but nothing beats working on the translation of a text that you personally enjoy. READ MORE…

Spontaneity Through Ambiguity: An Interview with Chia-Lun Chang

March 4, 2024  |  in Interviews  |  by Anne Lai

[H]ere is where I can explore my limited English as a vehicle, within this ambiguity.

I met Chia-Lun Chang when we were both enrolled in the Poets House fellowship program in 2016, when I had only been writing for a few years and was hesitant to call myself a poet. We bonded over how new we were to writing poems. In this following conversation, we retraced her unconventional introduction to writing poetry and how English as a second language offered her a newfound identity to be playful and purely honest. Her book Prescribee (Nightboat Books, 2022) wields humor like a dagger, rife with cutting repartee that reveals how cruel, yet liberating life is for her in America. Her poems from the book have appeared in Granta, The Brooklyn Rail, and BOMB online.

Chia-Lun Chang (CC): In Taiwan, the genres are not as distinct as in America, but I noticed that many high-profile writers in Taiwan primarily write non-fiction prose, expressing their opinions. Readers think of it as culturally significant; it provides a getaway into the lives of another world, a world full of writers or cultured individuals. During our conversation, I’ve also realized that many novelists are telling one story. They have numerous novels, but it’s one same story from a core idea because it originates from their body. 

Anne Lai (AL): Do you feel like you’re also in pursuit of one idea when you’re writing?

CC: Because of my experiences, I tend to question my identity. But, aren’t we all, in some ways, asking ourselves, “Who am I?” In that very question, I’m afraid of finding the unknown. There are moments when I write in English, where I create a new persona that reflects this nation and the body that I inhabit within it. That is the direction I’m heading and it’s tied to my identity, this very new role that I’m cultivating.

AL: This reminds me of your experience in trying to get your green card, and eventually getting it.

CC: Yeah, both of those experiences—applying for a green card and learning the language that I speak most of the time. The green card process was brutal so I was constantly facing a blackhole answer: what’s necessary for me to stay? I’m terrified of my desire. I don’t believe I have the opportunity to create art in Taiwan, I’m not talented enough or I don’t have space to do what I’m doing here, and many may disagree. But I’m grateful that I can be playful and try different things in this new language and space.

AL: I’ve never asked you this, but have you written poetry in Mandarin? How did you start writing? 

CC: Never. Growing up, I was always interested in writing, but I saw myself more as a reader. There were times when I would write essays for school; the requirements of exams in Taiwan were like the SAT tests in the States, but they asked for more melancholic and metaphorical compositions. Those were my experiences in building my first language. I remember the question on my college exam was, “Who is your idol? Who do you look up to?” I actually wrote about the poet Su Shi. In my society, I felt that people had a moral obligation in writing; they had to be heroic—even in love, in pain, or struggling. Deep down, I have a cynical personality and worry about not being accepted by society. READ MORE…

Bilingual Books: A Personal History

June 8, 2023  |  in Essays  |  by Ian Ross Singleton

The process of doubling, of language regenerating itself, overlaps the process of translation and the weaving of two versions together. . .

Though not yet standard practice, bilingual editions of translated works are becoming increasingly welcomed by readers, both as a method of language engagement and an embodiment of a text’s various appearances and lives. In this following essay, Ian Ross Singleton discusses the power of reading and learning from a bilingual text, as well as the many dialogues that can transpire from this meeting of reader, writer, translator, and the worlds they each bring along.

I have bilingual books to thank for access to much of my knowledge of each and every language I utter—specifically Russian and, most recently, Ukrainian. I began to learn Russian about seventeen years ago. I was delighted to be able to access the originals, alongside helpful translations, in books such as Russian Stories / Русские рассказы, edited by Gleb Struve, which introduced me to the work of writers such as Evgeny Zamyatin and Fyodor Sologub, among others. Penguin also published a bilingual anthology of Russian poetry that became the basis of my education in this language, from which I memorized poems by Aleksandr Pushkin, Mikhail Lermontov, Marina Tsvetaeva, and Aleksandr Blok.

There are bilingual books by individual poets as well; Pushkin Threefold, translated by Walter Arndt (Dutton Books), gives the original Russian texts of Pushkin alongside literal English translations and verse translations. The book shows how translators must scrutinize, interpret, and create texts that are nonetheless complemented by ready comparisons with the original. Nativity Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), a collection of the exile Joseph Brodsky, includes work written during the end-of-the-year holidays or discussing the story of Christ’s birth, and provides both a way of reading Brodsky’s original Russian poetry as well as elegies by poets who admired his writing, such as Derek Walcott, Anthony Hecht, and Seamus Heaney. Even the American poet Carol V. Davis wrote It’s Time to Talk About… / Пора говорить о…, a bilingual book of poems written in Russian and English, published in Russia by Simposium in 1997.

A bilingual book lends itself to a dialogue between two languages, the kind of negotiation that take place in a bi- or multilingual mind. It also creates a space for the kind of lingering that a bi- or multilingual person does with their words—the space a translator navigates in their relationship with both the original and their own renderings. It signifies companionship: of the author and the reader, of the author and the translator, and, if the reader is a language learner, of a teacher and a student. A bilingual book also does much to demonstrate the intimacy between the translator and their source texts—a relationship that involves a close scrutiny of language and meaning—and thus it also fosters the relationship between the two texts. READ MORE…

Writer and Translator E.J. Koh Explores the Bridged and Braided Histories of Language

August 23, 2021  |  in Interviews  |  by Ruwa Alhayek

If my mother’s letters could sleep, my translations would be their dreams.

E.J. Koh’s memoir, The Magical Language of Others, was published in January 2020, but I read it in lockdown a few months later. Since March, I have read or listened to this book at least four times, each time encountering something else that makes me come back to it. Koh’s memoir is a coming-of-age story framed by translations of the letters her mother sent her from Korea, where she and Koh’s dad relocated for work. It tells the heartfelt story of a young Korean-American woman who comes to poetry and translation, to Japanese, and to a deeper understanding of her own languages, English and Korean. And she weaves into this story, with palpable sincerity and magnanimity, the stories of generations of women before her who survived the Japanese occupation, the Jeju massacre, and one abandonment after another. In this interview, she talks about avoiding seamlessness and translating war, wounding, and the seemingly impossible.

Ruwa Alhayek (RA): Has translation allowed you to inhabit your mother’s letters in a different way? 

E.J. Koh (EJK): Translating my mother’s letters for me is inseparable from experiencing the vast distance between us in my youth—from the US to South Korea, between English and Korean—and the violence of when that distance suddenly collided to a close. I am living my way back toward the pain of being separated and reunited again. I am holding two strings at the same time. One is the mother who delivered her child. The other is the child who can deliver her mother. That is why I say if my mother’s letters could sleep, my translations would be their dreams.

RA: If you were to issue a new translation of these letters, how do you think they might change? 

EJK: I am in love with and feel deeply grateful for the work of translators. I’d be honored to see her letters translated again, by different translators. What occurs to me is how I leaned away from seamlessness, translation as if written in the historically dominant English, and hoped to let Korean remain—against erasure—choosing instead words with sound, syntax, and rhythm to keep pace with my mother’s voice running circles inside me. But I feel there is no one way, and the assumption of one is the failure to see what can be different and what can be changed.

RA: I was really inspired by the scene of your morning ritual in Japan where you sit in the coffee shop with the hanging vines from dawn until your classes start, memorizing ten pages from your pocket dictionary every day—is there something about that type of immersion that resembles the process of translation for you?

EJK: When I lived in Japan, I starved myself. I wouldn’t eat a proper meal until I could order in Japanese without error. My eating disorder entered my language, and discipline became a place where I could intellectualize my self-harm. I learned the language quickly but with shame and guilt—not opposites to but the very sources of pride. I used language to isolate myself. I say, Languages, as they open you up, can also allow you to close. Where before I depended on separation, now I move in the world by way of connection and humanity. READ MORE…

Teaching and Learning Narrative Identity

October 8, 2018  |  in Essays  |  by Claire Jacobson

"Though there is no substitute for language immersion in pursuit of fluency, you don’t need to leave home...all you need is a book"

What does it take to truly communicate? In this essay, Claire Jacobson takes us on a journey from language classrooms to the souqs of Morocco, exploring the narrative frameworks that create culture. Read on to discover the differences between learning a language, and the narrative identities that language use is built on.

Humans are inveterate storytellers. We narrativize our memories, use allegory and metaphor to communicate complex ideas, and search for meaning in suffering by placing it in the narrative arc of our lives. “When someone asks you who you are,” writes Richard Kearney, “you tell your story. That is, you recount your present condition in the light of past memories and future anticipations. You interpret where you are now in terms of where you have come from and where you are going to.” Or, as Paul Ricoeur says, “Selfhood is a cloth woven of stories told.”

But it’s not only individuals, Kearney writes. “Communities come to know themselves in the stories they tell about themselves.” When families gather, we always tell stories, sometimes new ones but mostly the old ones over and over—these stories are part of what makes us family. No Christmas celebration in my home is complete without reading about shepherds and wise men and the sociopolitical implications of the term “messiah” in first-century Palestine. These stories are part of what marks us as people of faith and also total nerds. A few weeks ago, my boss told me about the day we went from one bookmobile in town to two, traveling around to neighborhoods without access to the public library—this is one of the many stories that place me firmly in Iowa City, the only city I’ve ever known where you can find inter-bookmobile competition drama.

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “English Lessons” by Mónica Lavín

April 24, 2018  |  in Translations  |  by Mónica Lavín and Patricia Dubrava

"Stepping into the United States was stepping into order and cleanliness, Patricia always thought."

This Tuesday brings us a story that straddles the US-Mexico border. In Mónica Lavín’s “English Lessons,” a Mexican woman travels to San Diego for an all-too-brief reunion with her brother. Her notions of America, a “better world” glimpsed in the Dick and Jane stories from her childhood, are upended in an unexpected, heartrending manner. 

For more great short works like this, check out the fiction section and special Korean literature feature in the Spring 2018 issue of Asymptote.

English Lessons

Stepping into the United States was stepping into order and cleanliness, Patricia always thought. A sense of well-being settled in her chest when she crossed the border. It was like entering a story, a fiction, proof that a better world existed. Like the world her first grade English books had shown: the house with a garden, the family with a dog named Spot and a cat called Puff. Sally, Dick and Jane played with a “red wagon.”  “Red” was rojo, “wagon” carretilla? She’d never seen one except in the color illustrations of those books. The mother called them in to dinner, with her styled hair, her big smile and an apron over her full-skirted dress. Not that Patricia wasn’t critical of many things about the gringo lifestyle—their detachment from family life and excessive practicality, their sense of being the center of the world. But in her experience, U.S. highways had no potholes, there were fewer rattletrap cars, and San Diego’s landscaped roundabouts were a pleasure to see. She suspected her idea was childish, so it was a conception she didn’t dare confess. Certainly, after standing in the tedious line, and feeling like a convict when the guard took her papers and examined her, knowing she was safely “on the other side” made her breathe more calmly. She anticipated enjoying this trip especially because she’d visit her friend Laura in California, and her brother Daniel was also coming to San Diego for two days. They hadn’t planned it, but it was a happy coincidence. He lived in Guadalajara, further from the border, loved and knew San Diego. He’d promised to take her for a drink at the Hyatt at sundown to see the bay. And she would accompany him on his mission to buy household goods: sheets, towels, kitchen things, placemats for his bachelor breakfast table. She liked his attitude, how he was determined to make a pleasant abode for himself, treating it as a new project to be enthusiastic about, instead of being depressed by his divorce.

READ MORE…

In Conversation: Ottilie Mulzet on Multilingualism, Translation, and Contemporary Literary Culture: Part II

March 27, 2017  |  in Interviews, Translator's Profile  |  by Julia Sherwood

But his was a mind that never stopped questioning and was exquisitely attuned to the pain of the world.

Here to relieve the unbearable suspense we left you in after part I are Julia Sherwood and Ottilie Mulzet, picking up where they left off in their chat about Mulzet’s translations from Hungarian and Mongolian, and more! 

JS: Not all translators take on both fiction and poetry, but you have also translated Szilárd Borbély’s poetry for Asymptote, and your revised and expanded collection of his Berlin-Hamlet came out in the US last year. In what ways is your approach different when translating poetry and prose?  And given that in Hungary, Szilárd Borbély was primarily known as a poet, there is a whole treasure trove out there waiting for the English reader—are you planning to tackle any more of his poetry?

OM: I’ve actually already translated two other volumes by Borbély: Final Matters: Sequences, and To the Body: Odes and Legends. Final Matters has been described as a monument to his mother, who was murdered by thugs who broke into her home in a tiny village on the night before Christmas Eve, 1999. She was murdered brutally in her bed, Borbély’s father was left for dead but survived. (He passed away in 2006.) Borbély was the one who found them, and well, I don’t think it takes too much imagination to picture the unspeakably deep trauma this must have occasioned.

Final Matters is like a three-part memorial to her, although it doesn’t address her murder directly; instead, Borbély employs allegorical language—he drew his inspiration for the first part from central European Baroque folk poetry about Christ and the Virgin Mary, in particular the poetry of Angelus Silesius—to talk about death and the body. There’s a lot of brutally direct detail and philosophical language at the same time. In reading The Dispossessed, though, you see exactly where this comes from—the little boy is confronted with brutal details all day long, but in his own mind, he is preoccupied with abstraction, his love for prime numbers. In the second part of Final Matters, Borbély turns to the myth of Amor and Psyche to explore questions of physicality and immateriality. And in the third part, he reworks another part of Hungarian religious-poetic culture that’s been largely forgotten: the legends and parables of the Hungarian-speaking Szatmár Hassidic Jews from Hungary’s rural northeast. (Now, of course, the Szatmár region is mostly in Romania, and the Szatmár Hassidim, except for the Yiddish-speaking Satmari in Brooklyn, were almost all murdered in the Holocaust.) And yet through these three sections, which he terms ‘Sequences’, he causes the three great western traditions—Judaism, Christianity, and the world of the ancient Greeks—to confront each other, form a dialogue with each other; they all cause the others to be seen in a different light.

READ MORE…

In Conversation: Ottilie Mulzet on Multilingualism, Translation, and Contemporary Literary Culture

March 15, 2017  |  in Interviews, Translator's Profile  |  by Julia Sherwood

"One of the most amazing things about learning Czech is that it has enabled me to study Mongolian..."

Ottilie Mulzet translates from Hungarian and Mongolian. Her translation of László Krasznahorkai’s Seiobo There Below won the Best Translated Book Award in 2014. Her recent translations include Destruction and Sorrow beneath the Heavens by László Krasznahorkai (Seagull Books, 2016); The Dispossessed (HarperCollins, 2016); and Berlin-Hamlet by Szilárd Borbély (NYRB Poets, 2016); forthcoming is her version of Lazarus by Gábor Schein (Seagull Books, 2017), as well as Krasznahorkai’s The Homecoming of Baron Wenckheim (New Directions). She is also working on an anthology of Mongolian Buddhist legends. In 2016 she served as one of the judges of Asymptote’s Close Approximations translation competition and is on the jury for the 2017 ALTA National Translation Award in Prose.

Asymptote’s Editor-at-Large for Slovakia, Julia Sherwood, spoke with Mulzet via email. Below is the first part of their enlightening correspondence. Stay tuned for part 2!

Julia Sherwood (JS): You translate from the Hungarian, are doing a PhD in Mongolian and are based in Prague.  Your recent Asymptote review of Richard Weiner’s Game for Real shows that you also have an impressive command of Czech, enabling a close reading of the original and an in-depth review of the translation. How did your involvement with Hungarian begin and what is it like to live between all these languages?

Ottilie Mulzet (OM): Part of the difference is due to my involvement with each of these languages.  I started studying Hungarian because of my family background (two of my grandparents emigrated from Hungary), although I didn’t speak it as a child. I decided to learn it in adulthood as the result of some kind of fatal attraction, I guess, and never even realized I would end up translating. Hungarian grammar struck me as being so strange that I couldn’t wait to get onto the next lesson to see if what followed could possibly be any stranger than what I just learnt. I used a hopelessly out-of-date textbook with pen-and-ink illustrations of women in 1950s coiffures having a cigarette in front of a prefabricated housing estate. They spent their evenings complimenting each other on their clothes, sipping tea and playing match games, all the while making sure they were back at their parents’ houses by 8 pm. In retrospect, this textbook actually encoded, along with Hungarian grammar, a manual to the kind of “petty bourgeois-dom” that was so characteristic of central European socialism in the 1980s.

ottilie

An illustration from my first Hungarian textbook. Here we are introduced to Mr. Comrade Nagy, and his lovely wife, Mrs. Comrade Nagy.

I learned Czech more for practical reasons, because of living in Prague, but there are many aspects of the language I’ve come to love, not least its humour and slang. I try to keep up with what’s going on in Czech literature, although I don’t translate from it.  One of the most amazing things about learning Czech is that it has enabled me to study Mongolian—at Charles University, an institution with extraordinary language pedagogy with roots in the pre-war Prague Linguistic Circle, and an astonishing array of languages on offer—from Manchurian and Jagnobi (a descendant of Sogdian) to Jakut and Bengali. One can only hope, given the current trend toward mindless rationalisation, i.e. shutting down whatever seems too impractical or exotic, that the university will stay that way. It’s impossible to understand anything really essential about another culture without knowing something about the language: and the more you know about the language, the better off you are.

READ MORE…

Styles and Protocols

July 2, 2014  |  in Essays  |  by Antony Shugaar

"Ordinary details are the bread and butter of translation."

“For a long time, I went to bed early.”

With these words (in Lydia Davis’s translation), Marcel Proust began his exploration of memory and perception now known as In Search of Lost Time, formerly titled Remembrance of Things Past.

The two titles bookend a similar concept: was he actively seeking time that had somehow escaped, or was he more calmly remembering things that were simply no longer? Or was he splitting the difference: thinking his way out of the mirror dividing the two positions?

The past, it is said, is another country. Is translation, then, a form of time travel?

READ MORE…

English without Pain

June 2, 2014  |  in Interviews  |  by Miriam Sherwood

An interview with Thomas Smetryns on his untraditional, comic opera made with English language-learning records

Belgian composer Thomas Smetryns wrote one third of Triptych, a new opera commissioned and created by Opera Erratica. His piece A Party uses the English language-learning records L’anglais sans peine from 1950s France as the basis for an absurdist comedy.

How did you come across the L’anglais sans peine records?

I DJ with 78rpm records with a friend, and I was always looking for new material, because we didn’t want to only play the regular Bing Crosby and Andrews Sisters songs. I found the German-language records first and then I started to look for them, especially, and collect them. They’re all from the 1950s because they stopped producing 78rpm at the end of the 1950s.

How did you choose which records to use in A Party, your section of Triptych?

I was quite fascinated by L’anglais sans peine because there is a lot of material, it had the book with it, and because it was just quite funny. The accents of the records… the way they pronounce the words, as a Belgian I find them very refined, but for Patrick and other native speakers they are funny just because it’s a very old-fashioned way of talking.

I had already transcribed the whole record, so when Patrick [Eakin-Young, director and co-librettist] and I were trying things out for Triptych, I said he should take a look at it. He was completely enthusiastic, so from then on it went really fast, I think two weeks later I got the first draft of the libretto from him.

READ MORE…