Posts filed under 'translation process'

Keeping the Mystery Alive: On Translating Michele Mari’s Verdigris

November 30, 2023  |  in Essays  |  by Brian Robert Moore

[A]ll books, especially the really good ones, seem impossible to translate until you sit down and somehow translate them. . .

Italy’s lauded Michele Mari was first introduced to the English language via a collection of thirteen short stories, published as You, Bleeding Childhood; through translator Brian Robert Moore’s rendering of Mari’s singular voice, readers were able to enter a vertiginous realm of obsessions, hidden psyches, childhood revelations, and wondrous horrors. Now, Mari and Moore are returning with Verdigris, a novel that further displays Mari’s masterful construction of mystery and fantasy with the story of a young boy, Michelino, and his developing friendship with a strange groundskeeper, Felice. The translation earned Moore a PEN Translates Prize earlier this year, and in the following essay, he gives us some insight into his process, and tells us why Mari is deservedly recognized as one of the most important Italian writers today.

When I first encountered Michele Mari’s Verdigris (or Verderame in the original Italian), I experienced something rare, wonderful, and a little bit eerie that I’m sure most avid readers can relate to: the sensation that a book was somehow made for me. Its sense of otherworldly mystery, its dark humor, and its beautiful, inventive style all came together to form the exact kind of novel that I could gladly get lost in for ages. It likely would have been the first book I’d have tried to translate, had it not seemed beyond my capabilities at the time. But all books, especially the really good ones, seem impossible to translate until you sit down and somehow translate them, and so I eventually decided to make an attempt. It was too captivating a novel and too glaring an absence in the Anglosphere, and I hoped my own enthusiasm and love for Mari’s work might carry me through.

The first major difficulty in translating Verdigris is Mari’s use of wordplay, which, rather than appearing decorative, often plays a very direct role in the novel’s plot—a plot that is as intricate as it is engrossing. I realized there was no way around being particularly visible as a translator in order for this novel to reach anglophone readers: one could either rely heavily on the original Italian wordplay and speak directly to the reader through explanatory footnotes, or assume an even more active role and try to recreate Mari’s fluid inventiveness in English. Hoping the book could remain as immersive in English as it is in Italian, I opted for the latter approach throughout. To do this, it was essential to keep in mind not only the novel as a coherent whole, but also Mari’s broader autobiographical and autofictional body of work. Any literal changes had to remain consistent with his personality both as writer and as character, and I was fortunate to be able to run all of my solutions by him. Finding English equivalents for puns, word associations, and, most of all, anagrams takes a great deal of thought but also an incredible amount of luck—or, in the case of this book, maybe there was something else at work, and the fact that almost uncannily fitting solutions could be found in a completely different language had to do with the mysterious and occult forces invoked within the novel. For me, living day by day, for an extended period of time, in the world of Verdigris meant partially believing such things. READ MORE…

Every Word Counts: Chip Rossetti on Translating Diaa Jubaili’s No Windmills in Basra

October 27, 2022  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Laurel Taylor

Flash fiction is more like someone grabbing you by the lapels and then sending you on your way.

For the month of September, our Book Club selection Diaa Jubaili’s No Windmills in Basra, a visionary collection of short fiction that works from Iraq’s expansive folktale tradition to create vivid, surprising portrayals of the country’s complex present. In precise, yet fantastic prose, Jubaili jumps rope with the tight limits of short story to range from humour to darkness, from imagination to reality, from violence to tenderness. In the following interview, Laurel Taylor speaks to the translator of No Windmills in Basra, Chip Rossetti, on formalism, intertextuality, and the use of symbolism in Jubaili’s work. 

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 USD15 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.

Laurel Taylor (LT): You’ve mentioned that Jubaili’s work was the first flash fiction you had read in Arabic, and also that the genre is still very new in Arabic. To what extent are you thinking about formalism as you translate something that is a known genre in English but perhaps less so in Arabic?

Chip Rossetti (CR): It’s interesting, as the short story’s both a very old and a very new phenomenon in Arabic. The earliest form of prose narrative in Arabic is the khabar, which is a very short sort of text. One example of its earliest use is the hadith, accounts of things the Prophet Muhammad once said or did, and a khabar could be a paragraph long, or a few sentences. Khabar were always preceded by a citation of its oral sources, such as “I heard this account from someone, who heard it from somebody else who heard it from somebody else.” So there’s a chain of transmission, and that’s what scholars always point to as the very core, the oldest examples of prose texts in Arabic. Of course, that’s fourteen hundred years ago. That’s a far cry from modern short stories.

There are, as I think I mentioned in the introduction to No Windmills in Basra, some other practitioners of flash fiction in Arabic—notably the Syrian author Zakariya Tamer who ­is, I think, in his nineties now. He’s also done very short stories, but the contemporary boom in flash fiction started making its way into Arabic much more recently than in English. The challenge, as I understand it—and I’ve tried my hand at writing English-language flash fiction—is the intensity required of the writer. The challenge for a translator of flash fiction is to mirror that same intensity in the translation. Obviously, every word counted for Jubaili when he wrote it in the original, so I’ve tried to make sure I’m keeping that emotional punch in a way that inevitably brings you to each story’s end: an ending that comes sooner than you might expect, but is still somehow satisfying. READ MORE…

Sponsored Post: Join ALTA for a German-English Translation Slam on September 30!

September 25, 2021  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

Take a peek inside the translation process—and the fact that different translations can be equally valid!

This International Translation Day, come join the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) for a lively, interactive event, where translators and non-translators alike get a peek inside the translation process—and the fact that different translations can be equally valid. 

Two translators, Didem Uca and Jon Cho-Polizzi, will arrive having independently completed an English translation of the same German poem by Keça Filankes. They’ll read their translations, and then describe their choices, as well as cultural and linguistic aspects of the original poem. Which parts of each version will you prefer? Are there other possible translations that you might suggest? During the reading and conversation moderated by David Gramling, you’ll be invited to offer your own suggestions in the chat, and the event will conclude with a live Q&A.

Thursday, September 30  ⧫  10-11am Pacific Time

Register here

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This free, virtual event kicks off the 44th annual ALTA conference, ALTA44: Inflection Points. To watch and take part in the Translation Slam, register at InEvent, our online conference platform, where you can select a “Free – Special Event Access” ticket to watch this event for free. Or, join us for the entire conference, which is taking place online on October 15-17 and in-person in Tucson, Arizona on November 11-13, by purchasing a paid ticket.

This event is a collaboration between ALTA and SAND journal and is sponsored by Wunderbar Together. It is part of the Arizona Translates! series and is affiliated with the Tucson Humanities Festival at the University of Arizona.

Internal Harmonics: Fionn Petch on Translating Luis Sagasti’s A Musical Offering

August 20, 2020  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Josefina Massot

It is a very delicate balancing act . . . Any discordant note, and the whole might collapse.

True to its title and Sagasti’s style at large, our July Book Club selection reads like a Bachian fugue: it features countless shifts in pace, genre, tone, and content, but it weaves them into soulful patterns; it’s filled with deliciously nerdy in-jokes, but it ultimately strikes a universal chord. How does one transcribe such a complex score into English, making sure its author’s voice still sings? Fionn Petch has done it twice (he translated Sagasti’s Fireflies to great acclaim in 2018), and here he talks about it at length. One of many priceless takeaways: don’t get lost in theory—get lost with the author in a maze-like garden crammed with sculpture-poems instead.

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 USD15 per book; once you’re a member, you can join the online discussion on our Facebook page! 

Josefina Massot (JM): Like Fireflies, A Musical Offering flaunts a striking variety of literary genres: narrative, essay, aphorism, the occasional script-like quotation, and even something like blank verse (e.g., a fragment on the Voyager probe towards the end of ‘Sky Ants’). You’ve translated fiction, poetry, drama, and children’s books, among other things; did your experience with these different genres come in handy when translating Sagasti? Is there a genre you particularly enjoy working with?

Fionn Petch (FP): First of all, I’d like to thank you for a wonderfully insightful and deeply thoughtful review in Asymptote. It’s no exaggeration to say it brought new perspectives to the book for me.

Yes, it’s true that the short sections that comprise A Musical Offering switch between styles very rapidly. Sometimes, readers barely have time to find their bearings before they are propelled onto the next one. Of course, this is also a reflection of the swift changes in pace in the Goldberg Variations—which rather undermines the story that it was composed as a cure for insomnia! So in translating, it was important to be alert to these abrupt changes in tempo and intensity, and to what Sagasti is trying to get across with each section: evoke a feeling, make a subtle observation, set up an unspoken echo with another passage, or just convey a piece of information. Even the disarmingly straightforward segments that read like a line from a biography or encyclopedia require careful attention to how they are structured, as they have a very deliberate weight and emphasis. These are what Sagasti describes as ‘poetic facts.’

So there’s no doubt that all the genres you mention are relevant to draw on. You need a poetic ear for the specific weight of single words, a dramatist’s attention to gesture and glance—Sagasti is very precise in describing these—and you also need the innocence and sense of wonder often found in children’s literature. Of all the genres you mention, this last is undoubtedly the hardest to translate . . . But they all have their pleasures and challenges. READ MORE…

The Tactility of Translation; The Translation of Tactility

June 18, 2020  |  in Essays  |  by Marta Dziurosz

. . . just the original, the blank page, and the translator’s knowledge, experience, intuition, artistry.

Each translator’s relationship with their source text is utterly singular, and occupies all the emotional registers of human relationships: reverence, intrigue, and frustration. In the following essay, translator Marta Dziurosz, who works between the Polish and English, ruminates on the intricate development of this relationship: its precisions, intimacies, and sensitivities.

There’s joy in repetition

—Prince

In January 2020 I was due to speak at the British Library. It was a Holocaust Memorial Day event, and I was there to talk about my co-translation—with Anna Błasiak—of a book entitled Renia’s Diary: A Young Girl’s Life in the Shadow of the Holocaust, the wartime diary of a young Polish Jew, Renia Spiegel. The third speaker at the event was artist and writer Edmund de Waal, whose astonishing book The Hare with the Amber Eyes I read when it first came out. Half preparing for the event and half procrastinating, I watched Make Pots or Die, a documentary about de Waal’s work.

De Waal spoke about his work as evidence of spending time—how he places his pots in the vitrines in which they’re displayed very quickly and it’s almost always wrong or almost right, and then he needs to come back and look at them, look at them for a very long time, because there’s an enormous difference between almost right and right. The process struck me as familiar; as a translator, I think about the weight of a comma. I put it in, I take it out, I put it in, I take it out, I put it back in. I put a semicolon at the end of a sentence instead of a full stop, change it back to a full stop. I switch the second and the fifth words around. I change a noun to its diminutive, reconsider.

Once I had that thought, de Waal’s pots started to look like drafts. Perhaps he’s iterating. To me, every pot within an installation looks like a re-translation of a word, sentence, thought, text. The vitrine, taken together, is a mind subtly improvising on a theme. The difference is that in a de Waal vitrine, the audience can see many iterations, many expressions of a thought, if this is what they are; the reader of a translation only sees the last version, the one the translator (and, possibly, her editor) deemed the best, whatever that means.

the poems of our climate (detail), 2018 © Edmund de Waal. Courtesy the artist and Gagosian. Photo by Mike Bruce.

the poems of our climate (detail), 2018
© Edmund de Waal. Courtesy the artist and Gagosian. Photo by Mike Bruce.

What would a translation look like if every draft of every sentence, or even of just one sentence, was present at the same time? Unreadable, of course, but for a translator—how informative, how interesting. De Waal: “Repetition isn’t about repeating the same thing. It’s about minute differences between each moment, between each sound, between each object that you’re making.” Having to appreciate every shade of a sentence, calibrate every word choice so that meaning, register, mood, rhythm, emotional effect all work, and putting all those carefully chosen words in an order that suits the sentence, the paragraph, the whole book—all this makes translation seem impossible, but as some point you make the decision. You place pot A next to pot F and slightly behind pot R, and then lean tile N against pot V and somehow, you’ve arrived. READ MORE…

Close Approximations: In Conversation with Poetry Winner Daniel Owen

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

It's like an exorcism and a prayer for long life in one breath.

This year’s winner of the Poetry category in Asymptote’s fourth annual Close Approximations Translation Contest was Daniel Owen. Poetry judge Eugene Ostashevsky called Alfizal Malna’s text “intellectual poetry of the highest caliber,” praising Owen for his “elegant, reserved English,” and for offering readers “a beautiful thing of clear obscurity” in his translations of Malna’s Document Shredding Museum.

We recently caught up with Yogyakarta-based Daniel to learn more about his work with the legendary Afrizal Malna, the process of “unsomeoneification,” and what he has been up to since winning the Close Approximations contest in January.

Sarah Timmer Harvey (STH): I found your translations of Document Shredding Museum to be incredibly beautiful and inviting; no easy feat given the complexity of Malna’s writing. How did you first come to Afrizal Malna and his work?

Daniel Owen (DO): I met Afrizal at Kampung Buku Jogja, an annual literary event in Yogyakarta with a book fair, readings, and discussions. I had just come to stay awhile in Jogja to intensively study Indonesian language and to read and subsequently translate Indonesian literature. While my Indonesian was okay when we first met, I hadn’t yet read much and was quite ignorant of the literary landscape. We were introduced by my friends, the writers and small press publishers Lelaki Budiman and Tiaswening Maharsi, after Afrizal’s discussion on theater and poetry with Gunawan Maryanto. I bought a copy of his new book of short stories, Pagi Yang Miring Ke Kanan (Nyala, 2017) and we chatted a bit. Following our initial meeting, I started reading Afrizal’s work pretty intensely, the short stories along with poems I found on the internet, and then his book of essays Sesuatu Indonesia. I found myself entranced by the poems; it was like encountering something extremely familiar yet at the same time novel. That kind of tickling of the sensibilities that’s both troubling and pleasurable, takes you, as a reader, outside yourself while making you feel more yourself. I started translating these poems which I’d found online, primarily to see what would happen and to share them with non-Indonesian-speaking friends who asked about what I was reading, thinking about, engaging with. And then I borrowed Museum Penghancur Dokumen from Budiman, read the whole thing and started translating it.

READ MORE…