MadHat: Special Issue of German lit in translation

Like the new issue of Litro, the new issue of MadHat is dedicated to literature springing from Germany (albeit in translation; the Litro content all seems to have been written originally in English). In the issue:

Erika Burkart ~ Martin Clausen ~ Isabel Fargo Cole ~ Franz Josef Czernin ~ Robin Detje ~ Karen Duve ~ Carl-Christian Elze ~ Michael Farrell ~ Annett Gröschner ~ Anna Katharina Hahn ~ Ernst Halter ~ Franz Hohler ~ Henry Holland ~ Lucy Renner Jones ~ Milorad Krstic ~ Helmut Kuhn ~Karl Kunz ~ Sabine Lange ~ Pedro Lenz ~ Tess Lewis ~ Ruth Martin ~ Donal McLaughlin ~ Rachel McNicholl ~ Klaus Merz ~ Klaus Modick ~ Andreas Neeser ~ Francis Nenik ~ Jenny Piening ~ Steffen Popp ~ Julya Rabinowich ~ Steven Rendall ~ Katie Ritson ~ Kathrin Röggla ~Peter Rühmkorf ~ Bradley Schmidt ~ Jochen Schmidt ~ Philipp Schönthaler ~ Angela Schubot ~ Joel Scott ~ Sissi Tax ~ Jürgen Theobaldy ~ Gráinne Toomey ~ Marc Vincenz ~ Harald Weinrich ~ Jenny Williams ~ Karen Witthuhn

Litro: The Germany Issue

From the editors' mailing about this entirely enticing issue: "The stories in this month's Litro paint a picture of a Germany haunted by its past. In Schwellenangst by Jeremy Tiang, the central character is faced with a desolate past on a visit to the Nazi resort of Prora, built as a "Strength Through Joy" project. E. E. Mason's Blühende Landschaften is also an encounter with history, in the grounds of an abandoned house. Florence Grende's Heidelberg, A Beautiful Life: 1946-1951 is an extract from her memoir, telling the story of her family's post-war success, built on the black market cigarette trade. In The Fall Of Berlin (Oil On Canvas) by Jim Ruland, we follow a Nazi art collector as he watches the chaos of the invasion of a city, and then in Love by the Wall by Robin Wyatt Dunn, we move backwards to see the foundation of Medieval Berlin. Lastly, in Pippa Anais Gaubert's Berlin Ghost Story, we move forward again in time to a woman who is becoming a ghost in more ways than one in a modern city."

Yiddish novel to be crowdsourced

Reposted from BoingBoing:

"Best-selling author and native Yiddish speaker Michael Wex has launched an indiegogo campaign to translate what he is calling the most important work of world literature that you've probably never heard of. The book, written by Joseph Opatoshu in 1921 when he was a young Polish immigrant living in New York City is an historical novel about 19th century Jewish Eastern Europe:

 A vast panorama of Jewish life in Poland during the 1850s, Opatoshu's novel concentrates on backwoods Jews who live among gentile peasants rather than in Jewish communities in cities or shtetlekh. Touching as it does on hasidism, heresy, pre-Christian Polish folk customs, wife-swapping, messianism, and Polish nationalism, this book will change the way you think about Jewish life in Poland. 

"When he completes the work in about a year the translated novel will be released under a Creative Commons license. Wex hopes that a new translation will bring Opatoshu's 1921 novel to a broader audience. 'It'll change everybody's views of Jewish life in Poland,' Wex writes. 'If this campaign works, it'll also help other translators find a way to fund their own projects and establish a whole library of world literature that hasn't been translated into English before or has never been translated properly. Raising the money in advance means that the translators can work full time; since the finished product doesn't cost anything, they don't have to worry about a book's commercial potential. It's like a grassroots Guggenheim.'"

NB: the editors of Pusteblume just donated $20 to support the project's goal of $75,000!

Updike dings Goldblatt's Chinese-to-English

From a long profile in Chicago Reader, "Howard Goldblatt's life in translation" by Aimee Levitt:

One of Goldblatt's most discouraging experiences as a translator came when John Updike reviewed two of his translations in The New Yorker: Mo Yan's Big Breasts and Wide Hips and Su Tong's My Life as Emperor. While Updike acknowledged Goldblatt's dominance in the field of Chinese-to-English translation, he didn't particularly like the books, complaining that "the English cliches seem just plain tired." As an example, he cited a line from My Life as Emperor where a character "licks his wounds." It wasn't the worst example he could have cited, Goldblatt admits, but when he went back to the original, he discovered that Su actually had used the phrase "licks his wounds" in Chinese.

"He must have read it in Chinese and thought it sounded neat," Goldblatt says. "These are the things we deal with. We know we'll get slammed, but sometimes it's our call. We feel it worse than the writer. The writer's reputation isn't on the line with every book. But a translator's reputation can be destroyed by one book. It can call into question his ability to deal with the text."

Clive James on his new Dante

My translation of the Divine Comedy is here today because my wife, when we were together in Florence in the mid-1960s, a few years before we were married, taught me that the great secret of Dante’s masterpiece lay in the handling of the verse, which always moved forward even in the most intensely compressed of episodes. She proved this by answering my appeal to have the famous Paolo and Francesca episode in Inferno 5 explained to me from the original text. From various translators including Byron we can see what that passage says. But how did Dante say it? My wife said that the terza rima was only the outward sign of how the thing carried itself along, and that if you dug down into Dante’s expressiveness at the level of phonetic construction you would find an infinitely variable rhythmic pulse adaptable to anything he wanted to convey.

-- James, writing for Slate

New publication: Scottish Poetry in Translation

Scottish Poetry in Translation (SPIT) is a new postgraduate publication produced with the support of the University of Glasgow's Department of Scottish Literature. The first issue will be published this April and will contain new critical and creative work by some of Scotland's finest established writers, alongside several exciting emerging figures. The journal hopes to be a forum for the presentation of poetry in translation, as well as lively and informed criticism in the fields of translation theory, Scottish culture and contemporary poetics. Contributors to Issue One include Vahni Capildeo, Tom Hubbard, David Kinloch, Aonghas MacNeacail, J. Derrick McClure, Richard Price, Alan Riach, James W. Underhill, Nuala Watt and Rab Wilson.

Minter on becoming a translator

By the time I left Japan in January 1987 I had become “naturally conscious” in the Japanese language. You might say I’d forgotten English. I transacted most of my daily life in Japanese, and at night I dreamt in it as well. I’d lived with four wonderful families and had attended the senior year of what I later understood to be a prestigious boys school, Asano Gakuen. Here I was taken under the wing of the humanities staff, a group of slightly dishevelled, chain smoking men who let me hang-out in their office rather than attend classes. We drank tea and talked about anything and everything, and in our spirited conversations about life and culture and history and literature I really began to learn and understand Japanese. I took their classes in calligraphy, music, ikebana and art. And it was in that office, three storeys up looking north over a rather desolate playing field, that I began to translate Japanese poetry.

-- from a lovely essay by Australian poet Peter Minter, in the journal Southerly.

Hofstadter on elevators in French and American English

The last thing in the world that translators of novels wish to do, unless they are playing special kinds of intellectual games, is to carry a work of literature across the seas and re-set it in another land and culture; nonetheless, because vast numbers of words and phrases give off subtle aromas of which one is not always aware, this can happen, at least to some extent, despite their best intentions. The most insidious problem is that every single tiny act of translation, no matter how innocent-seeming, involves some degree of transculturation. This happens even with highly universal, vanilla-flavored words, such as "house", "door", "dog", "walk", "happy", "thanks", and so forth. 

To take a concrete example, how does one say "elevator" in French? If one uses the dictionary equivalent ascenseur (and there really is no alternative, so it's a forced move), that word will tend to conjure up in the mind of a native French speaker an image formed over the course of thousands of experiences with French elevators (strictly speaking, to be self-consistent, I should have written, "with French ascenseurs"). To be sure, the images of ascenseurs that jump to a French mind have much in common with the images of elevators that jump to an American mind, but there are also many differences, as anyone who has spent any time in the two countries knows very well. 

For instance, American elevators are usually quite large and frustratingly slow. They tend to have very thick walls and very thick, multi-layered doors that, on opening, slide out of view and, often after quite a long wait, slide back shut. They are rather silent (except for beeps at every floor), they have lots of lights, and they "intelligently" or "politely" stop at intermediate floors, if someone has pushed a button there. By contrast, European elevators (especially those of a few years ago) are often small (sometimes just a couple of people can squeeze in), their manual doors swing open outwards (and often there are two sets -- one inner and one outer). They move fast and are often "dumb" or "impolite", blithely ignoring people on intermediate floors, who simply have to wait till all current passengers have disembarked. And then there are those wonderful antique elevators with cages instead of actual walls, where, as you ascend or descend, you can see the spiral staircase winding around you, and woe to anyone who sticks their finger through the iron grillwork of the cage.

The contrast between these kinds of images is enormous. Although both the American elevator and the French ascenseur serve the function of vertically transporting people, animals, suitcases, and other items in some tallish building, the "vibes" that they emanate are radically different. Therefore, if a French translation of an American novel taking place in Richland, Washington replaces the word "elevator" by the word ascenseur all three times it occurs, there will result a tiny, microscopic, almost undetectable effect of transculturation in the minds of French readers.

-- from "Translator, Trader" (pp.15-17), an essay (bound in the same volume as the author's translation from French version of Françoise Sagan's novel La Chamade) which in its hundred-some chatty pages visits, considers, and retreads many of the challenges and pleasures of translation, including that familiar problem, discussed above, of transcultural references. As appears in That Mad Ache: A Novel/Translator, Trader: An Essay by Douglas Hofstadter. (See a review of the book at Three Percent.)