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• 

  Musings

  The Ghost of the Author

  I have only translated living authors, a circumstance owing to my being drawn to contemporary literature—as vain as it might sound, I want to participate in the dissemination of the stories and voices of my lifetime, to partake in the artistic production of the Thailand I was born into. For each book I have translated, I have always had the author to consult, even to befriend. I have double-checked with them my understanding of certain phrases, asked them about minutiae like the exact color (blue can become tricky moving between Thai and English) or collar style of a shirt mentioned in passing, traded a multitude of emails, texts and phone calls with them, shared meals (and, lately, my vaccination status) with them. In other words, their existence as living human beings who begot the original works is something I experience as part of my reality as a person and as a translator. Yet, somehow, I remain preoccupied with “The Death of the Author,” that Roland Barthes essay I read over two decades ago as a college coed. I found myself formulating thoughts through it and discussing it in my last pitch, as I did in my first. It’s true, my initial encounter with the essay precipitated something like an epiphany: Barthes’s words opened up the possibility of reading, and, for me, they gave literary criticism its raison d’être. Post-college, though, many years passed where that piece of literary theory lay dormant in my brain, only to return with renewed vigor when I took up translation. Prabda Yoon’s story collection The Sad Part Was was the first book I ever pitched. In presenting the collection, I discussed at length how the stories in it insist on exposing themselves as texts (“[I]t is language which speaks, not the author,” writes Barthes) and are eager to discredit the Author, via metafiction and other devices, thereby giving the reader the pride of place as the maker of meaning. Given Yoon’s influences during the years when he wrote the book, reading his early work through a post-structuralist lens is definitely not farfetched, and I did not expect the essay’s death grip on me to continue. Except it did. A few months ago, I wrote a synopsis for Saneh Sangsuk’s novel Jao Garagade (English title to be determined), and before I knew it, I had resorted to Barthes again, to explain the significance of the book’s anticolonial narrative structure, which aims to re-elevate the oral tradition of storytelling in the face of the novel’s dominance, the novel being a form imported into Thailand from the West.1 Garagade, in being made up of oral tales within a tale (some of them doubly contained), all either passed down or being passed down in the narrative present, inherently questions the idea of unitary authorship, harking back to a time before the myth of the Author took hold of our imagination. In many ways, Garagade and The Sad Part Was couldn’t be more different: the former is a tale set in a western Thai village in the 1960s and in the jungle that it used to be at the turn of the twentieth century, a tale that (in one of its many strata) mourns the loss of natural resources and hence mourns the lifestyle of the past, while the latter is an unapologetically urban set of stories that speaks to the Bangkok of the turn of the millennium, each using narrative forms reflecting their own substance. Why, then, did I feel so compelled to seek a “Death of the Author” reading in each of them? Even Barthes himself later questioned his own wisdom, as Kate Briggs, the translator of his Preparation of the Novel, tried to warn me when I was her student. For a long time, I put off reading the tiny sections in Preparation called “Return of the Author” and “Return to Biography” that she had pointed me to, fearing they would cause the foundation of my literary worldview to crumble. Although in the dreaded snippets Barthes goes so far as to describe his change of heart as an “about-face,” I hung onto the phrases where he humbly refrains from being prescriptive (“For me (once again, I’m not sure if I have the right to generalize) . . .”), and anyway, before taking the plunge into reading those two extracts, I had pre-consoled myself by reasoning: regardless of what he asserts therein, “The Death of the Author,” the text, has long been out there, severed from its Author, and need not be discounted merely because the same man who wrote it might later in his life wish to disavow it—He is dead. It is easy to understand why a translator who has spent years buying completely into the idea of the Author’s death being a precondition for reading would find that death likewise is a precondition for translating. As translators, we are readers first, even if we have the privilege of making our interpretation of the text less fleeting by documenting it in print. For a time, we get to be the “place where [the text’s] multiplicity is focused,” as Barthes says about the reader in his seminal essay. For a time, we get to play the writer reincarnated—a writer even more literally “imitat[ing] a gesture that is always anterior”—and doesn’t reincarnation always presuppose death? Later on, if we are lucky, we will die in many other people else’s hands or on their screens. Yet it’s not so simple: I’m haunted by the Author’s ghost. One basic task translators often do is write biographies in the target language for their authors. This exercise, at minimum, will require the translator to do some fact-checking, more likely also a bit of research, meaning engaging with the author’s life story is inevitable. This level of engagement—still conceiving of the author in the third person (the “external author . . . just the He,” as Barthes puts it in Preparation)—holds true regardless of whether the possibility to meet the writer in the flesh exists or not. But especially when we translate living authors, we potentially have some degree ofaccess to their I, to the “writer’s interiority,” “the recourse to [which],” Barthes had once suggested, was “pure superstition.” In such a scenario, the temptation, accompanied, even, by a sense of duty, to tap into that interiority is overwhelming. That is, the specter of the Author feels all the more present when the unabstracted version of the author is a living person only a phone call or an email away. These musings are in no way meant to negate the wisdom of consulting the author. But as translators, we spend many, many hours alone, with our computer in front of us and the original text off to one side (too often always the same side of the desk, however orthopedically ill-advised). Translation decisions are made constantly, consciously, unconsciously, and I can’t help but yearn for a blessing from the Author’s ghost to read the text, remake the text. The psychological balancing act of the need to assert my own construction of the text while respecting the ghost of the Author has left me fixated with scouring the text itself for clues that it—and maybe its Maker, too—also subscribes to the principles put forth in “The Death of the Author,” that it—and maybe its Maker, too—is telling me, Go on, translate the text. Go on, give it another life.   Mui Poopoksakul   1 Thai literature professor Saowanit Chunlawong discusses this aspect of the novel in her article “The Implication of Tale-Telling in the Archaic Love Story of Karaked,” available at: http://daen-aran-saengthong.blogspot.com/2012/01/implication-of-tale-telling-in-archaic.html (in Thai), concluding that Sangsuk suggests the novel is a continuation of oral storytelling. Mui Poopoksakul is a lawyer-turned-translator with a special interest in contemporary Thai literature. Her translations include three story collections: The Sad Part Was and Moving Parts, both by Prabda Yoon, and Arid Dreams by Duanwad Pimwana. She is also the translator of Pimwana’s novel Bright. Currently, she is translating a novel by Saneh Sangsuk. A native of Bangkok who spent two decades in the US, she now lives in Berlin, Germany.  

  by Mui Poopoksakul

• 

  Musings

  Making a Patch of Land for Myself

  Most of my translation work has been in poetry and dramaturgy and I’ve always thought that these genres played to my strengths. I’m a chameleon linguist, used to assuming voice, following rhythm and inhabiting character. In poetry and plays, the shape and the sound are intimately related to the sense. How you apprehend the sense of a line in a poem or play is only partly due to its literal meaning; the larger part of the impact it has on you, the reader, or you, the listener, is created by shape and sound. And as sound and shape are interpreted by the senses, by ear and eye, and are subjective, both these genres where I feel most at home are fundamentally unstable and open-ended, needing both a speaker and a listener for their full existence. My translation work has consequently always been in short intense bursts and I thought of myself as a lyric sprinter. So when my friend, the Russian poet Maria Stepanova, asked me to translate her book In Memory of Memory, a prose work of more than four hundred pages, I blanched momentarily. I agreed, of course. I had already translated Maria’s long poems and I knew her voice at its most condensed and ‘slant’. I was her friend, we had spent long hours in conversation, I loved her and I couldn’t refuse her. And perhaps also: I have always believed in fate, allowing myself to be repeatedly blown off-course (if I had even set a course) by projects I knew would bring me to new unimaginable lands. I thought that if I ever came to the end of Maria’s book I would certainly be a different person. In Memory of Memory is a book that slips between genres, at once novel and essay and memoir, with an ‘eye’ for detail and an atmosphere reminiscent of W. G. Sebald. Maria uses the scant information she has about her Jewish-Russian ancestors as a sort of spinal cord running through her expansive text, and accompanies this part-colourised family history with complex reflections on the nature of memory and loss, using examples from literature, film and art. I began working on the book in 2018. After only a very few pages a sort of horrified anxiety gripped me. I am a very concise writer, always pruning back, honing, tapping on metaphors to check their trueness, eliminating them if there is the least hollow echo. In life, Maria was my perfect pair, endlessly thoughtful with a desire to probe and investigate every truth, optimistic, life-loving, generous, operatic in her vision. But in translation every sentence of hers was a tussle – her stereophonic sound and technicolour dazzled me, I couldn’t anticipate the ending of any thought. As she opened up new vistas and landscapes some strange reflex in my unconscious longed for composure and closure. I thought to myself that despite not feeling entirely at home in British intellectual culture, I had inherited the pinched imagination and clipped wings of British empiricism and the thought depressed me. I inched forward. Each sentence required the sort of attention I’d give to a line of poetry, as well as an intense engagement with the material of the argument. The crux of the issue was this: if I followed the line too literally, I couldn’t capture the eloquence and beauty of Maria’s poetic prose, and if I refashioned the line to reflect this beauty then I lost my grasp of the argument. Russian is an inflected language; the endings of words indicate their grammatical relationship to other words. In Russian, it is possible to build an extremely long sentence and to produce a crystallising effect, an accumulating, slowly clarifying line; perhaps akin to turbid water settling to reveal its depths. But the English line doesn’t have the same elasticity. The English words have no inflections, no hidden valencies; only word order holds them in place. English eloquence, at least when I think about it, comes from texture and tautness. I slowly unwound each Russian sentence, I found the surprising ending and laid it on the page and traced my way backwards to the beginning. Then I began to cut it out in its equivalent English fabric. I wanted so badly for the line in English to enter the reader as the Russian entered me, with the same shock, the same swelling of possibilities as the meaning slowly took shape. I almost couldn’t bear the idea that translation would filter the voice of the original, or that like a lock gate it would change the levels of meaning mechanically. It would be an understatement to say that this activity stretched me. I could manage only a few paragraphs a day. In Memory of Memory is intensely visual as befits a work that opens out of evenings spent flicking through family photograph albums. The visual is made literary; each image touches the mental retina and becomes word. Translating the work was an equally visual occupation – I pored over the art works Maria mentioned: Rembrandt’s self-portraits, Charlotte Salomon’s Life? Or Theatre?, Francesca Woodman’s shadowy images and the peculiar and intimate glass-fronted boxes of Joseph Cornell. It is possible to translate the description of an object or an artwork without seeing the original, but it is better to triangulate between the image and the text, to see how the image touches my English retina and what new word it becomes. A certain tone and colour tints the work. Maria’s thoughtful, melancholy, highly poetic gaze is directed at a sepia past, and it attempts to grasp something of that past while at the same time gently mocking this need to grasp and hold, knowing it to be an impossibility. Her lightly ironical tone, never dismissive or undermining, protective of her subject, but altogether free of sentimentality, is contrived from the line and its gradual unfolding. Recreating that precise tonal balance without the possibilities of the syntax was perhaps the hardest part of the translation. I had a playlist of music I listened to as I worked, and I listened repeatedly to the same singers, the same tunes. I didn’t care whether the music was good or bad; the tunes simply induced in me a feeling of anxious love and that nostalgia that rises sharply in the throat. I often listened to music from my teens, and it brought back to me the restlessness and yearning of those years. That flickering nerviness helped me construct a prose of loss and yearning in English, something similar to my half-memories of being in love for the first time in the strange filtered light of the Soviet Union and Cold War Europe. The songs played somewhere beyond my immediate consciousness and gave me a continuous unchanging mood. A digression: I have never asked other translators how music has helped their practice. I once worked on a brutal and dispiriting passage (from a different book) describing the mass executions performed by the Soviet secret police. In order to translate this text, to maintain a moral and emotional balance and produce a text with clarity, I listened compulsively to bland pop music. That is, I didn’t listen to it exactly, but rather, the soothing, pappy background, like trickling water or the tide coming in, cushioned me and allowed me to carry on. When I finished the work, I would find that the same bland music, if I came across it by chance in shops and leisure centres, never failed to remind me of the executioners of the NKVD. One of In Memory of Memory’s legacies for me is its fusion of a Soviet and European past. The family memoirs are unequivocally Russian and Soviet; however, one of the most important of the ancestors is great-grandmother Sarra, who studied in France. References in the book are frequently to Western European and American artists and thinkers as if to prove beyond doubt that the doors of the hortus conclusus of Russian poetry and literature have always stood ajar and the twentieth-century Russian experience was above all a shared human one. Sometimes by translating a book we make a small patch of land for ourselves, the translators who exist between worlds, and this has been such a translation. I have, in translating it, heard my own voice and the voice of my friend, and the new land we have made together in a shared and more expansive literary tradition cannot now be gainsaid.   Sasha Dugdale

  by Sasha Dugdale

• 

  Musings

  Make It Make Sense

  One of my many lockdown projects, begun in the hope of giving my life some semblance of structure, is regaining my Cantonese. I say “regaining” because my parents tell me I spoke it as a small child (I don’t remember this, though at this point I don’t remember things that happened last week), but lost it when I had to switch to Mandarin for school, Singapore having decided that Mandarin is the only version of Chinese that qualifies for “official language” status. My parents still speak it to each other sometimes, reminding me of a world that is now closed off to me, a niggling voice in my ear. And so I am attempting to find my missing language via an app (not Duolingo, which only has Mandarin, though under the name “Chinese”—as if other Chineses do not exist). Singapore’s reinforcing of Mandarin as a main language has been more or less accepted by the populace, by some more grudgingly than others, but this shift left a mark. In her book Living in the Era of Lee Kuan Yew, Lee Hui Min describes turning on the TV one day in the early eighties, only to find Chow Yun-Fat and Carol Cheng suddenly speaking mellifluous Mandarin, instead of the Cantonese they’d been using just a day before. I think of how wrenching this must have been when I hear Cantonese now, and also Teochew, Hokkien, Hakka, and the other tongues now reduced to the status of mere “dialects,” while also marveling at their persistence, decades after the official policy, and indeed two thousand years after the First Emperor imposed his language across the whole of the newly unified (aka conquered) China. (Apart from English and Mandarin, Singapore’s official languages also include Malay and Tamil, which I hope to someday learn. All four languages intermingle to an extent—the Singaporean Chinese word for “market” is “basha,” which comes from the Malay “pasar,” which in turn has the same root as “bazaar.”) This language story comes from my upbringing and background, but I daresay all languages and places have one as complex, and many individuals too. Language is a messy business, which is what makes the business of literary translation so endlessly fascinating and impossible. A common misunderstanding about translation is that languages map neatly onto each other, and that translation is simply a matter of bringing each word across a boundary, with perhaps some light rearranging or choosing of synonyms. The gaps are actually far vaster than that. There are, for instance, no tenses in Chinese, so when bringing a text into English, there is immediately the choice of whether to use the past (more conventional), the present (more propulsive), or a mixture of the two (if the story takes place in more than one time period, say). A straightforward transfer is not possible; a decision has to be made, and this decision will be determined by the translator’s point of view—where, as they say, one is coming from. The act of translation lends itself to a variety of metaphors, among which the bridge is one of the most persistent: the translator as a bridge between one language and another, between cultures and places. This never felt right to me, having grown up somewhere that already contained many languages and cultures, and somewhat adrift ever since—for me, there is no clear “here” and “there.” And even if there were, isn’t this image somewhat imperialist? A place that was hitherto closed off to you is abruptly rendered accessible, and you are free to stroll right in.  It makes more sense to me to think of literary translation as an act of artistic creation—with the translator at the intersection of the original and new text, interpreting it as an actor does the lines of a play. Give a hundred different translators the same poem, and you’d get a hundred very different translations, because everyone brings their subjectivity to the task, which is as it should be. The best translations come when the artistry of the translator engages with the artistry of the author in thoughtful, exciting ways, producing work of merit in its own right, not a pale imitation.  This may all seem a bit like insider baseball—does it really matter how we choose to think of the translation process? Well, yes, because the way we understand the process affects the way we go about it. Languages are not coherent, contained entities, and translation is therefore not merely a matter of moving content from Box A to Box B. One frequently encounters the pernicious idea, from readers, reviewers and, sadly, even some translators, that the main criterion in literary translation is “accuracy,” “fidelity,” or whatever we’re calling it today. Of course everyone is free to take whatever they like as the center of their translation practice or reading, I just question, given the tangles that languages get themselves into, whether such a thing is possible at all.  For myself, I traffic in effect—the reader’s response being the only measurable outcome of a text. “This phrase evokes a certain feeling in me when I read it in Chinese; what form of words elicits the same emotion in English?” “This sentence has a certain resonance for the Chinese reader, what is necessary to make it chime with the English reader in the same way?” (And yes, by “the Chinese reader” and “the English reader” I do often mean myself; I am the only reader whose brain I have access to.) This is a different type of fidelity, a sort of faithfulness to particular elements of a text, the ones that feel most important in the rendering, rather than the mere surfaces of the words. Sometimes this means not translating—I may end up, for instance, using the word “hutong” throughout a translation, because the English word “alleyway” conjures up something far removed from the reality of a Beijing hutong, which to my mind justifies the importation. (You will also notice I have not italicized “hutong,” because please let’s not go down the road of deciding which words are “foreign” and which aren’t.) Perhaps this is idiosyncratic to me, in that my multilingual, peripatetic life has given me particular associations with these words that others may not have—and I’m certainly not saying that my choices are the right ones, only that they’re right for me. Translators aren’t just observers of language, but active users—perhaps the most active—which means we have the power to shape language too, in however small a way is within our power. If the English language at my disposal does not contain what I need to re-fashion the world I am translating from, it is a simple act of magic to invent it. Rather than bend myself and the text into an existing lexicon, I would rather expand this lexicon. The English language, after all, is marvelously flexible and accumulative, and will stretch if you need it to. I choose to center subjectivity rather than pretend to neutrality, because the viewpoint I inhabit is the only one I have. Like writers, translators have distinctive voices; some may be more adept at shaping or manipulating them than others, just as some actors are more transformative than others—but it’s important to recognize that the raw material we are working with is our perspectives, our experiences, our idiolects, our voices, and that these are the means through which we interpret the translated text. This is also why it’s necessary to have translators from a range of backgrounds and experiences in the profession—it’s not just a matter of justice or fairness, of giving everyone a fair shot (though this is, of course, vital), but also to ensure a diversity of viewpoints and ways of working, which can only enrich the community as a whole. Languages are messy because people are complicated—and it’s near impossible to truly understand the human beings in our own household, or even ourselves, let alone people using different words than the ones we know. And yet, we try. As translators, we pick our way through the mess of language, seeking connections and correspondences where they can be made, finding equivalencies or ingenious alternatives if not. Acknowledging this messiness seems more productive to me than pretending it is somehow possible to be objective, to stand completely outside both ourselves and the text. Relearning Cantonese is my way of re-connecting with a part of my brain that I’ve lost touch with, and also of increasing the mess, throwing yet another ingredient into my already multiple sense of self, to see how that affects my way of working. What previously unheard echoes will become audible to me? I can’t wait to find out. The myth of meaning being “lost in translation” only makes sense if you think of words as discrete units of sense, rather than the closest approximation we have to pinning down the seething chaos we carry around inside ourselves. It is not the text that is lost in translation, but the translator—and that’s a good thing. By allowing ourselves to become lost, and embracing the possibilities of confusion, we hopefully achieve the state of freedom in which creativity can take place, and find our way to where we need to be. Jeremy Tiang

  by Jeremy Tiang

• 

  Musings

  Translation as Pretence and Performance

  Translation is an activity to which we are so accustomed that we often forget and lose sight of some of its most essential and integral characteristics, one of which is its undoubted artificiality, the inescapable fact that it is a pretence, a sham, an act. Faced with a text by Dickens or Flaubert (for example) in Spanish, our innocent or naïve response is to believe – as we do – that it was actually written by Dickens or Flaubert and that we are reading their actual words. Common sense alone will tell us that this is quite impossible: not only could Dickens never have expressed himself in that language, he could never have expressed himself in that way; he would never have used certain words that appear in the text and which are only conceivable in Spanish, nor would he have written certain sentences using a syntactic construction unique to Spanish and unimaginable in English, nor employed idioms and turns of phrase he couldn’t possibly know and which, even if he had, it would never have occurred to him to use, because they form part of a language and a system of thought different from those inhabited by him and his prose. To believe that what we are reading in Spanish continues to be the work of Dickens is, when you think about it and seen from a rigorously theoretical perspective, arrant nonsense. And yet this, in practice, is what people do believe – or, rather, they behave as if they did – and it’s undeniable that the work in question does continue to belong – if it belongs to anyone – more to the English novelist than to anyone else, even the translator. Certain purists and other scrupulous people claim that one can only read poets in their own language. This, albeit arguable, view, is one that is nevertheless often heard, yet one rarely hears anyone admit or regret that they haven’t read Tolstoy or Turgenev because they were unable to read them in the original Russian. Translation, then, is universally accepted – with the inevitable exceptions – as a true and adequate reflection of almost any text. Now, what lies behind this acceptance of translation as a valid means of knowing a literary work when, from one point of view – rather unimaginative, it’s true, but not entirely to be dismissed – it is undeniable that nothing could be so at odds with the essence of that work than its supposed transposition into another language and, therefore, its renunciation or abandonment of the language in which it was conceived and written? How is it possible unreservedly to accept a translation when one knows that what characterizes and distinguishes a literary work is, in large measure, not to say primarily, the language in which it has its home and that has made its existence possible? This question, given that it was solved and settled centuries ago, may seem inadmissible or futile. But it is perhaps worth looking into the reasons for that age-old solution. It is due, I think, to the establishment and acceptance of certain conventions, so deeply rooted – so taken for granted, so taken as read – that their existence is often forgotten both by translators and by readers. Everyone knows, we all know, that a translated work is not and cannot be exactly the same as the work of the author who wrote it: the brutal shift involved in the change of languages makes this impossible, prevents it from being the same work. It is clearly something else, and yet since time immemorial, people have pretended, have made believe that it is the same. That’s why, as I see it, one could compare the activity of translation with any of the usual modes of performance, both those with centuries of tradition behind them and the more modern varieties, because they all require similar conventions in order to exist. In the theatre, for example, it’s obvious that what is represented on the stage isn’t real, indeed, the inevitable inadequacies of the scenery tell us so or, at the very least, remind us of this. A backdrop of trees is not intended to be taken as a group of real trees, and yet we accept them as such because of their context; we accept as a door something that our senses tell us is just a piece of painted cardboard that doesn’t open onto any room at all; we ignore the fact that no water comes out of a tap when one of the characters turns it on; we’re not surprised to see a famous actor disguised as Tamburlaine: we accept him as Tamburlaine for as long as the play lasts, even though we know he isn’t Tamburlaine. The same thing happens at the cinema, where the capacity for visual suggestion is far greater: and yet, were we not predisposed to immerse ourselves in a film, we would be unable to forget that we’d travelled to the cinema especially to see those images or that we were seated in a darkened room or that someone was sitting next to us or that the shifts of perspective happening before our eyes bear no relation to what our eyes are capable of in reality. We accept all this as natural because it’s part of an accepted convention. The theatre- or cinema-goer knows that in order to take part in, enjoy, understand and believe in the work being shown, you have to suspend your usual sense of reality for the two hours that the show lasts. You must be prepared – this is what the convention demands – to accept as trees something your eyes know to be a mere expanse of canvas, to perceive as a door what is mere cardboard, to imagine water coming out of a tap, and to ignore the fact that Tamburlaine has the face of a particular actor. Equally, we could say that someone looking at a painting sees volumes, shadows and dimensions that could never exist on a flat surface, and that being in close, permanent contact with the pages of a book in no way prevents us from experiencing passionately and innocently the adventures of Jim Hawkins or the misadventures of Madame Bovary. Well, in my view, the way in which a reader reads a translation belongs to that same realm of experience: we, the reader, know that Dickens could not possibly have written the sentences we’re reading in Spanish, nevertheless, we make believe that those words were written by Dickens, in his own hand, and to do this we must deliberately suspend all knowledge that any transfer or mediation has taken place: that is, we must accept that we are reading the words of a linguistically gifted Dickens, as well as the bizarre idea that this is how Dickens would sound if his work had undergone a miracle similar to that which occurred to the apostles after Pentecost, when they spoke in their own language – the only one they knew – but each person listening heard them speaking in his or her own tongue. Now, for such an attitude to be possible in any kind of performance, and for the spectator happily to accept the conventions that allow such a phenomenon to occur, and for it to be both effective and natural, the people putting on the performance must, of course, do all they can to make the illusion believable. They can’t rely solely on the spectator being in the right frame of mind, they have to confirm and maintain that frame of mind. That’s what lies behind the painted backdrop of trees and the actor’s costume, even though neither can be relied on to deceive entirely; that’s the reason – in part – why they turn off the lights in a cinema, or put frames around pictures, isolating them – even if only fictitiously – from the equally flat wall that accommodates them. To continue with the example of the theatre, while we the spectators must be prepared to accept the convention, we must also be prepared to make the effort required to be convinced. There must be a desire on our part to believe. Or perhaps the convention consists precisely in our willingness to allow ourselves to be deceived whenever there is an attempt or an apparent attempt to deceive us, whenever we are offered the appearance of or an attempt at verisimilitude. As far as the spectator or viewer is concerned, the convention, the rules of the game, could be set out in the following terms: “I will believe that the trees on the set are real trees if you really want me to believe it, and if, by painting them and putting them on the stage, your intention was that I would believe them to be real. I will pretend that I believe this precisely because it seems to me that you have tried to make me believe it, and your confidence in your ability to deceive me convinces and encourages and allows me to deceive myself during the time stipulated by us for the pretence and the performance to last. However, it’s vital that you help me to do this; that is, in order for me to experience your simulation as real, my willingness and readiness are not enough: I need your willingness and readiness too, and it’s up to you to smooth the way so that I remain willing and ready. And if you prove too implausible, you will have demonstrated that you do not entirely believe in or are incapable of accepting and fulfilling the convention that I, in good faith, am prepared to embrace the moment the curtain goes up; should that happen, I, too, will have the right to reject it.” So what happens, then, if we see translation, too, as pretence, as another kind of performance? As I said, every reader knows that the text has undergone a transformation that allows us to read what the author wrote in a language that we the reader do not know, while, at the same time, preventing us from knowing that text as it really is. Well, if we the readers are to ignore this fact, this knowledge, we, like the spectator or viewer, need to be convinced by the translator, who is, when you think about it, performing an operation as bold as it is bizarre, namely, giving someone who doesn’t know, say, English the ability to read English. Or to be more exact, the translator is trying to make the reader of his Spanish text believe he is reading in English even though he is, quite clearly, reading in Spanish. For such an absurdity (when seen from the point of view of common sense) to occur, a degree of verisimilitude is also required. So, what form does that verisimilitude take in a translation? Here is what Octavio Paz had to say on the subject: “Performance requires not only a degree of agreement and affinity with what is being performed, but also conformity and, above all, likeness.” If we accept that definition, which seems to me pretty accurate, we are being presented with an apparently insoluble problem: how can an ordinary reader judge how “like” a translation is to the original if he cannot read the original to which he has access, or thinks or pretends he has access, only through its enactment as a translation? In order to take part in the game and to play his part in the convention agreed between him and the translator, the reader must not be continually reminded that what he is reading is just that, a translation: for him to forget this and put that idea on hold, he must be able to read the text as easily and naturally as he would in his own language; but, at the same time, and so that he can believe that he really is reading Dickens, that is, for that reading to be plausible, he should also be aware of “something” distinctly and unmistakably different from what he is used to finding in texts written originally in his own language. He must be aware of “something” which, without it constantly reminding him that he is reading a translation, allows him at the same time to sense, to intuit, that original text, which, as we have seen, he cannot know in any other way. It’s hard to say what that “something” is or should be, and I’m not going to try and explain it here: the questions provoked by that contradiction would be endless and this is not the place in which to address them (although one should remember, purely as a bibliographical note, that Walter Benjamin held that any translation from language A to language B makes tangible the existence of a third active presence and reveals the traces of what he called the “pure language” that precedes and underlies both languages). Nevertheless, in the light of that, it would not be out of place to say a few words about the advisability or not of literary translations preserving certain indefinable but unmistakable elements of the original, which would give the reader some sense of what the original is like. In this respect, for example, it is often said that Spanish is being undermined by the overwhelming and indiscriminate invasion of English words and constructions, and there are those who say that these additions are contributing to a deterioration, not only in the standard of the very translations from English that introduced them, but also in the general quality of spoken and written Spanish. There’s a lot of truth in this, and it is, alas, commonplace now to find such absurd redundancies as autoconsolarse or autodefenderse (I’ve even heard someone say autosuicidarse, which would mean a triple suicide), or with unnecessary and dangerous semantic shifts, such as the use of contemplar to mean “consider” or “to bear in mind”, or with ghastly, superfluous neologisms like liderar or implementar. However, being overzealous about protecting language from such evils often brings with it, as a consequence, the tendency for the translator to eliminate from the resulting text any vestige, any trace – whether tangible or not – that might remind the reader of the original language, which, although possibly correct in its literal or exact application in Spanish, might “jar” because it feels awkward or odd; such zeal brings with it a tendency to translate syntax, semantics and diction in an ultra-Spanish way. This, in my view (albeit for different reasons), is equally prejudicial to Spanish – or whatever the target language might be – and can, in the long run, lead to a grave impoverishment of the very language the translator is striving to preserve. Languages are enriched in all kinds of ways, but one of these is, undoubtedly, contact with and permeability to the uses and dictions of other languages, which are also in a state of permanent evolution. Any translator intent on trying maintain at all costs – simply out of a fear of dissipation – a rigid, stagnant Spanish into which he would have to translate the most diverse styles coming from the most diverse languages, runs the risk of producing a translation shorn of all the original language’s peculiarities. But it’s not only that: such an attitude, the implementation of such tendencies, would be to deny translation one of its essential and most inescapable characteristics: pretence and performance. No serious reader would be convinced or satisfied to read, say, Shakespeare as if he were Lope de Vega or Dickens as if he were Galdós. If the reader is to accept and join in the pretence, he should find, in the translated Shakespeare, elements and facets and constructions not usually found in his own language, things that may even seem odd and, dare I say it, wrong. That’s why, to achieve this, the translator needs his own language – the instrument he’s working with – to be as flexible, ample and open as possible: he needs a language that will, first and foremost, accommodate all possible languages with their respective, infinite particularities. Ultimately, the task of the translator is not a matter of allowing or providing the reader with a mere understanding of a text, but of incorporating that text into his own language. And to achieve this, just as the actor playing the role of Tamburlaine will only succeed when, in the eyes of the spectator, he appears to be Tamburlaine in both costume and interpretation, so the translator should appear to the reader as a Dickens or a Shakespeare risen from the dead, like a Dickens or a Shakespeare writing in fluent Spanish, but still, undeniably, paradoxically and quite naturally, writing in the most perfect English. Javier Marías  Presented at the First Iberoamerican Translators Congress (Primer Congreso Iberoamericano de Traductores) in Madrid on November 10, 1982. Published as “La traducción como fingimiento y representación” in Nueva Estafeta, January 1983.   Copyright © 1983 by Javier Marías Translated by Margaret Jull Costa  

  by Javier Marías

• 

  Musings

  Translators and Collective Action

  I’ve just come back from the annual American Literary Translators Association conference, or ALTA, which this year was in Rochester, NY. It’s one of the highlights of my year, and I know I’m not alone. Part of what makes ALTA so special is seeing old friends who I only have a chance to catch up with in person once a year, and meeting new friends whose translations I’ve admired, or have yet to discover. Other highlights include: the always glorious book exhibit, taking part in a lively panel on, say, footnotes, and enjoying the satisfying feeling that for three blissful days I can look around and say with great pride that these are my people. I come back home each year heart full of love and enthusiasm for our art and for my fellow translators—and with more than a few ideas running around my head. This year I find myself thinking about literary translators and collective action. As many have pointed out, translating, like any kind of writing, can be a pretty solitary and lonesome affair. But there are obvious mitigating factors we translators enjoy that other writers don’t, like the fact that, at a minimum, we’re in a relationship with someone else when we work: part of a literary dyad. The not-translator part of this couple might be a hazy ghost from antiquity who may or may not have been a real person. Or, they might be a living, breathing author present in the flesh or via WhatsApp, ready to field questions about the tricky bits. And every possibility exists in between these two extremes. What’s certain is that all translation is collaborative. And then translators do something else that other writers rarely do: they found and join collectives. I attended a panel at ALTA this year called “A Collective of Collectives.” It was comprised of members from six translators’ collectives: the Seattle-based Northwest Literary Collective, the Michigan- based Emerging Translators Collective, New York-based Cedilla & Co., London-based Starling Bureau, Rochester, NY-based Plüb, and the Korean- language-specific Smoking Tigers collective. Each of these collectives operates a little differently. Some are open to new members and hold public meetings, while others have a fixed membership. One has its own publishing arm, and another emerged from the question of why it’s so hard for literary translators to find agents. Some help educate the public about literary translation. Most organize public readings. What all of them have in common—including the Chicago-based Third Coast Translators Collective (TCTC) I’m lucky to be a part of—is a sense of shared purpose and collaborative spirit prevalent among literary translators. We workshop one another’s drafts. We help with each other’s pitches. We share professional contacts and celebrate accomplishments. We feel deep in our bones that every new book published in translation creates a new space for a new translation. Whatever the opposite of a zero-sum game is, that’s the one we play. In 2015, I was fortunate to be part of our successful non-tenure-track faculty union campaign at the University of Chicago, and subsequent negotiations for our first collective bargaining agreement. Heroic organizing and great solidarity helped us win a strong contract that’s significantly improved our working conditions, and our students’ learning conditions. Only after this year’s ALTA and thinking about translators and collective action did it dawn on me that translators are the adjunct faculty of the literary world. It’s a connection I should have made along ago, and one I’m sure others have already made. It was sitting in front of me the whole time, but it still felt like a revelation. Like adjunct faculty, translators constantly struggle for visibility in a world that would rather pretend they don’t exist. Translators are often not considered “real writers” similar to how adjunct faculty are often seen as also- ran tenure-track professors. In a landscape of scarcity, most full-time translators, like adjunct faculty, have to hustle all the time, and live in a state of constant contingency, where being able to say no to work is a luxury. And how many literary translators are also adjuncts? Despite all of this, why do they do it? Why do we do it? Another point of convergence: it’s a labor of love. Even the greatest love is still hard work. Another shared belief among translators’ collectives is that this love ought not only be shared widely, but also compensated fairly. Many countries and languages are very fortunate to have government- funded agencies to help foster, recognize, remunerate, and disseminate these labors of love: France, Germany, Israel, Poland, and South Korea are just a few. In contrast, South Asia—the region I translate from—is unlikely to develop the same kind of institutional government support to bring non-English- language writers from India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Nepal to the rest of the world. One out of five people on the planet speaks a South Asian language, but literary translations from South Asian languages represent less than half of one per cent of translations published in the US. A better support system for literary translations from South Asian languages is needed, and a different kind of translators’ collective is called for: a DIY initiative that mirrors the work of government cultural institutions that foster literary translation. Instead of hewing to national borders, this initiative will have a regional focus on South Asia—imagine an agency for all Scandinavian literature, or Balkan countries, or Romance languages, but in a region where thirty languages have over a million speakers, and seven languages are among the twenty most spoken on earth. This greater collective will help translators find writers and works to fall in love with and translate, while allowing editors and publishers to discover new voices for readers who are seeking different kinds of stories. Funders will have the opportunity to underwrite translations of authors who are virtually unknown beyond the subcontinent.  We call this the South Asian Literature Translation Initiative (SALTI), and it represents yet another way that literary translators can work collectively to increase the visibility of writers, translators, and underrepresented literature of the world. Translators like Arunava Sinha, Daisy Rockwell, Shabnam Nadiya, Mahmud Rahman, Aftab Ahmed, and John Vater are involved, and writers including Vivek Shanbhag and Amit Chaudhuri have expressed support. We’re still in the planning stages, but one short-term goal is to crowdfund a virtual space that connects all branches of the literary ecosystem necessary to bring good translations of South Asian literature to bookshelves beyond the Indian subcontinent. It won’t take a lot of money, and we suspect there are individuals in the South Asian diaspora eager to assist with this and more. We also want to sponsor an annual short-story translation contest from all South Asian languages to encourage emerging translators, and hope to help subsidize US book tours with both authors and translators to tell stories, raise visibility, and educate. It’s a collective response that can nourish the cycle where translations raise the visibility of the language and the writers in a language, who often then achieve a new level of validation as writers in their own languages, which then encourages more writers to write in that language. Our collective spirit as translators can help pave the way for a literary future where artificial national and language boundaries are erased, and the conversation of literature is enlarged—a conversation that fully includes a fifth of humanity, with many stories to share. By Jason Grunebaum

  by Jason Grunebaum

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  Musings

  Changing the Literary Default from English or: To the English-Lit Lovers Who Should Be Reading This but Aren’t

  I write this essay with three memories in mind. Each one surfaces every now and then, mostly when I am doing some mundane mindless task alone—selecting green beans or squeezing kiwifruits at the supermarket, making coffee after dropping the kids off at childcare, fighting the eternally lost battle to straighten up my bookshelves. For the sake of retaining some semblance of organization, I’ll recount the incidents in order of when they happened. The first one occurred before I made the decision to stop being an academic, when I was a lecturer at the University of Newcastle in Australia. I was teaching a course on world literature with a specific focus on works by Asian writers. After the first class, I received an email from one of the students. She had been under the impression that the “world literature” in the course title referred to European literature. Since this wasn’t the case, she had decided to withdraw. The second incident occurred during my final months teaching at the same institution. I had been informed at the start of the semester that my application for a continuing position (the Australian equivalent of “tenure-track”) had been unsuccessful, and as such, my contract would not be renewed. I was severely demoralized and decided to quit academia for good once the semester was up. A few weeks after I made this decision, I received an email that disheartened me even further. It was from one of the tutors under my supervision, an older British woman who had always been very nice to me. In the message, she lamented the poor quality of the handful of translated works I had assigned as readings for the first-year English course I was coordinating with another colleague. The pieces in question included stories by Nikolai Gogol, Haruki Murakami, and Mo Yan (translated by some of the most respected translators in the business: Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, Jay Rubin, and Howard Goldblatt). She noted that this was especially the case for the Mo Yan story. (I wonder nowadays whether this influenced the way she ran her tutorials. This wasn’t very good, but let’s make the best of it, shall we? I imagine her saying to the students.) The third incident occurred just last year at a literary festival in Adelaide, long after I’d made the transition from academia into full- time literary translation and novel-writing. To my delight I was put on a two-person panel with the Indonesian author Eka Kurniawan, whom I’d translated once and had corresponded with via email, but had never met in person. The focus was on Indonesian fiction. During the Q&A, an audience member—an elderly Caucasian gentleman—asked if I’d ever felt the need to improve a work I was translating because the original wasn’t very good. I dredge up these incidents and collect them here in order to analyze why they still leave such a bad taste in my mouth. The intention behind each one was innocent enough and probably not meant to cause harm. I think it has to do with the casual prejudices they lay bare: there are students who think European writing is interesting, but not Asian writing; there are teachers who perceive translated literary works as inferior; there are readers who believe that foreign writing may need to undergo improvement in order to meet certain standards. Perhaps even more depressing is the fact that in each of these instances, actual exposure to literature in translation served as a catalyst for the expression of such prejudices: the rejection of unfamiliar titles from the neighboring continent; disappointment with what foreign writers and translators have to offer; the implication that Indonesian writing may not be up to snuff. Those who love and support literature in translation would like to believe that translation has the power to open minds, change hearts, forge connections, and incinerate bigotries. I too would like to believe this. But within powerful linguistic communities such as the Anglosphere (and perhaps in this day and age, it is only the Anglosphere that so stubbornly asserts its right to possess such stunted taste buds), unless translated literature becomes utterly the norm rather than the exception, unless the default literary setting is switched from “English” to “all languages,” the occasional encounter with a foreign text will do nothing to shake preexisting chauvinisms. So how does the default get changed? Is it heresy to say, in the context of a column aimed at a translator readership, that I’m not sure literary translators can do much beyond what they are doing now? Ironically, what I’m about to propose is directed at the people in the Anglosphere who are unlikely to be reading this essay; so I may as well be blunt. The Anglosphere should stop giving primacy to English literature (that is, literature written originally in English). Especially in educational contexts: schools and universities and creative writing classes too. Unless equivalent time, rigor, and resources are devoted to teaching literary works from other languages and cultures—so that English literature is always presented as one sub-group of literature existing alongside many, many others—the impression that students will always be left with, in all its falsity, is: Literature is composed mainly of English literature. And the benchmark by which the merits of a literary work will be measured will always be these same English-language literary texts, which students are told to spend so much time and energy scrutinizing that an impression of their “greatness” is conveyed. After all, we invest time and effort in what is valuable. Believe me, I myself am surprised that I’m proposing such measures. I love English literature. I have a BA and PhD in the subject, and enjoyed teaching and researching it for many years. I adore Jane Austen and the Brontë sisters. I think fondly of Middlemarch once a week. I used to have a crush on Sherlock Holmes, and when I visited London, my head was continuously filled with Virginia Woolf. The literary influences for my latest novel include F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ford Madox Ford. But this is the problem. Only in these past several years have I realized the depths of my ignorance. I used to believe I knew so much about literature, when actually, my knowledge is extremely limited and very culturally specific. I love English literature because I don’t know any other literatures well enough, not even Indonesian literature which I translate. My impulse, as much as any other English literature aficionado, is to hug my editions of Shakespeare and sob that he’s special, for why else would the rest of the world be obsessed with performing his plays? But in my heart, I know the reason: power carves the channels that determine how Culture with a capital C flows among countries and their inhabitants. Political force and economic clout, erstwhile and extant, play a hand in determining which nations’ literary works are deemed timeless masterpieces and which aren’t. As terrific as Shakespeare is, it’s undeniable that the cultural aftereffects of the British Empire and the undue influence of another Anglosphere member (i.e., the US) have played an enormous part in ensuring the perpetually “trending” status of these English literary canon staples. (By the way, the same can be said for the influence of mainland China in promoting certain works throughout the Sinosphere and beyond. Lest we forget, Western countries aren’t the only colonial powers.) To clarify: I’m not saying English literature shouldn’t be taught. Rather, the attention and veneration it receives should be radically redistributed to include literary works from other languages too—and not just the usual suspects from the Western literary canon (e.g., Kafka, Tolstoy, Flaubert), or the Asian literary canon for that matter (e.g., The Dream of the Red Chamber, the Ramayana, and The Tale of Genji). And no, I don’t think it’s a problem that such literature be taught in translation, as would most likely be necessary for this plan to be implemented. Literary translation is a skill, and works in translation are collaborative works of art just as worth reading as original-language works. As Norman Erikson Pasaribu likes to say of my translation of his poetry collection Sergius Seeks Bacchus: it’s the same work, but in a parallel dimension. A different version of itself, but no lesser for it. In fact, it is through studying and learning to revere works through translation that the Anglosphere is likeliest to learn what it means to appreciate new phrases, forms, and styles that diverge from those we’re most comfortable with. Because it’ll mean that our narrow conceptions of what constitutes “good” writing in English will go bang! And then the universe can start to unfurl.   By Tiffany Tsao Translator, Sergius Seeks Bacchus (2019) Author, Under Your Wings (2018)

  by Tiffany Tsao

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  Musings

  How Translators Are Saving the World

  Lately I have often stood alongside a translator as I have launched books published in other countries. It’s hard for me to express the relief that comes with being able to share authorship with someone. I was delighted to relinquish at least a little bit of my responsibility for the text, for better or for worse. Thrilled to not have to face on my own a riled-up critic, an oversensitive reviewer, a journalist with no interest or taste in literature, an arrogant, overconfident moderator. I took genuine pleasure from knowing that not all questions would be directed to me, and that in that object made out of printed pages, not all of it belonged to me. I think that many writers would share this sense of relief. The most astonishing thing, however, was the fact that the presence of the translator opened up all sorts of bold new worlds for me, entering into debates and discussions completely independent, touching on issues I found not entirely comprehensible, unfamiliar, mysterious, even. Suddenly, the text was freed from me, or maybe it was me being released from it. My text acquired a kind of autonomy, like a rebellious adolescent deciding to run away from home to a music festival in Jarocin. The translator would take over calmly, showing the text to the world from a different perspective, becoming its support and vouching for it. What bliss. Translators free writers from the profound loneliness that is inherent to our work, when for hours or days or months or even years on end we wander alone in the cosmos of our thoughts, internal dialogues, and visions. Translators come to us from the outside and say: I have been there, too. I have walked in your footsteps—and now we will cross over this border together. And indeed, the translator literally becomes a guide, taking me by the hand and leading me across the borders of nation, language, and culture. Literature begins when one signs a text one has written under one’s own name, when one stands behind the work as its author, expressing through words one’s deepest, most intense, and sometimes even painful unique experience, taking on the risk as well that it will not be understood, that it will be ignored, that it will make people angry or be dismissed. Literature is thus that particular moment when the most individual language meets the language of others. Literature is thus the space in which private goes public. A fact commonly agreed upon is that the first human being to sign a literary text (and therefore the first writer) was Enheduanna, the Sumerian priestess of the goddess Inanna. In a dark time of social unrest and political battles over power, Enheduanna wrote “Hymn to Inanna” in a mood of doubt and disappointment. It is the extraordinarily moving lament of a person who feels she has been abandoned by God. Thanks to the translation, which naturally modernizes its language, this text is perfectly understandable and relatable to the contemporary reader, transmitting deep, intimate experiences that voyage through time; it is without any doubt universal. It is a very dramatic, crestfallen confession of despair, of a sense of abandonment and isolation, written around 5,000 years ago (!), that may be fully experienced by anyone living in our radically different world, despite the fact that all the official languages of that world have long since crumbled (literally) into dust. A person’s private language gets shaped over the course of her whole life as a series of accidents from the language inherited from her parents to the language around her as she grows up, what she reads, what she’s taught, along with her own unique individual experience. This is the intimate language in which we speak to ourselves, and which only gets written down sometimes, since of course not everyone is in the habit of writing down her thoughts, of keeping a journal, or of creating any kind of text. An intimate language is therefore as unique as a fingerprint and can also be used to identify a person. I think culture is the complex process of striking a balance between private and communal languages. Collective languages are trodden routes, while individual languages perform the functions of private paths. Collective languages are agreed upon forms of communication that have been adapted for society to be as understandable as possible to the widest range of that society’s members; above all, they are to convey content that enables the construction of a similar or identical picture of reality. In a reality held in common, words will refer to concrete phenomena and things, whether existing or ideal. Moving forward, the common language and picture of reality will reinforce each other. The paradox is that in this situation of codependency between the collective language and conception of reality, one gradually begins to feel trapped, since language fuels reality and reality, language. The best examples of this are closed totalitarian regimes in which the media, seized by the authorities, grinds out a well-known, predictable reality couched in only the most appropriate terms. In this scenario, collective language serves to maintain a given political vision and is consciously and cynically used in propaganda. Soon communication stalls; then it becomes impossible. It becomes an act of courage to recall a word or an idea from outside that system, or to pronounce aloud a truth that is apparent though not accepted by the system. Amongst the system’s adherents, the collective language gradually becomes so obvious that it is increasingly used reflexively, words being emptied of their meaning, contexts growing too threadbare to be recalled. This sort of language turns into what is known in Polish as “speechgrass,” meaning language that’s simply there, that communicates nothing in particular, that can only be a ritual, a shouted slogan. Ideas without contours, suitable only for chants. The worst is that in the process of creating such politically marked collective languages, words get stolen. Some neutral, mostly forgotten, highly archaic word suddenly retrieved from the discard pile makes its way onto banners and political platforms. One example from my own country today is “nation.” It turns out that, stripped of its historical context and dusted off a bit, it serves perfectly the construction of the new world order. It becomes so completely appropriated that even those who speak another collective language cannot use it now, since, weighed down by new connotations, it has become a danger. Of course, some collective language has to exist in order for us to be able to communicate with one another in a reality we must constantly negotiate. There must be a dimension of general agreement and of commonality, and often the simplest phrases and idioms do give a sense of order and make the common world feel whole. The battle over the imposition of a common language is currently being waged not only in parliaments and on television stations, but also at universities. There, intellectual trends come in waves that tend to bring with them their own shared languages. The implementation of a language like this can take a few years, but once it has been accepted, it serves not only to sketch out a picture of the world, but also to create new selective societies in which some will become members and from which others will be excluded. Every generation has such a language to describe the world, and these days, there may be a new one as often as every decade. At the same time, this kind of language may remain blithely unaware of its ephemerality and its limitations as it articulates only that which is located within its narrow borders. There is no worse affliction than the loss of a person’s private language, its replacement with the communal one. Politicians, officials, academics, and priests may all suffer from this. And the only possible form of therapy for this affliction is literature: coming into contact with the private languages of artists permits the reader to strengthen her resistance to an instrumentalizing vision of the world. This is a powerful argument for reading literature (the classics, too), for literature demonstrates that collective languages once functioned differently, and in conjunction with this, other visions of the world arose. It is precisely because of this that it is worth reading—in order to behold those other visions and to be reassured that our world is only one of many possible worlds and that we are surely not confined to it forever. The responsibility of the translator is equal to that of the writer. Both stand guard over one of the most important phenomena of human civilization—the possibility of transmitting the most intimate individual experience to others, and of making communal that experience in the astonishing act of cultural creation. Copyright © 2019 by Olga Tokarczuk   by Olga Tokarczuk Winner, Nobel Prize in Literature 2018 Winner, 2018 Man Booker International Prize Author, Flights (2018), Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead (2019)   Translated by Jennifer Croft Cowinner, 2018 Man Booker International Prize  

  by Olga Tokarczuk

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  Musings

  Translating Korean Feminisms

  A friend asked me recently: why are you a feminist? Or, given that most of us can answer for the obvious reasons that we're against patriarchy and misogyny: what brought feminism home to you? Of the three things that occurred to me, one was becoming a translator. Historically, literary translation has been a feminized practice—seen as “women’s work,” associated with values that are coded female, regardless of the gender of the one performing it, and therefore devalued both in terms of cultural capital and actual remuneration. Proposition: a society that doesn’t value women won’t value translation either. Right now, many translators and translation scholars around the world are working to change literary translation from a feminized to a feminist profession in three main ways: · redressing patriarchal canons through what we choose to translate · exposing the patriarchal norms behind demands that translators be faithful, humble, invisible (the same words which used to describe a virtuous wife . . . ) · dismantling (NOT reversing) gendered hierarchies that subordinate translation to the original The two authors I have chosen to translate, Han Kang and Bae Suah, are both women, and the press that I run, Tilted Axis, mainly publishes women—part of a joint intervention, a collaborative project with many other translators and publishers I know, in a landscape where twice as many men than women get translated into English. Of course, not every woman is a feminist, either self-described or in fact. There are many ways to be a woman, many ways to be feminist, many ways to be a translator. This embrace of multiplicity, plurality, the fact that there is never only one “right” or “best” way to do or be something is itself a feminist insight—and a translationist one. There are many ways of translating any given word, or sentence, or poem, or novel. And these alternatives can be meaningfully contrasted without always having to decide that one is “better” than the other. The idea that to praise the translation is to denigrate the source, to make the translator visible is to occlude the author, is a deformation of everything the practice itself invites. I've heard both Han Kang and Bae Suah described as “not really Korean writers”—women can never represent the nation, when that nation is coded masculine. Women are always minor, aberrant in some way. And especially women who contest both the idea of the nation and the reality of patriarchy. And both Han and Bae have had their work dismissed as too “extreme and bizarre” to be taken entirely seriously. As Emily Wilson, the first woman to translate Odyssey into English, puts it: gender identity is something every translator should think about consciously if they are not to simply reinforce unconsidered echoings of dominant cultural ideology which in fact we want to change. “Unconsidered” is the key word for me. It's a feminist act to question everything. To recognise that every utterance has a context, every speaker has a perspective and a position. To pay attention to these things and make them seen, whether in translating a text, in the discourse around translation, or in daily life. “Extreme and bizarre” from whose perspective? Not that of the many Korean women who tell me that they see In-hye, the elder daughter in The Vegetarian who had always done what was expected of her, not so much putting the needs of others first as neglecting even to wonder what her own might be, as a kind of Everywoman. Just as the husband of her younger sister Yeong-hye is a kind of Everyman—a man every woman knows. We also know men like In-hye’s husband, artists who scorn old-fashioned patriarchy and might even self-identify as feminist (especially to women they want to sleep with). Both men rape their wives. Recently, Jack Halberstam,s book The Queer Art of Failure made me read The Vegetarian as a manifesto for queer failure, which replaces uncomplicated positivity with ambivalence, critique, nonconformity, and asks us to question everything, especially what we are told is “natural,” whether in the sense of logically axiomatic or biologically essentialist. Because I'd always experienced social conventions as a kind of violence, that was what I recognized in Han Kang,s book—the darkly compelling pull of refusal, silence, withdrawal. When In-hye has her sister committed to a psychiatric institution, saying she,s crazy to believe that she's becoming a plant, that she,ll die if she doesn,t eat, Yeong-hye questions even the ultimate taboo: “Why, is it such a bad thing to die?” Of course she says this, my friend said. Look at her life before. She was already dead. Bae Suah’s recent fiction offers a defiantly alternative way of perceiving and representing the world, privileging simultaneity and defamiliarization over linearity and rationality. Like that of poet Kim Hyesoon, I think of hers as a shaman logic—distinctly female in its aberrancy, and dismissed due to that gendered association. Just as shamanism itself was suppressed on the Korean peninsula by/due to an association with the female—and thanks to the women who have kept it alive, both women and literature have an alternative inheritance of irrationality, darkness, madness, to draw strength from. Revision: a society that does not value women will not value what is feminist in translation; will value translation only insofar as it conforms to masculine values. In February, Tilted Axis will publish a chapbook anthologizing seven female Korean poets, as part of our Translating Feminisms series. Korean American poet Emily Jungmin Yoon translated and edited the chapbook for us, and explained her decision to title it Against Healing: “These women are, in my opinion, not interested in the function of poetry to heal. It is to hurt. They write to acknowledge and declare their pain. They are not trying to nurture the pains of the world. They are not asking for pity or remedy, either.” Getting more women translated into English can introduce a diversity of mature, nuanced feminisms to new readerships and linguistic-cultural ecosystems. And it's when the focus is on broader landscapes rather than exceptional individuals that we can bring about structural change. Scholar Sara Ahmed notes that feminists are often characterised as “killjoys” because they ask awkward questions about the world. We have to risk being seen as “translation killjoys” and ask awkward questions about translation too. When prizes and media coverage spotlight a handful of translators/translations, what is going unseen? The pitiful pay, routine humiliations, and white privilege and colonialist assumptions that still characterize our profession? As Claudia da Lima Costa says, “The question is not anymore to make [female writers] visible, but to make visible the (canonical) mechanisms that silenced them in the first place, so that the canon as a perverse system of discrimination and valuation is revealed.” Paying attention to what has been ignored, denigrated, lied about, and making it seen. Literally re-visioning, as Adrienne Rich has it. And as Muriel Rukeyser wrote in “Kathe Kollwitz”: “What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? / The world would split open.” As Han Kang had Yeong-hye do, through silence, through her body, through questioning and refusal. How to tell the truth about translation, avoiding monoliths, platitudes, and binary jostling? Rather than immutable truths or all-encompassing theories, my thoughts on translation are simply that: thoughts and feelings that have been produced in my body, in my MAEUM. A personal response, just like any translation. by Deborah Smith Co-publisher at Tilted Axis Press Literary Translator

  by Deborah Smith

• 

  Musings

  Translation, Description, and Gertrude Stein

  Recently, I have been thinking about translation as a form of description. I’m not sure if this is a new idea or a very old one. Perhaps it has already been thoroughly considered and exhausted. But the parallel occurred to me for the first time a few months ago, and I have been pondering it intermittently ever since. The reason for this was—and is—Gertrude Stein. In February of this year, a new exhibition opened at the Museum Boijmans in Rotterdam, the city where I live. The exhibition was titled BABEL and marked the return of Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s famous painting, The Tower of Babel (1568), to the collection, which, along with a number of other fifteenth and sixteenth century Dutch paintings, had been on display in Japan. The Tower of Babel, famously the origin-story of linguistic diversity and confusion, and thus, of translation—an origin story that has itself been much translated, as the translator Ann Goldstein recounts in her recent column for this magazine. As part of the exhibition, Karin de Jong, a Rotterdam-based artist and curator, devised the Babel Bookspace. And Karin in turn invited me, together with bilingual writer Moosje Moti Goosen, to plan an event as part of her program of events. Moosje and I knew immediately that we wanted to make the process of translation—that very often solitary, somewhat mysterious, and for the most part undocumented activity—appear in the exhibition somehow. We knew that we wanted to stage the translation process—its difficulties, its doubts, its enthrallments—in such a way that the process was still very clearly ongoing. In other words, we knew we were less interested in showcasing translation expertise than in opening the process up both for ourselves and for others. But how? It was Moosje’s idea to try translating Gertrude Stein. Stein is famous for her relations with the artists of her time, and several important works of Cubism, the movement with which her writing is often associated, are held in the Boijmans. Moosje had long been fascinated by Stein’s Tender Buttons, a book of prose poems in three parts—“Objects,” “Food,” and “Rooms”—first published in 1914. In response to Karin’s invitation, Moosje and I proposed to turn the Babel Bookspace into a temporary translation zone. We invited a small group of interested writers, translators, artists, and academics to work with us—urgently and audaciously—on translating all fifty-seven of Stein’s “Objects” poems over the course of a single day in May. Stein’s writing is notoriously strange and estranging. The object titled PEELED PENCIL, CHOKE., for example, reads: “Rub her coke.” It asks its readers to settle into an unsettling space of sonorous and evocative non-understanding—and it seems to ask this of its translators too. It was not at all clear to us what an “accurate” Dutch translation of Stein’s “Objects” poems would look like, read like, or sound like. This is what made our task very hard. But it is also what made it feel very open. As we worked, we frequently stopped to read aloud what we had produced so far, to debate the merits of this or that approach, this or that decision, and to engage with members of the public who had happened across our project as they visited the BABEL exhibition. Working collectively, we felt enabled, with our varying levels of English and Dutch, our varying degrees of familiarity with the work of Gertrude Stein, to test and fail, experiment and play. We titled our project Supposing you do not like to change, which is a line taken from Tender Buttons. We subtitled it “studies in translation,” which is a rewording of Stein’s own subtitle, “studies in description.” Or, to more precise, in the poster we made for the project, we redacted “description” and replaced it with “translation,” like this: “studies in description translation.” And it is this minor (or was it a major?) intervention on our part that has been preoccupying me ever since. Stein called her prose-poems Object-Descriptions. By doing so, she challenges us to rethink what we mean by description—what we expect of a description. The dictionary says that a description is a “statement or account giving the characteristics of someone or something.” But Stein’s poems ask: Which characteristics? The most general and salient? The most overlooked and particular? Or all of them, all at once? And from whose perspective? In what light, at what time of day, and in the context of whose solitary or busy life? Stein also called her poems Object-Portaits. Ekphrasis is the term for making a written description of something visual and I am aware that ekphrasis is often theorized as a process of translation. But I am thinking more specifically of translation as a written description, in one language, of a piece of writing already written in another. In other words, I have been wondering whether “description” really needed to be crossed out and replaced with “translation” for our project, because perhaps they are fundamentally related. Let’s say that a (literary) description is a concerted effort to give the characteristics of the object in a way that is meaningful for others. We expect a description to be attentive. But we don’t expect to have access to the thing itself, to compare the description with its referent, because what is being described may well not exist. Instead, we judge a description on how far it succeeds in producing a (new or familiar) mental image in the reader. How it does this may well be partial, unexpected, challenging. But we allow room for partiality, and challenge, and subjectivity: we accept that this is how the thing appeared to this person, at this time, in this light, on these terms. Rather than invalidate it, this time-stamped, newly-shed light can be what gives the description its interest and power. Might this offer a way of thinking about translations? As I said: I don’t yet know. I can anticipate the objections. I know that the translator’s responsibility to what she translates is, or can be, very different from the writer’s to what she describes. But then I am reminded of a piece of writing advice that Gustave Flaubert is said to have given Guy de Maupassant. It was an instruction for literary description: When you pass a grocer sitting in front of his door, a concierge smoking his pipe, or a cab rank, show me that grocer, that concierge, their attitude, their physical appearance and [. . .] do this in such a way that I cannot confuse them with any other grocer or concierge; and with a single word show me how one cab horse is different from the fifty others ahead or behind it.1 With its emphasis on paying close attention, on precision and—especially—on the requirement to reproduce, in ways very much left up for invention, the singularity of what is being described, this reads to me as anticipating Stein’s project, undertaken about three decades later. It also reads like an instruction for a kind of translation.   1. Cited in the introduction to Guy de Maupassant’s Afloat (trans. D. Parmée). New York: New York Review Books, 2008 (originally published 1888).

  by Kate Briggs

• 

  Musings

  How to Get to Bucharest from Harlem via Istanbul

  Next week, James Baldwin’s groundbreaking second novel, Giovanni’s Room, will be published in Romanian for the first time, sixty-two years after its publication. The novel tells the tragic love story of a young man named David, who moves to Paris with a fiancée and—after a brief, heady affair with an Italian, Giovanni—departs, unsure of everything and terrified he has rejected the possibilities of true love. Although it’s frequently noted that Baldwin’s agent and publisher told him to burn the manuscript, Baldwin actually received a great deal of encouragement. After reading the novel, Michael Joseph, Baldwin’s UK publisher, professed that they would put out anything he wrote. Norman Mailer offered a prepublication blurb, and the reviews in America, when the novel finally appeared, were largely positive. On the basis of Baldwin’s talent, one of the first complex portraits of the alienation of gay and bisexual life in American fiction was treated simply as literature. I know Baldwin’s Romanian translator, Elena Marcu. Along with her friend, AncaDumitrescu, she runs the first all-female publishing house in Romania, Black Button Books, which publishes and translates the literary journal I edit. A couple years ago, in Bucharest for the publication of a book, I sat in a bar with Elena and Anca on an otherwise dismal night, drinking Irish stout, conducting the kind of comparison game editors play when visiting each other’s countries. Is this published? What about this? Heads are slapped and titles spelled out letter by letter. It’s less essential to do this explanatory work as an American. Most people know the essential writers in English, their work and influence travels on the jet streams of empire, even if empire is what these writers critique. But sometimes the work migrates on the back of other thermals. Such was the case for the essays and novels of Baldwin. This was the fall of 2015, after a long year of spectacular police shootings, stranglings, and outright abuse had been captured on camera phones and spread round the world on social networks. “The whole world is watching,” the phrase one could hear at many Black Lives Matter protests, took on a new meaning for me when two Romanian womenbegan to describe to me their reactions to the atrocities they had seen on screens and then quoted James Baldwin back to me. We talked for a while in the rainy pub about Baldwin’s essays and the sound of his voice, of the power of longing in the current environment and also in the context of a former police state like Romania under Nicolae Ceaucescu, where almost everyone over a certain age had had an experience of being harassed or beaten or interrogated. Put in jail. One of Ceausescu’s last great plans was to bug every telephone in the country. On that night we also talked for a bit about the long aftermath of this kind of disruption—the way trauma is passed down and inherited, housed in the body—and then spoke of Ta-nehisi Coates’s memoir, Between the World and Me, written—as Baldwin’s essay “The Fire Next Time” was—as a letter, in this case to Coates’s son rather than to a nephew, grieving for the racist world his boy would inherit. The need for Coates’s book was apparent every thirty-six hours in America, which was the periodicity with which a black person was shot and killed by the police. Anca and Elena had already read the book. He’s not published here, Elena remarked. Neither of them are, she continued, making it clear she was speaking of both Coates and Baldwin. We have to do this, she said, looking out the window. Two years later, Anca and Elena had made this impulse a reality, not only translating Coates and Baldwin, but essentially starting a publishing house to give themselves the platform to do so. I think of this experience often when I fret, briefly, over the necessity of translating culture alongside the words of a writer. How, after all, are we to understand all the peculiar reference points and personalities of a writer when the culture that has made them is often partially or even largely invisible? Shouldn’t there be footnotes? What about a map? How about a glossary of terms? Shouldn’t a reader know exactly what the writer was referring to at all times? What in the world, for example, would Baldwin's debate with Richard Wright mean to a Romanian? My experience in Romania reinforced something I have slowly come to realize as a traveler and reader. True literature has a way of speaking to people from elsewhere. This is hopeful. One of the reasons it can speak to so many people, however, is that most of us have experienced an abuse of power. Literature does not solely exist to witness such tyrannies; but the best of it does not shy from speaking against them. Think hard of the works of great literature, from Mo Yan to Han Kang to Adrienne Rich to Virginia Woolf to Naguib Mahfouz to Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Doris Lessing. A huge amount of great literature reinforces the human scale of life and in so doing forms some kind of resistance. It reiterates what is essential in living, through the senses and the experiences of love and loss, and in so doing forms bridges between cultures. Power doesn’t count on this; power in fact fears it. This is why Stalin came for the poets. It’s why writers today still need to defend their right to speak freely. It’s why so many writers have been in prison. The first time I experienced a shock that a book I felt was an essential text in American life was only recently being translated into another language was in 2004. Baldwin was in the air there then too. I was in Turkey, visiting the great Kurdish writer Yasar Kemal. For three days I traveled around Istanbul with Kemal and his wife and friends, moving from public square (where a statue of him stood) to mosque (where he slept when he was poor) to restaurant (where the biggest fish was brought out to him by the entire staff), listening to stories, hilarious and tragic. Many of them involved the absurdities of living under state control. I pointed out that what he described in one moment was a form of civil disobedience, a term made relevant in American life by the writer Henry David Thoreau. Walden was recently translated, Kemal replied right back, but I read him a while ago at the recommendation of James Baldwin. Baldwin, it turned out, had been a friend of Kemal’s. They met in the 1960s at a house party in Istanbul whenBaldwin was on his way to Israel to begin what he thought was going to be a series of reports. Baldwin would later return so appalled by what he saw in Sinai that he couldn’t write the piece as planned. He ended up staying in Turkey on and off, longer than he lived in France, becoming a great friend of Kemal’s and learning a whole new side of American’s empire, in how it treated Arabs through its surrogate in the Middle East, Israel. The former boy-typist from an Anatolian village and the one-time boy-preacher of Harlem bonded over their love of song, and would often stay up late singing when they got together. When Kemal’s outspoken views earned him a place behind bars, Baldwin used his international celebrity to intervene, essentially shaming—as is so often necessary—Kemal’s tormenters into relenting. As I sat and listened to Kemal tell these stories, I wasn’t hearing his words exactly. His wife, Aysa Kemal, was translating them, often slowing her husband down, interrupting and elaborating upon and even correcting his tales. I also wasn’t alone. Everywhere we traveled in Istanbul, Kemal was stopped, thanked, and then joined. In breaks, I often turned to these friends of his and asked how they had met Kemal, and the answer I heard most often was just one word: prison. We met in the clink, some of them said, and then they would burst into laughter, after which toasts would be said and then a new story loaded up. Sitting there as the nights unfolded, it occurred to me: of course a man from a country which imprisons a huge portion of its black population would have something in common with another man from a country where minority population were jailed. And so Baldwin and Kemal could be friends while speaking very little of each other’s languages. Toward the end of that trip, after Yasar had shown us most of his Istanbul, and we’d sat in his house overlooking the Bosporus and heard about the novel he was working on at the time, Aysa took me over to the Museum of the Ancient Orient. In her previous life she’d been a museum curator and recommended this one for its collection of antiquities. Wandering through the halls, gazing upon pottery two millennia old, I stumbled upon a tiny slab of text, the size of a piece of toast. It was billed as the world’s oldest existing love poem, and it was recorded on a clay tablet in Sumerian. Gazing into the words, then at the adjoining placard, I realized I didn’t need to know who was king during this time period, or who the poet had paid taxes to, just that one person had loved another enough to write it down and to want to make it last forever. Moved by the poem, I left the museum by way of its bookshop, in search of a postcard or two and maybe a volume of poetry for the flight home. Like any bookstore within a 1,000-mile radius of Palestine, there was a selection of books by the then living poet Mahmoud Darwish. I chose one at random and a few hours later when I was on the plane I took it out. Mahmoud Darwish, I learned, had begun writing poems as a boy. He had first been imprisoned at age sixteen. It was not hard then to imagine him sitting in the circle of the writers I’d just left behind with Asya and Yasar. I opened the book at random to a poem called “Now, As You Awaken” and read: “Did you see the morning dawn from the fingers / of the one you love? . . . tell me how you lived. . . .” and I realized in its best moments, a translation can do just that. It can ask us, without anything other than words, to provide it with the other half of its meaning, so the bridge from one place to another can continue, in spite of what the world does.   

  by John Freeman

• 

  Musings

  Corrective Readings: Translation in the Age of Trump

  Translators from various languages despaired of making sense of Donald Trump’s comments long before he coined in a late-night tweet the word “covfefe,” which quickly went viral, inspiring him to add some hours later, “Who can figure out the true meaning of ‘covfefe’??? Enjoy!” Three days after Trump’s inauguration, for example, the Washington Post reported on the difficulties of rendering into Chinese his infamous Access Hollywood taped remark: “Grab them by the p---y.” One media outlet translated it as, “You can even play with their nether parts; anything goes.” The larger problem, according to French translator Bérengère Viennot, is that “Trump’s broken syntax, often limited vocabulary and repetition of phrases makes it difficult to create texts that read coherently in French, a very structured and logical language.” We know how his Rose Garden speech about withdrawing from the Paris Climate Agreement was received around the world, but we can only imagine how it was translated because, as Viennot explains, “Most of the time, when he speaks he seems not to know quite where he’s going . . . It’s as if he had thematic clouds in his head that he would pick from with no need of a logical thread to link them.” Which is a dilemma for a translator who must decide whether to render his words literally, leaving others to figure out what he meant, or make them cohere. Trump’s former press secretary, Sean Spicer, came up with a brilliant translation of “covfefe”: “The president and a small group of people know exactly what he meant.” Wouldn’t it be nice to say that to a reader who flags a phrase you labored over? My title comes from Louise Gluck’s reflections on the necessity of corrective reading—that is, reading against the grain, outside our comfort zone, in order to challenge our assumptions about what makes for good poetry. Norman Dubie offers wise counsel: “If you are a young writer who admires the work of a single older writer, then you are in great danger. Admire the work of two older writers, or more. Give your mind a problem and your mind, without permission, will solve that problem.” It is common in a literary apprenticeship to seek models, imitating others in the desire to touch their magic. But it is no less crucial to read as widely as possible, expanding your sense of the contours of literature, in the hope of discovering what might belong only to you. Translation can play a key role in the acquisition of this knowledge. Remember Ezra Pound’s advice to W. S. Merwin, who at the age of eighteen, visited the incarcerated poet at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital: Write seventy-five lines a day and translate. When I asked Merwin some years ago if he could indeed write seventy-five lines a day, he replied, “No. But you can always translate.” Rereading is another way to read against the grain. If in my youth I read in translation such poets as Eugenio Montale, Czeslaw Milosz, and Anna Akhmatova for pleasure, instruction, and inspiration (admiring the crystalline beauty of their lines, the rigor of their thinking, and their insights into the human condition, albeit with a sense that their experiences were so removed from mine that I might never touch the true depths of their work), I now read them for something more: guidance for a turbulent time. In the same way, I also read Victor Klemperer’s two-part diary of the Nazi era, I Will Bear Witness, which records day by day Germany’s descent into madness. If once I traced an aesthetic current through German folklore, expressionism, and French Surrealism, now I look to writers who have borne witness to the evil that humankind is capable of. At the time of Trump’s election, I happened to be reading David Michael Hertz’s Eugenio Montale, the Fascist Storm, and the Jewish Sunflower—a monograph exploring the relationship between the Italian Nobel laureate and his muse, the American Dante scholar Irma Brandeis, and the necessity of maintaining one’s independence under an authoritarian regime. Meditating on Montale’s so-called Clizia poems, I realized that my life in translation, as a reader of literary, philosophical, and spiritual works from various languages, and as a poet, writer, and translator, was a form of preparation for whatever American-made storm was in the offing. It is not often remarked upon, but in addition to the delights we take from reading great works of literature, we may also find models there for how to live and love and write; how to bear up in difficult circumstances; how to summon courage for the way ahead, no matter how dark that may turn out to be. “Culture has never been a guarantee against barbarism,” Hertz notes, since “among the administrators of ‘the final solution’ were men who admired Goethe, Rilke, Mozart, and Bach.” Then he describes Montale’s lifelong effort to compose poems in the service of his language and vision of the world—a vision at odds with the Fascist ethos of Mussolini and his minions. Hertz reminds us that the philosopher and Nazi apologist Martin Heidegger wrote his book on Hölderlin near a concentration camp, and wonders how the course of history might have changed had Hitler not been rejected by the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts. He writes: Montale was probably the most significant poet of the twentieth century who dealt with this great paradox in his finest works. In his poetry he returns again and again to the irreconcilable extremes of human nature as he ponders a world that creates both the forces of the storm and the forces of love. On the one hand, he sees Hitler, Mussolini, and the destructiveness that overwhelmed European civilization in the mid-century. On the other, he sees his beloved Jewish-American Dante scholar [Irma Brandeis]. How can both be real? How can both be part of what human beings are? What purpose can there be to a humanity that has given a new meaning to bestial, a meaning that would even make the beasts ashamed? Montale is the poet who realizes the ramifications of this paradox, who is contemplating the great teachings of the Western culture and staring down the brutality of Fascism at the same time.1 In 1925, Montale took the courageous act of signing an anti-Fascist manifesto and then published his first important essay titled “Style and Tradition,” the first in a series of articles about the Italian-Jewish writer Italo Svevo, and his first book of poems, Cuttlefish Bones, which announced the arrival of a singular talent. He knew that signing the manifesto would not be without consequences, professional and personal, and yet he did it anyway—a reminder that in the face of authoritarian rule every decision counts. He discovered how to embody the complexity of experience, which is always the first victim of propaganda. Against the bombastic simplicity of Trump’s tweets, amplified in the echo chamber of right-wing news outlets, I propose that we write and translate poems that embrace nuance. Against Trump’s doctrine of “America First,” which seems intent on destroying our democratic traditions, political alliances, and even the earth itself, let us learn from those whose works survived the onslaught of totalitarianism and the destruction of the truth.    1. Hertz, David Michael. Eugenio Montale, the Fascist Storm, and the Jewish Sunflower. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013, pp. 17–18.  

  by Christopher Merrill

• 

  Musings

  One Language

  Comparing different English translations from different eras of the same work is not so unusual, but I recently had the chance to compare different Italian translations of the same work over a span of five centuries. That work was the Bible. I’m not a historian or a linguist or a philologist, but from an amateur point of view, I became fascinated by how the language in a single passage changed over those centuries. The earliest Italian translation, published in Venice in 1471, was made by Niccolò Malermi, a Venetian monk, and was based on the Latin Vulgate. The so-called Malermi Bible that I was looking at was a 1492 edition, illustrated with woodcuts, and on my first encounter with it I happened to open to Genesis 11, the passage that recounts the story of the Tower of Babel. Most of us know this story: the whole world speaks a single language, and the people decide to glorify themselves by building a city with a tower that reaches to heaven. To punish them for this sin of pride, God scatters them and confuses their language so that they can no longer understand one another. Malermi’s first sentence is: Era nela terra uno labro e uno medesimo parlare, literally, “There was on the earth one lip and an identical speaking.” Labro (or modern labbro) is “lip,” which, perhaps analogously with the English “tongue,” could mean speech or language—a mouth part standing for speech. And parlare is the verb “to speak,” used as a noun, “speaking.” The second Italian Bible, also published in Venice, in 1532, was that of Antonio Brucioli, a Florentine layman who worked from the original Hebrew. (He was said to have Protestant leanings and in fact was tried three times by the Inquisition.) His first line is: Et era tutta la terra d’uno labro & delle medesime parole, or, literally, “And the whole earth was of one lip and identical words.” So while the structure has changed slightly, he also uses labro, “lip,” in the sense of language, and medesimo, “identical” or “the same,” but Malermi’s verb parlare has become parole, “words.” The third translation, published in 1538 and revised in 1546, was done by Santi Marmochini, a Dominican monk who claimed to have worked from the original Hebrew but is thought to have in fact relied on Brucioli’s version. His first line is: Et era tutta la terra d’un medesimo linguaggio & parlare, literally, “And the whole earth was of an identical language and speaking.” So he has eliminated the second modifier and introduced the word linguaggio, “language,” but has returned to the verb parlare. Then, in 1559, Pope Paul IV published the first index of prohibited books, and on it were the Italian translations of the Bible. All printing and reading of vernacular versions of the Scriptures without the permission of the Holy Office was banned, and for the next 200 years no Catholic translated the Bible into Italian. However, in 1607 an Italian translation by a Protestant was published in Geneva. The author was Giovanni Diodati, a Hebrew scholar whose family, threatened by persecution, had left Lucca for Geneva. His version, revised many times over the years, is still the standard Italian Protestant Bible. Diodati’s Genesis 11 begins: Hor tutta la terra haveva havuta una sola favella, & un sol linguaggio, literally, “Now all the earth had a single speech and a single language.” It’s a more balanced sentence, using two ordinary nouns for “speech” and “language,” favella and linguaggio, and repeating sola/sol. (The “h” of hor, haveva, and havuta is etymological, from Latin, and not pronounced, and is absent from the modern Italian words.) Finally, in 1757, Pope Benedict XIV relaxed the ban on Italian translations, and Antonio Martini, a priest who was later named archbishop of Florence, made a new version. His version, published in 1781, was based on the Vulgate, but he consulted with a rabbi on the Hebrew of the Old Testament. His first sentence of Genesis 11 is quite straightforward: Or la terra aveva una sola favella, e uno stesso linguaggio, or, “Now the earth had a single speech and the same language.” Until the first half of the twentieth century, Martini’s was the only approved translation for Italian Catholics, and not until after Vatican II (1962-65) was there a flowering of new translations and editions, thanks in part to the fact that Mass was now celebrated in Italian, not Latin. In the current official Catholic Italian version, called the CEI, or Conferenza Episcopale Italiana, published in 1974 and revised in 2008, we find Tutta la terra aveva una sola lingua e le stesse parole: “The entire earth had a single language and the same words.” Here we have the common modern word for language, lingua—literally “tongue,” a body part that, unlike the lip, seems to have survived metaphorically.   Verse 3 of the Babel passage describes the building of the city and the tower. I won’t quote all the versions in Italian, but here’s the basic sentence: “One said to another: ‘Come and let’s make bricks and bake them with fire.’ And they used bricks instead of stones and bitumen instead of mortar.” Most of the versions use the normal word mattone for brick (or bricks); but the bricks are baked or cooked “with” fire, “on the” fire, or “in the” fire; brick or bricks are used “for” stones, “in place of” stones, or “instead of” stones. “Mortar” is calcina or malta until the twentieth century, when it becomes cemento. The 1471 Bible is the only one that doesn’t have bricks but, perhaps more vividly, says, “Let’s make stones out of earth and bake them with fire, and they had baked stones for rocks.” You can get a sense from these examples—and it’s even clearer if you look at the entire passage chronologically—that the sentences seem to get plainer, less ornate, use fewer and, understandably and inevitably, more modern words. Verb forms and spellings change, as one would expect. But then there are also words that don’t change, like bitumen and bricks. Still, without making any assumptions about why the translator made his choices, we can certainly appreciate how many choices he had to make. If you were to translate these five Italian versions of the first sentence into more idiomatic English, with the idea of preserving something of their individuality, you might have sentences like these:   There was on the earth one tongue and a single speech. (1471) And all the earth was of one tongue and the same words. (1532) Now all the earth had a single speech and a single language. (1607) Now the earth had a single speech and the same language. (1781) The entire earth had a single language and the same words. (2008)   What’s being described in all these versions sounds like a golden age of harmony and understanding, but without the differences, we wouldn’t have the fun of comparisons, and translators would be out of work.   

  by Ann Goldstein