Posts filed under 'translating poetry'

WIT Month: An Interview with Aneesa Abbas Higgins

August 26, 2020  |  in Interviews  |  by Sarah Moore

Fear makes fools of us all—I believe passionately in the power of literature and books to help break down the barriers that divide us.

According to the Index Translationum, a database published by UNESCO, texts written originally in French are the second most frequently translated, with over two hundred thousand titles published since 1979. Though the numbers exhibit a disappointing hierarchy, the fact that French occupies such a large presence is unsurprising; after all, as today’s interviewee, Aneesa Abbas Higgins, informs us: “French is a world language.” Spoken in diasporic populations around the world, the French of today is a linguistic carrier of resistance and individualism just as it once was a language of oppression.

Aneesa Abbas Higgins has translated numerous works from the French, including Seven Stones by Vénus Khoury-Ghata (Jacaranda, 2017) and Winter in Sokcho by Elisa Shua Dusapin (Daunt Books, 2020). In her efforts to represent a variety of original French voices, her contributions to English-language readers have been invaluable. Now, in our second feature for Women in Translation Month, blog editor Sarah Moore speaks to Higgins about her most recent translation, All Men Want to Know by Nina Bouraoui (Penguin, 2020), how French female authors are represented in translations, and the challenges of translating today.

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Sarah Moore (SM): You translate from the French into English—could you talk about your relationship with French and how you learned it?

Aneesa Abbas Higgins (AAH): I started it at school at the age of eleven—I’ve always loved languages, and I added German, Latin, and Russian over the next few years. I’ve also dabbled in Italian and Spanish and made a real effort to learn Urdu; I even tried Japanese at one point. But French was the one that really stayed with me, and I’ve spent a good part of my life going back and forth between London and various parts of France. I did my MA in French and taught French at an American school in London for more than thirty years, so I’ve spent most of my adult life immersed in French language and literature in one way or another. Learning another language is a lifelong project, and I think of myself as still learning. As a translator, one learns more and more about one’s source and target languages all the time.

SM: How did you come to be a translator?

AAH: Translating was something I’d always thought about. I’ve been fascinated by it all my life and have vivid childhood memories of my father, an Urdu speaker who was working on translating Shakespeare at the time, talking about the endless challenges of conveying such rich, figurative language. I’ve been a reader all my life, and have also always loved to write. So when I decided to retire early from teaching, it seemed like a natural progression. I took some courses in translation and creative writing, sought advice from the wonderfully generous and supportive translation community, and set about researching, translating samples, and pitching books I wanted to translate to publishers. I was lucky enough to find a publisher and obtain a PEN grant for one of those books, and I went on from there.

SM: Which books did you initially want to translate when you began your career?

AAH: Looking back, I was definitely looking mostly at female authors, but I was primarily interested in works that originated beyond the confines of mainstream metropolitan France. French is a world language, just as English is. There are many, many authors who write in French and whose relationship with the language is complex. French, the language of the colonial oppressors, becomes the vehicle for voicing anti-colonial sentiment and raising black consciousness worldwide, in the same way as English has been used by writers from the Indian subcontinent and diaspora. I wanted to help bring more of those voices, the inheritors of the original mantle of the Négritude of Senghor and Césaire, into English. And for me, it’s personal. I’ve always been drawn to writers and books that express what it means, and what it feels like, to be both an insider and an outsider in the society one lives in. READ MORE…

A Linguistic Emigration: Chinese Women Writers on Their Translation Practices

July 29, 2020  |  in Interviews  |  by Jiaoyang Li

You want to learn a language not only to fit in, but to create something new in it, like any native speaker would do.

Recently, I came across an interesting comment, that despite the fact that more POC writers are being published, the English publishing world will not actually become more diverse, as the editors and gatekeepers who select them for publication continue to be predominantly white.

Asian writers have perhaps heard similar feedback from their editors: “Your story is not Asian enough,” or: “Why don’t you write more about your family’s immigration stories?” Sometimes the endeavors of white editors to market POC writers may in fact reinforce stereotypes. The same could be said for translations: if the translators of foreign literature continue to be exclusively white, native English speakers, then English readers would likely continue to receive material that reinforces their expectations, rather than that which may broaden their perspectives.

The word translation is rooted in the Latin translātus (to carry over); it’s always about appropriation and transition, but that doesn’t mean we should stop thinking about how we can strive for a more inclusive and dynamic future in publishing—trusting and bringing in more POC translators to deliver English translations may be one solution.

Jianan Qian, Na Zhong, and Liuyu Ivy Chen are all millennial Chinese female writers who have received higher education in both China and the US. They write bilingually and translate between their two languages, having already introduced several talented contemporary Chinese experimental writers and young female authors to the English world. Their work has been tremendous thus far, and one expects their futures to be even greater.

                                                                                          —Jiaoyang Li, July 2020

Jiaoyang Li (JL): All of you were writers before becoming translators. What is the relationship between writing and translation for you? Is translation a kind of creative writing?

Jianan Qian (JQ): For me, the purpose of literary translation is twofold. First, the work pushes me to do intensive reading. Usually I choose my own translation projects, so I can take the time to appreciate the author’s writing on a granular level. I also consider translation to be a writing practice—it might be a sort of creative writing, but for me, it is more like an opportunity to see how beauty comes into being differently in the two languages. I work with a wonderful co-translator, Alyssa Asquith, and I always learn a lot about linguistic, aesthetic, and cultural differences from our exchanges.

Na Zhong (NZ): A great translator should think like a writer, and to be a great writer you have to be a great reader. Translation provides the reliable gymnastic exercise for me to maintain, stretch, and become aware of my linguistic muscles. A rich text demands that I pay maximum attention to its diction, syntax, voice, and many other elements of writing. And a carefully chosen word can lead me into the depths of the story that would be impossible to reach if I were only engaging with it as a casual reader.

And yes, translating is a kind of creative writing, as imitation lies at the heart of all art forms. In the most literal sense, translating is rewriting the story in another language. It allows me, the translator, to adopt a voice and way of storytelling that I have never embodied before. The writer creates the characters imaginatively; the translator recreates the implied writer imaginatively.

Liuyu Ivy Chen (LC): For me, writing in my second language is an act of translation; living in a foreign country is a daily work of translation. Reading a new book, meeting strangers, falling in love, visiting an old place, or forgetting about the past are all translations to be enacted or retracted. This distance to cross and reduce is not so much between two languages, but between me and the world. There is so much I don’t understand, and translation is one way to cope with the unknown, to stay open-minded, and to bring seemingly unattainable beauty closer to touch. I read, write, and translate to touch the world. Translation is not only a kind of creative writing; it is a way of living. READ MORE…

Desirable Impossibilities: On Henry Weinfield’s New Translation of Gérard de Nerval’s Chimeras

November 27, 2019  |  in Essays  |  by Alexander Dickow

Weinfield remains the best of these translations, and this is thanks to his sensitivity to rhythm, meter, and rhyme.

Poets and their translators have often agonized over the exhausting task of translating the ineffable poetics of their work, of which every word, punctuation mark, break, pause, and sound is a contributing factor; it goes without saying that the journey from one language to another somewhat impedes upon this delicate balance. In this following essay, Asymptote‘s Alexander Dickow expertly dissects an overarching complication: the act of translating metric verse. In dialogue with a newly published translation of Gérard de Nerval’s famed Chimeras and their predecessors, larger questions of poetics and translations emerge: just how impossible is translating music, and what can be accomplished in an impossible task?

The contemporary preference for unrhymed, free-verse translations of poetry generally has little to do with readability, and much to do with lack of ambition; with the belief, perhaps sanctioned by laziness, that capturing the rhythm of an original with any admirable degree of purity is a fool’s errand, a quixotic fantasy: impossible, and therefore undesirable. The French theorist of translation and poet Henri Meschonnic spent years defending metrical and rhythmic translation, arguing that rhythm is the mark of subjectivity in language and therefore essential to the enterprise of translation. He made this impassioned defense largely in vain, but the proof is in the pudding: whatever one thinks of Meschonnic’s theories of translation and rhythm generally—and he has no lack of critics—the translations of Shakespeare’s sonnets he offers in Poétique du traduire seem, at least to the author of the present essay, indisputably more accurate and powerful than any of the other examples (Meschonnic quotes some five to six examples of other translations for each sonnet he translates into French). Admirable and accurate verse translation is not impossible; even if it were, should the translator’s ambition yield before that impossibility? Is not reaching for the impossible the definition of worthy literary ambition? (See Georges Bataille.) Excessive humility may be a more typical translator’s flaw; perhaps it is time to consider a bit of pride in the “little art,” as Kate Briggs recently called translation, with a hint of tender irony. In fact, translation is an irreducibly arrogant and presumptuous endeavor in the first place—utopian, as Ortega y Gasset has argued. One might as well own that presumption, and aim for the heights: what do we have to lose? The worst that can happen is a bit more failure, which there is no lack of in translation, metrical or otherwise. One may certainly sacrifice too much for a rhyme, but one may sacrifice too much for any formal effect in a poem, and this is not sufficient cause, in my view, to jettison meter and rhyme entirely. Nor is “updating” a text for our own era and its prose and free-verse dominance. For is it not the foreignness of another age that we in part admire in a text of the past? And in resigning ourselves to “updating” a metrical text, are we not capitulating once more to our imprisonment in history (that “impossibility” again, this time of transcending the zeitgeist) and to the anxiety of audience expectations? READ MORE…

All of What It Could Be: In Conversation with Tiffany Tsao

June 10, 2019  |  in Interviews  |  by Sarah Timmer Harvey

To ignore his work’s vision, not to mention its cultural context, seems violent to me—a form of suppression.

When reading a new book in translation, I usually begin by reading the translator’s note. Although it is customary to print the translator’s note at the end of any translated work, I find it enriches my reading to know in advance how the translator approached and connected with the text, to understand their particular choices and challenges. But while translator’s notes often reveal a profound intimacy with the original text, I have rarely read a translator’s note as unapologetically impassioned and moving as the paean Tiffany Tsao wrote for Norman Pasaribu’s award-winning collection of poems, Sergius Seeks Bacchus. Tsao’s translator’s note calls Pasaribu and the collection a “miracle” and describes how working on the translation of Sergius Seeks Bacchus was transformative for both translator and author. “Norman’s poems,” Tsao writes, “have become a part of and spring from me as well,” adding, “I don’t think that I can ever go back to be being the person that I was before.” 

Through the translation of Sergius Seeks Bacchus from the Indonesian, Tsao and Pasaribu have forged a partnership that is intellectually energizing and dripping with creative charisma.  After reading Pasaribu’s vibrant poems, Tsao’s exceptional translator’s note, and following the two on social media as they successfully toured the UK, I was raring to speak with former Asymptote Editor-at-large, Tiffany Tsao. Amongst other things, Tsao was generous enough to share more about the “mutually nurturing” relationship she has developed with Pasaribu, and how Sergius Seeks Bacchus, published in the UK by Tilted Axis Press and forthcoming in Australia from Giramondo, has come to belong to both of them.

-Sarah Timmer Harvey, April 2019

Sarah Timmer Harvey (STH): Congratulations on the publication of Sergius Seeks Bacchus. Can you tell me about the collection and how it was received in Indonesia?

Tiffany Tsao (TT): After spending three years working with Norman on the translation, I almost feel I’m too close to speak coherently about it! It’s like being asked to describe someone you know intimately: you’re aware of all their facets, of them in different situations and at various points in time. Still, I’ll try my best. Sergius Seeks Bacchus is about contemporary queer life in Indonesia—as he and others have experienced it, but also and importantly, as all of what it could be. Hence the Christian, Batak, and speculative dimensions of many of the poems. Some of them depict realities for queer individuals that Indonesia’s present-day circumstances deny: strolling the streets of Heaven hand-in-hand; strolling the streets of post-alien-invasion Earth hand-in-hand; being celebrated by one’s family via the traditions of one’s culture; getting married (and divorced); having children; being happy; growing old. The poems range in tone too, from melancholy, darkly humorous, wistful, playful, tragic, to tragicomic. Perhaps this variegation is also what makes Norman’s collection so difficult to sum up.

The collection’s reception in Indonesia was bifurcated in the extreme. On the one hand, it won a major national literary award, placing first in the 2015 Jakarta Arts Council Poetry Manuscript competition. On the other hand, because the poems of Sergius Mencari Bacchus were overtly queer, Norman experienced a tremendous amount of online bullying afterward, which plunged him into severe depression.

READ MORE…