In the Company of Dead Languages

Ola Wikander has written a book called "I döda språkets sällskap" (ie "In the Company of Dead Languages") which I am reading right now. One item of note that I have gleaned in this book: the world's first known named author is Enheduanna, a Sumerian woman, writing in 2300 BC. And the first grammar is a Sumerian one, written for speakers of Accadian, who needed to know Sumerian after conquering Sumeria and in the process taking on Sumerian culture (by the way, ancient Sumeria is located in the area we now know as Iraq, and one of the pieces of writing in Sumerian, a stele, talks about a horrible war, the worst known ever, in which hundreds of men took part! How times have changed, now we have hundreds of thousands).
I was interested in Wikander's book, since I've studied a number of dead languages myself over the years, under the tutaledge of Joe Voyles, a professor of historical (Indo-European) linguistics. If the language is dead and Germanic, I've done it. Old Saxon, Old Icelandic, Gothic, Old English...
Studying dead languages puts a perspective on the language issues of today. What we speak as English is a language that the writer of Beowulf never could have imagined, and Shakespeare would also be hard-put to understand our babbling away in modern American English. In five hundred years, the language we now call modern English will be something else. No amount of wishing otherwise will change the fact that English never was a pure and stable linguistic phenomenon, and it will continue to change, differentiate, and, most likely, become a classical dead language.
The language Beowulf spoke almost a thousand years ago is, except for a die-hard enthusiasts, is as dead as dead can be, hence the need for Seamus Heany's translation. In five hundred, six hundred, seven hundred years, students of Classical American English will be sweating over their dictionaries, trying to figure out what the heck we were writing about. Or if they managed to tranfer DVD technologies, what we were talking about.
The language ideation in the United States, what with the recent legislative action and the brouhaha about the National Anthem in Spanish, is a lost cause from the beginning. Our great-grandchildren will be speaking something else than the English we speak today anyway (just a quick glance at Lincoln's Gettysburg Address will bring to mind much change we have already encountered in American English over a mere 140 years).
On the other hand, English, even as it changes, is the language of success in this place and at this time, which is why I think that folks who intend to live here for the rest of their lives have an obligation to learn it, just as someone moving to Sweden ought to learn Swedish, or learn French in France, or Spanish in Argentina, or Chinese in China. But in the end, all language is a living process that is constantly changing, constantly adapting, and becomes something other than what we ourselves speak (or, rather, once we're gone and buried, have spoken). Then our children and children's children will have issues of their own with the language policies of the day.
Does anyone remember that English won over German as the language to be used in the United States by one vote? Certainly the dominance of German in the United States has changed from the 1780s to now, and the issue of whether the national language should be German has definitely died out, along with the large number of colonists who spoke it, though their great-great grandchildren live on speaking an English they would not recognize from their own era. The dominance of German as the second language spoken in the United States lasted for a long time, though, I must point out. Its place as the mother tongue of a great number of Americans did not end until 1960. By the 1970 census, Spanish had overtaken German for the first time. During the First World War, German speakers were encouraged (if that is the right word in this context, since laws were made and books were burned) to switch to English in church services, newspapers and book publishing, which was the beginning of the end of American-born native German language speakers. No one born now would ever imagine the huge presence German once had here in this country.
And a thousand years from now?
The American English that we speak will have vanished. As all the languages now being spoken will have mutated into different forms, different sounds, different expressions. (Even, maybe, Icelandic will change!)
It's inevitable.
Sumerian, anyone? Or Accadian?
Or for that matter, Beowulf? Chaucer?
Dead languages have much to say about the future of language.

Reading the World: Dan Wickett's E-Panel on Literary Translation

Read all about it here.

The Book of Hours / Libro de Horas

No exaggeration: this is one of the most beautiful books I have ever seen: Poems and paintings by one of Mexico's most original and accomplished artists, Alfredo Castaneda, translated by the greatest living translator of Mexican literature, Margaret Sayers Peden. But-- oh, this world of Philistines!---it does not have a US distributor. Margaret tells me it can only be purchased from Castaneda's gallery in New York, Mary-Anne Martin Fine Arts. It was published by Artes de Mexico and has a prologue by Alberto Ruy Sanchez. (Ruy Sanchez's essay on Oaxaca, by the way, appears in my anthology, Mexico: A Traveler's Literary Companion.) In the prologue, Ruy Sanchez writes,

The ritual of Alfredo Castaneda's Book of Hours is permeated with a modern, ironic smile, no less disturbing and profound than the questions he poses before the abyss of being. It includes poems of abounding love, of liberty, doubt, mystery, and astonishment. In its lines time blows like the wind, and the horizon speaks to us. Light literally grows brighter with each page of this volume, because it composes an illuminated space which, when drunk in by our eyes, lights our steps as we move forward through it. This Book of Hours is one of those unique works of art that inscribe their mark on time.

I couldn't have said it any better.

Global Wording

German translator Lee Chadeayne sent this link to a very fun, very quotable article from the Smithsonian Magazine.

Swedish Translation Fun at SASS

I have just returned from Oxford, Mississippi, home of Faulkner and the most recent conference of the Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Studies, which included a panel on Swedish translation put together by yours truly, moderated by Marilyn Blackwell and with additional panelists Johannes Göransson and Rochelle Wright.
Johannes discussed his translation of Aase Berg, and Rochelle her translation of Kerstin Ekman. A lively discussion ensued which addressed the entire spectrum of translation, such as word play, cultural context, what makes a "good" translation (ie readability versus accuracy) and Swedish peculiarities.
The never-ending question of readability versus accuaracy is one in which I will now add my two cents. I am all for readability first and foremost, with accuaracy an accessory to art but not its master. When I translate a work, I want the emotional impact of the original to resonate with the reader of the translation. If that is sacrificed to accuracy, art dissapears. We are not solely intellectual beings, but also emotional and spiritual ones, and these latter aspects of humankind are just as important to a work of art as the intellectual satisfaction. When folks ask how I see my work of translation, I call it "gut-to-gut" translation, meaning that the whole person must be included in the work of translation, whether as translator or as reader of translated literary works.
A work of translation cannot be entirely accurate, because the entire cultural context cannot be translated. If the reader understood the entire cultural context, they would also be reading the work in the original, since language is part of culture. At best, we translators are approximating the original as best we can into a new cultural context, and we must take the cultural resonances of the new language into account. A translation is a glimpse of another place, but cannot take the place of the original language. But translate we must, since we love the original so much that we do not want our own culture to miss out completely on the literature that we love. Without translation, our readers would never see the worlds that our authors have created.
Criticising a translation is like shooting fish in a barrel. There is always something to find that is not to the critic's liking, and we translators must develop a tough skin to withstand the withering critiques that are inevitable. There it is, that's life.
Back to translating now, hard workers in the field of literary transfer!

The main discussion list for Slavists often fields questions about which translations people recommend for course use. Lately, there has been a minor flurry of emotions over Tolstoy and War and Peace in general and, in particular, over a recent review of the new Anthony Briggs translation written by someone with no known knowledge of Russian.

Stephen Pearl, contributed an excellent extended comment, which I’m quoting below with his permission, that raises questions about the very question being asked. What do we mean when we ask for the “best” translation. Do we really understand our criteria? Having served on numerous translation prize juries, I’m not so sure we’ve reached any kind of consensus. Pearl’s mention of Oprah is a reference to the fact that she chose the Anna Karenina translation by the team of Pevear and Volokhonsky for her book club, thus giving them her powerful seal of approval and generating millions in sales. This is by way of introduction. Here’s what Mr. Pearl wrote:

In this interesting and provocative discussion of the merits of the various English translations of War and Peace, there seems to be a tendency to overlook the rubric under which it is taking place, namely: "The Best WAR & PEACE English translation of All Time". A British philosophical school which flourished about six or seven decades ago, whose leading light was Alfred Ayer ["Language , Truth and Logic"], held that the fact that a language allows certain questions to be formulated, does not mean that all possible questions, such as "What is Truth?", "What is Beauty", "What is the Sound of One Hand Clapping", "When did you stop beating your wife" and "Which is the best English translation of W&P of all time" ? "are necessarily meaningful or answerable; although they have certainly engaged philosophers in sterile wrangling down the ages.

Defining one's terms is crucial. In this case, there are two extreme, although not exhaustive or mutually exclusive, criteria. Do we mean by a "good" translation one that contains few errors of translation, or one that reads "well", i.e. smoothly and seamlessly in the target language, both - or none of the above?

A translation that is error free may be totally unreadable, and one that is a good read may be totally inaccurate. Fitzgerald's "Rubaiyat" of Omar Khayam is said to be riddled with "errors" and the same has been said of the King James version of the Bible, but they are both impressive works of literature.

The culture in which we currently operate - Oprah-rate? -is one where the word "loser" is just about the most opprobrious epithet going, where winning is "not the best thing, but the only thing", where "nice guys finish last", where being "numero uno" is "it" and so often determined by PR and "hype", where endless "Awards Ceremonies", which celebrate and boost the "Entertainment Industry", have themselves become popular entertainments in their own right, where a Texan bishop once declared that the people of Texas are "the churchgoingest and guntotingest people in the world", and where Oprah decrees which books shall be bought, although her writ may not extend quite as far as enforcing the actual reading of them. Indeed it is Oprah who is largely responsible for the anomalous fact that in a discussion of the competing claims of the different translations of War and Peace, such disproportionate attention is being paid to a translation team which has not actually produced one.

Among the numerous symptoms of this unslakeable public thirst for an authoritatively proclaimed victor ludorum is the The Heisman Trophy which is awarded annually to the the "best" college football player of the year, almost always to a quarterback or running back, whose glamorous and conspicuous functions are at least as different from those of their "mute, inglorious" team mates as the apples are from the oranges which we are taught not to compare. Also, the Young Artists Artists Award for instrumentalists, an award which nearly always goes to those musical counterparts of the quarterbacks and running backs - violinists and pianists. The pernicious and distorting logic of this suggests that the hapless trombonist is ipso facto a worse performer and a lower form of musical life.

One other distinction that runs the risk of being muffled is that, whoever the reviewer may be and wherever s[he] may be coming from, there is a printsipiyalniy difference between the point of reviewing a translation of a new or previously unknown work in order to bring it to the attention of English speaking readers and that of reviewing a retranslation of a classic. Essentially, a review of the former should be about the work itself and a review of the latter about the quality of the translation. A review of a translation of a classic by a reviewer who does not have the necessary linguistic qualifications ,or is not prepared to take the immense trouble of comparing the translation with the original, is at best a review of its readability, and cannot be a review of the accuracy of the translation, still less of the skill, ingenuity and inspiration with which that accuracy has been conveyed. Accuracy itself is only a necessary, but not a sufficient condition.

A reviewer who fails or is unable to evaluate the quality of the translation as such, is disqualified from making an informed judgment as to the winner of "The All Time Best Translation" Stakes; although the fact that the question can be formulated doesn't mean there is an answer - unless, of course, Oprah is asked to deliver the final verdict.

No Man's Land

A new German literary magazine emailed us with an announcement of their new project, No Man's Land. It's a a site for English translations of German writing, and they are hoping to build an online community of translators, writers, and readers. There will also be an internationally distributed print magazine.

The no man's land project marks the 10th anniversary of the Berlin literary "laboratory" and magazine lauter niemand (www.lauter-niemand.de). Held every Sunday, the lauter niemand open mike sessions have been a fixture of Berlin's alternative literary scene since 1996, leading to the discovery of young talents for the lauter niemand magazine.

UCSB Translation Conference, May 10-12

UC Santa Barbara is sponsoring a translation conference in May 2006. You can get their flyer in PDF format. It looks like a great conference - I wish I could go!

The panelists include Bei Dao, Larry Venuti, Haun Saussy, and Suzanne Jill Levine.

On translation and crime fiction

A reader sent me this link to Sarah Weinman's article Pen World Voices Festival: Taking Crime Fiction Seriously. In the middle of the article there is a fascinating bit about Larry Venuti, Henning Mankell, and Boris Akunin arguing about translation.

But it was only when an audience member asked about the author-translator relationship that the panel really got going. Though they didn’t exactly fight, the debate was spirited enough that it could have lasted for at least another hour. Essentially, Mankell voiced the opinion that a translator has to capture the author’s voice ("must convey a language that is mine,” in his words.) He’s rejected translations that, while letter-perfect, simply didn’t do that. Akunin agreed, saying that there were several candidates to translate his work into English but he chose Andrew Bromfield based on the sample he provided, not to mention his pedigree - fluent in Russian with a Russian wife. But Venuti, surprisingly, disagreed with the writers, essentially stating that a translation can only be one possible interpretation of the work in question and that there isn’t a “right” or “wrong” translation.

I have a feeling that Venuti would admit that bad or wrong translations exist. In fact, I wonder how many literary translators turned to translation because they read something that outraged them and thought, "Hey! I can do that better." The issue is, perhaps, "Better for what?" Better for a particular time, or audience; better for a desired impact or effect.

Anyway, after reading Weinman's article, I'm curious to read Akunin's crime novels!

Mexican Writer Bruno Estañol's New Book

Just posted on Madam Mayo about Bruno Estañol: The Collected Fiction, translated from the Spanish and with a preface by Eduardo Jiménez, which has been published by Floricanto Press. Here's the book's jacket text:

The narratives collected in this volume are mainly set in the State of Tabasco, during the turbulent time period running from the Mexican Revolution to the late 1950’s. In one sense we’re dealing with a dreamy, genteel, picturesque — though somewhat atavistic — world, in which the paddlewheel steamboat remains the preferred means of long-distance transportation, in which the townswomen wear ruffled organdy or tulle dresses while daintily promenading, parasols in hand, around the town square; where couples, young and old, dance on Sunday afternoons to the elegant melodies of pasodobles, danzones, tangos or boleros; and where the finest merchandise, ranging from the mundane to the exotic, arrives daily to the various commercial ports along the Tabascan coast, having been shipped there from the metropolises of New Orleans and Havana. On the other hand, it may also be a horrific, hostile and harsh world, where fierce tropical storms arise without warning, claiming the lives and fortunes of unsuspecting townspeople; where the jungle and the wild creatures within it habitually menace the fragile and vulnerable human civilizations erected in their midst; where frontier-style administration of law and order continuously makes a mockery of justice; and where the more talented and gifted individuals often find themselves molested or marginalized, trapped in a life of boredom, monotony, indolence and ennui. Occasionally, the author takes us to places outside the realm of tropical Mexico, staging some of his stories in New England, Germany, England, India, Palestine and Paris; yet he always remains faithful to his penchant for exposing both the beautiful and the sinister sides of humanity, while concurrently manifesting a keen sense of humor. Estañol’s skeptical, ironical and slightly philosophical brand of humor resonates with the work of such fellow Latin American writers as Juan José Arreola, Jorge Luis Borges, and Ernesto Sábato.

No problem and other problems

At this moment, I am in the midst of a Swedish book called Mei Wenti! Inget Problem! In other words, no problem, no problem! It is a discourse on how a Swedish woman fell in love with China, and how she learned to love Chinese. One thing that caught my eye was the expression No problem.
When I was in seventh grade, two expressions started sweeping the teenage set "No problemo" and "No way". Perhaps you, too, remember the phenomenon when it was new. To me it seems obvious that using "no problem" came into American English from Latin American Spanish, since the teens I knew were using it as a borrowed expression, even though the Hispanic population of Waukegan was lower than 3% at the time. There is no doubt in my mind that "Inget problem" is a borrowing from American English into Swedish. The amount of American English words and phrases that have become Swedified in the past 40 years is remarkable, and a number of studies and op-ed pieces have been written about this (the op-ed pieces ususally decry the deterioration of Swedish purity by these barbarous Americanisms, but the process continues unabated).
This brings me to the problems I referred to in the title of this posting. Once upon a time, in the area where Waukegan now stands, there was a Potowatomie village, and the language spoken there was replaced by French when the traders came in (and France claimed Illinois as part of New France). But French gave way to English as American settlers from the colonies moved in and after the Louisiana Purchase, Illinois became part of the United States. At the turon of the century, African-American people were moving in from the South to take advantage of the manufacturing work opportunities and white ethnics were moving in from Central and Southern Europe. There was a huge diversity of languages and dialects until the first American-born generation came into their own. When I was a small child, there were still a number of ethnic stores: Greek, Armenian, Swedish come to mind. These stores started to disappear during my teenage and college years, as the folks became more Americanized and fear of integrated schools drove many white ethnics out of Waukegan.
In the late 70s, a few Mexican families appeared in Waukegan and now the Hispanic population is over 50% in Waukegan proper. This is causing a great deal of tension between the remaining white and black population and the new immigrants, and a large part of the anxiety is language.
I was recently home for the Easter holidays, and I was able to experience some of this tension first hand. A number of seventh graders took it into their heads to march for Immigrant Rights and at the same time cut school on Maundy Thursday, which also happened to be one of the first warm and sunny days after a long winter. It seems to have been an idea the youngsters caught from the media, as there were no adults involved in the march. About 200 students wandered through the city, chanting in Spanish. A reporter tried to talk to them, but they did not understand his English. My brother-in-law, who saw this brewing, turned on the radio to the local talk station, and emotions were running high. One person called for a boycott of Waukegan to punish the "lawlessness". Another called Waukegan "a sewer". This prompted a number of calls by those defending Waukegan. Meanwhile, the police followed the kids at a distance, just to make sure that a riot did not break out, but refused to arrest the kids, as they were practicing first amendment rights. The march went on for three hours.
Waukegan has been the setting for a number of fatal clashes, so I thought it was good that the police did not attempt to aggrivate the situation. Nevertheless, I could understand many of the feelings running through the city that day. Since the English and Spanish speaking inhabitants of Waukegan are roughly equivalent, there is a power shift in culture and politics away from English and toward Spanish. Most of the storefronts in my sister's neighborhood have only Spanish signage, which alienates the English-speaking population and is making them feel like foreigners in their city. Many fear that Waukegan will cease to be part of the United States cultural sphere and will become "Mexico Norte". However, many of the kids of the immigrants, those who stayed in school that day, do speak English, just as the American-born children of earlier immigrants learned to do, and their parents are eagerly working toward American citizenship.
So there is a great deal of fear and anxiety in today's Waukegan, a place that has seen language shift three times in the past three hundred years. I believe that those who fear "Mexico Norte" must remember the past history of fears toward immigrants that this country has seen (including the "smelling like sauerkraut" Germans, the "dumb" Swedes, the Italians, Greeks, Armenians, and all the others who have come to this country for better opportunities). Maybe it really is a situation where we should say "No problemo". But language is a barrier, and in order to live and work together, people need to be able to communicate. We shall see how this plays out, but a start would be to have at least a small sign in English in the storefronts so that the English speakers know what is for sale. That's just my humble opinion. Who knows, they may find a new customer!

Mexican Writer Juan Villoro: Translators Take Note

I just posted something about Mexican writer Juan Villoro on my blog, "Madam Mayo". To read it, click here.

let's talk about YOUR "big but"

In order to avoid talking only about my own obsessions, I'd like to spotlight a different ALTA member each week, starting in May.

It would be great to interview other literary translators and hear about what they're working on. I'm inspired in part by another writer, Mark Pritchard, and his own series "What Are You Working On?" - which he started on the theory that everyone asks writers about the books they've already completed. And that's like having someone ask you about your ex, years after your painful breakup, when you'd really like to talk about the love of your life who you just met yesterday.

I have to say, too, that the best part of ALTA is hearing other people get deeply geeky and passionate about the technicalities of their projects and "their" poets or novelists. I'd love to see some of that discussion, that "conference hallway conversation", happen online.

So if you'd like to talk about your current translation projects, please email me! Or you can suggest a friend, if you're extremely modest, as translators tend to be.

If no one takes the bait, I'll start with newer ALTA members, chosen at random.

blah blah blah my project

tuesday, longest day ever
Originally uploaded by Liz Henry.

I'm deep in the final stages of my thesis project, so have not been posting as I should here. In early May I'll be done with my degree & back in the blogging saddle.

I could talk about "my project" all day long, which is why I have not written about it here. I'd never shut up again once I opened the floodgates!

In March I went to South by Southwest Interactive, the "creative computing" branch of the SXSW festival in Austin. While I was there I got to sneak into AWP's final hour, bought a lot of books, and saw lots of friends from ALTA at Marian Schwartz's backyard party! It was great.

While in Austin I also spent two full days at the Benson Latin American Collection, a splendid, splendid library. I could barely tear myself away! Working on... you guessed it... "my project".

The research for it now fills five large 3-ring binders. The anthology itself, a collection of poems from Latin American women published between 1880 and 1930, is 200 pages long with the Spanish and my English translations and introductions for each poet. There are 24 poets from 11 countries. I am including an appendix with all the women I had to leave out.

I could spend years researching this project and working on it and still not feel "done".

So far my favorite poets of this time period who are a bit off the beaten track (if the beaten track is Mistral, Storni, Agustini, and de Ibarbourou) are shaping up to be: Enriqueta Arvelo Larriva, María Luisa Milanés, and María Eugenia Vaz Ferreira. The others are wonderful too or I would not include them, of course.

A Trio of Mexican Writers

Thanks to Liz Henry, blogger extraordinaire, who not only started this blog, but was so encouraging to me about blogging, I have entered the blogging fray, as it were, with "Madam Mayo", a blog about many subjects, including literary translation. This evening's post is "A Trio of Mexican Writers"--- Araceli Ardon, Monica Lavin, and Ricardo Elizondo Elizondo. The latter's short story was translated by Canadian Geoff Hargreaves, who has also translated the work of many other Mexican writers, among them, Carmen Bullosa and Fabio Morabito.

National Public Radio Saturday April 1st

John Ydstie interviewed me for National Public Radio about Mexico: A Traveler's Literary Companion. The interview will be edited, so I don't yet know what will and will not make it on, but we did talk quite a bit about literary translation. It is scheduled to air on Saturday April 1st, and will also be posted on www.npr.org

PEN World Voices: The New York Festival of International Literature, April 25-30, 2006

Like many if not most literary translators, my curiosity about foreign literature long predated my first translation attempts. It was part of the whole package--the vast array of backdrops provided by the great, wide world, the languages they spoke, the paintings, music, and architecture they created, the literature they wrote. This curiosity is fundamental to human nature at its best, it seems to me, witness the expanded interest we've seen in our lifetime in foreign literature written in English. If the number of books published by writers from India, Canada, Ireland, Australia, Anglophone Africa and the Caribbean, to say nothing of the immigrants from elsewhere who write in English, is any measure, then this is a viable part of U.S. publishing and, I would argue, a strong argument in favor of publishing more foreign literature in translation.

If foreign literature, whether written in English or translated, is your own true love, too, then you might check out PEN World Voices: The New York Festival of International Literature, to be held at various venues in Manhattan. The list of writers participating is impressive and reflects this mingling I've mentioned, of original English and translated authors: Salman Rushdie and Boris Akunin; Roberto Calasso and Nadine Gordimer; Huang Xiang and Chinua Achebe, and many many more.

I attended the festival last year, and although the larger, higher-profile events can be worthwhile, the best ones are more intimate, just two or three writers in conversation, or a reading at a bar. Demand is high for the big names, so be sure to sign up in advance and be prepared for lines, but if you go, I think you'll be glad you did. PEN is now steadily updating its information on the event at its website: http://www.pen.org/

One caveat. Last year being the first time PEN attempted this, they did not do a good job of crediting translators. It was the classic case of me scratching my head trying to figure out what had and hadn't been written in English originally. The PEN Translation Committee was painfully aware of the problem at the time and vowed to improve the situation this year. I won't be able to attend this time, but if any of you do, I'd be interested to hear what improvements they've made for the translators.

Mexico: A Traveler's Literary Companion

MEXICO, the latest in the Whereabouts Press "Traveler's Literary Companion" series is out.

"This is a book to throw in a suitcase or mochila (backpack) on the way to Mexico or just settling into a favorite patio chair. It will open your eyes, fill you with pleasure and render our perennial vecinos a little less distante."
--- Los Angeles Times (review by Tony Cohan, author of Mexican Days)

"A banquet of pieces that reveal Mexico in all its infinite variety, its splendid geography, its luminous peoples. What a treat!"
--- Margaret Sayers Peden, leading literary translator and editor, Mexican Writers on Writing


Here's the jacket text:

Mexico has long been the top travel destination for Americans. But until now, there has not been such a panoramic vision of Mexico offered by some of Mexico's finest contemporary writers of fiction and literary prose. Here are writings--- many translated for the first time--- that bring you to the people of the beaches, the deserts, jungles, mountains, and mega-cities. The voices are rich and diverse, enthralling, and strange. These writings shatter stereotypes as they provide a rollicking journey from the Pacific to the Gulf, from Yucatán to the U.S.-Mexico border, from humble ranchos to a fabulous mountain-top castle.

Contributors include rising stars as well as many of Mexico's best-known writers, including Araceli Ardon, Ines Arredondo, Agustin Cadena, Julieta Campos, Rosario Castellanos, Martha Cerda, Ricardo Elizondo Elizondo, Laura Esquivel, Bruno Estanol, Carlos Fuentes, Jesus Gardea, Raymundo Hernandez-Gil, Monica Lavin, Guadalupe Loaeza, Angeles Mastretta, C.M. Mayo, Raul Mejia, Carlos Monsivais, Pedro Angel Palou, Fernando del Paso, Daniel Reveles, Alberto Ruy Sánchez, Ilan Stavans, and Juan Villoro.

Translators include Myralyn F. Allgood, Leland H. Chambers, Philip Garrison, Daryl Hague, Geoff Hargreaves, Eduardo Jimenez, Carl I. Jubran, John Kraniauskas, Stephen Lytle, Alfred MacAdam, C.M. Mayo, Harry Morales, Mark Schafer, Daniel Shapiro, Amy Schildhouse Greenberg, and Cynthia Steele.

The editor, C.M. Mayo, is yours truly.

Whereabouts Press, founded in 1994, is dedicated to publishing books that bring a greater understanding of peoples and cultures through literature. With its inauguration, it started the Literary Traveler's Companion Series, of which Mexico is the twelfth.

Mexico: A Traveler's Literary Companion
Trade paperback original: Travel / Fiction: 5 x 7 1/4, 256 pp., $14.95
ISBN 1-883513-15-4
Available from fine bookstores throughout the USA and also in many English language bookshops in Mexico. It is also available from all major on-line booksellers including ww.amazon.com/ and www.longitudebooks.com/ and www.booksense.com

WHEREABOUTS PRESS1111 8th St, Suite D, Berkeley CA 94710-1455tel (510) 527-8280 / fax (510) 527-8780 www.whereaboutspress.com

Read more at www.cmmayo.com Includes cover, table of contents, excerpts, Q&A, and extensive translator bios.

Indiana Review Accepting Translations

At AWP's bookfair in Austin, Texas, I happened by the table of Indiana Review. The editor advised me that indeed, they are very happy to consider translations. For more information check out the submissions guidelines on their webpage:
http://www.indiana.edu/~inreview/general/guidelines.html

Panels flew in and a good conference is expected

This month I was working hard as host committee chair fielding an incredible amount of panel proposals. We received many more panel suggestions than we have slots, so our committee meeting this coming Tuesday will be one of blood, sweat and tears. Shortly after that, moderators should be getting letters, though some on-topic panels have already been accepted. If you have not heard that your panel is accepted by April 5, do contact me, as you should have heard by then.
The panels arriving this year are incredibly varied, interesting and even entertaining. The list will be published in the upcoming April newsletter, and I encourage you to read through them and see how remarkable the variation is. Many proposals have come from folks who have not yet attended an ALTA conference.
SOOOOO, for those not yet in the know,
there are NO PAPERS READ on the panels. TALKS ONLY. Which means talks.
Those of you who have never attended an ALTA conference before may be surprised at this, especially as academics in the humanities are known for reading papers at other conferences, such as the MLA. Luckily, no one at ALTA is trying to impress (ok, maybe we are, but secondary literature is put aside for the weekend anyway). I know for a fact that those who were reading papers last year had to brave the not-so-subtle muttering at the back of the room for breaking this rule. And remember, many ALTA members, such as your humble host committee chair, are recovering academics, ie, freelancers, and so have gravitated to speaking Human again. (Humor, tenured folks, humor!)
And for first-timers, there is an early morning presentation prior to the official start of panels, in order to break you in gently to the ways of ALTA. I recommend you attend. The big mucky mucks are quite friendly and helpful.
Really and truly.
Since this is such an important tradition in ALTA, and since the moderators who have not received letters will be getting them very soon, do help your moderator out by not having that sheaf of paper to shuffle. (A notecard or two is fine.)

Translating gendered language

Philip Balma's article "Passing through Language(s)" in the latest issue of Translation Review was an excellent view into the process of translation. Balma takes the reader through the poem "Solo solo solo" [Only only only] by Edith Bruck. (By the way, it's a beautiful poem, and you can order copies of Translation Review through the ALTA web site or when you become a member of ALTA.)

I especially enjoyed Balma's explanation of the gender-related subtleties of the poem. The narrative voice, in Italian, has strongly gendered implications, a definitely female vision of the speaking self. This gendered vision was difficult to translate. He points out places where the speaker addresses herself directly, and also that the title, while it has intentional ambiguity, does not mean "alone alone alone" or "lonely lonely lonely" because the adjective would be masculine and singular.

He says, "Upon completing a rough draft of this translation of "Solo solo solo" I was faced with the fact that I had not been able to transfer any textual evidence of the speaker as a woman. In truth, I don't expect I will ever find a way to convey this notion effectively without compromising the integrity of the translation." This is a very difficult issue. Balma adds, "The only other choice I made in hopes of clarifying the femininity of the speaker was perhaps too subtle to achieve its purpose." From the lines "un colore/come un altro/non la stella/da cucire sul cappotto" Balma arrived at "a color/like any other/not the star/to sew on my coat" by choosing the more active form of "to sew" over "to be sewn", with the assumption that the (woman's) voice spoke of who would be likely to do the sewing.

In my own translation I swing very slightly to the side of inserting extra signifiers into the poem in exactly this type of situation, where gender is an important factor in the poem, and leaving it out fails to convey crucial information to the reader. I don't think this makes the poem a Lowellian "Imitation" any more than leaving gender out does - if it is done well.

We can live with them just fine, thanks

Here's an article about a translator who challenged The New Yorker to include his name in an article about the author he's been translating from Norwegian into English. They quoted Lyngstad's translations in their lengthy article... and then said that including his name would make the article too "cluttered".  The quotes didn't seem to clutter anything... so why would citing the translator who wrote the words?

Apparently some NY editors need to be brought up to speed, because it's not okay to pretend that translation just happens by some magic alchemical process. And maybe some of those editors missed reading "The Translation Wars", a long article by David Remnick, the New Yorker's editor-in-chief, on Russian translator Constance Garnett.

Thanks to Lucas Klein for passing this along to ALTA... and to Liz Andrews for providing the contact info for translators and authors to write to The New Yorker in protest:

Letters should be sent to themail@newyorker.com or by fax to (212)286-5047,
and should include the sender's name, address and daytime phone number.

J. Peder Zane's article ends with a somewhat weak statement, "All of which reminds us of the central paradox of the relationship between readers and translators: We can't live with them, and we can't live without them."  We don't have to live with them - we just have to not erase their existence, and give them credit for their work. Surely it's not *that* hard to do. 

technorati tags: translation, literary translation, authorship, translating, citation

Frivolous and funny

This is extremely silly... and fun... I was reading over a role-playing game book, a satire of sexist role-playing games, called Macho Women With Guns. It's a send-up of the ways that female characters in gaming are treated - a very funny book by Greg Porter, who I note is also the author of "Black Death", an excellent strategy board game in which everyone plays different medieval plagues and tries to kill the entire population of Europe.

What does this have to do with translation? Well, I noticed in the introduction to Macho Women With Guns, there's a boastful note:

How To Say It

Macho Women With Guns is published in a number of languages, which says something about universal tastes in gaming, I suppose. If you wake up in some strange country with a few local currency units in your pocket, and have a hankering to buy a game, ask for:

English - Macho Women with Guns
Etruscan - Ampuial.tur.lupulal
Finnish - Aseistetut Machonaiset
French - Nanas Macho et Chargées
German - Machoweiber mit dicken Kanonen
Irish - Mna Fearamhlacht le Gunnai
Italian - Maschiacces Armate Pesantemente
Icelandic - Hressar Stelpur med Byssur
Klingon - b'pu' yoH qeng HIchpu'
Norwegian - Toffe Damer med Skytevapen
Ruritanian - Muldr Deina gam Bangibangy
Russian - Muzhestvyenniye zhenshchini s'arudiyami
Spanish - Amazonas con Pistolas
Swedish - Machokvinnor med Vapen

*Both the designer and BTRC disavow all responsibility for faux pas, bodily harm, or extended incarceration as a result of actually using these translations.

technorati tags: translation, humor, mistranslation, literary translation, gaming, rpgs

ALTA News

Hello, this message is from Jessie Dickey, secretary of the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA). From time to time I will be passing along bits and pieces of information which I hope will be of interest to translators and non-translators alike. The following are a couple of such items:

Item No. 1:
29th Annual ALTA Conference
Bellevue, Washington
October 18-21, 2006
www.literarytranslator.org/conference.html

Item No. 2:
ALTA Travel Fellowship Award
http://www.blogger.com/www.literarytranslators.org/grants.html.
The ALTA Travel Fellowship Award is for beginning (unpublished or lightly published) translators. We offer fellowships for travel to the annual ALTA Conference held each autumn, which features an event of readings by the invited fellows. If you would like to apply for an ALTA Travel Fellowship, send a cover letter stating your desire to attend the conference, a CV, and no more than ten double-spaced pages of translation (translation into English), accompanied by the original text, to:
Jessie Dickey
ALTA Travel Fellowship Award
c/o The University of Texas at Dallas
P. O. Box 830688 – JO51
Richardson, TX 75083-0688
The deadline to apply for a travel fellowship is May 15, 2006.

Thanks, until next time.

Navajo Literature

I was pleasantly surprised to receive a lengthy mail on the state of Navajo literature in response to my earlier blog on the subject "Grammar is Fun." Simon D. Tapaha wrote to inform me that Navajo literature is alive and well, and I herewith pass on his suggestions for understanding Navajo culture via Navajo people themselves.
Irvin Morris has written a work called "From the Glittering World" which includes traditional Navajo stories. Poet Luci Tapahonso has also written a body of work from the Navajo world view.
Simon encourages us: "Reading Native culture is not black and white. We have special significance for everything we do. To understand these significances one has to have some knowledge of the respective language the literature is coming from. Read Native cultures with an open mind, patience and sensitivity."
Simon has also recommended a look at the book "Indigenizing the Academy" by Angela Cavender Wilson and Devon Abbott Mihesuah for those who are interested in Native and non-Native academic interaction.
My thanks to Simon for putting me in touch with where to begin with Navajo literature.

First Carnival of Blog Translation

Welcome to the first Carnival of Blog Translation! And thank you very much for being the first bold translators to participate. Anyone I've left out, or anyone who's a day late, I'll add you if you email me as soon as possible. Now let's dive in !


Tatyana Epstein, in collaboration with Steve, has translated a short story by Leah Lubomirsky from Russian to English here on her LiveJournal. The comments from readers are in Russian and English, as well.

Bev Trayner, of Em duas línguas, and João Vasconcelos Costa, of Reformar a Educão Suuperior - Apontamentos, translated each others' posts, in Portuguese and English. Bev's "Pedagogy of Laughter" translates João's Pedagogia de Riso. João's Quem gosta de rir gosta de viver translates Bev's Lovers of laughter, lovers of life.

Regina Nabais, a blogger on intersections between writing, education, language, politics, and technology, has translated "A Difference Goes Multilingual", by Darren Kuropatwa, from English into Portuguese, here on her blog, Polikê. I like how she put each paragraph of the blog posts side by side for easy comparison. I don't know Portuguese, but could follow it, and was interested to see that "cut and paste" was translated "corta-cola".

Chris Waiglname of Diacritiques has translated a post by Ed Felten's blog, Freedom to Tinker, "Analog Hole Bill Would Impose a Secret Law": from English to French. Ed blogs on law, public policy, technology, and freedom of information, and is a professor of Computer Science and Public Policy at Princeton University.

Stuart Mudie of Blethers.com has translated a post by mobile tech and high-tech-lifestyle blogger Pedro Jorge, "NFC en el 3GSM". I still don't know how to translate 3GSM from acronymese to any other language, but Pedro's post is about mobile phones and how they can communicate with other electronic devices through a technique called NFC or "near field communication". Read Stuart or Pedro to learn more about that - it's quite intriguing.

Liz Henry (that's me) translated "Primera persona del singular del futuro imperfecto" by Hester Prynne of La letra escarlata, and the translation is over here on Composite.

This is cheating in a way, but I will count Hans Persson's translation of the call for submissions - after all, it was a post on this blog, and he translated it into Swedish. "Trendoffice", a journalist and interior designer, also translated the call for carnival entries into Bulgarian, on her ad-speckled blog; a good example of someone using a multilingual blog for business purposes.

What a fascinating variety of blog styles, subjects, and languages! We have fiction from Leah, personal memoir from Hester Prynne, pedagogy and the philosophy of laughter from Bev and Joao, speculations on mulitlingual education from Darren, legal issues by Ed Felton, and technology and translation from Pedro. Russian, French, English, Portuguese, Swedish, Bulgarian, and Spanish are represented.

I found it significant that most of the active participants came to this via Bev Trayner's blog, Em duas línguas. She's clearly a catalyst for action, which is a good thing since she has agreed to host the second Carnival of Blog Translation in March!

British recommendations of foreign books

Carol O'Sullivan recently posted a pointer on the British Council for Literary Translation listserv about a British blog effort:

"Guardian Culture Vulture blog has been running a monthly series of calls for recommendations of foreign books which is interesting to scroll through and maybe contribute to; I think they have looked at Polish and Czech literature so far. Archived posts can be found at http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/culturevulture/."

The current post, "Czech In: World literature tour," is by Sarah Crown, who describes a tidal wave of response to her previous post on Polish literature.

It will be interesting to see when she first ventures outside the EU.

What they're saying

Non-bloggity ALTA members might be interested to look over here on Technorati, a search engine that references blog posts. Take a look: right now, people are noticing the idea of the Carnival of Blog Translation, and they seem to like it a lot. I hope we get a lot of participants!

I especially noticed D. Karopatwa's post on his education/blogging/math blog "A Difference". His posts about using blogs in the classroom are so good, I'm going to have to make time to go back and read all his archives.

Well, anyway, we have a lot of interest right now in the blogosphere! How exciting! And I think that's thanks to a nice mention by languagehat.

Carnival of Blog Translation

Announcing the first Carnival of Blog Translation! Tuesday, Feb. 28th, 2006!

On the day of the Carnival, a participant translates one post by another blogger, and posts it on her own blog with a link to the original. She would need to email me, or post in the comments right here, and I'll compile one big post on the day of the Carnival with links to all the participants.

You can translate any blog entry that was posted in the month of February 2006. It can be your own blog entry, if you like.

From participants I need:

your name
name of your blog
your blog URL
post title in target language

name of blog you're translating
name of person you're translating
that URL
the post title in the source language

You should get permission from the person you're translating to post your translation of their work. I would also suggest that you might introduce your translation for the target-language audience, and provide some context if you can.

A Blog Carnival is sort of like a travelling signpost that points to a bunch of magazine articles. It is a post that contains links to other posts written especially on a particular theme. I'll host it this month, and next month will hand it off to another host. The content will not appear here; only links to that content!

If you're looking for a blog in a particular language, try searching on Technorati, a useful blog search engine.

This idea came from a discussion on Bev Traynor's blog and further discussion of bilingual blogging and tagging at BlogHer. I'm excited about the idea and its possibilities!

*** Rebecca Mckay points out that the "Translation Carnival" is a graduate student conference happening at University of Iowa in April. Here's some information on the U. of Iowa Translation Carnival; it sounds like a great event!

Carnival of Translation

(This was the wrong URL - and the correct one is http://literarytranslators.blogspot.com/2006/02/carnival-of-blog-translation.html.

Click on over to it! Sorry for the confusion.

J.M. Coetzee on translation into various languages

A fascinating article by J.M. Coetzee on being translated into various languages. Thanks to Washington DC poet and translator Yvette Neisser Moreno for this link to the Australian News:
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,17924843%5E5001986,00.html

One book but which language?

I wanted to bring out more thoughts around Liz's essay on One City, One Book. This city-wide reading idea has been used in Seattle for some time, and I don't think that the availability of Spanish was an issue, though I could be wrong. However, in our town, Spanish is not the second language. Instead, the language with the most speakers after English is Chinese. Our voting registration information is in English and Chinese. When you land at Sea-Tac airport, the languages on the subway train to the baggage claim have been English, Japanese and Chinese for decades, with later addition of Russian. Spanish is growing here, as everywhere in the United States, but unlike California, Seattle is more an Asian city than a Hispanic one. So if the One City, One Book folks here were thinking of the availability of a language, Spanish would not necessarily have been the first language in the running.
This brought my thoughts to the rise of Spanish as the de-facto second language in the United States in general, and what that means for speakers of other languages besides English and Spanish. As I receive panel proposals for the ALTA conference, it seems that at times the proposer assumes that I know Spanish, which, alas, is not the case. (Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic, German, French, some Hungarian, some Hebrew, some Yiddish and now some Chinese is frankly all I can, and most likely will muster in this lifetime, though our exchange student is pushing me to learn some Vietnamese in exchange for some Latin). My hometown of Waukegan is now about 40% Spanish-speaking, and at times when home on a visit, I have been greeted in Spanish, a development during the past decade which initially surprised me, but now is a fact of Waukegani life. My reactions to this confuse me, since I love languages and have been eagerly learning them all my life. I surmise that it is this assumption that I should/must/ought to know Spanish that is getting under my skin a bit. Well, should it? Or should I learn enough Spanish to get along with the other folks in the town in which I was born? Maybe I should...but for now I am sticking to Chinese. Does that make me racist? Does it? Would it make me racist in Waukegan or California but not in Seattle? Inquiring minds want to know.
So, one book, one city, which language -- and here in Seattle, should it be Chinese?

Tameme's all new website www.tameme.org

Tameme, the bilingual (English/Spanish) journal of new writing from North America (Canada, the U.S., and Mexico) is coming back as a chapbook publisher. Our first title in the Tameme Chabooks ~ Cuadernos series will be a short story by Mexican writer Agustin Cadena, forthcoming this July. In March -- for the Associated Writing Programs conference bookfair -- we will have a "call for submissions" flyer at our table. So please stop by. And have a look at the all new wesbite, same URL, www.tameme.org which has a great links page. And, by the way, if you have any suggestions for more links, please do let us know.

One city, one book: two languages

My San Francisco Bay Area town of around 90,000 people is declaring a "One city, one book" month. The librarians and the city council came up with a plan, and a list of possible books, but then scrapped it, realizing they had not invited input from the community. Last night I went to the first committee meeting, as one of around 8 "community members" to set the qualities we wanted to see in our One Book.

The central idea of the program is to get people in town talking with each other across normal social barriers. I've seen Harry Potter function that way; strangers see each other reading it, and talk to each other at the grocery store or train station. My town is said to be around 35-40% Latino, though I suspect the numbers are substantially higher if you include the unincorporated Fair Oaks neighborhood on the other side of the tracks. I'd set it more at 45%. Language and class are the barriers that divide our town. I put myself forward for this meeting primarily because I wanted to argue strongly that the book should be available in Spanish and English. I expected to meet resistance to this idea.

Our committee brainstormed a list of qualities for the One Book. (Doesn't it sound like Lord of the Rings... One book to rule them all, one book to bind them!) We were a committee of all white women, and I'd say all pretty upper class; and one latina librarian. To my (pleased) surprised, nearly everyone voted for "language accessibility" as their top priority; then "high interest and relevance to the community", then, third, "crossing age lines." After a while and more discussion, I finally said, "So, now, does that mean that we are absolutely ruling out any book that isn't available in Spanish?" And there was a long uncomfortable silence...

People talked the talk, and voted the vote, but when it comes down to it, I am worried that a few weeks from now when we come back with our lists of suggested books, about 90% of them will be chosen from whatever books in English that people like best. Are they going to take the time to narrow their field first, or to look up whether a book is available in translation? Probably not. But that's exactly the kind of effort it takes. In fact I think I'm about to see in action the way that the road to hell is paved with good intentions... And in my own head I had a tiny voice saying, "Put forth your friend's novel, it fits the other criteria, not available in Spanish, but think what a sales boost it would be for her book..." Hell indeed! And of course I won't do that.

Well, my point is, I would love suggestions. I thought of popular authors like Julia Álvarez but my top choice so far is Claribel Alegria and Darwin Flakoll's "Cenizas de Izalco/Ashes of Izalco" because it's cool, it's compelling, it's short, and it would tie in well for our heavily Salvadorean immigrant population, and it would give the anglos a little kick in the pants with Salvadorean history, but also it wouldn't be too heavy and disturbing as it's about difficult history from 1930 (rather than about something more recent). I have to go read it while thinking "Would a 13-14 year old possibly read this..." And then I'd like to look at books translated by ALTA members, and see if something jumps out as the perfect choice. Suggestions, anyone?

What to do with Latvian?

Latvian, the native language of my poet friend Dagny in Riga, is a language called "of limited diffusion". Finding good translators from Latvian to English would be a daunting task, and Dagny had a deadline. She was giving a reading in Croatia, and only had her poems available in Latvian and French. Could I help her out, since I was a translator? Now, Dagny works as a translator and is aware that it is best to have someone speaking Latvian do the translation, but the clock was ticking.
I did not want to leave my friend in the lurch, and she had thoughtfully provided the French translation as well as her sketchy English literal rendition. Yikes! What to do? I did not know if I could even find a Latvian translator who would translate her poetry for the usual fee for poetry (ie., nothing), and she really wanted to have me do the job. So, I did the best I could. I wasn't translating, I don't know Latvian and although I read French fairly well, it is my fourth language and not one I translate from. I took the English word-by-word translation provided by the poet, read the French for the feeling and emotion that the poet was trying to convey, and made it into the most poetic English that I could muster.
Luckily, my friend was happy with my rendition and her reading in Croatia went over well. Whew! But now what to do if she has a complete collection coming?
One of the ALTA panel proposals which has crossed my desk this month will address the issue of translating languages that are of limited diffusion and the various ways that authors, translators and co-translators have worked together in order to provide a English language work of literature. I am looking forward to attending this panel already, just to see how others have come to a solution for languages having limited numbers of literary translators devoting themselves to it. How do they manage? How is literary quality assured? How do you know? I'm going to find out!

Yes, Grammar is Fun

When I am not translating from Swedish, I have a normal life focused around kids, cats and charitable works. One program which I participate in is called Futures for Children, where I am able to mentor a child on the Navajo reservation. Now of course, with that degree in historical linguistics in my background, the first things I acquired to enable me to be a better mentor were a dictionary and an elementary language text in Navajo, the excellent Dine Bizaad by Irvy W. Goossen.
I know not everyone reads grammar for fun, but I do. When I open the covers, I am in another world, one where the constructs of daily life as I know it disappear, and another world is glimpsed without even needing an airplane ticket. I began to wonder, as I delved into the spoken ways of the Navajo language, why those non-Natives of us in the United States and Canada are often so unaware of the Native languages which have been spoken here for millenia.
And from there I speculated: where are the literary works in Navajo? Is there a Native Navajo literature being created right now? And for that matter, how do we literati read Native cultures here? Besides some New Age believers who have appropriated Native religion, where is the general knowledge of the Native world view in our education and our bookshelves?
I began to think back to Waukegan, my hometown with a Potawatomi name. Where were the Potawatomis in our city, in our schools, in our world view? I began to research the issue and found out that the Potawatomis were exiled from Waukegan to Wisconsin in 1832 after the Black Hawk War, even though the Potawatomi people had sided with the Americans and tried to prevent the outbreak of this war in Eastern Illinois. So, one hundred and fifty-odd years later, the only Potawatomi word I learned in school was the name of my hometown, and no one living there knew where the Potawatomi people who had inhabited Waukegan had gone or why they were no longer in the place they had called home for centuries.
So, spending the week reading a Navajo grammar instruction book brought me back to the larger issues of literature and life and my place in the stream of peoples, languages, ideas and names. I might even become a better translator for it.

story quilts and language lessons

Perhaps tangential to literary translation, but so many people I met at ALTA are language teachers, so it seems relevant! I love this site, Los hilos de la vida, which shows a collection of story quilts made by some women learning English as a Second Language. They tell the story in Spanish and English, and then planned and made their quilts together.

If you're in Northern California you can go to Boonville and check out their show at the local community center. But the blog is just great, with nice photos, and the stories in Spanish and English.

SF in Spanish

I got this list of links for science fiction in Spanish from Sue Burke of Broad Universe, and they look like great places to get new SF stories, if anyone's looking:

...there are a variety of Spanish-language e-zines
available. You can get a good listing of them at E-Fandom:
http://www.othlo.com/e-fandom/ezines/fantasiacf.htm

I especially recommend the Argentinean e-zine Axxon:
http://axxon.com.ar/axxon.htm

For general news and reviews about the genre in Spain, visit:
http://www.bibliopolis.org/

I learned from Sue that there is a genre in Spain called "cape and beret" which uses elements of folk tales: "ghosts, curses, apparitions, ogres, witches, and demons".

I can't wait to check out Axxon, which seems very slick.

Canadian/Caribbean to Chinese; Australian/US to Hebrew (or not)

I came across an interesting post and comment thread today on Nalo Hopkinson's blog. Two of her science fiction novels, Brown Girl in the Ring and Midnight Robber are going to be translated into Chinese, and there was some discussion of how the creoles in the book will be handled - including a "mashup of Trinidadian and Jamaican".

Comments in this post let me to another sf writer's blog, where Justine Larbalestier discusses (with some disappointment and puzzlement) the fact that an Israeli literary agent said her novel was untranslatable into Hebrew:

So far, the book has sold to Taiwan, France and Thailand. I confess I have been wondering how those translations were going to get around the linguistic play in the book between Australian and USian English. Especially as I don’t speak any of those languages and don’t know much about them. Didi reckons a French translation could make use of Quebecois French.

I thought that ALTA readers might find it interesting to jump into one of those discussions! Especially anyone translating into/from Chinese, Hebrew, dialect, or creoles...

Article on translation blogs; the global blogosphere

The Austin Area Translators and Interpreters Association mentioned this blog in its January newsletter, downloadable here as a PDF file. In the article, on page 5, Frank Dietz explains many crucial elements of blogging in a few informative paragraphs. He points out that you can search blogs on Technorati, a search engine specializing in blogs and news; it's the place to look if you want to know what people are saying this very minute, ahead of any other news media, all over the world.

He also points out that blogs are easy to start -- you can have a free one in 5 minutes if you go to blogger.com -- yet difficult to keep up, as you have to update it regularly or it fades from view.

The AATIA web site looks great and I love how their newsletters are freely available.

Dietz's article highlights the Global Voices site, which has been a useful resource for me. Global Voices tries to monitor and report on the international blogosphere. I've been developing a list of spanish-speaking women bloggers from the Americas (Mostly Latin American, but I want to include Chicana/Latina bloggers in the US/Canada too.) Anyway, Global Voices has been useful for that attempt, and so has Technorati. I'll talk more about this in another post.

UNESCO Index Translationum update 2006

I get occasional updates from the FIT website, in particular about UNESCO's Index Translationum, which I've found an intriguing reference, if not always what I need (what source ever is?). Today I received the announcement below about their latest update. When you have a moment, it's worth checking out to see how well it suits your needs:

We are glad to inform you that the first update of the world translation bibliography of Index Translationum for the year 2006, is now on line (www.unesco.org/culture/translationum) featuring some 40,000 new entries from the following countries: Albania (2004)*, Algeria (2003), Belarus (1997, 1998), Brazil (2004), Bulgaria (2003), Germany (1989, 2004), Hungary (1993, 1997, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003), India (2003), Indonesia (2003), Kuwait (2003, 2004), Mauritius (2004), Netherlands (2004), Nigeria (2004), Oman (2002), Poland (2003), Rwanda (2004), Saudi Arabia (2003, 2004), Spain (2004), Syrian Arab Republic (2002, 2003), Tunisia (2003), United Arab Emirates (2001, 2002, 2003).
* The dates here mentioned generally correspond to the year of issue of the listed publications.
Created in 1932, available free of charge on line and updated three times yearly, the on line edition of Index Translationum contains some 1,600,000 references (from 1979 to now) on all subjects: literature, social sciences, science, biology, art and history. The references registered before 1979 can be found in the printed editions of the Index Translationum, available in all national depository libraries and at UNESCO library in Paris. Information: index@unesco.org <mailto:index@unesco.org>
Nous avons le plaisir de vous informer que la première mise à jour de bibliographie mondiale de la traduction de l'Index Translationum pour l'année 2006 vient d'être publiée en ligne (www.unesco.org/culture/translationum) avec approximativement 40.000 nouvelles notices concernant les pays suivants : Albanie (2004)*, Algérie (2003), Allemagne (1989, 2004), Arabie saoudite (2003, 2004), Bélarus (1997, 1998), Brésil (2004), Bulgarie (2003), Emirats Arabes Unis (2001, 2002, 2003), Espagne (2004), Hongrie (1993, 1997, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003), Inde (2003), Indonésie (2003), Koweït ( 2003, 2004), Maurice (2004), Nigeria (2004), Oman (2002), Pays Bas (2004), Pologne (2003), Rwanda (2004), République arabe syrienne (2002, 2003), Tunisie (2003).
*Les dates entre parenthèses correspondent en général aux années de parution des ouvrages.
Crée en 1932, accessible gratuitement et mis à jour trois fois par an, l'Index translationum contient actuellement approximativement 1.600.000 notices en ligne (de 1979 à nos jours). Sa base de données concerne toutes les disciplines : littérature, sciences sociales et humaines, sciences exactes et naturelles, art et histoire. Les notices antérieures à 1979 peuvent être consultées sur la version imprimée disponible auprès des bibliothèques dépositaires et de la bibliothèque de l'UNESCO de Paris. Informations : index@unesco.org
Tenemos el agrado de informales de que la primera actualización anual del Index Translationum, bibliografía mundial de traducciones, acaba de ser efectuada en línea (www.unesco.org/culture/translationum) con aproximadamente 40.000 nuevas referencias de los siguientes países : Albania (2004), Alemania (1989, 2004), Arabia Saudita (2003, 2004), Argelia (2003), Belarrús (1997, 1998), Brasil (2004), Bulgaria (2003), Emirates Arabes Unidos (2001, 2002, 2003), España (2004), Hungría (1993, 1997, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003), India (2003), Indonesia (2003), Kowait (2003, 2003), Mauricio (2004), Nigeria (2004), Omán (2002), Países Bajos (2004), Polonia (2003), República Arabe Siria (2001, 2002, 2003), Rwanda (2004), Túnez (2003).
*Les fechas entre paréntesis corresponden, en general, al año de aparición de las obras.
Creado en 1932, accesible gratuitamente y actualizado tres veces por año, el Index Translationum contiene hoy unas 1.600.000 referencias en línea. Su base de datos comprende todas las disciplinas : literatura, ciencias sociales y humanas, ciencias exactas, arte e historia. Las referencias anteriores a 1979 pueden ser consultadas en la versión impresa, que se encuentra en las bibliotecas depositarias y en la biblioteca de la UNESCO, París. Por más información : index@unesco.org <mailto:index@unesco.org>

the task of the outsider

I am reading A Place in the Sun? Women Writers in Twentieth-Century Cuba, by Catherine Davies, and enjoying it very much. Here is a lovely quote from her introduction to the book, where she describes having tea first with Dulce María Loynaz and then with Nancy Morejón. I found myself marking up this passage, which is relevant for all translators:

The task of the outsider is to make connections between these apparently heterogeneous spaces without reducing the complex cultural map to a monochromatic transparency.

This book is about opening windows on to interior spaces: the inner spaces of women's lives, offices and homes but also the inside pages of their books. The greatest homage a critic can pay to a writer is to open her book and read her work attentively, to enter not only the shade of the living space to take tea, but to enter the ofen unvisited, unread world in the book. To read literature seriously means to tread carefully, to avoid the obvious. My aim is to enter into dialogue with the texts to which I had access, to examine their multiple layers of meaning, to communicate their discursive universes to other readers, to create ripples. It is, perhaps, the greatest and riskiest form of cooperation with a writer. I invite readers to open these windows and look through them with me. The woman writer may be surprised at what I see between the casing of her book. Where she sees patriotism I see sex; where she sees love I see horror; where she sees God I see mother. She sees animals, I see woman, she sees revolt, I see conformity; she sees sex, I see revolt.

This is so exactly how I feel, and what I aspire to as a reader, critic, and translator! How beautifully expressed! So relevant to the work I'm doing of re-evaluating and interpreting and translating! As I typed this passage a few weeks ago, I felt that it was the embodiment of the practice of feminist scholarship in a book by Liz Stanley and Sue Wise, Breaking out: Feminist consciousness and feminist research, and also in various books by Dale Spender which advocate direct dialogue with the subject of scholarship/research/literary criticism whenever it's possible. In other words, conversation, with all its risks, is key to taking apart the offensive pose of objectivity...

Then, just now as I looked at the back of Davies' book, I realized she's at University of Manchester, where Stanley and Wise also work or worked. Hell, they probably know each other. I don't know how to explain it, but this realization made me laugh at myself... as I realized yet again they are real people who talk to each other; which further made me think "And I could write to them, or call them up; the conversation continues, and... can include me. I can not just cite this book in my humble book; I can ask, and respond, and get responses in return." Which was a happy and freeing thought and one I am still not used to, in part because most of the poets I translate are dead and don't talk back.

Swedish Swearing and Translation Travesties

While websurfing during the winter break, I found, among other interesting reading, what appears to be a Master's thesis by a student at Luleå university, Katarina Källhammer, on Swedish literary translation. Her study, a 32-page work, was entitled "A Study of the English Translation of Populär Musik från Vittula (Popular Music)". Since studies on Swedish-English translation are not all that easy to come by, I clicked in and read it eagerly. Källhammer spends a great deal of time analyzing the problem of swear words and the difficulty of rendering swear words appropriately, and she examines various ways that Swedish swear words have been rendered into English.
Now we all know that translating swear words is not easy. Obviously, if I translated a line of a contemporary work as "Fie, seventeen!" the English language reader is going to react, probably in an extremely confused manner, to this literal rendition of mild Swedish swearing, pretty much equivalent to "Darn it!" The strongest Swedish word for excrement, spelled exactly the same as its English cousin, is also considered mild and is used as an intensifier, to the amusement of English-speaking students of Swedish. Quite frankly, the translator would render this word as the innocuous "very" and be at the exact level of the Swedish usage.
In her essay, Källhammer critizises Laurie Thompson at one point for "protecting" English speakers by not rendering some taboo words in their most virulent forms at certain places in the work. I doubt very much that this would be the case, as in other places in the work, Mr. Thompson has availed himself of most of the English language's rich f-word vocabulary. Anyone using any aspect of the f-word in a literary work is not protecting anybody from anything, so something else must be going on.
Magnus Ljung has written a wonderful work called "Om Svårdomer" (All about Swear Words), and his study will give us a clue as to the situation we are encountering here. He begins his work with swearing in Swedish and ends with swearing in American English, recognizing that swearing is completely different in the British Isles and the North American continent. Ljung progresses from a few pages to a major discussion (three pages for Swedish, fourteen for American English). Quite simply, there are not as many Swedish ways of swearing compared to English ways of swearing. In fact, the Swedish language is now borrowing English obscentities wholesale.
Let's take the cliche of piano keys for a moment. I see Swedish swearing occupying the middle three octaves and English swearing taking the entire register. That is, we have swearing in much milder forms and in much more severe forms than our Swedish-speaking counterparts. I am often amazed that Swedish speakers use English swear words in abandon (indeed, the influence of films and music from the Angl0-Saxon language realm has had a great impact), but I am also amazed at the apparent lack of understanding these words have on the native English-speaking ear (not to mention the inadvertant humor if, say, the word for excrement is pronounced "sheet", though lately, I admit, that mispronunciation is less common). It seems to me that the native Swedish speaker has attempted to bring the English swearing system into the Swedish register, and cannot comprehend the English-speaker's reaction. One has heard English-speakers called prudish and puritain from the Swedish side in this regard, but I counter that the Swedes do not fully comprehend our many levels of swearing, and leap to the most severe examples as normal swearing as opposed to extraordinary swearing, if I may call swearing extraordinary.
Now, having grown up in a Waukegan of many ethnic groups and a large working class base being devestated by a recession that began in 1970 and has kept going to this day, I was not raised with a firewall between me and the swearing of my culture and I can also swear with the best of them as needed. (Just get me talking straight Waukegani dialect, and you'll see.) So I hardly see myself as puritanical, and therefore would not avoid the f-word if necessary in a translation (or if I had just crashed the car). Nevertheless, I have noticed that if a Swede is translating from Swedish to English, the first word of choice for rendering a Swedish obscenity will be the f-word, ignoring the entire levels of swearing beneath that register. I believe this is a reaction to the borrowing of this word into the Swedish language at a lower level of offense than it has in its native English habitat as well as its ubiquity in present-day spoken Swedish. Ms. Källhammer's criticism of Mr. Thompson for not leaping to the most severe word in the lexicon can be understood in that light. The word itself does not need to be so severe in an English-speaking context, because it is not as severe in Swedish. So watch your language! And, if you are Swedish-speaking, take some time to peruse Ljung's enlightening book.

Waukegan, There I Come From

Ray Bradbury, science fiction master and native of my hometown (immortalized as Green Town in his classic Dandelion Wine) once wrote a poem, a hymn rather, an homage to Waukegan, Illinois. The line, lodged forever in my brain at seventeen, "Waukegan, There I come from, and not, my friends, Byzantium" has become a dizzy undercurrent of my daily thought pattern. I will admit that the poem itself causes me to shudder, even this line which I can no more erase from my thought waves, but it has become a part of me, and so has Waukegan and so has Ray. (All right, I've never met Ray, but his nephew did play tuba in the high school orchestra at the same time as I did.)
Decades later, I am sitting in the Swedish equivalent of a bistro, located just off Odengatan (the old gods were big with the Stockholm city planners a hundred-odd years ago). Swedish author Niklas Rådström is sitting across the table and we are talking literature, translation, and my recent translations of his poems. It was the first time we had met face-to-face, and it felt a bit odd for me, as I was a total newcomer to the translation scene and Rådström's reputation was well-established in Sweden. Then I asked about the writer who had influenced him most when he was starting out, and he said, to my surprise, "Ray Bradbury."
"Ray Bradbury? He's from my hometown."
"Really? I don't believe it. My translator comes from Bradbury's hometown! Bradbury should win the Nobel Prize. His prose is beautiful, so poetic."
"Though his poetry, well..." I said, and then quoted the quote that rattles my brain.
We went back and forth on Bradbury's novels, returning to Dandelion Wine.
"That one, I think, influenced my writing the most in the beginning," said Niklas. "When I was a teenager."
"Your trilogy does remind me of his work," I said. "The poetic and the scientific combined in a memoir, minus some of the more science-fictiony aspects."
As I left the bisto, I wondered. Did Rådström like my translations of his poetry because Ray and I spoke the same Waukegani dialect, and this way of thinking, this way of writing words in a string until the prose becomes poetry is as much a part of my molecular system as the water of Lake Michigan? Or was I drawn to translate Rådström's work because he had created a Swedish way of writing Waukegani-style?
I know one thing: Bradbury loved Waukegan with a passion that he would not hide, and Rådström also loves Stockholm, loves its bistros, its neon, its building facades, its birds and trees and the people who inhabit its cinemas and restaurants.
It's the love, the thing that matters most in art. Without it, style be damned.
Waukegan, there I come from....

Mural, San Francisco

Murals and street art in the Mission
Originally uploaded by Liz Henry.

This mural is at 24th and Valencia in the Mission District of San Francisco... the photo is of a detail from it.

It's by Marta Ayala, and is called "Roots and frequencies basic to our education".

Imaginary translations

I'm curious to take a look at "Imaginary Poets", an anthology of translations of made-up poets. It's 20 well-known poets, each asked to make up a poet, translate the poem to English, and write an essay about the poet and their work.

It's a fun and playful idea. I tend to like that sort of thing. I liked that book that was a fake translation of an imaginary ancient Greek poet. I love things like "Songs of Bilitis" by Pierre Louys - I even love Ossian and that whole strange cult of Ossian. Flat-out parodies charm me immensely...

And yet I find that the idea of project at this particular moment in our country's history makes me sad and angry. If I felt that people in this country knew anything substantial about non-US cultures, history, or other languages, maybe I'd be less pissed off. I think of all the excellent poets, dead or alive, who are NOT translated or well-known even in literary communities in the U.S. Great - we're so ignorant about other cultures and languages and poets, we think we get to invent them and make them up. I'd be embarrassed to make up a fake Latin American poet. If I were going to do that kind of project, I'd do it in the context of science fiction or speculative fiction, and would make up a completely alien culture, and I'd do it to make some interesting political point; this distancing allows for a lot of play and exploration... Science fiction writers use alien races to explore ideas of race, class, gender, and utopia - all the time in the U.S. today.

There is at least room for some thought and questioning, some room to be conflicted about art, poetics, humor, and politics.

I'm sure many of the people who contributed to Imaginary Poets considered issues of cultural imperialism and cultural appropriation. There's some excellent and thoughtful translators in the table of contents. I'm very curious to see the book and see what they did with the idea. Will I be so charmed by the book's witty cosmopolitan sophistication that I won't care about the cultural politics? Or will I just be more embarrassed than I am now? I'll read it and report back.

Slavic women's translation registry

The Association for Women in Slavic Studies has announced that the expanded and updated AWSS Translation Registry is now online at:http://www.awsshome.org/resources/registry.html

The Registry includes both published translations of work by women authors and translations in progress from a wide variety of Slavic and East European languages. The data base can be searched in a variety of ways, making it a valuable resource for teaching, research, and planning future translations or anthologies.

You may direct questions, suggestions or updates to Sibelan Forrester <sforres1@swarthmore.edu>) or Diana Greene <diana.greene@nyu.edu>.

A link to Langwich Sandwich

Langwich Sandwich

Wow! This page is a dynamic aggregator of many language and translation blogs.

The titles of recent posts from a blog, for example Languagehat, show up here as links. If you mouseover the link, you'll see the first few lines of its content. Very handy. It's a great starting point to see the best of the language and translation blogs!

Baudelaire & Rimbaud

What a lovely surprise I got today in the mail from Eric Greinke: two beautiful chapbooks from Presa Press: The Rebel: Poems by Charles Baudelaire / American Versions by Leslie H. Whitten Jr, and The Drunken Boat & Other Poems from the French of Arthur Rimbaud / American Versions by Eric Greinke.

For fun, here's a random line from the latter:
A white ray tumbles above the clouds & brings an abrupt
end to this merciless comedy

update on Nadia Anjuman

Nadia Anjuman died earlier this year, and the international attention to her story created some demand for translations of her work. I still dont' know if anyone is working on translating her book into English or other languages. Someone passed on this page about her, from Bukhara: Review of Arts, Culture, and Humanities.

Here's an update from the writer Ren Powell:

The Norwegian PEN center together with Centre Culturel Francais plan to support a PEN Writer's House Publishing in Kabul. It will be a cooperative venture with the existing publishing house Maiwand .

The three groups will finance printing, distribution and a royal for writers, while an Afghan PEN subcommittee will choose the manuscripts. The first book is expected in January next year (I'm not sure if this is 06 or 07). According to the report on Norwegian PEN's website, the first book will most likely be a collection by Anjuman. This will be in Farsi, of course.

The Dangers of Double Translation

I believe there's a standard term for translating through an intermediate language, a practice necessitated by the dearth of qualified translators from Chinese, Arabic, and other minor languages, but for the time being I'll call it double translation.

Case in point, The Girl Who Played Go, by Shan Sa, and translated into English from the French. (I'll leave the French translator unnamed.) An episode in the book involves Japanese soldiers fighting in Manchuria on the border with Russia. I don't mind them calling the city "Ha Rebin" (what we know as Harbin), but the very long river that separates the two countries is referred to repeatedly as "River Love."

There's never a good copy editor in the house when you need one.

It's like, la lengua de Cervantes

Spanish at school translates to suspension

The tension in Kansas City over a teenager's suspension from school for speaking Spanish on campus reflects a broader national debate over the language Americans should speak amid a wave of Hispanic immigration.


In today's Washington Post

Catalog of Copyright Entries

Jeffrey S. Ankrom, an ALTA member and copyright attorney, passed us this excellent, useful link to a site on the Catalog of Copyright Entries. I especially recommend this section on how to determine if a copyright has been renewed.

Ankrom sent us a detailed "short version" of his process in figuring out the copyright status of All Quiet on the Western Front.

International copyright is very confusing. At least this CCE might give a starting point to some people!

Recent reading: Native Tongue

Translators are key in Suzette Haden Elgin's dystopian classic from 1983, Native Tongue. It's 2182. Earth's economy depends on fluency in alien languages, and the only way to be fluent is to be born a Linguist, and grow up from infancy with an Alien In Residence. The Linguists are a class apart, living in austerity, working terribly long hours, the target of human resentment because they can't have babies and train them fast enough to be interpreters.

Part of the result of this situation is a patriarchal dystopia similar to Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale (1986) in which women have very few rights. The book's central premise is the women's invention of a secret language, their attempt to reshape reality through language.

Alien literary translation enters into the story briefly, when Nazareth, a brilliant young linguist, has offended alien trade negotiators for the umpteenth time. In order to understand just how she has transgressed the bounds of politeness, she tells a long rambling story gently introducing the offensive ideas (in this case, color) to gauge the alien reaction without triggering their hostile withdrawal.

Haden Elgin has a fascinating blog. She talks about linguistics, teaching, poetry, science fiction, feminism; lately she's told some autobiographical stories that have a bearing on translation. In her early life she went to Europe to life with her husband's family, and she writes eloquently of the cultural and gender boundaries she transgressed and how difficult it was to figure out through interpretation of social and nonverbal cues what she was doing "wrong".

Why I decided to be ALTA 2006 Host Chair

Lately, I've found myself considering translators and their role in transfering and promoting the literature of the language that they translate. One reason for this is that I am the host chair for ALTA's 2006 annual meeting, and, although the official invitation in the newsletter has not yet been published, the first proposals have started to cross my desk. I am amazed by the creativity of these early proposals and am eagerly looking forward to the rush prior to the deadline cutoff of April 3rd. And I also realize how grateful I am to other translators, and the way that they have brought the rest of the world to me through their difficult, creative work.
We all know that translation cannot be the source text, no matter how hard we try. And yet, in the hope of showing our fellow English-speaking members of Planet Earth that our language has much to offer humanity, we work on with our dreams and dictionaries, hoping to bring forth an artistic creation worthy of the text that we have in our hands. And much as we wish that we could read everything in the original, this is just not humanly possible short of brain implants. I can read fluent Swedish, Norwegian, Danish and German, and prefer to read works in those languages and not in translation. In Montreal, I picked up a number of novels in Quebecois, since I do read (though would never dare to translate) French. But in spite of the rise of Hispanic culture and language in the USA, I have never learned to speak or read Spanish, and must trust my translator to convey the text to me. I certainly don't speak Vietnamese, and now that I have an exchange student living in my house from Vietnam, I turned to Vietnamese literature in translated into English to find out about my guest student's culture and background. I was saddened to see how little of Vietnamese literature was presently available, and treasured every work I got my hands on. And how many of us in North America speak Mandarin Chinese? I've been working on learning Chinese, but assume that it will be a good five years before I can read a simple text. Again, my collection of Chinese literature is all in translation.
The events in the Middle East have brought a renewed interest in fiction and memoirs from the countries of the region, and, if you are like me and do not speak Arabic, Persian or Hebrew, it is the work of translators which allows us to experience these works and to inform our understanding of that corner of our planet. But how important that we do read these texts and understand as much as possible about the world they describe!
Literary translators have a hard lot. No matter how much they have polished their translations, no matter how many years they have devoted to the text, they are rewarded by criticism at best, dismissal or invisibility most of the time, and let's not even mention the abysmal financial renumeration in these United States. The legal or medical translator may be anonymous, but at least that person is well-paid, relatively speaking, for his/her work. We literary translators are also contributing to society. I am looking forward to planning (with the quite able and vocal help of the rest of the committee) ALTA 2006 in order to give my fellow literary translators that place to be heard and appreciated. My time is my gift to you and your hard, and (so neccessary in this world) chosen profession.
And now, let's see what the day's e-mail has brought in for 2006!