Conference: ALTA 2009, "Continental Drift"

November 11 - 14, 2009

The 2009 ALTA Conference Committee invites you to join us in Pasadena for a celebration of the confluence of cultures and languages that characterizes Southern California. Greater Los Angeles is the home of the world’s second largest Mexican population (after Mexico City), the most populous Korean community outside of Korea, and a center of Arab, Armenian, Central American, Chinese, Iranian, Jewish, Russian, Vietnamese, and countless other ethnic groups. LA is a place where continents truly do collide, even when our infamous seismic activity is at a lull! And who facilitates this metaphorical continental drift more effectively than literary translators?

This year’s ALTA conference will feature the intersection of translation and the entertainment industry, including film, legitimate theater, and music. Additionally, we will take a close look at the pedagogy of translation and the increasing visibility of literary translation in academia.

Of course, you can expect the usual complement of provocative panel discussions, as well as an exciting selection of bilingual readings, expertly coordinated, as always, by Alexis Levitin. We’re happy to report that Barbara Paschke will once again be in charge of Friday night’s ever-popular Declamación. And we’ve invited three prominent keynote speakers associated with Latin American, Asian, and European literature in translation, respectively.

But look for a few unusual twists this year. For example, you won’t want to miss the pre-conference reception, co-sponsored by Red Hen Press, on Wednesday evening, from 7-9, at the beautiful Pacific Asia Museum. The museum is located just steps from the Hilton. All galleries will remain open for our enjoyment. John Balaban will read his exquisite translations of Ho Xuan Huong's poems from his book, Spring Essence: The Poetry of Ho Xuan Huong and the talented Le Pham Le will recite the Vietnamese originals in this unique setting. As a tribute to Los Angeles’ rich theatrical traditions, we have a special event in store – a production of Jaime Salom’s Behind the Scenes in Eden, directed by Chris Kidder of Commedia Beauregard.

Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Near East, and Far East

Those of you based in Cambridge, MA, may be interested in a reading coming up this Sunday. As part of the Longfellow Summer Reading Series at the Longfellow National Historic Site, Michael Archer, the editor of Guernica: Magazine of Art and Politics, will be interviewing Nathalie Handal, one of the editors of the new anthology Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Near East, and Far East.

This 784-page anthology, published by Norton last year, features work by hundreds of poets based in Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Europe and America. Poems are translated into English from more than 40 different langauges. Publishers Weekly and Booklist have lauded the scope, ambition, and range of the project, the former describing the book, with its sections featuring whimsical titles like Bowl of Air and Shivers as "more an esoteric journey than a systematic reference."

On Sunday, in addition to the interview with Nathalie Handal, Boston- and Cambridge-based poets Martha Collins, Diana Der-Havonessian, Fred Marchant, and Afaa Michael Weaver will read from the anthology on the East Lawn of the Longfellow National Historic Site. The event is free and open to the public, and -- assuming the weather holds -- it should be a pleasant day to spend out on the green and leafy lawn.



Sunday, August 23rd, 4:00 p.m.

East Lawn, Longfellow National Historic Site, 105 Brattle Street, Cambridge

*Free and open to the public* 617-876-4492

George Szirtes' Blog

I highly, highly recommend that you skip right over to poet & translator George Szirtes' blog now. I could spend all day reading up on the back posts. From today's:

"I am doing a lot of Márai posting at the moment because I am deeply immersed in translating him, that is in between others, like Krasznahorkai and various poets. I do far too much of this sort of thing and I wake in the morning, saying to myself: Stop it and write your own grands oeuvres! and I think I will, I actually will stop it, once I have cleared the decks, taking on nothing more for two or three years. [Carries on talking to himself...]

Ah, Márai on poverty. The fascination of Márai is the sheer intensity and articulacy of his intellect. He feels everything and tries to describe it the way an explorer might describe a voyage. It's what makes him a thrilling read. I don't mean that his mind is a 100% original mind. In many ways he is a man of his time, a self-confessed bourgeois-cum-citoyen, but there is all this substructure and superstructure that is perfectly heroic in scale."

Cheesecake and Translation Tonight

Dear Boston-based translators, tonight a few stalwart members of the Boston Poetry Union are gathering for a pleasant evening of translation and tasty treats at the Cheesecake Factory in Boston's Prudential Center at 6:30 pm tonight. Feel free to RSVP here if you wish to join us and share your own original translation of another author's work, to read some of your favorite translations by others, or simply to talk about poetry in translation while eating mountains of food. I, for one, may bring in a few translations of sonnets by French Canadian sonneteer Pamphile LeMay.

We will be meeting in the lobby of the Cheesecake Factory at 6:30 sharply to determine numbers and get a table.

Introduction to Translation E>S, new online

The University of Wisconsin Milwaukee Translation Program is offering a course in Introduction to Translation English to Spanish online this fall, beginning September 2 and ending December 14. For more information, please contact Lorerna Terando at terando@uwm.edu.

Translate in the Catskills

The Translate in the Catskills workshop from August 21-23 in Maplecrest, NY will be helping freelancers use target language writing skills to rise to the top of the market. The workshop is aimed particularly at EN > FR and FR > EN translators, but other languages are welcome too. Program details and information on the course leaders can be found at http://translateinthecatskills.wordpress.com. Places are limited, so potential attendees are encouraged to sign up early.

Sassan Tabatabai in PEN Translation Slam

Sassan Tabatabai, a contributor to and supporter of PBJ since the journal's inception, is being featured in the first of a series of online Translation Slams organized by PEN American Center. His translation is of a political slogan devised by protesters who took to the streets of Iran this year after results of the June presidential elections were announced. From the PEN American site:

The slogan refers directly to an insult levied at protesters by Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who referred to them as khas-o-khaashaak, meaning dirt and dust, scraps and bits. The structure of this slogan -- I am / you are -- recalls a ghazal included in the collection Divaan-eh Shams by Rumi, the classic 13th century Persian poet who is generally considered one of the foremost figures in Iranian literary history and is known for celebrating love in his poetry. That slogans in the current protests in Iran are being based on poems bears witness to the extent to which poetry plays a role in the Iranian upbringing and consciousness.

Tabatabai's version of the protest slogan ends with a statement of resolute determination: "I am brave, I am bold, I am the lord / of this land." Both translations -- that by Tabatabai, and the other by Niloufar Talebi, director of The Translation Project -- can be seen beside the Persian/Farsi text of the protest poem at the PEN American Center website.

Le Clézio in English Translation: Sale!

Boston publisher David R. Godine has let us know that they are offering two novels from Nobel Prize–winning author J.M.G. Le Clézio at 30% off the cover price, until August 1st:

DESERT, translated from the French by C. Dickson
The Swedish Academy, in awarding J.M.G. Le Clézio the 2008 Nobel Prize in Literature, praised Desert as Le Clézio's "definitive breakthrough as a novelist." Published in France in 1980, Desert received the Grand Prix Paul Morand from the Académie Française, was translated into twenty-three languages, and quickly proved to be a best-selling novel in many countries around the world. Available for the first time in English translation, Desert is a novel composed of two alternating narratives, set in counterpoint. The first takes place in the desert between 1909 and 1912 and evokes the migration of a young adolescent boy, Nour, and his people, the Blue Men, notorious warriors of the desert. Driven from their lands by French colonial soldiers, Nour's tribe has come to the valley of the Saguiet El Hamra to seek the aid of the great spiritual leader known as Water of the Eyes. The religious chief sends them out from the holy city of Smara into the desert to travel still further. Spurred on by thirst, hunger, and suffering, Nour's tribe and others flee northward in the hopes of finding a land that can harbor them at last. The second narrative relates the contemporary story of Lalla, a descendant of the Blue Men. Though she is an orphan living in a shantytown known as the Project near a coastal city in Morocco, the blood of her proud, obstinate tribe runs in her veins. All too soon, Lalla must flee to escape a forced marriage with an older, wealthy man. She travels to France, undergoing many trials there, from working as a hotel maid to becoming a highly-paid fashion model, and yet she never betrays the blood of her ancestors.

From the Reviews:
In scenes of shimmering intensity, Le Clezio contrasts nature's stark and majestic clarity, from scouring sand to the incinerating sun and the vast gleaming net of stars, with the chaos, toxicity, and injustice of human life. A long time coming for English-language readers, Le Clezio's incandescent masterpiece couldn't be more relevant.
— Donna Seaman, Booklist (starred review)

THE PROSPECTOR, translated by Carol Marks
The Prospector is the crowning achievement from one of France's preeminent contemporary novelists and a work rich with sensuality and haunting resonance. It is the turn of the century on the island of Mauritius, and young Alexis L'Etang enjoys an idyllic existence with his parents and beloved sister: sampling the pleasures of privilege, exploring the constellations and tropical flora, and dreaming of treasure buried long ago by the legendary Unknown Corsair. But with his father's death, Alexis must leave his childhood paradise and enter the harsh world of privation and shame. Years later, Alexis has become obsessed with the idea of finding the Corsair's treasure and, through it, the lost magic and opulence of his youth. He abandons job and family, setting off on a quest that will take him from remote tropical islands to the hell of World War I, and from a love affair with the elusive Ouma to a momentous confrontation with the search that has consumed his life. By turns harsh and lyrical, pointed and nostalgic, The Prospector is "a parable of the human condition" (Le Mond) by one of the most significant literary figures in Europe today.

From the Reviews:
Le Clézio's prose is so sensual and rhythmic it's hypnotic. — Boston Phoenix
A novel of intense beauty. — Review of Contemporary Fiction
A remarkable work. — Booklist, starred review

News and Reviews to Peruse this July

In the summer, a young translator's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of summer reading. There are plenty of new books in translation out there, along with reviews and reviewers giving their yay or nay.

Scott Esposito, editor of The Quarterly Conversation, has a review of J.M.G. Le Clézio's Desert up at The Critical Flame. This is the second of the French Nobel Prize-winner's work to be published in the United States. Esposito particularly admires the slow, deliberate pace of the novel and ends his review with praise:

Desert is a dramatization of certain things that Western civilization doesn’t — and won’t — get. That Le Clézio can make these things seem beautiful and precious without preaching or succumbing to petty romanticization makes it all the more unfortunate that he had to be awarded a Nobel prize before English-language readers could learn what he had to say.

Meanwhile, over at Three Percent, translator and bookseller Margarita Shalina reviews The Sacred Book of the Werewolf by Russian novelist Victor Pelevin. This novel transforms the Russian folkloric archetype of the fox and the wolf into their modern guises of the sex worker and the government secret agent. Shalina concludes her review with the suggestion that "Pelevin is attempting to relay that Russians have been living their lives in a perpetual state of moral ambiguity going back as far as the ancient folktales. In such a state, why shouldn’t a fox or a wolf or a sex worker or an FSB agent aspire to evolve into a higher being?"

Lastly, for your listening pleasure please do visit Poetry International Web, which, for a limited time, is featuring audio clips of talented poets from all over the world reading at the Poetry International Festival in Rotterdam, recorded by Radio Netherlands Worldwide from the 1970s onward. Listen to poems by Mahmoud Darwish, Pablo Neruda, Wole Soyinka, Joseph Brodsky, Inger Christensen, Derek Walcott, Ernst Jandl, and others. They won't be up there forever, so listen now!

To the NYTimes: Remember the translator!

Ezra E. Fitz, of Brentwood, Tenn., reminds the editors of The New York Times that without the diligence and skill of translators, world literature would largely be inaccessible to English-speaking monoglot readers:

Gerald Martin’s “Gabriel García Márquez: A Life” (June 7) is certainly chock-full of savory facts and hearty commentary, but it is also notable for its near-total lack of another, equally vital literary nutrient: the translator. You can count the references to Gregory Rabassa and Edith Grossman on one hand.

Your reviewer, Paul Berman, notes that García Márquez studied Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner and Proust “in Spanish translation,” but when he raves about the “gorgeous sentences” in “The Autumn of the Patriarch,” lauding it as “a heroic demonstration of man’s triumph over language,” he neglects to mention whether he read those sentences in Spanish or English.

Martin himself reads “The Autumn of the Patriarch” with close scrutiny, counting the number of sentences in each chapter and noting the subtle changes in narrative voice, before ultimately concluding that the novel “stands as the decisive oeuvre of García Márquez’s career” because “it encapsulates all his other works.”

Let us remind ourselves that García Márquez’s gorgeous sentences have been encapsulated in English variations thanks to the unheralded work of his translators.

New Russian Poetry at Jacket

Привет. Jacket Magazine 36 devotes a substantial chunk of space to new Russian poetry in translation, compiled by Russian poets and translators Peter and Tatyana Golub. In a preferatory essay, Peter Golub explains,

I selected the great majority of the poets in this anthology because they belong to the category of newcomers who are not disposed to enter the cycle of simple reproduction, i.e. to recognize the old hallowed literature and do likewise. Many of these poets bring with them dispositions that clash with prevailing norms and expectations.

The poets he chooses are in their 20s and 30s. What marks this generation of poets, Golub argues, is that they "cannot simply resist the dominant field, because the dominant field no longer consists of official Soviet literature, but of legitimate literary figures like Osip Mandelshtam, Gennady Aigi, and Joseph Brodsky, and living writers like Kolya Baitov, Evgeny Rein, and Elena Schwartz." The younger poets' "task is to add new space to the existing field, to carefully balance respect for the older authors and also to challenge the establishment with a call for new literature. This means playing by the rules of the field, and facing competition from its established figures, while trying to be catalysts of change."

In addition to the poems in translation -- and I will leave you to discover the young Russian poets yourselves -- Jacket's special feature includes a handy list of links to organizations promoting new Russian literature, including Argo-Risk projects and press and Interpoezia bilingual poetry quarterly, as well as an interview with Russian literary scholar and editor Mikhail Aizenberg, and essays on poets Anastasia Afanasieva and Nina Iskrenko.

More wet floor signage

At this late date we have a follow-up to one of our most heavily trafficked blog posts, "The Example of the Wet Floor Sign." In that post we gave as an example of the difficulty in obtaining both semantic and rhythmic equivalence in the transfer of meaning from source language to target, the problem of wet floor signs (native to supermarket aisles and institutional corridors). "Caution: Wet Floor" being an insufficiently musical translation of "Cuidado: Piso Mojado," our PBJ crew suggested "Caution: We're Washin'." Now, Ilya Gutner, our New York City correspondent, suggests an alternative rendering:

Don't forget,
Floor is wet.

This is the nitty-gritty, nuts-and-bolts of translation, folks. It doesn't get more real than this.

Kirsch on new translations of ancient Chinese poetry

In his twofer review of David Hinton's anthology of classical Chinese poetry and David Young's Du Fu: A Life in Poetry, Adam Kirsch gestures dramatically and divertingly toward the historical and cultural depth which often goes under-appreciated of Chinese poetry in translation. He reminds us of the dubious and charismatic authorships, subversive quality, and truly penetrating clarity and perception (among other qualities we forget are not exclusive to poetry written after 1900) that drew Pound to this literature and which will reward new readers. I would be drawn to the books in any case, but Kirsch's review, informative and erudite as it is, enhances the appeal. One just wants quickly to dig in:

Reading commentaries on Chinese poetry--notably, Stephen Owen's The Great Age of Chinese Poetry, which deals with the High T'ang period of Li Po and Tu Fu--one begins to get an inkling of how many layers of meaning even the simplest, most imagistic poem contained for its original readers. Each genre of Chinese poetry had rules about rhyme, line length, and parallelism so intricate as to make the English sonnet look like free verse. Then there were conventions about how poems should start and end, and what images they could use, and what register of formality was appropriate to different subjects and different readers.

Now, I do take as challenge and invitation Kirsch's claim that many of the expressive features of Chinese literature -- e.g., the immediacy with which single-character ideograms communicate meaning; the shadings available to a tonal language; the paratactic grammar; and, as Kirsch notes, the relative scarcity of grammatical helpers like pronouns -- "are totally untranslatable into English." Tentatively scheduled but enthusiastically hoped for, in the Spring 2009 issue of Pusteblume, is new translation from contemporary Chinese by Eleanor Goodman. Look for the essay paired with these texts, to deflate the familiar argument that in translating Chinese, though something lovely may be transformed into English, much must be left behind.

BU Translation Prizes ceremony

Winners will be announced and awards presented at the ceremony for the 2009 Boston University Translation Prizes, the Shmuel Traum Prize and the Robert Fitzgerald Translation Prize.

When: Monday, May 4, 2009, at 2 PM
Where: School of Theology Room 625, 745 Commonwealth Avenue

For more information, contact dhabersh@bu.edu.

LeClezio to read at MIT on April 28th

Talk and reading (in English) by Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, "The Writer and the World: Reflections of an Author."

Date: Tuesday April 28, 2009
Time: 6:00-8:00 PM
Location: MIT Stata Center, 32 Vassar Street, Room 123

In more essential, Boston-based reading news, 2008 Nobel Prize winner Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio will be reading at MIT's Stata Center on April 28th, from 6 to 8 p.m. Few of Le Clézio's works are available in English as of yet; Boston-based press David R. Godine published a translation of Clézio's novel The Prospector in 1993. Listen to an audio clip of Christopher Merrill discussing the novel at PRI's "The World".

Tuesday's talk is sponsored by the Foreign Languages & Literatures Section, Contemporary French Studies Fund and The French Cultural Services in Boston, MA.

Bernardo Atxaga and Ilan Stavans to read on Monday May 4

Reading at BU Photonics Center
8 St. Mary's Street, 9th Floor
on Monday, May 4, at 7:00 p.m.

Bernardo Atxaga, a Basque novelist, poet, and short story writer who writes in the Basque language (Euskara), will be reading along with Mexican-American cultural critic Ilan Stavans as part of BU's Institute for Human Science's "Imagining Europe" project. The talk will be moderated by Mark Feeney of The Boston Globe. According to the project's website, the intent of the public fora is to "ask artists and writers inhabiting different cultural circles, so to speak, to reflect as Europeans on such questions as what constitutes the European 'we,' what keeps 'us' together, and where do “we” want to go in the future."

Transcripts of the series of conversations -- including Atxaga's and Stavan's contributions -- will be published in a volume by Zephyr Press. Monday's reading will also kick off the launch of AGNI 69 (despite the fact that neither speaker features in this issue). After the reading and discussion at the BU Photonics Center, there will be a tapas dinner at AGNI's offices.

Dr Johnson, making no bones about it

From today's Wordsmith mailing:

Poetry, indeed, cannot be translated; and, therefore, it is the poets that preserve the languages; for we would not be at the trouble to learn a language if we could have all that is written in it just as well in a translation. But as the beauties of poetry cannot be preserved in any language except that in which it was originally written, we learn the language.

-Samuel Johnson, lexicographer (1709-1784)

2008 Nobel Laureate Discusses Languages

Translating a Moving Target: Poetry of a New Romania

Poetry reading and discussion with Romanian poet Liliana Ursu and her American translator Sean Cotter. Moderated by AGNI founder Askold Melnyczuk.

Liliana Ursu is an internationally acclaimed Romanian poet, prose writer, and translator. Ursu's first book in English, The Sky Behind the Forest was translated by Ursu, Adam J. Sorkin, and Tess Gallagher. It became a British Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation and was shortlisted for Oxford's Weidenfeld Prize.

Co-sponsored by the BU Center for International Relations and AGNI, in cooperation with the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA), and Zephyr Press. A reception will follow.

Thursday, Mar 26, 2009, 6:30-8:30pm
Photonics Center, 8 St. Mary's Street (9th floor)
Open to General Public; Admission is free

For more information, contact Elizabeth Amrien: eamrien@bu.edu.

New Paul Valéry biography

As an accomplished poet, philosopher, and essayist, Paul Valéry is the quintessential Man of Letters, or--as The Guardian would have it--"the ultimate French intellectual."

Michel Jarrety has put together a new biography, published in French by Editions Fayard. In an interview on the publisher's website, Jarrety discusses Valéry as a poet and a man of science, and his great circle of acquaintances, and the process of writing his extensive biography.

Paul Gifford at The Guardian observes:

Valéry’s circle of contacts remains dazzling. He was intimate with leading poets and writers (Mallarmé, Gide, Rilke); he worked alongside Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Thomas Mann, Gabriele d’Annunzio, John Galsworthy and Stefan Zweig; he exchanged ideas with André Malraux, Jean Giraudoux, Colette and Paul Claudel (but also with George Meredith, Arnold Bennett, H. G. Wells and Aldous Huxley); his lectures at the Collège de France were an influence on Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, Michel Tournier, Yves Bonnefoy and Paul de Man. Who else with such a profile could also have had Einstein as trusted interlocutor and colleague, discussed atoms with Niels Bohr, or the crisis of representation in sciences with the likes of Paul Langevin and Émile Borel; compared notes with Ravel and Stravinsky, Degas and Picasso; collaborated with Bergson and Sir James Frazer; interacted with both Pétain and de Gaulle; interviewed Mussolini and crossed paths with an entire gallery of Europe’s interwar power-brokers? To say nothing of the cast list of princesses, duchesses, countesses and other denizens of the cosmopolitan, high-society Paris salons who provided the writer with dinners, contacts, funding, entertainment, country-seat vacationing, confidantes and lovers.

Jarrety's biography can't but be interesting focusing on a busy polymath like Valéry, and it covers the scope of both his public life and his private (love) life extensively.

As of now, Paul Valéry is only available in French and is priced at 52 Euros.