Posts filed under 'translation theory'

The Dastardly Things a Translator Might Do: An Interview with Shelley Fairweather-Vega

November 7, 2024  |  in Interviews  |  by Willem Marx

My advice is to simply get started. Pick up anything from the region and go.

The enormously prolific Uzbek writer, Hamid Ismailov, is one of the vanishingly small number of Central Asian authors to crack the code of being translated into English. He experiments in virtually every literary form and genre—from the novel to the play, from translation to poetry; has lived in exile from Uzbekistan since 1992; and continues to build on the wealth of Central Asian culture and memory.

The breadth of history that informs his work can be felt in “Trinity”—a dramatic scene excerpted from a sprawling, six-book novel (Russian Matryoshka) that follows a peasant as he harvests a field of wheat only to have the yield stolen, again and again, when the wider world forces its way into his life. Published in Asymptote’s Summer 2024 issue, “Trinity” is a fragment of a fragmented text, a scene from an unfinished play embedded within an unpublished novel. In many ways, it is emblematic of the whole, knotted process that is translation. The short, dramatic scene is ripe with pungent symbols of the past, yet also exhibits a linguistic dexterity such that each word seems to impose its own gravity on the text. Longtime Ismailov collaborator Shelley Fairweather-Vega’s sensitive translation of “Trinity” achieves an exquisite balance between intimacy and distance, accessibility and mystery. I had the distinct pleasure of speaking with her about staging this piece, the influence translators exert on a text (and each other), and much more.

Willem Marx (WM): Your translations of Hamid Ismailov’s writing have introduced him to many English readers, myself included, so I’d like to start off by asking: how did you discover his work? And what set you on the path to become one of his principal English translators? 

Shelley Fairweather-Vega (SFV): Willem, that might be the most gratifying thing a translator can hear, that our work introduced a reader to a great author they might not have discovered otherwise. I’m so happy to hear it.

The story of my collaboration with Hamid Ismailov began more than a decade ago, when he happened across a pro bono translation I did of an essay by an Uzbek political prisoner. He contacted me through the organization who published that translation, looking to add to his very small list of people who could translate from Uzbek to English. Within a short time, he had convinced me to try translating his short story, “Tosh mehmoni,” which Words Without Borders published as “The Stone Guest” in September 2014. That story is so sad and powerful, and working with the author was such a good experience, that I was instantly, permanently hooked. So, you could say I also discovered Ismailov through my translations. You and I have that in common.

After translating several more of Ismailov’s short stories and essays, and now four of his novels, I’m nowhere near tired of his work and will always jump at the chance to translate it—but I do have competition, especially in the UK where he was first published in English, and where American translators sometimes aren’t eligible for the funding Ismailov applies for. A forthcoming short story collection combines work translated by me and several others. Ismailov did a very good job building that collection of translators.

WM: It’s telling to hear how tenacious an author must be in order to have their work translated into English. To shift slightly, I wonder if you ever find that your work is influenced by the way other translators have approached his writing. Do you notice different emphases or ways of tackling an aspect of voice among your fellow Ismailov translators?   READ MORE…

The Teacher’s Task: Translation in a High School English Classroom

September 4, 2024  |  in Essays  |  by Kena Chavva

They had stumbled upon a fundamental question that interested them more than Benjamin: what does it mean to produce something original?

Where did you first encounter translation—at home, in a classroom, online? In the following essay, Kena Chavva reflects on her experience prompting high school students to consider their own interactions with language and translation, and the ways both shape their lives and the world around them. Throughout the course, she and her students delved into questions of authenticity and identity, of faithfulness and creativity, seeming always to come back to concerns of originality: translation or not, how can we make something that is truly our own? 

It’s not uncommon to hear teachers speak of the joy in teaching something that they, as individuals, love. I had experienced something akin to this in my first year of teaching high school English—I adore Frankenstein and have an abiding affection for Macbeth, and when I taught those texts, it was clear to both me and my students that we were having a better experience of the literature and one another than we’d had with The Canterbury Tales some several months earlier. But what I’ve always found less commonly discussed is how soul-crushing it is to teach something you deeply love when your students aren’t responding to it the way you hope they will.

For me, that text was an excerpt from Pascale Casanova’s 1999 book The World Republic of Letters. The first chapter, titled “Principles of a World History of Literature”, outlines some of the hidden rules that govern the world’s literary economy:

In thrall to the notion of literature as something pure, free, and universal, the contestants of literary space refuse to acknowledge the actual functioning of its peculiar economy, the “unequal trade” (to quote Braudel once more) that takes place within it.

Casanova goes on to explain how “Literary value therefore attaches to certain languages” and that “…literature is so closely linked to language that there is a tendency to identify the “language of literature”—the “language of Racine” or the “language of Shakespeare”—with literature itself”. When I first read this very same chapter as a junior in college, it felt the way that education should feel: like you were presented with a framework through which to understand your lived experiences.

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Risgröt or juk? On Han Kang’s We Do Not Part and Translating Between Small Languages

August 28, 2024  |  in Essays  |  by Linnea Gradin

[Indirect translation] obscures the specific challenges that arise in Korean-Swedish translations, and thus the joy of these two languages meeting.

Behind the walls of the publishing industry, countless decisions are made to bring our favorite novels to our shelves. These decisions grow ever greater when it comes to translations, and particularly translations into languages other than English. In the following essay, Linnea Gradin explores the complex process of bringing Korean literature to Sweden, featuring commentary from Swedish translators and publishers in her analysis of monumental author Han Kang’s latest release in translation: 작별하지 않는다/Jag tar inte farväl/We Do Not Part. Discussing indirect translation, questions of form, and even the choices made in translating a single word, Gradin presents both the burdens and blessings of such a unique language pair.

Han Kang, one of South Korea’s biggest international authors, broke into the English-speaking literary fiction space with a bang in 2016 when she won the International Booker Prize for The Vegetarian (originally published in 2007), a darkly insightful look at Korean society told through the story of a woman who one day decides to stop eating meat in a quiet act of resistance that turns increasingly obsessive. That same year, Human Acts (originally published in 2014)—a novel that delves into painful parts of the country’s past—was also published in English, further cementing Kang as a leading voice of Korean literature worldwide.

Born in the city of Gwangju (where Human Acts is set), Kang is from a family of writers: her father is a teacher and award-winning novelist, and her two brothers are writers too. Kang herself has been widely praised and won many prestigious awards both domestically and internationally, and is known for her ‘poetic’ yet spare and quiet style among Korean readers. In her work, she often comes back to themes of remembrance and Korean history, approaching the subjects in a deeply empathetic though notably neutral way, never telling the readers what to feel or think. After winning the Booker Prize, her work—particularly the English translations of The Vegetarian and Human Acts by Deborah Smith—found itself at the center of discussions about the complexities of translation.

With her latest book, We Do Not Part, scheduled for English-language publication in January 2025 (almost a year after it was published in several European countries), I again find myself reflecting on translation and publication practices—and how different stories are mediated across different parts of the world.

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Between Languages: The Politics of Class, Race, and Translation in the Novels of B. Traven

February 26, 2024  |  in Essays  |  by Josh Todarello

Such is how the frontier in Traven functions: an arena of capital that both equalizes and reproduces extant racial hierarchies.

The identity of novelist B. Traven has spawned a delightfully layered and debated array of theories, stipulations, and investigations. Best known as the author of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, later adopted into a well-loved film by John Huston, Traven was the pseudonym of a German- and English-language writer who, in various hypotheses, has been the collaborative result of several individuals, an imprisoned actor, an enthusiastic explorer of Mexico, and a translator from Acapulco and San Antonio. The most fascinating aspect of this mysterious identity, however, lies not solely in the individual’s life, but also in the entangled multiculturalism and various iterations of his works, which render American landscapes in German language, examine the intersection of class and race politics, and create narratives in which complexities of social agency are examined in both local and international contexts.

If you’re reading B. Traven’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre in its English translation, it would be be hard to guess that it was written by a German author, let alone intended for German-speaking leftists, living in German-speaking countries in the interwar period. Even in the original German, the book bears no obvious trace of Europe or European culture—aside from the language, of course. It feels, on the contrary, quintessentially American, falling easily into the category of the western and full of the genre’s tropes and generic dictates. At least for this reader, it felt odd to be reading one’s way through many of the familiar elements of the western, in a language not commonly associated with it.

The novel takes place in a post-revolutionary Mexico during the interwar years, and its protagonists are white American vagabonds, property-less and looking for work. There are oilmen, Mexican “Indians” and Mexican ladinos, or mestizos. There are bandits, train heists, and Federales. There is gunplay. And there is gold. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre was originally written and published in German as Der Schatz der Sierran Madre by Büchergilde Gutenberg in 1927, and was part of Büchergilde Gutenberg’s mission to provide impoverished workers with access to cheap entertainment and Bildung. The current Büchergilde Gutenberg website tells us, for example, that the publisher was founded in 1924 to facilitate easier access to Bildung for members of the working class, doing so by means of affordable but well-crafted, premium books. Bruno Dreßler, Büchergilde’s first chairman, had in mind the idea of a proletarian cultural community, a “proletarische Kulturgemeinschaft”; the publisher saw itself as part of proletarian literature and culture at a time when such a thing perhaps still existed, though its contours and possibility—or impossibility—were, even then, debated by Marxist critics and thinkers of every stripe. Even Diego Rivera, a card-carrying communist, argued that, properly speaking, there could be no such thing as proletarian art within capitalism. Only after the dictatorship of the proletariat has “fulfilled its mission,” Rivera writes, after it has “liquidated all class differences and produced a classless society,” can there be a proletarian art. READ MORE…

The Full Meaning of Events: An Interview with Antonella Lettieri

January 8, 2024  |  in Interviews  |  by Willem Marx

. . . failing to fully understand the other might just be the most human experience of all.

“They were still days when I wasn’t like I wanted to be but I wanted to be like I believed I could become, or at least that’s what I kept telling everyone” says Manu, the polarizing protagonist of Enrico Remmert’s “The War of the Murazzi”. Excerpted in Asymptote’s Summer 2023 issue, the story tracks the city of Turin as its identity shifts from Italian homogeneity to a hub of immigration during the 1990’s—a multicultural turn rendered both joyful and sinister in Manu’s cloven gaze, in which the hypocritical impulses towards political optimism and casual violence are mapped from the level of the individual onto that of society in a riveting character study. In an award-winning English translation, Antonella Lettieri preserves Remmert’s literary pyrotechnics and the layers of complexity in his unreliable narrator’s voice. 

I had the distinct pleasure of corresponding with Lettieri via email: our conversation ranged from the differentiation of ‘imagination’ and ‘creativity’ in the act of translation to the tensions between humanism, cynicism, and so much more that ripple under the surface of Remmert’s text.

Willem Marx (WM): In a recently published book review, you write that one of the joys of literature in translation is “imagining the book that was and the books that could have been”. I’m struck by the way you center the role of imagination. How does imagination play into your translation practice? 

Antonella Lettieri (AL): Every time I read literature in translation I cannot help but wonder about the original, whether I speak the source language or not; I’m sure this is a very common experience, but for me it is always a great source of enjoyment. This was particularly true in the case of the book I was reviewing: Thirsty Sea (translated by Clarissa Botsford and published by Héloïse Press), which poses a great challenge to the translator because of its ample use of wordplay and double meanings—as the brilliant Clarissa explains in her interesting translator’s note. 

When it comes to translation, I find that ‘creativity’ is perhaps a more useful notion than ‘imagination.’ Reading always requires a creative effort (it is an act of co-creation with the author) and I think that this is even more the case for the kind of close reading required of translators. If we start to understand both reading and translating as acts of creation, perhaps we can put behind us fraught notions of loyalty and fidelity, and start realising that re-reading and re-translating are key efforts in keeping a text alive over time.

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Language Is the Horse: On Rebecca Suzuki’s When My Mother Is Most Beautiful

November 2, 2023  |  in Reviews  |  by Jay Boss Rubin

More surprising than Suzuki’s work as a translator is the presence, in her book, of a translation’s ghost.

When My Mother Is Most Beautiful by Rebecca Suzuki, Hanging Loose Press, December 2023

Technically classified as a book of poetry, Rebecca Suzuki’s debut collection, When My Mother Is Most Beautiful, contains verse, prose, drama, and haibun, a form that combines prose and haiku. Across the delightful hybridity, the author achieves thematic cohesion through her enthusiastic embrace of multilingualism. From the first entry to the last, Suzuki demonstrates multilingualism’s ability to make more resonant questions of identity that, trapped within a single tongue, remain stifling. “When I was 産まれた,” reads the book’s opening line, followed by a footnote that states, simply, “born.” For Suzuki, who immigrated to Bayside, Queens, from Nagoya, Japan, when she was 9, being born was an event that took place—and takes place for the author still—in a combination of English and Japanese. By comparison, Suzuki’s description of New York pizza (“cheese oozing off the side with hot orange oil pooling at the top”) is decidedly monolingual. Meanwhile, the dialogue in that same entry—between the author-speaker, her mother, and her sister—appears in Japanese. What the three family members say amongst themselves is translated in footnotes.

For a reader who does not know Japanese, the entry, titled “early days,” presents a kind of inverse experience of Suzuki’s initial weeks in New York, which involved navigating a new cultural environment, plus the logistical challenges of trips to the welfare office and the Herculean task of finding an apartment. The pizza, despite its mouthwatering description, feels public facing and familiar; what’s said between family members, on the street and in the restaurant, feels private. In a painful but poignant possible coincidence, the pizzeria in which the mother and sisters land for their respite may have once belonged to Suzuki’s Jewish-American father. The family’s move to the United States follows his death—an event, no doubt tragic, that the author addresses mostly obliquely. With much more directness, Suzuki confronts her preoccupations with the well-being of her ancestors at large. In an entry titled “eggplant,” she lays her fear bare: “My biggest worry has come true. How do my ancestors get home?”

The titular eggplant, which is also depicted in evocative original artwork on the book’s cover, is also a horse. Suzuki introduces the eggplant horse, her most striking metaphor, in an early entry about Obon, Japan’s festival of the dead:

my aunt makes a horse out of a thin cucumber or eggplant by sticking disposable chopsticks into them as legs. We all walk to the beach with the horse. When we get there, we light incense and let the eggplant horse float away in the water. That is how the spirits travel back to heaven.

Note the absence of simile: the creature isn’t like a horse or intended to represent one. It is alive, moving, capable of transporting others. The eggplant horse doesn’t only cross between the world of the living and the world of the dead. It traverses borders between the United States and Japan, English and Japanese, meaning and word, word and image. Suzuki’s horse reminded me viscerally of a moment in The Magical Language of Others, by E.J. Koh. In that hybrid-genre, multilingual, translation-obsessed text, Koh, who longs for a pet parakeet and flight from loneliness and isolation, fashions a bird out of a plastic bag tied to a string. The make-shift kite soars: “So little labor could bring so great a reward,” she writes. READ MORE…

Truths in Ambiguity: On Uljana Wolf’s kochanie, today i bought bread

October 12, 2023  |  in Reviews  |  by Anna Rumsby

Nissan’s expert translations, in turn, are contemporary in the sense that they are unapologetically “unfaithful”.

kochanie, today i bought bread by Uljana Wolf, translated from the German by Greg Nissan, World Poetry Books, 2023

In German, Uljana Wolf’s work inhabits the liminal spaces between the German and Polish languages, with all the fraught history that this double heritage involves. Now, in an English translation by Greg Nissan, this palimpsest of linguistic plurality has received another layer. Born in the German/Polish borderlands, Wolf has rapidly become a voice for a globalised, post-GDR generation, her life and work echoing the political and social upheaval of the twentieth century. In compact scenes of personal and shared experience, both dreamlike and jarring, she weaves together metaphoric word-sounds, juxtaposed imagery, and multilingualism. Nissan’s expert translations, in turn, are contemporary in the sense that they are unapologetically “unfaithful”. He has incorporated new imagery into the retold poems, such as the echoes of mink fur in “mornmink”, reiterating that his translated poems should not be seen as reproductions or ‘shadows’ of the original, but rather as a “jealous lover, eager to retort”.

Wolf’s verse is extremely dense and laden with historical and cultural references, making both the foreword by Valzhyna Mort and the afterword by Greg Nissan crucial pieces of the puzzle in beginning to decode Wolf’s poetry. This being said, such ambiguous verse is also a joy for the reader or reviewer; there are as many interpretations as there are eyes to read. The poetry benefits from its bilingual presentation, with the German on the left and the English on the right as equal partners that reflect one another without simply replicating the other. This allows readers to appreciate the form and page-feel of both languages, even if they are not bilingual.

Something that struck me initially in Wolf’s German was the formatting: a reader of German would expect the nouns to be capitalised, but here they are not. This only adds to the possibilities of their ambiguity, as words which could be both nouns and adjectives, or nouns and verbs, are no longer distinct from each other; the line einen gehorsam verzeichnen could mean, as Nissan has translated it, “to register an obedience”, but equally could have been translated as “to register (somebody/something) obediently”. The German prose is made ever denser by this use of the language, as the nouns no longer jump out on the page. While reading the German poems, I realised with a start that this is what reading English may have felt like to my German-speaking students, learning to read a language in which the nouns blend in with everything else. READ MORE…

The Amman International Book Fair: Translation Across Languages and Periods of Civilization

October 11, 2023  |  in Dispatches, Essays  |  by Bridget Peak

How can you capture rhyme and rhythm, the cadence of a work in another language? If you can, should you?

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In its 22nd edition, The Amman International Book Fair ran from September 21–30 this year and featured over 400 publishing houses from 22 countries, offering a full calendar of literary activities from a reading marathon to calligraphy classes. The Union of Jordanian Publishers, established in 1989 to elevate the standing of publishing houses in Jordan, organizes the event each year under the recurrent theme “Jerusalem: Capital of Palestine”, and marks the start of book fair season across the region. The state of Qatar was recognized as the esteemed guest of honor of the fair in a symposium attended by Dr. Khalid bin Ibrahim Al Sulaiti, the General Manager of the Katara Cultural Village of Qatar (the foundation responsible for the Katara Prize for the Arabic Novel) and historian Dr. Hind Abu Al-Shaar was recognized for her contributions as a writer and academic within Jordan’s literary landscape as this year’s ‘key personality’. 

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The Amman International Book Fair is an immense organizational feat, a forum not only dedicated to the sale of books in the Arabic language but also an accessible discussion of literature’s role in Jordan historically and today. Inevitably, the topic of translation asserts itself, demanding rumination on grappling with meaning in a foreign alphabet and the challenges and opportunities implicit therein. When speaking with representatives of publishing houses of the broader region, the question of the quality of translations was ever-present and reflected in the events hosted by the fair and its partners. READ MORE…

Principle of Decision: Translation from Swahili

October 5, 2023  |  in Principle of Decision, Translations  |  by Albert Mwamburi, Hassan Kassim, Idza Luhumyo, Jay Boss Rubin, and Wambua Muindi

. . . the auditory and visual imagery that gather as you read the Swahili version . . . How [to] transfer the same to the English version?

This edition of Principle of Decision—our column that highlights the decision-making processes of translators by asking several contributors to offer their own versions of the same passage—provides a look at how translators render the subtleties of a poem with multiple layers of meaning in a new language. This round, Asymptote contributor Wambua Muindi leads our Swahili edition of the column.

Ken Walibora’s Kufa Kuzikana was originally published in 2003 and just clocked two decades since publication. For this edition of Principle of Decision, I chose the first two paragraphs of Walibora’s novel partly to celebrate it but also to appreciate the story it follows in the context of what occupied the first half of 2023 in Kenya—the cycle of anti-government and cost-of-living protests, the ensuing police brutality, and the ethnic targeting and profiling.

I also found these paragraphs appropriate here given that introductions are always novel and always set the tone for a story. In this case not only do the two paragraphs borrow the geography of Kiwachema, the fictional country the novel is set in, they also illustrate the constant movement and consequent contact that is the backdrop against which Walibora animates post-colonial Kenya. The friendship between Akida and Tim—the novel’s main characters—becomes a fable for the nation and demonstrates the exclusionary logic of national politics despite the promise of nation-building. 

I wanted to see what different translators’ English renditions of the novel’s opening lines would sound and feel like. Of particular interest was the auditory and visual imagery that gather as you read the Swahili version, and the way these sentences introduce the tone of the narration. How does a translator transfer the same to the English version?  This is also a question many of the translators asked themselves. Phrases like ‘dhahiri shahiri’ and ‘miinamo ya vilima’ which embody the particularity of Swahili sounds, posed an interesting challenge. The particularity with which the translators supply the tonality of Swahili is fascinating. Take for instance the last word: It is translated differently by each of the translators below, showing the different interpretations given and techniques employed in English translation.

—Wambua Muindi

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Translation as Disorder in Carlos Fonseca’s Austral

August 23, 2023  |  in Reviews  |  by Alan Mendoza Sosa

. . . disorder plagues the opening pages of the book, always in tight connection to translation.

Austral by Carlos Fonseca, translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023

“What is the social impact of translation?” is a question that often buzzes in my ear like a hungry mosquito, especially when I read translated books, and even more commonly when I try to teach colloquial expressions in Spanish to my non-Hispanic friends—more precisely, Spanish from Mexico City, my hometown. Immediately, attempts at clear definitions become convoluted, uncertain, ambiguous—in a word, atropellados (literally “ran over,” an adjective that refers to stumbling over words). I sound more or less like this: 

“Take ‘chido/chida/chide’ [CHEE-duh/-da/-de] (adj.). It can technically mean ‘cool,’ but also ‘good,’ ‘agreeable,’  or ‘comfortable’ (for things and places and preceded by the auxiliary verb ‘estar’); it also means ‘nice-kind-laidback-easygoing-friendly’ (for someone who meets all and every one of these attributes and with the verb ‘ser’); or ‘ok, no problem,’  and ‘thank you’ (in informal social interactions with a close friend but not necessarily an intimate one and, crucially, with an upbeat intonation)…but if you want to make things easier for you, just remember that in any colloquial situation where you would say ‘cool’ in English or the closest equivalent in your mother tongue, you can say ‘chido.’ Don’t forget to adjust the last letter for the grammatical gender of the noun, or the preferred gender of the person you are referring to. Recently, non-binary gender is expressed with an ‘e,’ but some people prefer ‘ex,’ or the feminine (a), or do not have any strong preference. When in doubt, ask.”

Similarly involved and protracted explanations often result in simpering faces and jocose efforts by my bravest friends to try out the words I share. More common, and more fun, is when friends also share their favorite colloquial untranslatables in their mother tongues, eliciting everyone’s excited perplexity and marvel at the abundance of meaning and the frustrating difficulties of carrying that meaning across languages and cultures. When we try to explain these terms, it is as though their translation abruptly hits the brakes on our language, pushing us into linguistic confusion with the inertia from the sudden interruption. In other words, translation begets disorder, upsetting the comfortable and normally thoughtless flow of everyday language. This sensation—which emerged in me after my recurrent attempts at translating colloquialisms—appears more subtly and robustly in the 2023 novel Austral by Carlos Fonseca and its translation by Megan McDowell. Disorder, Austral suggests, lies at the heart of translation’s social potential, as it makes translation (its exercise and its experience) essential for radical change.

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Principle of Decision: Translation from Urdu

June 28, 2023  |  in Principle of Decision, Translations  |  by Farah Ali, Haider Shahbaz, Hammad Rind, Naima Rashid, and Sabyn Javeri

Each of the four translators interacts with the same, short poem through the filter of their individual personalities.

This edition of Principle of Decision—our column that highlights the decision-making processes of translators by asking several contributors to offer their own versions of the same passage—provides a look at how translators render the subtleties of a poem with multiple layers of meaning in a new language.

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I chose a poem by Iftikhar Arif, a revered Urdu poet. It was written for his son, Ali, and was published in his first volume of poetry, Mehr-e-Doneem (The Divided Sun, Daniyal Publications, 1983). This poem is a father’s sendoff; as he says a farewell to his son, he feels a lump in his throat and slips some blessings and lessons for the future into his farewell, barely masking his fear. A companion piece, the short poem “Dua” (Prayer), was written for his daughter, and published in the same volume, containing a similar wish of goodwill.

The poem is not to be read at face value. Defeat is baked into its premise, and what the poet is saying out loud, he knows to be the opposite of the truth. It is a prayer for the impossible, asking a grown man not to lose his innocence. There is rupture in the title itself: Aik tha raja chota sa—(once upon a time) there was a little prince. It’s the tone in which you speak to a child, who is uninitiated into the realities of life. It’s the tone of lullabies. There is a clinging to a make-believe world in the language, an attempt to soften the edges, to make the truth less harsh, to almost wish it away.

The first word of the first line starts with the son’s full name, Ali Iftikhar. The once-little prince is a grown man, which the poet acknowledges, but then slips back to addressing the grown man through his mother, a line repeated thrice in the poem: “I have told Ali Iftikhar’s mother not to let him…”.

Throughout the short poem, there is a push and pull. On one hand, there’s an attempt to glaze over the truth and to control the circumstances; on the other hand, there’s truth leaking through the veneer of denial. The repetition is like a broken record to convince the speaker himself. There is also a contrast between the naïveté of the language and the knowledge of truth beneath it—and bridging both, a father’s love. He tells the son to stay away from the corruption of the world by asking his mother to keep him from transgressing the different circles of protection: the garden, the neighbour’s garden, the street and the world beyond. Which grown man hasn’t transgressed these limits?

The four translators, sensitive to the central challenge posed by the poem, have found different solutions to address the tug in the original. Farah Ali is alert to the rhythm and pace in the original. Hammad Rind pays attention to calibrating the register and forms of address, important tonal considerations for the poem. Haider Shahbaz brings an experimental take to his reading, leaning into its dark undertones. Sabyn Javeri sees the poem through a feminist lens, asking questions that trouble her as a woman.

I’ve always seen translation as a conversation—a conversation between the author and the translator, the translator and the work, a translator and other translators, a translator and a reader. This folio shows how rich that conversation can be. Each of the four translators interacts with the same, short poem through the filter of their individual personalities.

—Naima Rashid READ MORE…

Internal and External Dialogues: PEN Grantee Isabella Corletto on Being Multilingual and Coming to Translation Through Publishing

June 14, 2023  |  in Interviews  |  by Isabella Corletto and José García Escobar

Constantly switching back and forth or speaking in Spanglish, gave me a lot of flexibility with the way I use language and approach the world.

Earlier this year, PEN America awarded the 2023 PEN Grant for The English Translation of Italian Literature to Isabella Corletto, a young Guatemalan translator based in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. The grant awards $5,000 to an individual working on translating an Italian literary fiction or nonfiction text into English, and with it, Isabella will complete the translation of Giorgia Tribuiani’s Padri (Fazi Editore), a novel whose prose, according to her, “blurs the lines between narration, internal dialogue, and external dialogue”, built around “the tension between the mundane and the extraordinary”.

As a translator working with multiple source languages, Isabella also translated from Spanish into English Amalia Andrade’s Things You Think About When You Bite Your Nails (Cosas que piensas cuando te muerdes las uñas) in 2020, and currently works at Indent Literary Agency (home of authors like Leila Guerriero, Dolores Reyes, Oscar Martínez, and Guadalupe Nettel) and Words Without Borders as their 2022-2023 editorial fellow.   

A talented polyglot born in Guatemala City but with access to an international education, she has been formed by a myriad of languages: Spanish, English, Italian, and Portuguese. In her work, she sees no borders between them. “The more language and literature classes I took, the more interested I became in reading exophonic and multilingual writers, many of whom I realize now are also translators,” she said.

Recently I had a chance to talk to her about her craft and being multilingual. We discussed growing up bilingual, working in publishing, the authors that shaped her as a person and reader, and the need and importance of translating more Guatemalan and Central American authors into English.

 José García Escobar (JGE): I feel like we can ask translators the following question a limited number of times before it gets redundant. So, I’d like to take advantage of the moment. What drew you to translation?

Isabella Corletto (IC): I’ve always loved reading and writing, and I grew up bilingual—yet I never really thought much about translation growing up. While I always knew it was a useful skill and was grateful for it, I think I took speaking both fluently for granted, to a certain extent. Probably because most people around me growing up also spoke both languages. I always knew I wanted to write and work with books, but I never considered literary translation as a possible career path.

Learning Italian made me realize how much I love learning and working with multiple languages. For the first time, I had to think about all of the grammatical and idiomatic particularities of a language I was learning, but also of the two I grew up with.

READ MORE…

The 2023 PEN/Heim Grantees Talk Translation: Part I

May 22, 2023  |  in Essays  |  by Caroline G. Froh, Mark Tardi, and Richard Prins

Doesn’t the magic of writing happen in those rare bursts where you manage to coax an extra voice out of your mind?

The PEN/Heim Translation Grant is one of the most reliable indicators as to which texts will come to be considered vital in the English-language literary landscape, with past grantees including George Szirtes translating the Hungarian giant of postmodernism, László Krasznahorkai; Daniel Borzutsky translating the Chilean revolutionary poet, Raúl Zurita, Jennifer Croft translating Polish Nobel Laureate Olga Tokarczuk, and Anton Hur translating the celebrated South Korean genre-bender, Bora Chung. The aim of the grant is to support translators during their vital and difficult work of working on a text, and as a result, the texts that come to English-language readers by way of this gift are often exemplary examples of not only the writers’ intelligence, imagination, and effort—but equally importantly, the translator’s.  

In this three-part series, Asymptote has asked the 2023 PEN/Heim grantees to talk about their work in progress; their responses, brimming with excitement, conviction, and connection, are a testament to how much translators put themselves into their labor. Through the varied approaches and languages, they share the important commonality of surety: that the work they’ve been entrusted with has an immense potential to illuminate our reality, enlarge our world, and enrich our experiences of literature.

Here, Mark Tardi ruminates on the importance of discipline; Richard Prins talks about following instinct; and Caroline Froh opens up about the physical effect that reading has on us.  

Mark Tardi on Olga Hund:

In The Poethical Wager, Joan Retallack argues intelligently for the creative embrace of life’s unexpected swerves, the “unsettling transfiguration of once-familiar terrain [which tends] to produce disorientation, even estrangement, by radically altering geometries of attention.” Olga Hund’s remarkable and award-winning debut novel, Psy ras drobnych (Dogs of Smaller Breeds) was such a swerve for me, thanks to James Guerin and Klaudia Cierluk, editors at Berlin Quarterly, who commissioned me to translate an excerpt. Hund’s writing pulled me in immediately, and I felt sure that English-speaking readers would connect with the book much like I had.

Dogs of Smaller Breeds takes place in an in-patient women’s psychiatric ward in southern Poland and via the narrator—who may or may not be the pseudonymous Hund herself—we’re offered short vignettes, unabashed and unapologetic glimpses into the lives of women who would be otherwise largely invisible and neglected. In one poignant and heartbreaking segment, Hund’s narrator observes that:

If it weren’t for papers: documents from orphanages, correctional institutions and prisons, hospital records, blue cards and prescriptions; and if it weren’t for their various small objects: a spoon from the canteen, a prayer book, a photo of two Yorkies torn out of a newspaper, a cassette with the inscription “Mother” and the chaplet of Our Lady recorded on it, a tote bag washed and folded evenly—no one would remember that these women, who are here today, were alive at all.

Hund doesn’t attempt to construct a comprehensive picture, which would reveal some neatly packaged truth. This is one of the most compelling aspects of the book—the devastating intimacy and scaled back narratives propel the story forward, à la Fleur Jaeggy or Jenny Offill. For instance, in one scene, the narrator recounts how the women are not so crazy as to have forgotten the abuses they’ve suffered, most often from family and partners. Hund uses a neologism, “męże-węże,” which literally would be something like “husband-snakes,” but the term rhymes perfectly while simultaneously magnifying menace. I rendered this as “spouse-louse,” which loses some of the historical connotations of snakes and viperous dangers, but the parasitical qualities of lice—surviving on the blood of another—echoes other aspects in the novel. READ MORE…

Reading Palestine in French: In Conversation with Kareem James Abu-Zeid

May 11, 2023  |  in Interviews  |  by Tuğrul Mende

The translation on its own should be so powerful or important that it serves as its own aesthetic justification.

Born in Haifa in 1944, Olivia Elias is a poet of the Palestinian diaspora  writing in French. During her childhood, she lived as a refugee in Beirut, but later moved to Montreal and then to Paris in the early 1980s. While she started to publish her poetry quite late in comparison to other poets, she has authored several collections since 2013. Her poetry is characterized as precise and rhythmic, and the Palestinian cause is a recurring theme throughout her work. Elias’ poem “Flame of Fire” opens:

I was born
In this
Eruptive time
When my country’s
Name was changed

Though Olivia Elias began writing poetry at a later stage in her life, she quickly gained maturity in the craft. With her third collection, Chaos, Crossing she reached an artistic peak, which has been brought into English in Kareem James Abu-Zeid’s translation. While the collection contains previously published poems, it also features  poems which haven’t yet been published in French before. In this interview, Kareem James Abu-Zeid discusses his introduction to Elias’ work, the influences and intricacies of Elias’ poetry, and the process of bringing Chaos, Crossing into English for the first time.

Tuğrul Mende (TM): You studied French literature in the past. Can you tell me what drew you to the subject and what drew you to translate Olivia Elias?

Kareem James Abu-Zeid (KJAZ): It’s funny, because I did study French literature and poetry—French was my major as an undergraduate—but that wasn‘t how I discovered Olivia‘s poetry. She was introduced to me by another Palestinian poet, Najwan Darwish, in May 2020, and I immediately wanted to translate her work.

I wasn’t reading a lot of French poetry at the time, and I was mainly translating Arabic. All of the literary projects I had done up to that point were in Arabic. I do a lot of academic and professional translations from French and from German, but I hadn’t done many literary texts. Up until 2003, when I graduated from college, I was reading a lot of French poetry, but then I began translating Arabic and French literature dropped away a little bit in my translation life. So this project somehow felt like it connected those disparate parts of my life.

TM: What do you do differently when translating from those various languages?

KJAZ:  I don’t consciously do anything differently. There are different things that happen and different challenges that arise with different languages, of course. For me, it always starts with understanding the source text, whatever its language. Then, hopefully, you develop a more empathetic connection to the source text, you really connect with it on a deeper level. The goal is to have the translation work as poetry in English.

There are different challenges with each language, and certainly with Arabic. When translating from Arabic to English, for example, the way the two languages work is so different that anything resembling a word-for-word translation is pretty much impossible. You’re forced to get very creative in terms of syntax, rhythm, etc.

With this project in particular, what I noticed is that I felt (for a little while) that I was going to be able to produce a translation that looked, at least on the surface, more like a mirror of the original French. I got lulled into a false sense of security, because the two languages are so close to one another in so many ways. But later on, I realized that the English wasn’t quite ”clicking” in the way I wanted, and that I couldn’t always mimic the French syntax or rhythms, or go with English cognates for French words—I had to step back a bit and really allow myself to recreate the texts as English-language poetry. I learned that there are unique difficulties when the languages are so close to each other as well. There were several times when I thought I had something good in English, and I was pleased, because in many ways it looked very close to the French. But then, when I managed to forget about the source text and just consider the English on its own, I realized that something was definitely sounding a bit “off” in my translation. READ MORE…