The Dark Road by Ma Jian

This sophomore novel by Chinese writer Ma Jian is a look at how the Chinese still hold onto their proud lineage and male dominated society and how their one child policy can conflict with their conservative thinking. Giving the reader a grim look at how this policy is enforced. The novel centers around a family headed by a man named Kongzi who believes he is a descendent of the philosopher Confucius. Kongzi already has his heir, a girl named Nannan, but a girl isn’t an adequate heir for Kongzi. So he needs his already pregnant wife to produce a son for him and his line. Unfortunately, Kongzi impregnating his wife for a second time has broken Chinese law so he and his family are forced to live on the lam until his second child is born. It’s important to translate a story like this because it gives westerners a look at what pressures future parents can have when dealing with issues like the gender of a child and proper decedents. A way of thinking that seems archaic to most people living in the West. This story should also help give the reader a better perspective of themselves as westerners since having multiple children is so common because of our comfortable populations. All from someone who can give a first hand view

"What's your problème?": The problem with translating ideas

At times, there is a word we run into when translating that poses a difficulty not only because its meaning is more complex in one or other of the languages, but because the cultural understanding of its meaning is also different. My encounters with these words happen mostly in French, and I am thinking specifically of the French word "problème" which gets translated into English as several different words, depending on context: "problem" "question" "difficulty" "issue" "trouble" "debate," among, probably, others. This word is not simply a false cognate, it is so much more. And it is a cognate that is not entirely false. The complexities in translating this word do not arise simply because English has more ways to say what the French say with one word, it is that the French don't have "problems" the way Americans do. Take, for example, this paragraph from Madame Bovary:

Puis ils [les hommes] avaient quitté la dépouille des bêtes, endossé le drap, creusé des sillons, planté la vigne. Était-ce un bien, et n'y avait-il pas dans cette découverte plus d'inconvénients que davantages? M. Derozerays se posait ce problème.

[Then they [men] had left the corpses of animals, put on a sheet, dug some furrows, planted a vine. Was this really a good thing? Weren't there, in this discovery, more inconveniences than advantages? M. Derozerays [presented this problem to himself] or [asked himself this question].]

Problems, in the modern French mind, are more philosophical musings than tactile difficulties. Flaubert puts the word "problème" (which occurs only twice in the book) into the mouth of a minor character, a common agricultural worker. In a novel where the magnificent is muddled ironically with the banal, the characters who believe themselves to be divinely inspired are beset with "difficultés,"and the plebeian characters are the ones with the "problèmes." This works within the terms Flaubert's irony because "difficultés" are the common obstacles of life, the hang-ups we deal with every day: running out of eggs, a child who won't stop crying, your spouse running into your paramour at the market. "Problèmes" are the sort of hang-ups one would rather have, if one is a romantic character: oscillations of the soul, a questioning of one's reality, struggles to define words like "love" and "virtue." Emma Bovary likes to believe she is the one with "problèmes," but her author never gives her the luxury of this word, no matter how long he has her languish in front of her mirror in pensive poses.

In English, a problem is a more quotidian thing. We tell the doctor, "There is a problem with my stomach," are assigned "problems" to do in math class, ask our fellow chest-thumping neanderthal at the bar if he's "gotta problem, man?" We slog through life's problems so that we can, maybe one day, staring at ourselves in the mirror, begin to have questions, concerns, and irresolutions. We would never call these problems. Problems are the several bottles of nail polish that roll to the floor as we slide our elbow across the vanity in an attempt to bring ourselves closer to our selves. In French, on the other hand,  "Ce qui m'est un problème" is not necessarily "what I have a problem with (what I object to)" but "what is confusing to me, what I don't understand." The "problematique du cours" (course description) is so named because it is a space to address French "problèmes," in the sense of questions, concerns, or meditations. They are thoughts which produce or provoke interest.

Still, the French don't limit their use of this word to these more positive thought-acts. A French "problème" can be a bad thing, as in this Kristeva quotation:

Puisque vous restez irremediablement différent et inacceptable, vous êtes objet de fascination : on vous remarque, on parle de vous, on vous haït ou on vous admire, ou les deux a la fois. Mais vous n'êtes pas une presence banale et negligeable, un M. ou une Mme Tout-le-monde. Vous êtes un problème, un désir: positif ou negatif, jamais neutre (Kristeva, "Toccata et Fugue pour l'Étranger").

[Since you remain irresolutely different and unacceptable, you are an object of fascination: you are noticed, spoken of, hated and admired, or both at once. But you are not a banal or negligible presence, a Mr. or Mrs. Everyone. You are a problem, a desire: positive or negative, never neutral].

The foreigner, or more generally speaking the stranger, presents a set of extremes: hated or admired, a problem or a desire, negative or positive. Disregarding an analysis of the essay itself (which is nonetheless very interesting and possibly deserving of its own blog post) and focusing on the language: the "problème" spoken of here is definitely negative, something to hate. Yet still, the author couches all of these descriptions under the umbrella of "fascination." As a "problème," the stranger may be hated, but is still an object of interest. A problem, for the French, is not something to counter, reject, get rid of, repair, or fix. It is something to think about, meditate on, delve into, examine, and incorporate into the construction of coherence.


These complications are not unique to this word. Several other words in French have given me similar difficulties: "étranger" = stranger, foreigner; "experience" = experiment, experience; "ennui" = annoyance, trouble, depression, apathy. Many of these seem to come from differing attitudes in French and in American culture which manifest themselves linguistically. I am certain other languages produce their own set of difficulties with their own set of words. What interests me about these words in French is that they seem to generally be related to a greater acceptance in French culture of negativity or suffering as something banal, an attitude which finds itself in conflict with the American desire to avoid trouble at all costs. Our avoidance of "problèmes," I believe, is our problem.

Labé's "Je vis, je meure…" in translation

Sonnet VIII

Je vis, je meure, je me brule et me noye :

J'ay chaut estreme en endurant froidure :

La vie m'est et trop molle et trop dure.

J'ay grans ennuis entremeslez de joye :

Tout à un coup je ris et je larmoye,

Et en plaisir maint grief tourment j'endure :

Mon bien s'en va, et à jamais il dure :

Tout en un coup je seiche et je verdoye.

Ainsi Amour inconstamment me meine :

Et quand je pense avoir plus de douleur,

Sans y penser je me treuve hors de peine.

Puis quand je croy ma joye estre certaine,

Et estre au haut de mon desiré heur,

Il me remet en mon premier malheur.

Louise Labé

Sonnet VIII

I live, I die; am burnt and submerged;

I am scorched by biting cold;

Life both coddles and abuses me.

My great suffering is entangled with great joy:

It happens all at once – I laugh, shedding tears.

Full of gladness, I am haunted still by grief.

My livelihood is fled, but ever endures.

All at once I wither and I flourish.

Thus Love is my fickle guide:

And when I see only more sorrow ahead,

Suddenly I am brought out of misery.

Then when it seems my joy has been decided,

And I am on the brink of bliss, 

Love forsakes me to my former wretchedness.

Labé; tr. Sara Balsom

Of course a great difficulty of translation is deciding whether to remain stringently faithful to the original diction, or render natural-sounding language in the translation. In translating this sonnet, I opted rather for the latter, although I find myself doubting this decision. While I like the sound of my English translation, I am afraid of having missed the point of translating this particular sonnet. Labé's diction is somewhat simplistic for the period, yet the intellectual concept of the poem is complex and striking. She describes life as a series of contradictions or juxtapositions which ultimately resolves into misery. The simplicity of the language makes this idea seem almost commonplace, the speaker almost apathetic, as if this is something one should or could learn in a school primer. The French have a history of taking a less melodramatic attitude towards suffering than the English do, and this sonnet seems to express this especially in the last line, which literally translates to something like "puts me back into my first/primary unhappiness." I don't believe that "former wretchedness" conveys this adequately, although I chose it for its half-rhyme with "bliss," which gives a truer rendering of Labé's rhyme scheme, and its metrical value, the three syllables of "wretchedness" being less jarring than the four in "unhappiness."

Hofstader's "Ma Mignonne"

À une Damoyselle malade

Clément Marot

Ma mignonne,

Je vous donne

Le bon jour ;

Le séjour

C'est prison.

Guérison

Recouvrez,

Puis ouvrez

Votre porte

Et qu'on sorte

Vitement,

Car Clément

Le vous mande.

Va, friande

De ta bouche,

Qui se couche

En danger

Pour manger

Confitures ;

Si tu dures

Trop malade,

Couleur fade

Tu prendras,

Et perdras

L'embonpoint.

Dieu te doint

Santé bonne,

Ma mignonne.

In The Life in Rhymes of Clément Marot, Douglas Hofstader takes us on a merry ride through the process of translating Clément Marot's poem "A une Damoyselle malade," a poem to which Hofstader affectionately gives the nickname "Ma Mignonne," taking an appellation from the first line of the poem. Along the way he asks the reader to discover the problems of translating poetry, especially when the reader's interest and enjoyment of that poetry relies heavily on its structure ("Note also that a teeny bending of the norms of pronunciation was deemed allowable [in my translation]...Did you catch any of these minuscule anomalies while reading "My Sweet Maid" aloud?).

Before he begins his task of translating, Hofstader provides the non-reader of French with a list of characteristics describing the original French poem, which the reader should keep in mind while perusing his multiple translations:

1. The poem is 28 lines long. 

2. Each line consists of three syllables. 

3. Each line's main stress falls on its final syllable. 

4. The poem is a string of rhyming couplets: AA, BB, CC... 

5. Midway, the tone changes from formal ("vous") to informal ("tu"). 

6. The poem's opening line is echoed precisely at the very bottom. 

7. The poet puts his own name directly into his poem. 

The biography of Marot which serves as an introduction to the translations is, charmingly, written in rhymed prose:

 "In the four-and-a-half centuries now passed since his death, Marot's carved a niche – although small, quite secure – in the vast pantheon of French literature. Le tome beau de Marot – the great book of our bard – has respect far and wide; though he's dead, he's not died. Mort n'y mord, Marot's motto: "Death, dull are thy fangs." The fellow (it can't be denied) had toupet – he had marrow and pluck, plus some luck of the dice. Thus he garnered nice blurbs from the likes of Boileau ('Il trouva pour rimer des cheins tout nouveaux' – He opened up pathways of rhyme no one knew)" 

Hofstader's transparent critique of his own translations entertains and intrigues. He gives the reader all the tools to make their own translation(s) of Marot, while humbly presenting his own examples. He acknowledges that these translations – like all translations of poetry – each fail in unique ways and succeed in other ways to convey aspects of the original to an Anglophone ear. His admissions are also written in a prose style that is nothing if not adorably endearing:

"...despite the fact that I was striving for nothing but the purest, most austere, least form-concerned type of literality, issues of form raised their little heads all over the place, like crowds of little mushroomlets merrily sprouting up in the most carefully tended of lawns." 

Interestingly enough, in pointing out his own difficulties in translating these poems, Hofstader actually (it seems inadvertently) uncovers some tiny flaws in Marot's tight verse:

"Another interesting matter is the handling of lines 20-21 (Si tu dures / Trop malade)... In a truly mindless translation, 'too' would have to modify 'sick' and the word 'long' would not enter the picture at all...Marot wanted to encourage his little friend Jeanne not to stay sick for too long a time. The idea of 'staying too sick,' after all, doesn't even make sense, for to be sick at all is by definition to be too sick."

The lines in question are not only a problem for the English-speaking translator, they are confusing in the original French. The enjambement that Marot makes in these lines is an anomaly in this poem, and one that feels awkward given the tightness of the other lines. However, Marot might have intended this moment to grab the reader's attention, for the lines in question also contain a haunting speculative clause for a girl in poor health: "If you last, ..."

The pessimistic translator may be discouraged to know that this poem exists in possibly a hundred translations, none of them, of course, actually equaling the original. But I choose to think it a wondrous thing that any one poem so simple and short can, by the process of translation, undergo a sort of self-multiplication, producing a wide range of related poems in several languages – one begins to think of the poem as engenderer of its own small world, a deity, if you will, of its kind.

Here are several of Hofstader's translations and "translations," beginning with the initial crib. (As an aside -- I encourage anyone to call their significant other "My sweet cute one feminine" and giggle at the resulting facial expression.)

1. My Sweet/Cute [One] (Feminine)

My sweet/cute [one] (feminine)
I [to] you (respectfully) give/bid/convey
The good day (i.e. a hello, i.e. greetings).
The stay/soujourn/visit (i.e. quarantine)
[It] is prison.
Cure/recovery/healing (i.e. [good] health)
Recover (respectful imperative)
[And] then open (respectful imperative)
Your (respectful) door,
And [that one (i.e. you (respectful)) should] go out
Fast[ly]/quick[ly]/rapid[ly],
For/because Clement
It (i.e. thusly) [to] you (respectful) commands/orders.
Go (familiar imperative), fond-one/enjoyer/partaker
Of your (familiar) mouth,
Who/which herself/ himself/itself beds (i.e. lies down)
In danger;
For/in-order-to eat
Jams/jellies/confectionery.
If you (familiar) last (i.e. stay/remain)
Too sick/ill,
[A] color pale/faded/dull
You (familiar) will take [on],
And [you (familiar)] will waste/lose
The plumpness/stoutness/portliness (i.e. well-fed look).
[May] God [to] you (familiar) give/grant
Health good,
My sweet/cute [one] (feminine).

2. To a Sick Damsel


My sweet,
I bid you
A good day;
The stay
Is prison.
Health
Recover,
Then open
Your door,
And go out
Quickly,
For Clément
Tells you to.
Go, indulger
Of thy mouth,
lying abed
In danger,
Off to eat
Fruit preserves;
If thou stay'st
Too sick
Pale shade
Thou wilt acquire,
And wilt lose
Thy plump form.
God grant thee
Good health,
My sweet.

3. My Sweet Maid

My sweet maid,

You I wish

A good day;

Your sickbed

Is a jail.

Total health

Please regain,

Then unlatch

Your room's door,

And go out

With full speed,

For Clement

Does insist.

Go, gourmand,

Thou whose mouth

Lies abed

Under threat,

Off to eat

Fruit preserves;

If thou stay'st

Sick too long

A pale shade

Wilt acquire,

And wilt lose

Thy round shape.

May God grant

Thee good health,

My sweet maid.

4. My small princess

My small princess, I send you a warm hello. Your stay in bed has been like a term in prison. Uncle Clement urges you to recuperate, and to get out of there soon. You've always loved sweets, so don't let being bed-ridden stop you from indulging – have some jam! And don't stay sick too long, because you'll get ghostly pale and start looking like skin and bones. God will surely bring you back to good health, my small princess.

5. Touchstones
("a pattern of words telegraphic... a chain of keys to its message will reveal what mustn't be skipped')

Vous: Cuteness; hail. Quarentine; cure. Egress; speed. Clément; insistence.
Tu: Epicurism; threat. Appetite; jams. Pallor; gauntness. Prayer; cuteness.

Introducing the Atlantean Poets Project

Of possible interest to those interested in South American letters and the esoteric, an announcement from Joyelle McSweeney:

My friend Jared Harvey did some sharp resurrection work for Beverly Pérez Rego's Atlantean Poets project. This project seeks to open an aperture on Venezuelan poetry not through translation into English but through an occult communication among poets.

2011 New Yorker letter: Iliad, Islam, globalization

Here we are in the winterval doldrums, that time between the cheery holidays and the digging-into of the work of the New Year; a good quiet fireplacey time to set aside the hubbub of new translations and translation news, and get discursive. Chatty, even! In the spirit of such times, here's a pair of interesting letters from The New Yorker which the Pusteblume editors noted a few years ago as being worth mention, but which we failed to get onto the blog at that time:

___________________________

The following letters, intersecting issues of cultural appropriation, as well as translation, appeared this week in The New Yorker: one from a reader responding to two articles (Daniel Mendelsohn’s review of a Stephen Mitchell's translation of the Iliad and a review of the Metropolitan Museum’s reopened galleries of Islamic art), and the other from Stephen Mitchell, responding to Mendelsohn's review.

Here's the reader letter:

The contrast between Daniel Mendelsohn’s review of a new translation of the Iliad and, a few pages later, Peter Schjeldahl’s review of the Metropolitan Museum’s reopened galleries of Islamic art was striking. Mendelsohn reminds us that, whoever Homer was or whatever the genesis of the Iliad, this glimpse at a polytheistic world of near-nihilistic savagery belongs to the Western canon; to him, it raises modern, even existentialist, questions. On the other hand, Schjeldahl, who describes himself as “a latter-day scion of the Renaissance wedding of Greek and Roman with Judeo-Christian traditions,” takes us on a tour of otherness; he argues that the Islamic and Western civilizations “cannot see each other.” But my reading of history is that Muhammad the monotheist is altogether more modern than the wrathful Achilles. It is the extraordinary power of serial appropriation and willful back-projection, both driven by medieval and early-modern politics, that takes the Koran (like the Iliad, an orally propagated text) out of the antiquity of Aristotle and Aristarchus. Amid the grand convergence that is called globalization, we might consider breaking free of hoary genealogies. Chase Robinson, Hartsdale NY

And here's Mitchell:

Mendelsohn, in his review of my translation of the Iliad, correctly says that the received text of the Iliad is a kind of wiki-composition. No one disputes that many passages were spliced in after the text was first written down. For some scholars, as Mendelsohn says, it’s the composite text that matters; yet there are other scholars who conclude that the Iliad is primarily the work of one great genius. To me, the additions are like the accumulation of grime, touch-up attempts, and yellowing varnish on a Renaissance masterpiece. With a painting, it is sometimes not possible to strip away the accretions and see the original brilliance. But with the Iliad we often have the manuscript evidence to help us do just that. (Book 10, the Doloneia, for example, has been recognized as an interpolation since ancient times, and contemporary scholars are in almost unanimous agreement.) All English translations up to now are of the wiki-Iliad. We will always have them to enjoy. But, as I discovered in reading M. L. West’s superb edition of the Greek text, when you remove the accretions an even greater poem is revealed—an Iliad that is leaner, more dramatic, more awe-inspiring. Stephen Mitchell, Ojai CA

(Emphasis added.)

from "Reading Across the Gutter"

Several weeks ago, I was at a roundtable discussion on editing poetry translations for literary magazines at which the question of presenting translations along with their originals resulted in such a range of responses I’ve been unable to let the question go. Unsurprisingly, it was harder for the editors of print journals to accommodate two texts, even if they wanted to: both space and funds are at stake. On the other hand, Don Share, editor of Poetry magazine, argued that publishing just the translation honors the translator’s work and grants the translation its independence. Erica Mena of Anomalous Press had a different—and to me, fascinating—approach to managing a translation’s independence: not wanting to encourage “reading across the gutter,” the online journal she edits (which you should absolutely visit) publishes the source text in a pop-up window, not en face. “Reading across the gutter,” as I understand it, refers to the sort of reading in which a person compares original and translation word-for-word and line-by-line, checking for “mistakes”—in other words, the sort of reading an en face presentation could unintentionally promote. [continues...]

Read the rest of Aditi Machado's thoughts on publishing en face, at Asymptote Journal online.

Eugen Ruge at Goethe-Institut Boston

Tuesday, October 15, at 7:00 pm
Goethe-Institut Boston
170 Beacon Street, Boston

Reading in German (English translation on-screen)
Discussion in English

Moderator: Barton Byg, UMass Amherst
Admission free

Eugen Ruge is the author of In Times of Fading Light (Graywolf Press; translated from the German by Anthea Bell), the portrait of a family set against the backdrop of the collapse of East German communism. It traces the stories of both this particular family and the GDR, while exploring the tragic intertwining of politics, love, and family under the East German regime. 

From an interview of Heather Cleary

From an interview of Heather Cleary by Stephen Sparks, published in Issue 30 of The Quarterly Conversation (2012):

SS: Does how a work affect you as a reader play into your work as a translator? In other words, how much distance, if any, exists between reader and translator? 

HC: I tend to think there’s very little distance between reading and translation. Gaytri Spivak has called translation “the most intimate act of reading.” It’s the closest reading you can do, and there’s almost an affective, if not sensual, quality to the practice of lingering over individual words in a way that the average reader typically does not. Of course, getting too entrenched at the level of the word can skew the perception of the work as a whole, something along the lines of missing the forest for the trees. As Natasha Wimmer, quoting the Mexican writer Gabriel Zaid, has said, reading a book too slowly is like getting a slug’s-eye-view of a mural. So, while translation is a detail-oriented kind of reading, it seems to be in constant negotiation with a broader, more story-oriented kind. 

SS: What Latin or South American writers are English-language readers missing out on?  

HC: Well, there’s Antonio di Benedetto, whose Zama (1956) and El silenciero (1964) are incredible. But there are so many great things already out in English translation, which means there’s NO excuse not to read them. On the dystopian end of the Argentine literary spectrum, there’s Roberto Arlt’s classic The Seven Madmen (though I don’t think its sequel, The Flamethrower, has been translated yet). And, seriously: Saer Saer Saer (of what’s out in English, I’d suggest Scars and The Witness). I also really like Bonsai by Alejandro Zambra, a young Chilean writer whose background in poetry comes through in the crisp beauty of his prose (in Carolina De Robertis’ translation, too). And these are from the Portuguese, but Chico Buarque wrote a smart, charming novel called Budapest, and Fernando Verissimo’s Borges and the Eternal Orangutans totally lives up to the outrageousness of its title.

A. K. Ramanujan: "Thoughts on Translation"

The following commentary comes from Chapter 2 ("Three Hundred Ramayanas: Five Examples and Three Thoughts on Translation") of Many Ramayanas: The Diversity of a Narrative Tradition in South Asia, ed. by Paula Richman. The section immediately preceding the text excerpted below ends as follows: "Some shadow of a relational structure claims the name of Ramayana for all these tellings, but on closer look one is not necessarily all that like another. Like a collection of people with the same proper name, they make a class in name alone." The texts Ramanujan refers to as "tellings" are a set of alternate versions of segments of the Ramayana.

That may be too extreme a way of putting it. Let me back up and say it differently, in a way that covers more adequately the differences between the texts and their relations to each other, for they are related. One might think of them as a series of translations clustering around one or another in a family of texts: a number of them cluster around Valmiki, another set around the Jaina Vimalasuri, and so on. 

Or these translation-relations between texts could be thought of in Peircean terms, at least in three ways. 

Where Text I and Text 2 have a geometrical resemblance to each other, as one triangle to another (whatever the angles, sizes, or colors of the lines), we call such a relation iconic . In the West, we generally expect translations to be "faithful," i.e. iconic. Thus, when Chapman translates Homer, he not only preserves basic textual features such as characters, imagery, and order of incidents , but tries to reproduce a hexameter and retain the same number of lines as in the original Greek—only the language is English and the idiom Elizabethan. When Kampan retells Valmiki's Ramayana in Tamil, he is largely faithful in keeping to the order and sequence of episodes, the structural relations between the characters of father, son, brothers, wives, friends, and enemies. But the iconicity is limited to such structural relations. His work is much longer than Valmiki's, for example, and it is composed in more than twenty different kinds of Tamil meters, while Valmiki's is mostly in the sloka meter. 

Very often, although Text 2 stands in an iconic relationship to Text ! in terms of basic elements such as plot, it is filled with local detail, folklore, poetic traditions, imagery, and so forth—as in Kampan's telling or that of the Bengali Krttivasa. In the Bengali Ramayana , Rama's wedding is very much a Bengali wedding, with Bengali customs and Bengali cuisine. We may call such a text indexical : the text is embedded in a locale, a context, refers to it, even signifies it, and would not make much sense without it. Here, one may say, the Ramayana is not merely a set of individual texts, but a genre with a variety of instances. 

Now and then, as we have seen, Text 2 uses the plot and characters and names of Text 1 minimally and uses them to say entirely new things, often in an effort to subvert the predecessor by producing a countertext. We may call such a translation symbolic . The word translation itself here acquires a somewhat mathematical sense, of mapping a structure of relations onto another plane or another symbolic system. When this happens, the Rama story has become almost a second language of the whole culture area, a shared core of names, characters, incidents, and motifs, with a narrative language in which Text 1 can say one thing and Text 2 something else, even the exact opposite. Valmiki's Hindu and Vimalasuri's Jaina texts in India—or the Thai Ramakirti in Southeast Asia—are such symbolic translations of each other. 

One must not forget that to some extent all translations, even the so-called faithful iconic ones, inevitably have all three kinds of elements. When Goldman and his group of scholars produce a modern translation of Valmiki's Ramayana , they are iconic in the transliteration of Sanskrit names, the number and sequence of verses, the order of the episodes, and so forth. But they are also indexical, in that the translation is in English idiom and comes equipped with introductions and explanatory footnotes, which inevitably contain twentieth-century attitudes and misprisions; and symbolic, in that they cannot avoid conveying through this translation modern understandings proper to their reading of the text. But the proportions between the three kinds of relations differ vastly between Kampan and Goldman. And we accordingly read them for different reasons and with different aesthetic expectations. We read the scholarly modern English translation largely to gain a sense of the original Valmiki, and we consider it successful to the extent that it resembles the original. We read Kampan to read Kampan, and we judge him on his own terms—not by his resemblance to Valmiki but, if anything, by the extent that he differs from Valmiki. In the one, we rejoice in the similarity; in the other, we cherish and savor the differences. 

One may go further and say that the cultural area in which Ramayanas are endemic has a pool of signifiers (like a gene pool), signifiers that include plots, characters, names, geography, incidents, and relationships. Oral, written, and performance traditions, phrases, proverbs, and even sneers carry allusions to the Rama story. When someone is carrying on, you say, "What's this Ramayana now? Enough." In Tamil, a narrow room is called a kiskindha ; a proverb about a dim-witted person says, "After hearing theRamayana all night, he asks how Rama is related to Sita"; in a Bengali arithmetic textbook, children are asked to figure the dimensions of what is left of a wall that Hanuman built, after he has broken down part of it in mischief. And to these must be added marriage songs, narrative poems, place legends, temple myths, paintings, sculpture, and the many performing arts. 

These various texts not only relate to prior texts directly, to borrow or refute, but they relate to each other through this common code or common pool. Every author, if one may hazard a metaphor, dips into it and brings out a unique crystallization, a new text with a unique texture and a fresh context. The great texts rework the small ones, for "lions are made of sheep," as Valery said. And sheep are made of lions, too: a folk legend says that Hanuman wrote the original Ramayana on a mountaintop, after the great war, and scattered the manuscript; it was many times larger than what we have now. Valmiki is said to have captured only a fragment of it. In this sense, no text is original, yet no telling is a mere retelling—and the story has no closure, although it may be enclosed in a text. In India and in Southeast Asia, no one ever reads the Ramayana or the Mahabharata for the first time. The stories are there, "always already."

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.)

Plunkett on Merwin's translations

The world of Merwin’s translations is flat. In his English, the Spanish sounds just like the Eskimo (although the latter features a seal and the former just a dog). You cannot distinguish poems of different languages from the originals—there are none—nor by notes that explain regional symbols and literary traditions—there are hardly any notes at all. What is odd and distinctive about Merwin is that I doubt that he’d take these observations as criticisms.

-- from Adam Plunkett's review of Merwin's Selected Translations for New Republic

Job posting: Urbana-Champaign

The Center for Translation Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign invites applications for 1) a Visiting Lecturer (Ph.D. in hand required) and 2) a Visiting Instructor (MA required) in Translation Studies, for 2013-4, with a target start date of August 16, 2013.

Full consideration will be given to complete applications received by February 15, 2013. For complete details, visit www.slcl.illinois.edu.