Posts filed under 'translation theory'

Principle of Decision: Translation from Chinese

March 29, 2023  |  in Principle of Decision, Translations  |  by Dave Haysom, Liuyu Ivy Chen, Mike Fu, Na Zhong, and Xiao Yue Shan

This column is an exercise in transparency, an effort to lift the curtain and show the undercurrents of the translator’s mind.

The second 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—demonstrates translation’s capacity to reveal shades of meaning in the source text. Here, Xiao Yue Shan poses to the translators a passage from Chinese writer 林棹 Lin Zhao.

轻而又轻的一天。时隔多年，那轻而又轻的一天生机犹在。如果你推却一切责任，对他人的痛苦视而不见，去拥抱巨大的明亮、明亮的寂静、寂静的自我，你就能短暂地占有那种轻而又轻。

qīng ér yòu qīng        de yī tiān            
轻而又轻                     的一天。
A light and light         day.

shí gé duō nián
时隔多年
After many years,

nà qīng ér yòu qīng de yī tiān     
那轻而又轻的一天
that light and light day

shēng jī yóu zài
生机犹在。
still exists.

rú guǒ nǐ tuī què                 
如果你推却
If you push aside

yī qiē zé rèn
一切责任，
all responsibilities,

duì tā rén de tòng kǔ         
对他人的痛苦
to the pain of others

shì ér bù jiàn
视而不见，
turn a blind eye,

qù yōng bào          
去拥抱
go to embrace

jù dà de míng liàng, míng liàng de jì jìng
巨大的明亮、明亮的寂静、
the enormous and bright, bright silence,

jì jìng de zì wǒ
寂静的自我，
the self of silence

nǐ jiù néng duǎn zàn dì zhān yǒu   
你就能短暂地占有
you can also briefly possess

nà zhǒng qīng ér yòu qīng
那种轻而又轻。
that kind of light and light.

This passage is taken from the Chinese writer 林棹 Lin Zhao’s debut novel, 流溪 Liu xi, published in 2020. Its narrative takes place throughout Lingnan, a region on China’s southeast coast, weaving through dense urbanities and viridescent ruralities, the subtropical heat and myriad languages, to tell the story of a young woman whose daily life, from its very earliest days, is inextricable from violence, metamorphosis, and fantasy. A tribute to high Nabokovian style, Liu xi is a stunning, inimitable example of what is possible in the Chinese language—the music it pronounces, the visions it conjures, the delicacy and intricacy that can be excavated from its logograms.

READ MORE…

Submission Call For New Column On Myths: Retellings

March 1, 2023  |  in News  |  by Bella Creel

. . . what does it mean to translate myths, embodiments of reason, morality, and culture?

Across cultures and time, people have turned toward myths for their wisdom and experience. Even today, when ‘myth’ has become synonymous with ‘falsehood,’ we are drawn to the weight and impact of mythology in contemporary literature and media; from Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s 2018 retelling of the Kĩkũyũ myth of origin in The Perfect Nine, to Madeline Miller’s 2018 retelling of the myth of Odysseus in Circe, to Makoto Shinkai’s expansion on the myth of Namazu in the 2022 film Suzume, myths prevail in modern consciousness, woven into our lives, retold and retold again. 

In this way, myths are inherently translational. From one mouth to the next, from the oral to the written, from one language to another, from antiquity to contemporary retellings, they have all been acts of translation. But what does it mean to translate myths, embodiments of reason, morality, and culture? How do our personal lived experiences reshape myths in retelling? How do cultural values and the bounds of language influence translations of myths? When a translator approaches a retelling with an explicit agenda, such as Thiong’o’s feminist approach to the Kĩkũyũ origin myth, what does that mean for the myth itself? When we read myths, when we relate to and learn from and shape these ancient texts to fit our modern lives, is that not its own form of translation? And again, what happens to the myth itself in these myriad retellings? 

Here at the Asymptote blog, we are headlining a new column on myths and myths in translation, Retellings, and would like your submissions and pitches! We are interested in the following approaches, and more than open to any other formats:

  • In the language you work from, what myth has had a particular impact on you? How does the language of the myth move you, as a reader, and how has the myth affected the legacy of literature in its language?
  • Myths of creation; of origin; of love; of conquering—how do these vary across cultures? What aspects remain constant? We would particularly be interested in hosting a group of translators from various languages in a roundtable to discuss these questions. 
  • How does a myth develop in translation? When a myth is translated from the ‘original’ language to another, do the morals, message, and impact transform in turn? In what ways? How does translation between languages differ from other retellings?

Completed essays can be submitted to the blog on Submittable until May 15, and pitches can be emailed to the blog editors at blog@asymptotejournal.com. Please include the language you translate from and/or work in, as well as any particular myth or type of myth you are interested in discussing in your email. 

We’re looking forward to your submissions!

—The Blog Editors

Principle of Decision: Translation from Armenian

January 2, 2023  |  in Principle of Decision, Translations  |  by Kristina Tatarian, Lusine Kharatyan, Margarit Ordukhanyan, and Nazareth Seferian

[This] will, we hope, allow for a more direct look at the choices translators make—at the principle of decision they employ in their practice.

Each translation speaks with two voices; that of the author and that of the translator. Yet, it is often when they have done their work well that the voices of translators go unrecognized. Their names are left off of covers, and their efforts mentioned only as brief asides in reviews. 

This neglect fails to give translation its due. Walter Benjamin wrote: “Reading a translation as if it were an original work in the translation’s own language is not the highest form of praise;” it is, rather, a failure to fully considering a work in translation, with its two voices and two languages. In an essay for Astra, translator and writer Lily Meyer references Susan Sontag’s definition of style when discussing translation as an art, stating that “to make art without having or consulting your own stylistic preferences strikes me as impossible . . . [Sontag] defines style, more or less, as ‘the principle of decision in a work of art, the signature of an artist’s will.’ Surely a translator’s will can also be found inside anything they translate, animating the text and powering it to full-fledged life.” 

This new column, Principle of Decision, is an effort to make the styles of translators more visible. In each installment, one translator will select a famous sentence or brief passage from the literature of a certain language, and several translators will then offer their own translations of it. The differences and similarities between the translations will, we hope, allow for a more direct look at the choices translators make—at the principle of decision they employ in their practice.

For our first edition, we are proud to feature a selection from the Armenian, chosen by Editor-at-Large Kristina Tatarian. Kristina’s word-for-word translation is accompanied by translations from three translators, whose work can also be found in the Fall 2022 issue’s Special Feature on Armenian literature. Kristina has also provided explanatory commentary on her selection, as well as on the translators’ choices.

—Meghan Racklin

 

One peaceful morning  was   one     sad      morning

Մի խաղաղ  առավոտ  էր  .  մի  տխուր  առավոտ :

Mi  haghah    aravot         er      mi   tehur  aravot
˘       ˘     ¯      ˘  ˘   ¯          ˘        ˘    ˘   ¯    ˘  ˘  ¯

This sentence is from the beginning of “Gikor” by Hovhaness Tumanian, one of the central figures in Armenian literature. Based on a real story that Tumanian had heard as a child, “Gikor” is a tale about the dreams and hardship of a twelve-year-old boy, the eponymous Gikor, as his father sends him away from his home in the village to “become a man” and earn a living in the big city. Unfortunately, the boy’s precocious aim to alleviate his family’s hardship eventually ends his life. This sentence marks the moment in the story when Gikor’s mother and siblings watch him leave; accompanied by his father, he moves further and further away from home. The story comes full circle as the father returns to the village—only this time, Gikor is not there anymore. The different translations of this sentence, which presages the early death of the young protagonist, highlight the theme of the Armenian Special Feature (half-lives) by presenting us the “half-life” of the protagonist, a life that prematurely ended. This poignant story may be seen as an emblem of cultural memory about the Armenian Genocide, as Tumanian himself was at the forefront of humanitarian efforts to save children. The contributing translators have each found their own way of translating this memorable sentence, which marks the day when this young and sensitive boy leaves his home, and never returns.

—Kristina Tatarian READ MORE…

Asymptote at the Movies: Blow-Up

October 6, 2022  |  in Asymptote at the Movies  |  by MARGENTO, Rubén López, Thuy Dinh, and Xiao Yue Shan

Ultimately, both Antonioni’s cinematic approach and Cortázar’s literary vision are simply two sides of the same coin.

Michelangelo Antonioni and Julio Cortázar form our double feature for this latest edition of Asymptote at the Movies—a perfect pairing in their own idiosyncratic way, as two auteurs who both formidably challenged the responsibilities and capacities of their mediums. Cortázar’s “Les babas del diablo” was published in 1959, and a short six years later, Antonioni’s Blow-Up hit the theatres. Both works have at their centre a photographer: Cortázar’s narrator, Michel; and Antonioni’s protagonist, Thomas. Both also see their leading men stumble across something sinister, which drastically—and perhaps irreversibly—alter their engagement with their respective realities. Cortázar and Antonioni have both declaimed any other significant crossover between their works, and indeed they seem to have little more in common besides an overarching narrative catalyst. . . but isn’t there always more to be found when two intelligences are in dialogue? In the following roundtable, Chris Tănăsescu, Thuy Dinh, Xiao Yue Shan, and Rubén López discuss these two masterpieces, their phenomenology, and how the mode of translation works between them.

Chris Tănăsescu (CT): I read Cortázar’s story only after watching the movie—actually, after watching Blow-Up multiple times over the years. But I believe this is far from being the only reason why, when I did finally read the Cortázar text, it seemed to me that the story had been written after the movie, and not the movie that was based on—or rather, “inspired by”—the story . . . The story struck me as a piece I would have expected Antonioni to write himself. “This is Antonioni,” I thought to myself . . . His cinematic poetics, the style and language (of characters in various movies of his, quite a number of them writers or artists), even his obsessive motifs (such as composition versus/and/as the machine) were all there. What’s more, Cortázar’s speaker’s moody, stylistic, grammatical, translational, topographical, and voyeuristic flaneuring seemed like the perfect illustration [and at times even (re)wording] of some of Antonioni’s most well-known statements about the art of modern filmmaking; particularly the ones in which he ponders over the director’s mission to capture a never-static flux-like reality by continuously staying in motion and incessantly gravitating towards, and away from, moments of potential crystallization. The “arriving and moving on, as a new perception.”

Thuy Dinh (TD): I prefer to think that each work—whether the film or the story—exists independently of each other, with its own unique language and attributes, yet can converse with or sustain the other like a dance, a collaboration, or an equitable marriage: where no one has, or wishes, to have the upper hand. This idea of conversation seems more inclusive, and helps us to gain a more holistic view of what we call “reality,” don’t you think—especially since both Antonioni’s Blow-Up and Cortázar’s “Las babas del diablo” squarely address the limitations of subjectivity and/or the inherent instability of any narrative approach, and in so doing invite the audience/reader to accept the fluidity of all human experiences?

Xiao Yue Shan (XYS): This concept of dialogic resonance operating inside the small words “inspired by” is so discombobulating and vast, it’s a shame that we only have the linear conceit of before and after to refer to it—but before and after it is. Chris, even though as you so precisely pointed out, the film is rife with Antonioni and his inquiries (that of the despair innate in sexual elation, that “memory offers no guarantees,” and that hallucinogenic quality of modern opulence), I think at the centre of his Blow-Up is this idea that life is always interrupted with seeing, and seeing always interrupted with life, and this is, I believe, a direct carry-over from Cortázar’s mesmerising, illusive tale of what it means when the gift of sight is led through the twisted chambers of seeing. Which is to say, I agree with both of you, that at the confluence of these two works lie a similar attention to fluidity. READ MORE…

A New Way of Thinking About Voice: An Interview with Robin Myers, Part III

August 17, 2022  |  in Interviews  |  by Alan Mendoza Sosa

When you’re translating, you’re never entirely by yourself in your own head.

This is the third and last installment of my interview to poet and translator Robin Myers. The first part was published on May 11 and the second on July 7.

Alan Mendoza Sosa (AM): I would like to delve a bit deeper into the relation between creative writing and translation. How does being a poet inform your translation practice or the other way around?

Robin Myers (RM): Poetry led me into translation, and I started translating only poetry, so what feels absolutely shared by my experiences of both writing poetry and translating anything is this compulsive contact with language as a material thing, as something that you get to experiment with. It happens of course in writing prose, too, but I think there’s something especially tactile about poetry, and this sense that it always could’ve been otherwise. There’s just a kind of intoxication I’ve felt with poetry that has made me think about translation as a site for looking for freedom within constraints. I do think there’s something different about writing poetry and translating it, however, at least for me. When you’re translating, you’re never entirely by yourself in your own head. I mean, in writing you’re not either, really. As we’ve been talking about, there’s always this sense of where you come from and who you’re seeking with. But with translating you’re writing toward something and with something that’s already concretely there. When I start writing poetry again after a long time of mostly just translating, there’s a renewed sense of me making something up out of nothing, which is both thrilling and scary.

AM: And there’s also not a harsh division between writing creatively and translating. In a way, when you write, you are translating a continuous flow of language or ideas into the more precise form of a poem on the page. So we can even consider writing a self translation.

RM: Yes, and I love how Kate Briggs talks about that in This Little Art. It’s easy to overgeneralize this stuff—Briggs says something like, “Say it too fast and it all goes down the trap door.” Like, okay, all writing is translating, we can agree on that, but how do we keep from getting lost in the abstraction? How else can we get at the differences or the similarities between the two practices?

I’ll say that translating has also helped me get through my fallow periods as a poet in a really gratifying way. I am a fairly off-and-on poetry writer. I have periods of writing a lot followed by long, long periods when I don’t write at all. And that used to fill me with despair. Translation keeps me company during those times in a way that lets me know that I’m engaged with language and that I’m collecting things and learning.

READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: August 2022

August 15, 2022  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Alyea Canada, Laurel Taylor, and Samantha Siefert

Introducing new translations from French, Persian, and more!

As the world reverberates with the powers and consequence of language, this month’s round-up of translations are especially resonant with their assertion of how texts can subvert, heal, and ascribe meaning to life. Below, find reviews of a text that gathers poetry and its translators in boundary-defying dialogues of methods and ideas; a novel that powerfully uses silence to address the transgenerational trauma of the Rwandan genocide; and a sensitive story of an Iran on the precipices of change by celebrated modern novelist Simin Daneshvar.

Screen Shot 2022-08-15 at 1.39.43 PM

Poetry’s Geographies: A Transatlantic Anthology of Translations, edited by Katherine M. Hedeen and Zoë Skoulding, Eulalia Books, 2022

Review by Laurel Taylor, Assistant Managing Editor

How does one review a translation (or rather a set of translations) which center the translator? This is the question I’ve been asking myself as I make my way through Poetry’s Geographies: A Transatlantic Anthology of Translations, edited by Katherine M. Hedeen and Zoë Skoulding. This ambitious collection is unique in bringing together translation practitioners from the heart of the Anglosphere and giving them a space to speak about their practices—what Hedeen might describe as “countermapping,” what Don Mee Choi might describe as “lilymethod” mapping, and what Erin Moure might call “in”mapping.

As you may have gathered from this description, Poetry’s Geographies begins not with the text-in-translation but with the translator, with their essays and methods which speak in sometimes contradictory, sometimes complementary dialogues. Through these, we, the readers, are asked to sit with the very contradiction of translation itself—the notion that one language can be “deformed” or “twinned” or “exploded” into another. Indeed, the acknowledgement of this impossibility, the greatest and most repeated cliché concerning poetry and translation, drives the collection. As Skoulding writes in the introduction, “Rather than making the world more transparent and ‘accessible’ for quick consumption, poetry and its translation can sustain opacité…as an opaqueness that allows the Other to exist in full, not to be reduced or subordinated.” Put differently in the essay from Sasha Dugdale:

I stand against this idea of translation as a vitrine in which we see the original. I stand against it here, me, many kilos of proteins, lipids, water, with a slow local history of my own composition and concurrent decomposition (I see also that it is a grave act to scribble in these lines)

no person is a pane of glass no person is of pure intent no person is devoid of history

In this approach, the notion of language as a window is cast aside. Language is smoke and mirrors (me). Language is air (Ziba Karbassi). Language is sound (Skoulding). Language is an infestation (Moure). Language is a sufism (Stephen Watts). Poetry’s Geographies asks us to stare into the mist and watch the swirling shapes, the fleeting shadows, the forms familiar, menacing, and absent. The thing we perceive, in Hedeen translating Victor Rodríguez Nuñez, may in fact be absence:

your existing is not shaped
from the knot that resembles the foliage weave
your being is not shaped
from the board sanded down by countless downpours
barely the keyhole owl eye
to look inside so nothing was left outside
an image in heat

fertilized by the void

READ MORE…

Translating Multilingualism: An Interview with Ros Schwartz

July 21, 2022  |  in Interviews  |  by Sheela Mahadevan

Translation is the deepest form of reading.

Ros Schwartz is an award-winning British translator who has translated over one hundred works of French fiction and non-fiction into English, with a strong emphasis on authors including Dominique Eddé, Aziz Chouaki, and Tahar Ben Jelloun. Her most recent translations are Swiss-Cameroonian author Max Lobe’s A Long Way from Douala (Hope Road, 2021) and Does Snow Turn a Person White Inside (HopeRoad, 2022), and she is part of the team re-translating the works of Georges Simenon for Penguin Classics. Ros was made a Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2009.

Earlier this year, I had the honour of interviewing Ros Schwartz to find out about her approaches to literary translation, and in particular, about the art and complexities of translating multilingualism. Owing to histories of colonisation and migration, literatures are increasingly hybrid and multilingual. A work composed in “French” may bear explicit or implicit traces, tones, and vocabularies of other languages, and processes of translation may be embedded within the source text itself. Such linguistic entanglements in source texts challenge the very boundaries of languages and pose distinct challenges for the literary translator. In this interview, Ros Schwartz shares her own experiences about translating multilingualism in creative and innovative ways.

Sheela Mahadevan (SM): Ros, you come from a multilingual background, and you have translated several multilingual works which depict experiences of exile and migration. You also have a Jewish ancestry and have translated a work which relates to this theme, entitled Traduire comme Transhumer (Translation as Transhumance) by Mireille Gansel (Les Fugitives (UK) and The Feminist Press (USA), 2017). How does your own background and experience of migration and multilingualism intersect with your career as a translator, and how does Gansel’s work influence your thinking about translation?

Ros Schwartz (RS): My background has some similarities with that of Mireille Gansel. I too am Jewish—second generation—and my grandparents spoke only Yiddish, so although different from Gansel’s experience, I share that multilingual background common to families descended from exiles. Gansel interweaves her memoir with reflections on the art of translation, constantly interrogating and refining her practice. Her ethos chimes with mine and her approach to translation helped me better articulate my own; by translating the book and being inhabited by it for many months, I was able to engage with Gansel’s ideas in a way beyond that of a casual reader.

SM: You have translated numerous multilingual literatures into English, including the Lebanese Francophone novel Cerf-volant (Kite) by Dominique Eddé (Seagull Books, 2003). The novel depicts multilingual experiences; sometimes the characters speak in French, sometimes they speak in Arabic, and sometimes they translate between the two. The work is also about multilingual writing and casts light on the ways in which another language can haunt the primary literary language. Could you tell us more about your experience of translating this hybrid work? To what extent is it necessary to collaborate with native speakers of the additional language or the author in the translation process?

RS: I worked very closely with the author. We went over the translation together literally line by line, in person, closeted in her Paris apartment. I had her read passages out loud to help me capture the intonations and rhythms. I would never have attempted a translation like this had I not been able to collaborate with the author.

The novel has a different sensibility, and its non-linear narrative took me out of my comfort zone. The reader is plunged straight in and the narrative is a mosaic, which the reader gradually has to piece together. Eddé’s writing functions like an Impressionist painting, with deft brushstrokes that evoke characters, places, and atmospheres. It has disconcerting metaphors: “. . . une bouche à mi-chemin du cœur et de l’oiseau.” Literally: “a mouth half-way between a heart and a bird.” You don’t question it in French, partly because of the music of the language. For the English, I made it slightly more explicit: “a mouth that was shaped like a heart or a bird.” READ MORE…

One for Another: A Conversation on Translation from the Chinese

June 16, 2022  |  in Interviews  |  by Xiao Yue Shan and Zuo Fei

It seems to me that the world is a better place to live in simply because we translators are eternally making contributions to the Tower of Babel.

In Antena’s “Manifesto for Ultratranslation,” it is stated: “The politics of translation make us ultraskeptical and ultracommitted.” As such, the discourse and dialectics surrounding this artform are in an ever-evolving state of being challenged, argued, and explained. In the following conversation, Blog Editor Xiao Yue Shan discusses her work in editing Chinese language translations with fellow translator Zuo Fei, touching on their separate values, priorities, and approaches.

Xiao Yue Shan: Translation is an intensely personal experience—perhaps the most transparent reflection of what occurs when idea is transmuted through the individual mind’s various channels. This is why we, as translators, are continually struck by our work’s mutating forms, its evolving methods, and continue to conversate with such intensity about our own logic; when one speaks of translation, one speaks of a way of seeing the world. When we were editing translations together, you wrote me a letter in response to some edits I sent on a final draft of some poems; in it, you stated that you believe in literal translation, in seeming opposition to my approach of preserving the ineffable by creating anew.

It’s interesting because we are both poets, and I’ve always assumed—presumptuously—that poets are all apart of the same passionate investigation, in which consciousness touches something and brings it to life, shaped in a precise and resolved concentration of words. In translation, there is no transposition of this consciousness, which is a singular encounter between the poet, their knowledge, and all that it reaches and contacts. So, the translator must take the place of the poet, and—with intelligence but without egoism—give the original poem something it can live with.

Essentially, there is a distinction between a poem’s components and its poetics. It seems to be a corrupt exchange should a text be translated word-for-word, when one acknowledges the multiple roles that words play in literature; they do not simply transmit meaning, but also voice, history, and music. Could you tell me why you work from a more literal approach?

Zuo Fei: I prefer literal translation to free translation simply because, in the time of science and technology, people believe translators should strictly follow the original text. By literal translation, I don’t mean word-for-word, which does not work for poetry in many cases; my intention is that we should adhere to the original work as much as we can, and put it into a target language according to our desires. That is to say, if translation is an impossible job, we try to increase the odds of it being possible. READ MORE…

All Literature Is Worth Investigating: An Interview with Translator Stefan Rusinov

June 21, 2021  |  in Interviews  |  by Andriana Hamas

All cultures are exciting, both for their achievements and failures, for their beauty and nastiness.

In 1999, almost 170 years after his birth, Bulgaria honored publisher Hristo G. Danov’s legacy by establishing national literary awards in his name. In 2021, Stefan Rusinov, a translator who isn’t afraid to ask the important questions about the essence of his trade, won Best Fiction Translator for multiple books he had worked on over the course of twenty-four months. In addition to these admirable recent endeavors in Chinese prose, he juggles his work at Sofia University and his tasks as a freelance interpreter. Our conversation highlights his current projects, the importance of honest answers, and the value of simply “hanging out” with writers.

Andriana Hamas (AH): I would like to begin by asking you about your Бележка под линия (Footnote) podcast, thanks to which you meet fellow translators and discuss “behind-the-scenes torments,” the decisions they eventually have to make, and their inevitable missteps or failures. What have you learned so far?

Stefan Rusinov (SR): I’ve learned a lot, which was really the selfish reason to start this project to begin with. Private conversations with other translators and several years of translating gradually made me realize how case-specific this activity is and that mastery comes rather from accumulating solved problems than from learning universal principles (not to underestimate translation theory). That’s why I wanted to create a space where we won’t so much muse over the nature of translation and other such abstract questions, but we would dig into the specifics, where translators would be put in the position of explaining their considerations and decisions to someone who doesn’t know their working language. Nine episodes on, I’m even more certain that discussing actual problems encountered by translators from all kinds of languages is an important way to understand this activity (and also a major way to pump up my own translation skills).

I’ve learned, or rather, I’ve confirmed, that uncertainty is part of the game, and it should be. I find it very hard to trust a confident translator. There are tons of problems we need to solve and tons of decisions we need to make and, to borrow Wolfgang Iser’s idea of interpretation, the mere existence of these cases means that we are bound to create a gap between the original and the translation. So, in a way, we are bad translators by default.

I also learned that in French unfuckable means “incomprehensible.” READ MORE…

Honoring the Art of Translation: Carolina Orloff

September 29, 2020  |  in Essays  |  by Carolina Orloff

There is so much of us in the language we inherit, the language we’re nursed in. Our mother tongue defines us, whether we like it or not.

As National Translation Month draws to a close, so does our four-part special feature on the subject—a series of first-hand, original essays by key players in the translation process: an author, a platform, a translator, a publisher. And since translating also means shifting coordinates, we made sure to hit four different corners of the world. Over the course of the past few days, we’ve brought you a Romanian poet, a Chinese online literary hub, and a Turkish translator, all at the very top of their game. Today, we wrap it up by traveling from Buenos Aires to Edinburgh with Carolina Orloff, co-founder and publishing director of the award-winning Charco Press (we figured the trip was worth postponing our usual “Translation Tuesday” column, back next week).

In this thoughtful, moving piece, Carolina masterfully intertwines personal experience with theory. She dives into the challenges of living between languages (she’s a longtime Argentinian expat in the UK), explaining how that has influenced her own views of translation and, more broadly, Charco’s publishing philosophy. From missing dulce de leche to musing about Benjamin, she covers almost as much ground here as she’s done throughout her life as a bona fide globetrotter.

Those who have insinuated that Menard devoted his life to writing a contemporary Quixote besmirch his illustrious memory. Pierre Menard did not want to compose another Quixote, which surely is easy enough—he wanted to compose the Quixote.

‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,’ Jorge Luis Borges

When I think about translation, I’m seized by a host of thoughts and emotions—some varying, some constant. It goes beyond the years I’ve spent studying and writing theory, or the fact that I’ve been living between languages (‘entre lenguas,’ to quote the extraordinary Sylvia Molloy) for more than half my life now: there is something within my matrix, my emotional framework, that is made of languages, of gestures from different cultures, different geographies. As is the case with many compatriots, I’m a second-generation Argentinian (most of the country’s indigenous population was wiped out by a nefarious ‘whitening’ campaign during the late 1800s); like many in my generation, I have also emigrated from that southern land. All my grandparents were foreigners, and I use this word with the utmost care and precision. My parents fed off that simultaneously strange and normalised state of living in Buenos Aires while immersed in the echoes of Russian, English, Yiddish, Polish, and Andalusian Spanish. They soaked up these acquired traditions and dressed them up in new meaning—a meaning that they could call their own and that could be freer, albeit loaded with so many other foreign codes. In sum, they were constantly translating.

I recall a conversation I had with a fellow student once, when I was at the University of York. His porteño accent was much stronger than mine. I was twenty years old and had been living in English for three. When I asked him when he’d last been to Argentina, he said nonchalantly that he had actually never ‘crossed the pond.’ His mother was from Buenos Aires and yes, he had been born there, but when he was just one or two years old, they had left for Sweden in search of political asylum. They had never returned. It was an epiphanic moment for me. And now that I am a mother, an Argentinian mother living in Scotland with a daughter born in Edinburgh, I can’t help but re-signify it. There is so much of us in the language we inherit, the language we’re nursed in. Our mother tongue defines us, whether we like it or not, and I feel that there is no satisfactory way of translating that identity; it can only be transmitted. READ MORE…

A Titan of Brazilian Literature: John Milton on José Bento Monteiro Lobato

March 18, 2020  |  in Interviews  |  by Shelly Bhoil

Lobato’s adaptations of Peter Pan and Don Quixote have become more so the works of Lobato than those of Barrie and Cervantes.

José Bento Monteiro Lobato (1882-1948) is one of Brazil’s most influential writers, a prolific translator, and the founder of Brazil’s first major publishing house. His lifelike characters have become an integral part of the Brazilian society, so much so that restaurants, coffee shops, wheat flour, or readymade cake packs in Brazil are named after Dona Benta, an elderly farm owner in Lobato’s fictional works. Despite the largeness of his influence and the progressive ideas he sought to bring in Brazil through his literary endeavors, however, Lobato has been posthumously accused of racism in his literary portrayal of black people. His work, Caçadas de Pedrinho, has especially come under scrutiny for calling Aunt Nastácia as a “coal-coloured monkey,” and he continually makes reference to her “thick lips.”

Professor John Milton’s recently launched book Um país se faz com traduções e tradutores: a importância da tradução e da adaptação na obra de Monteiro Lobato [A Country Made with Translations and Translators: The Importance of Translation and Adaptation in the Works of Monteiro Lobato] (2019) examines how Dona Benta’s character is instrumentalized by Lobato in his stories to express his criticism of the Catholic Church, the Spanish and Portuguese colonization of Latin America, and the dictatorship of Getúlio Vargas, among other socio-political practices of the times. In the following interview, Professor John Milton speaks about Lobato, a household name of Brazil, stemming from his long-term research on the author’s life and works.

Shelly Bhoil (SB): Monteiro Lobato’s famously said, “um país se faz com homens e livros” (a country is made with men and books). Tell us about Brazil’s first important publishing house, which was found by Lobato, and how it mobilized readership in Brazil? 

John Milton (JM): Lobato’s first publishing company was Monteiro Lobato & Cia., which he started in 1918, but it went bust from over-investment and economic problems in 1925. Then, together with partner Octalles Ferreira, he founded Companhia Editora Nacional. Both companies reached a huge public. Urupês (1918), stories about rural life in the backlands of the state of São Paulo, was enormously popular, and within two years went into six editions. Lobato quickly became the best-known contemporary author in Brazil. Dissatisfied with available works in Portuguese to read to his four children, he began writing works for children. In A Menina do Narizinho Arrebitado [The Girl with the Turned-up Nose] (1921), Lobato introduced his cast of children and dolls at the Sítio do Picapau Amarelo [Yellow Woodpecker Farm]. The first edition of Narizinho sold over fifty thousand copies, thirty thousand of which were distributed to schools in the state of São Paulo. By 1920, more than half of all the literary works published in Brazil were done so by Monteiro Lobato & Cia. And as late as 1941, a quarter of all books published in Brazil were produced by Companhia Editora Nacional. 

READ MORE…

Translating a Fundamental Spiritual Text: An Interview with Dr. Karl Brunnhölzl

January 2, 2020  |  in Interviews  |  by Chime Lama

I see no contradiction between the rigorous academic approach and the more intuitive and experiential approach of the Tibetan tradition.

The 2019 Khyentse Foundation Prize for Outstanding Translation was awarded to Dr. Karl Brunnhölzl for A Compendium of the Mahāyāna: Asaṅga’s Mahāyānasaṃgraha and Its Indian and Tibetan Commentaries (Shambhala Publications, 2018), a monumental three-volume work and the first complete English translation of the fourth century C.E. text. Originally written by a philosopher and spiritual teacher, it presents an extensive overview of the Yogācāra School of Mahāyāna Buddhism, which explores the nature of consciousness, existence, and spiritual practice.

Upon accepting the Khyentse Foundation Translation Prize, Dr. Brunnhölzl said, “I feel very honored and privileged to receive this award—more importantly though, the prize highlights the major significance of the entire Yogācāra tradition in general, as well as Asanga’s Mahāyānasaṃgraha, and specifically its commentarial tradition as being a major Indian Buddhist system of thought and practice that has been vastly influential over many hundreds of years in numerous countries. It is my wish that these volumes may be a small contribution toward Yogācāra receiving the attention and appreciation in the English-speaking world that it deserves.” 

In light of the new wealth of knowledge that Dr. Brunnhölzl has made accessible to English readers, and with the wish that it reaches knowledge-seekers new and old, I gladly share this most timely and opportune correspondence.  

Chime Lama (CL): Dr. Brunnhölzl, given that you were trained as a medical doctor, what made you shift your career path in favor of religious studies?

Karl Brunnhölzl (KB): Many people ask me that question, mostly because they find it strange to give up the well-respected, well-paid, and (mostly) beneficial profession of a physician in order to pursue something more “ethereal.” I became a Buddhist during my medical studies in 1983, and was even considering quitting to become a Buddhist translator, feeling that this was my true calling. However, my teacher gave me the good advice to finish medical school and study Buddhism afterwards, while having a solid financial footing. And so I did that for twenty years: working half the year as a doctor (in others’ clinics) and going to Nepal and India in pursuit of Buddhism for the other half. That proved to be a viable way of pursuing my religious studies, rather than having to quit due to lack of funding, like many others I know have had to do. READ MORE…

Translating Grief and Silence: Denise Newman on the Work of Naja Marie Aidt

December 18, 2019  |  in Interviews  |  by Nataliya Deleva

Translation is for me both stripping down and holding open to possibility.

Denise Newman is a poet and translator based in San Francisco. She has published four collections of poetry, and translated two novels by Inger Christensen from the Danish—The Painted Room and Azorno—as well as the short story collection, Baboon, by Naja Marie Aidt, which won the 2015 PEN Translation Prize, and most recently, Aidt’s memoir, When Death Takes Something From You Give It Back: Carl’s Book. The memoir, a semi-finalist for the National Book Awards and a finalist for the 2019 Kirkus Prize, is saturated with the trauma experienced by a mother grieving her son. Nataliya Deleva recently spoke with Newman about her approach to translating this deeply personal narrative across various cultural contexts, her proximity to the text and its author, and the role of rhythm in conveying silence on the page. 

Nataliya Deleva (ND): Translating is often co-creating, as it is not only the words and sentences of a text being translated, but also their meaning in a different cultural context. How did you find this process, considering this book is so painfully personal? Is grief universal?

Denise Newman (DN): Yes, the translation process touches on the mystery of language. I’ve often marveled at how translations of Bashō’s haikus seem to connect me directly to the moment of his observation. It doesn’t matter that the poem has traveled centuries, oceans, and languages. Maybe this is mostly possible when something is experienced and communicated directly, without any interference—then the original energy, which is outside the conditions of ordinary time and space, stays vital. I think this is what makes translating compelling; you have to go so deeply into a text that you depart from linear time and space. Working on Aidt’s book was hard, though, because of my own interference. She’s my friend, and my sorrow and concern for her sometimes got in the way, particularly while working on the passages that describe the last hours of Carl’s life. Her writing in this part is so direct, I felt as though I were actually present in the nightmare, and often needed to take breaks to clear my head. To get back to your question, I think all emotions are universal; we sense this when they are expressed directly, without any interference, as Aidt is able to do. Translating requires the ability to access those original emotions; they are what electrifies the language.

READ MORE…

The Troubling Biography of Corneliu M. Popescu

November 21, 2019  |  in Essays  |  by Andreea Scridon

Rhyming “outblaze” with “always” suggests an intuitive understanding of the English language.

In 1977, a massive earthquake erupted from sinister pith of the Vrancea Mountains, with a magnitude of 7.2 on the Richter Scale. The city of Bucharest partially crumbled on top of itself. In weight of damage, that meant destruction to approximately 33,000 buildings, wounds to 11,300 people, and death to 1,578 people—including actors, singers, film directors, writers . . . and a nineteen-year-old translator named Corneliu M. Popescu.

Born at the end of the 1950s, a decade that represented the height of communist censorship, Corneliu Popescu was ultimately swept away by the violent waves of the era he lived in. The sporty and sociable son of a lawyer, “Cornel” was offered a good education: while most people studied Russian in school, Cornel studied English with Ion Kleanthe Gheorghiu, who had been Romania’s ambassador in London, shortly before being imprisoned for anti-communist activities. Much of the boy’s short life seemed governed by the power of the moment, polymorphous in its guise as coincidence or destiny: perhaps subconsciously aware of the importance of now, he was effectively a savant, translating Treasure Island into Romanian at age ten. At around sixteen, enamored with the foamy intensity of Mihai Eminescu’s poetry, he began translating the poet, something only his parents and teachers knew about. Agreeing to postpone publication so that he could fully dedicate himself to preparing for medical school (a scholarship at Humboldt University had been lined up for him), Cornel edited his manuscript up to the day of his death: March 4, 1977. As he had arrived home from a tutoring session earlier than expected, the earthquake caught up to him at home. He was found in the arms of his mother the next day, amidst the rubble.

READ MORE…