Posts filed under 'philosophy of translation'

Casting the Spell: Damion Searls on Translating Jon Fosse’s A Shining

November 23, 2023  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Georgina Fooks

There is this very human, normal, everyday level, and at the same time there's this big, spiritual, complicated stuff.

Jon Fosse’s A Shining is both a luminous entryway for newcomers to the Norwegian author, and a fine distillation of Fosse’s long-running themes for familiar fans. We are proud to feature this latest English offering of the Nobel laureate as our October Book Club selection, and in this monthly interview with the translator, Damion Searls talks to Georgina Fooks about following rhythms, the translator as reader, and making his own rules. 

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD20 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title.  

Georgina Fooks: To begin, congratulations on the Nobel Prize! I know the Swedish Academy likely would have been reading Fosse in Norwegian, but there’s no doubt that your translations of Fosse into English have been so important for the increased critical reception of his work.

Damion Searls: Thank you! Something that’s worth telling people who aren’t in the book business – I know Asymptote is well aware of this – is that for better or for worse (mainly for worse), English is the language that matters professionally for world literature. A German publisher told me a couple of years ago that if they have a book, they can get it translated into five or six languages, but it’s not until it gets a review in the Guardian UK or in the New Yorker that they can sell it to twenty or thirty languages—and they also told me that this is increasingly the case. English really is the gateway to bigger success for every other language; it’s not going to be a worldwide, translated-everywhere success unless it goes through English first.

The thing about Fosse—which Americans and English audiences don’t really know—is that he’s incredibly famous worldwide as a playwright. He is, from what I’ve read, the most produced playwright alive today. There have been productions of his plays in fifty languages all over the world, and it’s just never taken off in England or America. And there is a question asked about Fosse’s work: is it inaccessible? Well, if he’s the most produced playwright in the world, then by definition, it’s accessible. He was honoured with many prizes in Europe and in Norway before the English translations.

It’s not the case that the English publication raised him from obscurity, but it does seem to be a kind of stepping stone to things like the Nobel or to more translations. I know that now, Septology is being sold to dozens more languages than it had been before. READ MORE…

As Close to 600 BC As We Are to Tomorrow: A Conversation with Saudamini Deo

May 8, 2023  |  in Interviews  |  by Tristan Foster

The role of the translator is to madden a language, drive it insane, do unimaginable things with it.

Writer and translator Saudamini Deo is expanding the English-speaking world’s understanding of Hindi literature, working to translate forgotten works by avant-garde literary outsiders into English for the first time. Several years after she began this series of translations with a collection of short stories by Bhuwaneshwar, the second book in the project, Traces of Boots on Tongue by Rajkamal Chaudhary, is being published by Seagull Books as part of their India List series. 

I first spoke to Deo about her translation project in 2020, at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. The writers she was interested in were almost totally unknown outside of India, and I was curious to know what it meant to have them recovered, translated, and presented to an English readership navigating life in the twenty-first century. We exchanged questions and answers while both of our countries were in strict lockdowns—her in India, me in Australia. In the fog of fear and uncertainty that had overcome us, I wondered if Deo’s project was a way of coping with the immediate reality of living through something lifted straight from a history book—would it last beyond those early days of COVID-19 or was it a mere distraction?  

Three years later, the project has not only outlasted lockdowns, it has expanded and matured, taking on the shape that Deo had envisioned from the beginning: where Bhuwaneshwar’s stories are dreamy and deeply pessimistic, Chaudhary’s stories face the concrete absurdity and hardships of the everyday head on—their subjects span time and culture. As Deo states in her introduction: “Written more than 70 years ago, the stories sometimes read like they were written just this morning.”

Chaudhary wrote at a time when India was still a young nation, yet its promises of a future filled with hope and opportunity were slipping further and further beyond the horizon; as Deo puts it, it was a “world where there is no longer either god or morality, not even the desire for it.” Maybe, regardless of time and place, we always feel as though the riches we were promised never actually eventuate.

I asked Deo about the act of translation, the direction her translation project will take from here, Chaudhary the writer, and the parallels between his time and the present moment.

Tristan Foster (TF): Your English translation of Traces of Boots on Tongue by Rajkamal Chaudhary is due to be published by Seagull Books. What, in your view, makes Chaudhary significant to a modern English readership?

Saudamini Deo (SD): I think, in the last few decades, there has been some interest in Indian writing and Indian writers in the anglophone world. However, this interest or exposure is, to a large extent, limited to diaspora writers and writing. It’s about time that India is no longer seen or understood as a mere background to its diaspora. It’s not just a reference point or historical source, it’s a living and evolving country where people live fully human and complex lives, and is just as interesting or incomprehensible as anywhere else in the world. Rajkamal Chaudhary takes his readers through this maddening incomprehensibility of the modern Indian existence in the 1950s and 1960s. And India is not just about India much the same way as Europe is not just about Europe. It’s part of the entire world, it’s part of the reason why our present reality looks and feels the way it does. Chaudhary’s work would be significant to anyone interested in arriving at a fuller understanding of the human existence in these mad modern times. READ MORE…

Translation as Séance: Saudamini Deo on Forgotten Hindi Authors

June 24, 2020  |  in Interviews  |  by Tristan Foster

. . . in order to survive, they must get used to the absurd horror of life.

An unfortunate reality is that every language has great writers who have faded from the collective memory; either they fell out of favour, or their writing spoke only to their time, or perhaps they practiced on the margins, and their work never made it beyond a small readership. Difficulties in categorising a writer’s work is especially likely to put them in peril—writing that doesn’t fit neatly into one particular genre or tradition is easier to overlook than to perpetually seek its niche. And when these writings are forgotten, a small miracle needs to occur for them to be rediscovered again.

For the first time, English language readers will have the opportunity to read forgotten Hindi writers thanks to a new and, arguably, miraculous series from Seagull Books, based in Kolkata. First to be published are short story collections by Bhuvaneshwar and Rajkamal Chaudhary, names which may be unfamiliar to readers in their native India, let alone to readers beyond. Wolves and Other Short Stories by Bhuwaneshwar will be released in Fall 2020, and Traces of Boots on Tongue and Other Stories by Rajkamal Chaudhary is due for release in early 2021.

To understand what was lost and what has been gained with these new translations, I asked translator Saudamini Deo why we should refresh the collective memory by reviving the work of Bhuvaneshwar and Rajkamal Chaudhary, and what it means for the English-speaking world to have access to their work for the first time.

—Tristan Foster, June 2020

Tristan Foster (TF): Your translations of short story collections by Bhuwaneshwar and Rajkamal Chaudhary are forthcoming from Seagull Books, with translations of work by other forgotten Hindi writers to follow. How did the series come about?

Saudamini Deo (SD): Last year, I wrote a series of articles published by Scroll.in about forgotten Hindi writers. Naveen Kishore of Seagull Books read those articles, and graciously offered to publish some of these writers as a part of their Hindi series under their India list. Neither Bhuwaneshwar nor Rajkamal Chaudhary has ever been translated into English before, which is indicative of a larger pattern: Hindi literature rarely gets translated.

TF: I want to talk first of Wolves and Other Short Stories by Bhuwaneshwar. His narratives are rhythmic, dreamy, and brutally pessimistic. The story “Wolves” tells of a caravan being chased by a pack of wolves in the night; girls are thrown off to lighten the load and stop the attack. In “Sun worship,” he writes: “This is hell, doctor, hell! A colony of the dead. This bustling city is a colony of the dead . . . Imagine that rain dissolves this place like a load of cow dung. But it will not make any difference in the world.” This harshness is even occasionally acknowledged—in “Alas, Human Heart,” the narrator discusses the carefree life he lived with friends, playing card games and going on hikes, all of them optimistic because “no one had yet had a break to look life in the eye.” The Bhuwaneshwar story looks death square in the eye. What was your experience immersing yourself in his world?

SD: As with most experiences, it was both strange and not strange. It was the first time that I was translating him, but I have been reading him forever—I wrote a paper on him during my master’s degree. So, I knew what I was getting into—I already knew the brutal pessimism and the omnipresent death in his work. What was new to me were the moments of tender insight and human ambivalence. In the story “Wolves,” right before the father is about to jump off of the caravan amidst wolves, he takes off the new shoes he is wearing and instructs his son to sell them (dead men’s shoes are never worn). I thought about this little detail for a long time. A man about to kill himself thinking about his shoes. In the story “Freedom: A Letter,” a single mother describes her life in a hill station hospital (she is a doctor) and the story is not dramatic, nothing happens, and in the end she just writes, “What is this thing called freedom? Nothing can be known about it without acquiring and using it.” It is especially moving because of its simple truth. It also acquires a political meaning considering Bhuwaneshwar was writing in pre-independence India, and he seems ambivalent about the idea of freedom itself, not necessarily politically—the idea of freedom as the ultimate harbinger of hope. Freedom can change everything except human nature. We are witnessing this in India right now. In any case, I can’t think of anything more symbolic of our times than wolves constantly chasing us. I think I emerged out of my immersion in his work with the feeling that perhaps we are all already immersed in Bhuwaneshwar’s world. READ MORE…

Translating Longing : A Novice Translator’s First Transgressions

November 12, 2015  |  in Essays  |  by Gnaomi Siemens

"In the text the girl sings: This earth cell is old—I am full of longing. She is under the oak. There is ambiguity. "

I’m translating “The Wife’s Lament,” from the Anglo-Saxon (among other poems), and—though I am in the habit of calling my drafts “transgressions”—there is a palpable sense of longing breaking through which I think may be possible to understand. What I mean by “even now,” has to do with the ideas of immediacy prevalent (one could say saturated) in the current collective consciousness.

I just read an article eulogizing the long email. And who even talks on the phone anymore. We interact in quick bursts, with no breaks. Both of these things being, of course, enemies of longing. We do not allow ourselves the luxury of longing. For to long, literally, takes “length.” Long stretches of absence and time—for which nobody has time for anymore.

The girl I’m trying to write (the wife lamenting) gets left to long by herself under an oak tree. This oak tree intrigues me. There is so much symbolism here. Pagans had their sacred groves. Druids had oak knowledge. I have also read about the linguistic link between the Celtic word for oak and the Sanskrit word for door—the connection between knowledge and doors apparently reaches pretty far back, but the other thing has to do with the oak as a portal, a door to another world. In the text the girl sings: This earth cell is old—I am full of longing. She is under the oak. There is ambiguity. Is she even alive?

READ MORE…