Three Percent's 2008 Translation Database

Chad Post at Three Percent has been doing an excellent job putting together a database of books of fiction and poetry translated in 2008. He updates the list regularly and writes capsule reviews for many of the titles. I strongly recommend taking a look if you are interested in picking up some new translations. Chad also has an interesting analysis of 2008 translations so far in terms of language and publishing house. The list of titles is by no means complete, so the data will not be 100% accurate, but here are Chad's findings for 2008 so far:

French: 26 titles (14.7% of total)
Spanish: 19 (10.7%)
Arabic: 17 (9.6%)
German: 16 (9.0%)
Russian: 12 (6.8%)
Italian: 8 (4.5%)
Hebrew: 7 (4.0%)
Chinese: 6 (3.4%)
Japanese: 6 (3.4%)
Portuguese: 6 (3.4%)
Swedish: 6 (3.4%)

Unsurprisingly, Europa Editions and Dalkey Archive have been responsible for the greatest number of publications in translation this year, followed by Melville House, FSG, Harcourt, Penguin, and Archipelago.

These results will undoubtedly change a lot as the year progresses.

Announcement: Translation conference at Rutgers University

Conference on Translation at Rutgers University

April 3-4, 2008, Teleconference Room, 4th floor, Alexander Library, 169 College Avenue.

With a lean and varied format—1-1/2 days, all sessions plenary—the conference will explore translation as a real-world activity in political, legal and commercial arenas, as well as a vital discipline in the academy.

Translators from New Jersey State law courts and the field of dubbing, and renowned theorists and scholars will come together in public dialogues, roundtables and panels to consider translation in the dimension of culture, institution, and theory. This conference is FREE and OPEN TO THE PUBLIC!

Fore more information, see:
Translation3%20Flyer%5B1%5D.pdf

Announcement: PAUL CELAN FELLOWSHIPS for TRANSLATORS 2008/2009 at the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) in Vienna

CALL for APPLICATIONS - DEADLINE: April 11, 2008

OBJECTIVE
The program supports East-West, West-East and East-East translations of classical texts and contemporary key works in the HUMANITIES and SOCIAL SCIENCES as well as in the field of CULTURAL STUDIES.

CONDITIONS
Paul Celan Visiting Fellows will be invited to spend 3 to 6 months at the IWM in 2008/2009 to pursue their translation project while working in residence at the Institute.

The fellows will receive a stipend to cover living expenses, travel, health insurance and incidentals.

They will be provided with a guest apartment, an office with access to e-mail and internet, in-house research facilities and other relevant sources in Vienna.

DEADLINE for applications is April 11, 2008 Please refer to the website www.iwm.at, "Fellowships", to learn the details of the application procedure and materials/documents required.

Sixty-Six: The Journal of Sonnet Studies is now available

I am very excited to announce that the inaugural issue of Sixty-Six: the Journal of Sonnet Studies is now available for purchase.

Of particular interest to Pusteblume readers are the sonnets in translation and accompanying essays on translating. Stephen Tapscott, a fine scholar, poet, and teacher at MIT, has submitted original translations of Frederico Garcia Lorca's sonetos del amor oscuro and a short, intriguing essay on these darkly delicious Spanish sonnets. There are also several sonnets by Francesco Petrarca, translated skilfully from the Italian, with an accompanying essay, by Christina Mengert. The Spring 2008 issue of Sixty-Six also features translations of poems by the German poet, Herbert Eulenburg, and--delightfully--a translation in English of a Polish translation of a poem originally in Hungarian. I would recommend you get your hands on a copy!

Stephen Marche on Alain Robbe-Grillet's death and the repercussions for Eng Lit

On February 18th, 2008, the French writer Alain Robbe-Grillet died. Grillet spearheaded the "nouveau roman" movement in France in the 1950s with his essays on reinventing the novel. Robbe Grillet saw conventional novelistic techniques (read: plot, character, narrative, ideas) as horribly out-dated and focused, instead, on the individuality of objects. The resulting work was highly stylized, "art" literature. The novels rarely interest contemporary readers; Robbe-Grillet is primarily read for his ideas on novel-writing. And his ideas, as such, have become rather unpalatable as writing moves back (if it had ever truly moved away) towards the structural architecture of the 19th Century novel.

Stephen Marche at Salon sees the backlash from Robbe-Grillet-style avant-garde writing towards realism and traditional novelistic structure as a source of stagnation in English writing (why he doesn't consider consider French writing more thoroughly, though, is puzzling). While Marche admits that Robbe-Grillet was "a great champion for the innovative novel," he believes the inaccessibility of Robbe-Grillet's work led to a literary backlash. "After him," Marche write, "literary innovation, experiment with form or anything mildly unconventional came to be seen as pretentious and dry, the proper domain of the cheese-eating surrender monkeys and nobody else."

Marche continues:

English fiction in the wake of Robbe-Grillet has become a deliberately
old-fashioned activity, like archery or churning your own butter. He
represented, through his status as cultural icon of the avant-garde, an entire
generation that turned literary experimentation into self-involved blandness. In
the '50s, writers like Nabokov could produce "Pale Fire" or "Lolita" and feel
themselves part of the mainstream of literary culture. After the '60s, after
Robbe-Grillet, anyone who experimented in fiction was being consciously
marginal, or at least countercultural. Thomas Pynchon(Nabokov's student) removed
himself in the most dramatic way; Nicholson Baker is another, quieter example.

Robbe-Grillet not only convinced a generation of talented novelists
that there was something vulgar about attracting a popular readership but also
lost the war he undertook to fight; the reaction against him was so much
stronger than the revolution. It is entirely appropriate that six months before
Robbe-Grillet died, James Wood became the principal literary critic at the New
Yorker. He is the master and commander of the forces of archaism. Whenever I
read a James Wood essay, I feel like I'm entering an oak-paneled club where I'm
forced to put on a tie and turn off my cellphone.

At the core of Wood's appeal as a critic is not an idea or a program
but a prejudice, a leaning, that the novel is essentially a nineteenth century
form. This prejudice came out most clearly in his review of Monica Ali's "Brick
Lane," where he argued -- and I don't think he's wrong -- that the book's
strength and appeal derive from inhabiting a pre-modern perspective. We live in
a world where divorce does not necessarily result in ultimate personal disaster.
Ali's characters do live in such a world and therefore they, and not we, make
better characters: "Adultery has withered as a fictional theme because it drags
such little consequence behind it nowadays." "Nowadays" is the quintessential
Wood word. There is more than a faint tinge of moralism in his nostalgia: You
should not want to recognize yourself in novels because characters like you are
not fit for them. Wood has made himself the opposite of Robbe-Grillet. He
instructs us in the maxim "make it old."

Now it seems that Marche's argument has slid, quietly, from Robbe-Grillet to Wood. Marche is as discontent with what he terms the "ultraradical" (embodied in Robbe-Grillet) as he is with the "willfully archaic." What he wants, of course, is good writing that is not trend-driven. Good writing, ideally, is driven by both stylistic beauty and the quality of ideas. If one of the two is lacking, the work is rarely memorable.

Reviews and news

Just a quick round-up of news and reviews of translations that have appeared this month:

-- Thomas Mallon at the New York Times Sunday Book Review reviews a new collection of three short works of fiction by Irène Némirovsky.

-- Benjamin Lytal at The Sun discusses new translations of Kafka, focusing on Metamorphosis and Other Stories translated by Michael Hofmann. Lytal remarks on how Hofman brings out the humor in Kafka's writing. As Lytal observes, the "new Kafka is funny — as David Foster Wallace pointed out in his essay "Laughing with Kafka" (1998), he is often much funnier than American students give him credit for."

-- Words Without Borders is examining contemporary Lebanese writing this month.

Nooteboom's Lost Paradise

I'm all set to read Cees Nooteboom's Lost Paradise, which has just come out in English translation. Nooteboom shares with Harry Mulisch the somewhat back-handed accolade of being one of the few heavy-weight Dutch writers known outside of the Netherlands. One reason his prose works well in translation is that it is a prose of ideas, rather than style alone. The esteemed J.M. Coetzee reviews Susan Massotty's translation of Lost Paradise in a recent New York Review of Books and places Nooteboom in the international realm of letters:

Nooteboom has a reputation as a postmodernist, not only in respect of his
fictional procedures, where he has plainly been to school with Vladimir Nabokov,
Jorge Luis Borges, and Italo Calvino, but in his sensibility too, cool,
intellectually sophisticated, ironic. He may come from the dark, heavy north and
speak a northern tongue but his heart, he implies, lies in a brighter, lighter
south (he is a devoted Hispanophile). He is a son not of Germany, whose high
peaks and dark forests breed in the soul dangerous metaphysical yearnings, but
of the commonsensical Low Countries. Even from the Dutch he keeps a critical
distance: for example, his 1984 novel translated under the paradoxical title In
the Dutch Mountains criticizes the complacency, greed, and hypocrisy of his
countrymen.

Perhaps that is what most appeals in Nooteboom--his resistance to provincialism; he is concerned more with manipulating ideas than with the dreary, fixed details of time and place.

The novel's story is (perhaps undesirably) fanciful, influenced by Rainier Maria Rilke's poetry as Coetzee sees it and, more directly, as I see it, by Wim Wender's film Wings of Desire. I won't go into plot summary here since Coetzee does a thorough job.

Coetzee also has this to say about Massotty's translation:

Massotty's translation of Lost Paradise reads fluently. Some of that fluency comes, however, at the cost of precision. Nooteboom is a careful
prose stylist of a notably philosophical bent. In a book concerned so centrally
with questions of dying and living beyond death, it is remiss to write of
someone who is burning with curiosity that he is "dying of curiosity," of
someone who is crying out to be seen that she is "dying to be seen," and of
someone who has one question above all to ask that he is "dying to ask"
it.

I would imagine his judgment is likely to be valid since Coetzee is, himself, a fine translator from Dutch and appears to know a thing or two about Noteboom. His slim translation of the work of Dutch poets, Landscape with Rowers, includes a poem by Nooteboom. In his collection of criticism, Stranger Shores, Coetzee has also written on Nooteboom.

Sabotage et Clavicule, a new bilingual journal

Claire Trevien, the editor of the journal Sabotage et Clavicule, is working to launch une nouvelle revue poetique. She seeks submissions from French to English or from Anglais to Francais, as well as essays and reviews concerning literature and translation. Work from visual artists will also be considered for this online magazine. Fully half of the publication will be dedicated to new poems by French poets under the age of 30. Submissions may be sent to her attention at SabotageEtClavicule[at]gmail.com.

Autumn Hill Books

Dan at The Wooden Spoon lets us know about Autumn Hill Books, which is briefly featured at 3%. AHB is a small non-profit press in Iowa, loosely connected to the international writing program there, 'whose emphasis is on making fine translations of primarily contemporary literature from around the world more widely available in English.' Chad writes, 'Overall, this is one of those presses that more people should know about, and their forthcoming title Laundry by Suzane Adam sounds intriguing.'

Reading in Kolkata

The lauded annual Calcutta / Kolkata book fair is cancelled this year. This would have been the 33rd year of the festival, which features throngs of people and hundreds of stalls of books in Bengali and English. With no book fair to go to, a disappointed attendee decides to take a literary tour of Kolkata instead. He then realizes that the Publishers Guild have put together a semi-clandestine makeshift book fair (nowhere near on the same scale as the official one):

"A few hundred book lovers are seated in plastic chairs in a
recently-restored hall decorated with chandeliers, columns and bunting. Before them sits an unlikely gang: the Bengali poet Sunil Gangopadhyay; the US consul general, who's fluent in Bengali; and Paul Theroux, who shares a few clumsy words on Hinduism and American transcendentalism. The crowd, he remarks, looks like "people meeting secretly for some furtive faith - like early Christians in a cave".

The Publishers Guild views the fair's cancellation as a blow to
Bengal's tradition of egalitarianism. "The rich can afford to go to the malls and buy books," says Mahesh Golani, joint secretary of the Kolkata Book Fair, whom I meet at the Guild's office. "It is the middle class people who cannot go to such malls in big swanky cars. Our visitors are also from the [rural] districts. They will feel very sad that they have lost the opportunity to come to the book fair."

So the Guild seem to be in the right, keeping the tradition going despite the High Court decree. But then our attendee finds himself talking to some publishers of small presses who claim that the fair "isn't about books anymore; it's about business. The Guild is guilty for this" and that "[a]ll the Guild wants is prestige[.]"

Most agree that the fair has been tainted by commercialism; the books are more expensive than they need be. Still, Kalkota's literary community is a vibrant one--Bharati Mukherjee, Jhumpa Lahiri and Amitav Ghosh are all associated with the city--and there is a large audience for literary periodicals. It would certainly be a shame for all this interest in literature to stagnate under commercial pressure.

Herbert (again)

I feel that I have been posting conspicuously often about the Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert, in part because a new Collected Poems appeared in 2007. (Words Without Borders recently featured Herbert in their Forum in connection with the 2007 publication of The Collected Poems, edited and translated by Alissa Valles.) The collection did receive quite a bit of attention; some reviewers, though, staunchly prefer the Carpenters' translations. Michael Hofman at Poetry writes that the text is "an uncorrected bound proof—rather unnavigable without an index of titles and first lines, and no doubt subject to all sorts of further alterations and corrections." About the translator, Hofman scoffs: "Herbert has a new translator, someone I have never heard of. Even that drafty, echoey thing the Internet (our very own updated version of Ovid's cave of rumor) has barely heard of Alissa Valles. This, by the way, is to register my surprise, not some snobbish impulse." Hofman, it seems, doth protest too much.

Valles' volume, I think, is, on the contrary, thoughtfully composed and her understanding of Herbert is, to my mind, astute. In the Jan./Feb. Boston Review she notes how English speakers still have relatively limited access to (or perhaps understanding of) Herbert despite his status as a literary juggernaut. She writes:

For most Americans, Herbert’s poetry still exists in a kind of historical void, sometimes called World Literature, in which he floats, stripped of his native matrix, alongside Anna Akhmatova, Bertolt Brecht, and Constantine Cavafy. It is, of course, no one’s fault that American readers do not have wide access to the extensive and diverse Polish criticism on Herbert. But the manner in which he was introduced to American readers has almost certainly encouraged a narrow reading of his work. It is at least in part a generational issue. Among those who started reading Herbert in the ’70s, there is angry resistance to any approach that complicates or challenges the standard vision, that of an idiosyncratic poet of historical irony.

Her new volume, incidentally, contains all the early translations of Herbert by Miłosz and Dale Scott. You may recall, Dear Reader, that I mentioned in an earlier post the minor quibbles the two had in translating Herbert's "Pebble".

Arabic Poet Idol

The number one primetime show in the Arab world -- an audience of 70 million -- features poets.

An initiative of Abu Dhabi's Authority for Culture and Heritage intended to increase interest among the region's youth in their cultural roots, "Million's Poet" is an Arabic-language, American Idol-style competition. Over the course of the 15 week competition, an initial batch of 48 bards is voted down to a final winner who will be crowned as ‘Million's Poet' and awarded 1 million AED.

Are the poems being translated for performance or publication in Europe, the States?

More about the show, and the progress of the contestants can be found at CNN, ArabianBusiness.com, and Zawya.

Quizzes

Do you know what a "wo-mba" is? Try the How wide ranging is your vocabularly" quiz at the Guardian to test your multi-lingual mettle.

You can also test your knowledge of Italian literature.

The Times Stephen Spender Prize for poetry translation

Today in The Times Online, Jenny Harris, whose translation of Horace won the Stephen Spender Prize in the 18-and-under category, writes about her experience. Her prose shows a mature grasp of the difficulties of translation:

"All translators try to get as close as possible to the experience of reading the original. At one extreme, this involves finding words that mimic the sound of the foreign poem, often with surreal effects, or giving the original words in the original order with scant regard for English syntax. At the other, it produces a poem that feels like it was written in the English tradition, using English verse forms and idioms that the translator feels are equivalent to those the foreign poet used."


Information on How to enter the 2008 Stephen Spender Prize for poetry translation:

Entrants must submit a translation of a poem from any language, modern or Classical, into English, with a commentary of no more than 300 words covering the reason for choosing the poem and the difficulties that they encountered.

There will be three prizes in the Open and 18-and-under categories and one in the 14-and-under category, ranging from £50 to £500. All winning entries will be published in a booklet and selected poems will be printed in The Times.

A charge of £3 will be made for each entry (entrants aged 18 or under are exempted), to arrive no later than May 23, 2008. Results will be published by October 25. Further details and an entry form can be found at the Stephen Spender memorial trust website, or can be obtained from 3, Old Wish Road, Eastbourne, East Sussex BN21 4JX.

Aesop's fables

Willis G. Regier at The Chronicle Review writes about the trials and tribulations of finding the best translation of Aesop's fables. No straight-forward task, apparently.

Regier writes that "[n]ine translators dominated Aesop in English over the past 500 years, and new ones are vying for attention. What do the translations show? Most obviously, some Aesops have more Aesop, much more, than others. Some have been much more reprinted, and more popular. And some change the fables: In some editions a lion outwits three bulls, in others four. Animals are altered: A weasel in one translation is a cat in another, toads become frogs, crows become ravens, a bear becomes a tiger, a lion becomes a leopard, and so on."

He goes through the different translations and their various political/social/religious slants and mentions which new translations are available. His vote, however, goes to Laura Gibbs's 2002 translation.

Unprintable Ozark Folklore, René Depestre the erotic voodoo novelist, and the Candlewick Monk

Robert Irwin at TLS reviews the new Encyclopedia of Erotic Literature, with entries spanning the literatures of the globe. Apparently the volume is not as titillating as it sounds. Still Irwin is baffled by (and slightly incredulous of) some of the entries:

"The Encyclopedia of Erotic Literature takes one into some relatively unfamiliar sexual territories – Japanese, Chinese, Arab, Zulu, Thai and Catalan. Some of the biographical entries are so strange that I wondered if some of these writers had not been made up. (It is common practice in reference books to insert a bogus entry or two in order to establish copyright in any future plagiarism case in court.) Was Pierre Albert-Birot a real person? Did he really write Les Six Livres de Grabinlour (1991)? In its first book, Grabinlour is “an indulgent observer of the sexual activities, from passing moments including a queen and a cowherd, a marchioness and ‘a luxury hotel negro’ to a king and shepherdess . . . . In the second book, Grabinlour is a courteous host when the Angel Gabriel spends twelve hours in Paris, largely comprised of eating, drinking and sex”. And so on.

Gershon Legman, the scholar tramp and author of Unprintable Ozark Folklore, sounds pretty fishy, too: “Over his long career he championed origami, attacked the initiation rites of the medieval order of the Knights Templar, critiqued the typography of the fifteenth-century printer William Caxton, translated Ubu Roi by Alfred Jarry, and compiled a bibliography on the economist David Ricardo, but he devoted himself chiefly to the study of sexual humor and folklore”. Then there are René Depestre, the erotic voodoo novelist, and Felipe Guaman Pomo de Ayala, the Incan essayist. The Chinese Dengcao Heshang Zhuan (“The Candlewick Monk”), a long novel about a little fellow who leaps out of candles and expands to fill the desires of the women he falls on, has one of the strangest plots I have ever come across."

upcoming events in France and Britain

If you are in Paris tomorrow, you can stop by the American University of Paris to hear Professor Alan Jenkins read his own poems and his translations of Rimbaud from his cahier Drunken Boats. Jenkins is a poet and was a long-time editor of the Times Literary Supplement.

And if you are in Britain later this month, you can stop attend a postgraduate symposium on translation theory and practice at the University of East Anglia.

graphic novels in translation

A light piece in The Times Literary Supplement on the pitfalls of Translation: David Baddiel expresses his disappointment in (and suspicions about) translations of Musil and Flaubert, amongst others. He raises the valid--if obvious--point that novels are not only about ideas and narrative, but language itself, "the resonance of the words, the rhythm and flow of sentence structure, wordplay." A good translator, however, should treat the difficulties of translation as an exquisite puzzle and determine how to pick and choose resonant words and a rhythm that captures the spirit of the original, even if this entails a slight loss of factual accuracy. (Ezra Pound's versions and Robert Lowell's imitations do this successfully, I think.)

This month, Words Without Borders has a feature on graphic novels in translation. The Duck is charming, if bizarre, and A Happy Childhood and Life of Pahé are somewhat interesting as accounts of childhood in Beirut and Gabon, respectively.

Ktonk! Adgno!

The New York Times Review of Books has had its first incarnation in another language! Any guesses which one? Romanian. No matter that its spoken by only about 25 million people. Don't be fooled by the scanty numbers or stereotypes of Eastern European exoticism. Critic A.O. Scott writes: "Romania is one of those countries where it seems that every literate person has written a novel, a book of essays, or at least a play." The NYT's Paper Cuts blog has more.

Also, Dan at The Wooden Spoon found a nice little piece on contemporary Russian poetry by Stephen Burt at The Poetry Foundation. Burt starts the piece by professing bemusement:

"The classroom next to my office has been booming all morning in Russian, a language I don't speak at all: I recognize it when the students respond to the teacher, in unison, by shouting "Spasibo!" though the other frequent shoutouts wouldn't be phonologically possible in any of the (too few) languages I read: one of them sounds like "Ktonk!" and the other like "Adgno!""

Bolaño, Berlin, and Bits from Herodotus

Following up on the last Bolaño post, another excerpt from Nazi Literature in the Americas appears in this month's Bookforum. This time, we get a portrait of the Schiaffino brothers--aficionados of literature and Argentinian football. The characters in Bolaño's faux reference book come off as credible, if just barely: Argentino Schiaffino is a criminal mastermind who, between stints running from the law, shows up at various World Cup games. Bookforum also has a little piece on the Spanish translator Edith Grossman.

Ian Buruma at the New York Review of Books talks about Alfred Döblin's 1929 novel Berlin Alexanderplatz and Fassbinder's fifteen hour long movie based on the book. Buruma is suitably impressed with the film, but thinks that the book still needs an inventive, new translation in English. Nice in theory, but the (almost) insurmountable problem is that the book, written in heavy, Berlin workers' slang, is "pretty much untranslatable," according to Buruma.

Over at More Intelligent Life I came across a series of articles on reading Herodotus. In the first, A.P. David introduces Herodotus--the "only travel writer in print for 2,500 years"--in its English translation by the late big-name classicist David Grene. The second talks about women in Herodotus and observes that they "all too often as a sideshow to the perceived motives of powerful men," in reductionist readings, at least.

Blips on Beckett and on Turkish poetry

The February issue of Poetry features translations of a few of Samuel Beckett's French poems by Philip Nokolayev, editor of Fulcrum. Shockingly, Beckett's poetry has been largely disregarded by critics, who have traditionally seen it as less interesting and competent than his dramatic works. In fact, this is the first time any of it has appeared in Poetry. Nikolayev is currently translating all of Beckett's French poems for a new critical edition he is putting together. Fulcrum 6 will also feature essays on, and translations of, Beckett's poetry.

The current issue of Jacket Magazine features a selection of poems in translation from Eda: An Anthology of Contemporary Turkish Poetry, as well as essays related to the poetry in the collection by Murat Nemet-Nejat (who is also editor of the collection.)

Also, check out Mary Jane White's translation of Eugenio Montale's "Cafe at Rapallo" online at Agni. The language is surprising and, somehow, endearing: the "raconteur of cupidity and sweet delay," for instance, the "tepidarium," and the "gnomish world."

Dutch Poetry Day & Second Life

For people whose "first life" isn't enough, Poetry International Web is "launching a Second Life pilot project to coincide with Poetry Day in the Netherlands and Flanders. Two short films of the poets Mark Boog and Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer reading original work in Second Life will be premiered at the Red Sky Club, Cookie Island in Second Life on 30th January. The films will also be shown in Rotterdam during the Gedichtendag opening.
If you are not already a Second life regular, in order to attend the screening you will need to sign up to www.secondlife.com, download the application and create yourself an avatar."

Those of you in the Netherlands should definitely try to get over to Rotterdam for Gedichtendag--"Poetry Day." Readings and talks will be held on January 30th from 8 to 12pm at Arminius, Museumpark 3, Rotterdam.

For the occasion of Poetry Day, a new collection of ten poems by Mark Boog, Alle dagen zijn van liefde (All days are of love) will be made available, along with an essay on reading poetry by the Flemish poet Paul Bogaert.

In even more Dutch literary news, UNESCO has named Amsterdam the World Book Capital City 2008. Hooray! Get over there and get some books!

Bolaño's Nazis

Words Without Borders provides an excerpt from Roberto Bolaño's new novel Nazi Literature in the Americas, forthcoming in February from New Directions. Bolaño's concept is intriguing; the novel is a collection of biographies of fictional writers who, in some way or another, sympathized with Nazism. Max Mirebalais--the fictional writer presented at WWB--is just one of the shadowy men from the collection.

Natasha Wimmer's English translation of Bolaño's The Savage Detectives was one of the most praised translations to have come out last year, and you can bet there is plenty of anticipation for Nazi Literature in the Americas.

Quibbles in translation

Today I came across an interesting little piece by Peter Dale Scott in the Words Without Borders forum. Scott, who, along with Czesław Miłosz, translated Zbigniew Herbert's "Pebble". Scott discusses the elegant simplicity of the poem--its suitability for translation--but also how two translators--both good poets in their own right--can vehemently disagree on an aspect of a given translation. Scott writes:

"Straightforward though the poem may be, it was one of the very few Herbert poems which, precisely because of its tight austerity, gave rise to two irresoluble disagreements between Miłosz and myself as to how to translate it. I failed forty years ago to persuade Miłosz to accept these two changes. At the time I was filled with awe and gratitude for the exciting and educational experience of translating with him, so I deferred. Nevertheless my two suggested alternatives have since continued to haunt me. How important these nuanced differences are, the reader can judge."

Scott provides both his version and that of Miłosz with accompanying explanations of what choices each translator made and why. Still, Scott does not capitulate to the great Polish writer, declaring: "To this day my admiration of Miłosz is one which still generates in me the desire to dispute with him. As to which is the better version of “Pebble,” I will let the reader decide." So, reader, decide. I encourage you to leave a comment stating which version you prefer and why.

In other translation news, The Center for the Art of Translation announces its Spring 2008 reading series. The Center has reeled in some big names, including Kenyan author Ngugi wa Thiong'o and poet W.S. Merwin.

Anna Amalia: risen from the ashes

"First time round, the books escaped: the Duchess had moved them out to her new library in the Green Palace eight years before the great fire of 1774..."

Northern California Translation Award

The Center for the Art of Translation, a non-profit organization that promotes international literature and translation through programs in the arts, education, and community outreach, is co-sponsoring the Northern California Book Award in Translation for the best translation by a Northern California translator. The Center staff are gathering books that may be qualified for the translation award and ask for your assistance in identifying book-length translations from any language into English (primarily fiction and poetry, though some non-fiction will be considered) published by Northern California translators in 2007. For the purposes of this award, Northern California is defined as Fresno north to the Oregon border; the publisher does not have to be from Northern California, but the translator must currently reside there. The translation award is co-sponsored by the Northern California Book Reviewers (formerly Bay Area Book Reviewers Association/BABRA) and PEN West Translation Committee. Sponsors of the Northern California Book Awards (with categories in fiction, non-fiction, poetry, children's literature, and translation) include the Northern California Book Reviewers, the Northern California Independent Booksellers Association, Poetry Flash, and the San Francisco Public Library. This year's NCBA ceremony will be held at the San Francisco Main Library in April 2008.

DEADLINE FOR SUGGESTIONS: NOVEMBER 21, 2007. Even if the book is due out in December 2007, they still need the information in advance of the deadline. For all suggestions, please include the author's name, the translator's name, the publisher, and the title of the book, and send the information to Olivia Sears at osears@catranslation.org.

Literary Arts Festival

The Translation Project is organizing an Iranian Literary Arts Festival from November 13-17 at Theater Artaud, 450 Florida Street in San Francisco. In partnership with Beyond Persia, the festival program features an art exhibit, panels, a gala celebration and the world premier of ICARUS/RISE, a theatrical piece based on new Iranian poetry and voted by 7 X 7 Magazine as the HOT PICK for November. ICARUS/RISE was created by Niloufar Talebi, with original score by Bobak Salehi and choreography and video by former SF and LINES Ballet dancer, Alex Ketley. ICARUS/RISE shows on November 15, 16, and 17. The November 17th show is followed by a gala celebration benefiting The Translation Project.

The woefully inadequate English language

"English is such a limited language. Why does it not have a word for the rushing sound a grandfather clock makes before striking the hour or the act of sticking a finger up a chicken’s bottom to see if it is about to lay an egg? Others do," writes Alan Hamilton in his discussion of Adam Jacot de Boinod's "second compendium of unlikely but useful words that other languages enjoy but English does not. "

Boinod's "original compilation included such obscurities as the Japanese baku-shan (a woman who looks better from behind) and nakhur, from the Farsi, meaning a camel that won’t give milk until its nostrils are tickled."

Hamilton admits, however, that English speakers will probably have little opportunity "for an equivalent of the Finnish poronkusema, being the distance a reindeer can travel without taking a comfort break. Nor would a snappy translation of embasan, from the Maguindanaon language of the Philippines and meaning to wear clothes while taking a bath, be daily on the lips of the chattering classes."

The right side of the tapestry

Recently Carol Rumens addressed the pleasures and frustrations of translation on the UK Guardian's book blog, partly in response to an earlier review of a translation of Paul Celan's poetry. An excerpt from the blog post:

So why translate? My first answer is that poetry in translation simply adds to the sum total of human pleasure obtainable through a single language. It opens up new language worlds within our own tongues, as every good poem does. It revitalises our daily, cliche-haunted vocabulary. It disturbs our assumptions, jolts us with rhythms flatter or stronger than we're used to. It extends us in the way real travelling does, giving us new sounds, sights and smells. Every unique poetry village sharpens us to life.

Some people would disagree, saying poetry in translation is the wrong side of the tapestry - it just can't be done. But they are talking about replication, not translation. It is perfectly true that you will never get a replica of the original - nor would you wish to. The way it works, when translator and original are in tune, is that a third poem is created. It is the child of two parents and simply couldn't exist without them.

How poor modern Anglophone poetry would be without Edwin Morgan's Mayakovsky, Anne Carson's Sappho or Mark Musa's Dante; without George Szirtes's Hungarian poets or Ian and Jarmila Milner's Czechs. What a loss to the itinerary if we didn't have the journal Modern Poetry in Translation to transport our imaginations across the globe in 80 seconds."

The irresistability of translation

Quotation from taken from Jean R. Longland's "World World Vast World of Poetic Translation", Latin American Research Review, 1977:

Literary translation is an addiction. A happy few are able to surrender their lives to it. We others sacrifice our precious free time and our social lives to this irrestistible addiction.

Shattuck on French translation, from 1959

In 1959, the Center for Translation at the University of Texas convened a symposium on translation. At the conference, the organizers invited prominent authorities in the field to look ahead and lay out an agenda for translators and publishers working in the language of their expertise. Their comments were published with the proceedings of the conference in 1961 as The Craft & Context of Translation, by the University of Texas Press. Here, Roger Shattuck on French:

French literature has been and continues to be better served than any other in English translation. For over three centuries, publishers’ hacks and the idle rich of letters, as well as a few dedicated craftsmen, have cast or coaxed into somebody’s English almost all major works in French. They have also translated enough tripe to add considerably to our nightmare vision of the future as archive. In 1960, however, this accumulated mass of translation means less to all three literatures (since ‘English’ must stand for two) than the fact that within the past fifteen years the Song of Roland and the prose masterpieces of Rabelais, Montaigne, Pas cal, Diderot, and Flaubert have appeared in fresh and generally felicitous versions. This running revival of the classics will have a more lasting effect than any publishers’ race for the latest nouveau roman or the literary reviews’ endless sightings and soundings in order to locate a new Paris avant-garde. The only great prose author that needs refurbishing in English, like that lately given de Tocqueville, is Montesquieu. The sociology of government knows few more pithy texts than L’Esprit des lois, and Nugent’s standard translation needs replacement (as Franz Neumann points out in his preface to the 1949 edition). Les Lettres persanes might well be brought back again within our horizon.

I know but a single basic statistic about French-to-English translation of contemporary works and ask for no other to demonstrate its robust ness. Two twentieth century French authors have begun to appear in English translation in complete uniform editions: Colette and Valéry. I doubt if a more sensitive and economical choice could have been made by a discriminating critic of modern letters. A committee could never have done so. All France can be found in these two authors, from music hall to Academy, from Chanticleer’s farmyard to Mallarmé’s living room. The vagaries of publishing sometimes find the mark.

What lacks today in English after these centuries of valorous service is not impossible to discern. We still need performable and faithful translations of plays of all periods and, in almost the same sense, performable translations of poetry. Few translators seem to be able to work long in the theater or in verse without becoming stilted or excessively racy. Most, in fact, start one way or the other and hold their ground. There is also the wide field of memoirs, ripe for tilling after long neglect because of changes in taste. Outside these areas, a handful of important modern authors still await suitable presentation in English.

Find this title on Google Books

Reading: Tabatabai at BU Central

Sassan Tabatabai will be reading his original poetry and translations from Persian TODAY at BU Central at 5 PM. The performance space is in the lower level of the Boston UniversityGeorge Sherman Union, 775 Commonwealth Avenue, accessible off the BU Central stop on the B-line Green Train. Sponsored by the Iranian Student Association.

Kiji Kutani on Poetry International Web

The October issue of Poetry International Web (http://international.poetryinternationalweb.org/) is now online. Featured: the Japanese poet Kiji Kutani. Editor Yasuhiro Yotsumoto looks at the disarming and disorienting qualities of Kutani's work, evident in lines like the following:

The moment the train pulled into Koiwa,
she turned soundlessly into a translucent morsel
and came sliding towards my feet
at a snail’s pace.

Seminar on German Poetry at the Goethe Institute Tomorrow

What is "German"? Goethe to George

An Introduction: Where is Germany in its Literature? A Closer Look at Some Celebrated Poems.

Seminar:
Wednesday, September 19, 2007, 6:30 pm
Goethe-Institut Boston,
170 Beacon Street, Boston

Text and discussion in English

Admission free

Info: +1 617 262 6050 or info@boston.goethe.org

Texts include English excerpts from:
Goethe (Erlkönig)Heine (Lorelei)Nietzsche (excerpts)

Photocopies will be provided at the meeting

Literary Translation and Mountain Climbing

In "World World Vast World of Poetic Translation", published in Latin American Research Review, 1977, Jean R. Longland compares the challenge of literary translation to mountain climbing and puzzle-solving. Do translators get the same sense of exhilaration after completing a tough translation that mountain climbers or skydivers get?

Longland writes:

"They say it is impossible to re-create a poem in another language, and perhaps it is. It is also irresistible.
Translators may attempt the impossible because they want to share their enjoyment or because they need versions for teaching or because they like word games – translations is as much fun as Double-Crostics. My own reason is the challenge of the irresistible; I am like the mountain climber who says, “Because it’s there.” And in fact, mountain climbing and poetic translation have some points in common. The translator and the climber may find smooth stretches on their rough paths, and they both struggle upward, but at the goal the similarity disappears, for the climber may succeed absolutely. There are no absolute successes in translation, which John Cairdi calls the art of failure. On the other hand, the translator will never find himself in the anticlimactic position of having climbed Mount Everest. He always has more worlds to attempt to conquer, and his old worlds to improve."

For the full article: http://www.jstor.org/view/00238791/di000614/00p00574/0

Combatting Stereotypes

"What is a European? Someone with the industriousness of the Spanish, the sobriety of the Irish, the palate of the English, the sense of humor of the Germans, the generosity of the Dutch, the modesty of the French and the courage of the Italians. In other words, a Belgian."
- Antoon Pardon, via Peter Van Roy

Language and influence

In his article “Dumber in English” (“Dümmer auf Englisch”), German biophysicist and author Stefan Klein discusses the implications of a scientific lingua franca. In many European countries, including Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden, English is the de facto language of academia and the sciences. Lectures and seminars are given in English, and international conferences are held in English even when it is not the language of the audience.

Klein mentions a conference on neuroscience held in Berlin where the six German and four international speakers gave presentations in English despite a primarily German audience. As Klein notes, the justification is that “[p]eople only take a conference seriously when English is the official language”. There is, of course, a pragmatic reason for the dominance of a foreign language over the local variety; Klein observes that “[f]or researchers, it’s all about influence, which is greatest when everyone uses the same Lingua franca.”

Sociolinguists, who study how social aspects affect language use, relate the preference of one language—or dialect—over another to social prestige. Within any given language, dialects or varieties are assigned prestige values linked to social class, gender and education. While all varieties of language are linguistically equivalent—Cockney is not inherently “worse” than Received Pronunciation, the Queen’s English—varieties are ascribed prestige due to correlating social factors. The same holds for languages. In a given community, different languages may serve different functions. This use of a vernacular, “low prestige” variety, alongside a “high prestige” variety is called diglossia and was seen in England, for instance, at the time of the Norman invasion when the language of the court was French and the common people spoke a Germanic variety. The use of the lingua franca, English, as the language of academia alongside vernacular languages such as German, Dutch and Swedish, can be considered a form of diglossia.

While English is accepted as international currency and publishing in international journals undoubtedly furthers a researcher’s academic reputation, the neglect of the vernacular in education can be disadvantageous to students. Klein’s observation that Dutch and Swedish students do worse on tests when taught in English is alarming. Students are less willing to ask and answer questions in a foreign language. How, then, do we achieve a balance between the accessibility of a language—how comfortable students are with a given language and how much it facilitates learning complex subject matter—with the prestige factor of a language—how much it will further a researcher’s international reputation? Klein’s answer is that “German should remain the language for seminars and lectures” in Germany. Why should students, still coming to grips with difficult material, have the added burden of doing so in a foreign language? The lingua franca is undoubtedly essential for international communication, conferences and publications, but using the vernacular at university lectures and seminars may ultimately best serve students learning the material.

Read the article in English at Sign and Sight; auf Deutsch von Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

No.1 is out!

Printed copies of Pusteblume No.1 are now available!

This is the second issue, following our No.0 last spring. Languages featured include Japanese, Modern Greek, Latin, French, Spanish, German, Russian and Italian.

(This is a temporary post. We will try to get a working PDF online within the next few weeks, which we will be able to link to this page. Check back soon!)

2007 Shmuel Traum Prize

Undergraduate and graduate students enrolled at Boston University 2007 Shmuel Traum Prize in Literary Translation, for works in poetry, fiction, or drama translated into English from French, German, or Hebrew. The winner of the grand prize will receive $200.

Your submission must include s copies of the selection in the original language; s copies of your typed manuscript, including title and author and specifying language of the original (do not include your name); and a cover sheet giving the titles of the original and of the translation as well as your name and student ID number, mailing address, telephone number, and e-mail address.

Verse submissions should not exceed 100 lines of a single long poem or several shorter works by the same poet or by poets of similar style and period; prose submissions should not exceed 12 pages of a complete work or excerpt (chapter, act or section). Materials must be submitted by 5 pm, March 19, 2007, to:

Shmuel Traum Translation Prize
University Professors Program
745 Commonwealth Avenue, Room 636
Boston, Massachusetts 02215

The judges for this year’s contest are Abigail Gillman, Assistant Professor of German and Hebrew, Boston University, and Rosanna Warren, Emma Ann MacLachlan Metcalf Professor of the Humanities,
University Professor and Professor of English and French, Boston University. For more information, contact: Caroline Hartevelt, University Professors Program, 617-358-1763.

2007 Robert Fitzgerald Translation Prize

Undergraduate and graduate students enrolled at Boston University are invited to enter the 2007 Robert Fitzgerald Translation Prize, sponsored by the University Professors Program and the Creative Writing Program. First prize is $250, second $100. Your submission must include 3 copies of the selection in the original language; 3 copies of your typed manuscript, including title and author and specifying language of the original (do not include your name); and a cover sheet giving the titles of the original and of the translation as well as your name and student ID number, mailing address, telephone number, and e-mail address.

Verse submissions should be approximately 100 lines of a single long poem, or several shorter works by the same poet or by poets of similar style and period. Prose submissions should not exceed 12 pages of a complete work or an excerpt (chapter, act, or section). Materials must be submitted by 5 pm, March 19, 2007, to:

Fitzgerald Translation Prize
University Professors Program
745 Commonwealth Avenue, Room 636
Boston, Massachusetts 02215

The judges for this year’s contest are Professor Irit Kleiman, Department of Modern Foreign Languages and Literatures, Boston University; Professor Patricia Larash, Department of Classical Studies, Boston University; and Professor Anita Patterson, Department of English, Boston University.

Journal: "New Translations"

A new journal affiliated with the Comparative Literature Department at The Graduate Center of the City University of New York has released a call for submissions for its first issue. New Translations invites submissions of newly translated and retranslated works of literary, historical and philosophical merit as well as reviews of recently translated texts. Inquiries may be sent to submissions@newtranslations.org.

From the Blumies: what, in the minds of the editors, constitutes merit? It's a challenging question, but one that deserves no less priority than the accuracy or elegance of the translation. That a translation is well-executed does not neccesarily mean the content of the source text is well-written or well-conceived! I look forward to seeing how the editor's emphasis on judging the value of the original is realized in publication.

Rosanna at Work

In an article from BU Today, the community news site for Boston University, Professor Rosanna Warren advances an uncontroversial but largely unheeded proposition: “You can be word-by-word accurate, but produce an absolutely horrendous translation that has no life in it." The article is a genial introduction to a writer whose poetic sensibility is central in the American writing community, and whose lyrical intelligence has had wide influence, not the least reason for which is her celebrated Literary Translation Seminar in the University Professors Program at BU.

In the seminar, students gather on Mondays for classroom sessions under Prof. Warren's able direction, discussing the challenges and techniques for depositing the gold of one language in the treasury of another. On Fridays, expert practitioners are flown in to discuss their chosen art. Already this spring, Robert Hahn has spoken on translating from English to Italian and from Italian to English, and Roger Greenwald came down from Toronto to share his expertise in editing and translating work from Norway and Denmark. Looking ahead, I'm personally excited to hear Richard Serrano's lecture titled "Translating Traditions in Chinese and Arabic Poetry: Al-Akhtal and Sun Yunfeng" on February 16. For a full list of this semester's lectures, visit the seminar webpage.

Professor Warren is given rein to say altogether more interesting things in a 2005 interview from The Kenyon Review. Interviewer Joseph Campana asks about an attitude found in her essays about Sappho and Catullus: "that poetry is, inherently, both elegy and translation." Asked to speak more about this, she responds:

... "I think of poetry as being lyric in the deep and archaic Greek sense, as song and dance. By the time it is translated to the drawing on the page that we call writing, the markers of dance and song are no longer present. Writing tries to conjure the presence. In that sense, I think of poetry as a kind of elegy for that transient intensity of experience. And translation, more specifically, sacrificial and elegiac in that it takes you to the heart of the mystery of what is poetry, which nobody can define, but we keep dancing around it. It’s an essence, which is not just engineering, which you can't just get by riveting together choriambs or dactyls, and yet which involves the engineering at some level. The image of the human body is a good one since most of us have the illusion, at least, that who we are is not merely the engineering of our bones and flesh and nervous system, though we wouldn't be here without them. So translating means teleporting a body, teleporting Sappho into another body. Inevitably in that passage, the molecules, the cells are damaged and yet we reconstitute it in something like a good translation which gives us the illusion of another dance being made, another breath being breathed, another nervous system pulsing.

Elsewhere in the interview, readers will learn about Warren's traditionalist stance on the education of poets and translators, an ethic enacted in the translation seminar's emphasis on metrics and formal verse in Greek, Latin, French, and Italian, among the many languages held up for consideration.

Links:
WBUR "World of Ideas" with readings
Translations of imaginary (!) French poet Anne Verlaine
Faculty Profile at Boston University

Chicago Translation Symposium

Featuring an unusually interdisciplinary schedule, the 2007 Caxton Club/Newberry Library Symposium will be held on March 31, 2007, under the title "Remodeling the Tower of Babel: The Translator's Role in a Shrinking World." The program is available at the website of the Caxton Club of Chicago. Translators and others with a professional interest in translation who would like to discuss the possibility of a caravan expedition from Boston to Chicago, are encouraged to contact the Blumies by email.

Of particular interest to this Blumie is the panel discussion to explore "the future of translation and translation studies, which seem inevitably linked to the ongoing development of the Internet and of digital translation technologies. This question will also be taken up in the Fall 2007 issue of the Journal, by Chuan Summers at the University of Leeds. In his article, Summers considers the merging methodologies of machine translation, corpus tools, and the traditional exertions of the human practitioner. He advocates ultimately for the integration of these disparate elements. As the demand for translation of print and digital works continues to rise, translators can either embrace all available methods in order to provide efficient and competent versions, or can stake out differing claims on "legitimacy" that impede the collective effort to disseminate literature across linguistic and culture boundaries.

Manga and Scanlation

There’s been a lot of positive feedback on Dygo Tosa’s translation of “Snowfall” from Kazuhiro Fujita’s Ushio to Tora Gaiden. Several folks have written in to tell us more about scanlation, in which amateur translators "dub" the scanned pages of a manga with new text; the product is distributed by the same file-sharing techniques employed by music fans to download illicit tracks.

Manga publishers are not meeting the market demand for translation; fans who’d like to get their hands on a particular title are forced either to learn Korean or Japanese or turn to underground sources whose reproduction of source texts is illegal under current copyright statutes. The language barrier discourages Asian publishers from printing English-language editions; yet surely they can’t be content to watch their copyright be disregarded by eager scanlators! Readers with legal perspective are invited to share their two cents on this dynamic literary situation.

Mr. Caxton – an online persona of veteran manga translator Toren Smith – argues in his blog The Dead Zone that scanslation is not a benign form of reader enthusiasm:

I know from talking to many folks in the industry that scanslations DO have a negative effect. Many books that are on the tipping point will never be legally published because of scanslations. This is not only unfair to the honest fans, it is robbery from the very creators the otaku profess to love.

And yes, the neo-otaku (my neologism for the new generation of entitlement-minded and puritanistic manga and anime fans) have mutated into a truly awful bunch of people, which is part of the reason I dropped out of the biz. Why work twelve hours a day, seven days a week for such an audience?

Although they scanlate at their own risk, this fan community is thriving and well-organized, with devoted Spanish-language and German counterparts. The German site Eyeshield21 uses a flow-chart to illustrate their scanlation process (translated here for the convenience of monoglot readers).

The globe-spanning technology that allows the easy interchange of foreign language literature also enables piracy. Or should we consider scanlation a new form of samizdat, being fundamentally a response to the lack of access to literature? Though of course this lack is caused not by censorship but by the laggard pace of publishers in keeping up with their web-savvy readers. As with illegal music downloading, as bandwidth increases so does the tension between publishers and consumers ready to turn to alternative sources for their favorite manga. It’s my opinion that cease-and-desist orders and the threat of lawsuits are not the right way to resolve this burgeoning conflict. After all, authors and artists should be delighted to have readers so eager for the story that they to their own scan optimization, image retouching, research and translation! Let us see.

Turn to The Comics Journal for a discussion of the scanlation phenomenon from July 2005. Blumies who want to learn more can explore del.icio.us tags on the subject or can visit MangaBlog for a good introduction to all things manga.

"Snowfall": An Original Manga Translation

"Snowfall" from Ushio and Tora Gaiden
A Manga Translation by Dygo Tosa
Original Manga (c-Japan) 1996-2003 Kazuhiro Fujita

I've spent the past two weeks translating one of my favorite mangas, "Ushio and Tora." I started reading the series back in middle school and I've loved it ever since; while the series ended years ago, I am still trying to collect all of the episodes. To my knowledge, none of the printed manga have ever been published/sold in the United States. Here, I've tried to put together points about translation and other notes so that reading the translation will both be more enjoyable and meaningful. Let me know if you have any further questions -- or even "worse" -- translation requests! My email for this project is tosa.dygo@gmail.com. Thanks for reading!

An Introduction to Manga
You are about to step into a dark, scary and also very cheerful world of Japanese manga, but there's always something to be gained in seeing the world through another man's (or woman's) eyes. Mangas are Japanese comics and cartoons; the different genres and characters of manga are as diverse as what you might find in the Sunday newspaper to the cult follower's comic shop. I grew up with mangas and Japanese so reading them is no difficulty for me, but it takes a lot of learning for a gaijin ("foreigner") to pick up on reading a manga to the fullest. First of all, Japanese mangas are very much like their American counterparts in that they draw upon both common and obscure references. Many translated mangas will need to either omit or explain seemingly strange facts and behaviors which would be perfectly normal for a Japanese person. One memorable scene comes from the popular children's show "Pokemon," when the Pokemon pets are chewing on onigiri riceballs. The translators adeptly called them "jelly-filled doughnuts"; a clever translation that neatly explains the red center (onigiri are filled either with salmon or pickled plum). Since Japanese culture has embraced much of American culture (and not as much of the other way around), it's difficult for me to find a good reverse analogy; perhaps American Revolutionary and Civil War references would require some level of explanation for a Japanese audience. Pokemon being an example, many Americans are more familiar with "anime" than with manga, but most if not all anime originated as manga. There are some exceptions to the rule, such as Miyazaki's feature films like Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind. Some differences with American comics include the fact that most manga in Japan are published as weekly collections rather than single issues. In the U.S., the imported and translated Shonen Jump Magazine is representative of a number of weekly manga publications in Japan. But like American comics, the episodes are collected by series and later published as anthologies in bookstores. More translations of manga and comics are appearing in American bookstores these days under the category of "graphic novel" which is a more correct term for the longer and more serious works. While I suggest a "try before you buy" approach (try borrowing from a friend!), since manga appeal to different tastes, if you've never read a manga series, I hope this encourages you to start.

About "Ushio and Tora"
"Ushio and Tora" by Kazuhiro Fujita is a epic series centered around an adolescent boy (about 14 years old) named Ushio who stumbles across a monster living in the storehouse basement. The monster, named Tora, happens to be a demon who had been sealed there a few hundred years ago. Did I mention Ushio lives in a temple with his dad, who's a exorcist priest? The story takes place in modern times though, and with Tora's awakening, other demons in the area start to appear and their adventures begin. Ushio must team up with Tora to protect his classmates, friends and even strangers from the paranormal. While typical of manga to be centered around high school age kids, the people they meet and the monsters they defeat are by no means ordinary. What sets "Ushio and Tora" apart from other manga is a brutal bluntness and sincerity, as well as wholesomeness, of Ushio and his allies. In the late 80's to early 90's mangas were plagued with depressing storylines and twisted perversities, and Fujita's style attempts to visually and literally destroy these perversions. The manga itself is visually R-rated for excessive violence, lots of blood and ink smears, nudity, and in translation, language.

The "Ushio and Tora Gaiden" is an epilogue written by Fujita to explain some of the untold stories in his series, exploring characters' pasts in the context of Japanese historical and literary tradition. For example, one of his tales borrows a chapter from the classical "Tale of Heike", that of the story of Tomo-e, the only female warrior remaining with the Genji warlord Yoshinaka in his final stand. I do not know from which classical story "Snowfall" was adapted but the reader should be aware it may not be entirely in keeping with the original. "Snowfall," by the way, is my own title to the story.

Opening Notes
Japanese is read top-to-bottom, right-to-left. Hence the pages in translation have been mirrored so that a reader can follow the story left-to-right as with any conventional English language comic book. I regret having whitebox lettering since it obscures some of the art, but this was easiest for me to get all the text in. Again, the following content is R-rated for graphic content and some language.

Links to pages (hosted by Photobucket):

Translated Page 01 Original
Translated Page 02 Original
Translated Page 03 Original
Translated Page 04 Original
The additional pages have been translated, but are currently unavailable pending copyright/distribution permission. I apologize for this delay.


Notes
One of the biggest challenges in bringing Japanese manga to English is translating onomatopoeias. Sounds common to Japanese readers can be alien and difficult to express in English, for example: the howling of the wind ("go!"), the murmur of the crowd ("zawa-zawa", "hiso-hiso"). In each of these cases it made more sense to write up a description rather than attempt to reproduce the sound. Explosions had to be changed; in Japanese, "don!" represents an English "bam!". And Japanese can describe footsteps ("dodododo" and "tototo") but English lettering just doesn't seem right. Even musical sounds, such as those of a lyre (which is the traditional koto for those more knowledged), I couldn't use the Japanese sounds: "jyonnn" may be closer to the actual instrument's sound, but "bing" will sound truer to the English-speaking reader for a string-based instrument. I've seen translation of Japanese Noh-genre plays that retains the phonetic spelling of the original Japanese, but for my own translation I opted for familiarity. I tried to make the manga as a comic book, since I thought that would relate best to an American reader.

Recreating the distinct voice of each character is a huge challenge in any translation. I admire Fitzgerald's Odyssey for mastering this challenge, allowing Nausicaa's pouting and gradual maturation speak as vividly about her character as does the Cyclops' bumbling care for his sheep. In my effort to carry over the unique voices of the original, the monster (who is actually Tora from the series) should have a bad-ass attitude, while Mumio retains the sincerity and wholesomeness that is found in the series' Ushio. A lot of the dialogue in the original manga is written in a slightly archaic dialect, but conveying this without caution could have laden my text with a clumsy, anachronistic tone. In several places I experimented with "thee" instead of "you" but for the most part "you" had a more correct sound without being unduly modern, and I changed them to the "you" translation.

The texts of the Japanese Buddhist religion are written in ancient Chinese, just as Christian bibles and chants are chock full of Latin. To ensure that even arcane references would be somehow accessible to my English-language reader, I have used Latin equivalents for the three spells that appear in this story. The first was the easiest; I replaced "Koku" with "Victanda," a gerundive neuter plural (for the curious, my reasons were that the neuter gender would give a sense a generalness and the gerundive is slightly substantive). The second spell, Kamo's rune, is a fictional mishmash of Chinese characters and brush strokes. Hence the Latin includes gibberish as well as some real words. The last spell, the Zodiac sign, plays on resemblance of the Chinese "gon" with the English "begone." The twelve Zodiac signs are thought to be imbued with magical powers; the character "gon" is a north-eastern direction between the sign of the bull (Ushi) and tiger (Tora). The "Ushio" and "Tora" names are probably not a coincidence!

The names have not been retained exactly by the standard of Roma-ji, that is, the conventional system for transcribing Japanese phonetics into the Roman/English alphabet. Where I use "Fuvuki," "Mumio," and "Shiba Kutime," a stricter adherence to the Roma-ji system would form "Fubuki," "Mumyou," and "Shiba Kuchime." I hope my renderings are more stylized and easier to reproduce the sound of the original. I especially thought about Mumio's, since Mum-you doesn't really sound too tough. Lady Fuvuki's name also doesn't exactly mean "snowfall" but rather "blizzard." I've compromised the exact literal meaning of the word, since in my own reading the gentle nature of the character (although she seems at times emotionally callous) would be distorted by the name "Blizzard." Mumio's name means "without light." I was tempted to change Shiba into Shiva to invoke the Hindu goddess, but decided that would be taking far too much liberty in association. Kutime means "rotten-eye." These names could be Latinized like the spells, but that's a direction that I didn't take here.

In addition to any comments you'd like to share here on Boston Translation, I invite you to send any questions and inquiries to tosa.dygo@gmail.com.

Some Further Links
Wikipedia reports an anime version that was released in the U.S. The overall reports are not very good, especially for excessive, unnecessary violence and I don't recommend it. I have not seen them myself, so I do not know how faithful they are to the manga. The Wikipedia article is here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ushio_and_Tora.
Japanese Wikipedia article on Fujita Kazuhiro: http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E8%97%A4%E7%94%B0%E5%92%8C%E6%97%A5%E9%83%8E
According to the article, Fujita won the Shogakukan Manga award in 1992 for "Ushio and Tora", and later received a Seiun (Nebula) Award for the same series in 1997.
Lastly, here is a link to the Japanese publisher's profile on "Ushio and Tora" (Shonen Sunday Comics): http://websunday.net/museum/no01/no01.html.

Again, thanks for reading!

Call for Submissions: "Translation"

Translation, the new translation studies journal from the Translation Studies Research Focus Group of the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center at the University Of California, Santa Barbara, is now accepting submissions of poetry or short fiction translations into English and essays concerning literary translation. The following guidelines are taken from the journal website.

Only unpublished translations will be accepted. The journal is collaboratively run by graduate students and faculty, and welcomes translations from both new and established translators. Please email a brief bio of the translating author along with your submission to ucsbtranslation@gmail.com. All submissions should use current MLA formatting where required.

Poetry submissions should be limited to 3 per entrant. Poetry translations may be to or from English and should be submitted along with the original text for side-by-side publication. For short fiction submissions, 7-10 pages is the preferred length. Translators should obtain necessary permissions for translating texts and will be expected to assist in obtaining permission for publication of originals in the case of poetry. As a non-profit scholarly journal, Translation does not offer payment for submissions. Submissions will be accepted no later than January 10, 2007.

Farsi Kafka and Hindi Brecht

The Goethe-Institut is Germany's state cultural institution. As part of its mission to "promote the study of German abroad and encourage international cultural exchange," GI offers grants to support the work of translators who translate German literature into other languages, a program that is only one of the reasons the Institut is a model for other nations that seek to integrate their national culture into the world community. According to the information available on the organization's website, for the nearly thirty years that the subsidy program has been active GI has sponsored the publication of nearly 4,000 books in 45 languages.

In 2006 alone, GI funded the translation 236 titles including Nietzsche in Ukrainian and Polish; Goethe in Lithuanian, Indonesian, Albanian and Croatian; Kafka in Farsi; and Brecht in Hindi. Contemporary writers are support as well, e.g. the translation of W.G. Sebald into Brazilian Portuguese and Galician, and acclaimed author Ingo Schulze into Rumanian, French, Greek, Italian and Dutch.

Translators interested in investigating this funding opportunity should be advised that the program supports book-length projects only. Information about conditions, application, and contacts can be found online.

Helpfully, the Goethe-Institut has assembled a directory of links to other grant sources for translators. Readers in the Boston area can join the GI mailing list so to be notified when the Boston branch office is hosting another of its many cultural events. Of course, not all of our readers are in Boston; luckily GI has locations all over the globe.

Is there an agency of the US government which has taken up the banner of cultural diplomacy? The clearest analogue I see -- and my knowledge of the federal bureaucracy is acutely lacking -- is the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, a unit of the Department of State, specifically the Cultural Programs Division. I invite readers with greater knowledge such programs to share what they know. Is there a Henry James Haus in Berlin? Are there government-funded Twain Institutes? It's not unlikely the US government balk at the likely criticism of its ostensibly hegemonic aspirations. The Cold War era Congress for Cultural Freedomwas arguably a very successful program, but the backlash against state intervention in the arts surely still stings. I fail to think of any credible way to be similarly suspicious of the Goethe-Institut; after considering the distasteful question of the policy being GI, I conclude that it is a politically benign effort if it is at all political.

The Example of the Wet Floor Sign

The Spanish text on a janitorial sign, "Cuidado piso mojado," rhymes elegantly. However, the English version "Caution: Wet Floor" preserves neither the rhyme nor the rhythm. Why should one linguistic cohort enjoy tightly crafted service messages, while English-speakers have to make do with flat, literal admonitions?

Editor Matthew Kelsey suggests as an alternative: "Caution, we're washin'."

The moral of the story: don't be afraid to ask if it could be done better.

Polizzotti at Harvard Co-op

From a notice circulated on the AGNI mailing list:

Mark Polizzotti will read from his new translation of Marguerite Duras' "Yann Andrea Steiner," published this year by Archipelago Books, at 7 p.m., this Thursday, November 30th, at the Harvard Coop, Cambridge.

Dedicated to Duras' companion with whom she spent the last decade of her life, "Yann Andrea Steiner" is a haunting dance between two parallel stories of love and solitude: the love between Duras and the young Yann Andrea and a seaside romance observed--or imagined--by the the narrator between a camp counselor and an orphaned camper, a Holocaust survivor.

Polizzotti has translated the work of Jean Echenoz, Gustave Flaubert, Andre Breton, Christian Oster, in addition to Duras' novel, "Writing" in 1998, and he is currently director of publications at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. He will be available for question and answer after the reading.

Duras and her screenplay for Hiroshima Mon Amour were of central importance in the birth of French New Wave cinema.

Charters & Tranströmer: Translations and Versions

In the preface to his 1975 translation of Tomas Tranströmer’s lovely long poem “Baltics”, Samuel Charters shares two points with the reader that I think greatly deserve to be shared with a wider readership. The first, that the Swedish language distinguishes two types of translation where conventional English gives only a single name to both kinds of rendering, will ring true to any translator who has had to protect the integrity of the original work while making of it a worthwhile experience in the target language.

The second point follows from the happy fact that Charters and Tranströmer are both alive, and good friends. When faced with a thorny question of nuance, they could push their chairs away from table and walk out of doors, so as to find the exact object about which the poem was concerned. The translator and the poet standing in a salt-rimed meadow, confirming with conversation and finger-pointing just exactly what was meant by this word in this line. As exciting as the search for the right sense can be, I have to confess: that manner of ‘gathering the meaning’ is so much more attractive than thumbing through the pages of a dictionary. I can think of a few Pusteblumies who would be abundantly grateful for the privilege of joining Apollinaire on a crepuscular tour of Paris, for the chance to ask the poet to point out just the moment of dawn the line “Soleil cou coupé” was intended to capture. Charters writes:

There are two words in Swedish to describe a rendering of a poem from one language into another. One is oversättning, which means “translation”, and the other is tolkning, which is close to the English word “version”. In English the distinction is often blurred, and there is particularly a tendency to describe unrhymed renderings of rhymed poetry as translations, when they are actually versions. In Swedish, however, the distinctions are usually kept, and this is an oversättning: a translation. With some poems a great deal of the original can be lost in a translation, but with a poem like Baltics; unrhymed, rhythmically rather free, and in a contemporary idiom, it is possible to come fairly close to the original; especially since Swedish and English share a large root vocabulary, and there are many points where grammatical forms are similar. What is most obviously different is the sound of the English, which is a softer language with a rounding at the edges from the romance languages that helped form it. Swedish has a harder sound, more abrupt, and this tone is difficult to bring across.

As with most Swedish writers, English is a second language for Tomas, and we worked closely together on every aspect of the translation. At troublesome points he was often the best judge of how well the Swedish and the English reflected each other. Also he and his family made my family feel welcome on the island off the Swedish coast that figures so often in the poem, and the long summer days with them there gave me a feeling of the poem I couldn’t have gotten in any other way. In a very immediate sense, if we were trying to decide if the translation of a word should be something like either “bay” or “channel” we walked down to the shore to look at what he was describing. We worked out as many problems on afternoon walks as we did at the kitchen table in the evenings with notes and dictionaries.

I recommend Tranströmer (as much from my own reading as from the received recommendations of Robert Bly, Czeslaw Milosz and Robert Hass). His latest book is newly available on Amazon. From Maureen McLane of The Poetry Foundation:

Tomas Tranströmer is one of Sweden’s most lauded poets, with a massive international reputation as well. In The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems, an often surreal dream logic moves us from archipelagos to the sea, and from family to world history, as in his long poem “Baltics.” Tranströmer’s poems are often located on thresholds or borders, bespeaking incomplete yet promised arrivals, as his book titles suggest—Secrets on the Way, The Half-Finished Heaven. Sleep and winter are native zones to him; windows, seas, mountains, painters, music, and geography recur. This work offers intense, visionary transformation: “[t]he lake is a window into the earth” in which “[d]ozens of dialects of green” appear.

Here, from Charters’ translation, are two (non-consecutive) segments of Part IV of “Baltics”. If you think they are fine as I do, hop on over to Amazon UK or other friendly source and dig up the paperback copy. If you are truly desperate to read the rest, let me know and I shall provision you with a copy of the book… but beware the charity of a fellow addict. The verse:

Our Worldwide Readership

In the short while since we’ve begun posting to this blog, we’ve had readers from all over the United States, as well as from Argentina, Armenia, Australia, Canada, Chile, China, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Latvia, Mexico, Netherlands, Pakistan, Philippines, Poland, Singapore, Thailand, Ukraine, and the United Kingdom. It’s exciting to realize that we’ve participating in a conversation about literary creativity with people from all over the globe. But let’s not make this a one-sided chat. If you’ve got a relevant news item or link to share, or would like to respond to a post you’ve read here on Boston Translation, please accept our invitation to make yourself heard, either through a comment or by sending us an email at pusteblume.translations@gmail.com. We’ll be glad to add your contribution as a new top-level post. We look forward to hearing from you!

Jonson on the Translator's Pen

The following anecdote is taken from the Isaac Disraeli's widely admired multi-volume Curiosities of Literature, a compilation of observations on a life of book-loving, -collecting, and -making, edited by his son Benjamin, the future Prime Minister. In that collection, this entry appeared under the heading “Ben Jonson on Translation.” My gratitude to the good work of the Project Gutenberg volunteer community for providing the text.

I have discovered a poem by this great poet, which has escaped the researches of all his editors. Prefixed to a translation, translation is the theme; with us an unvalued art, because our translators have usually been the jobbers of booksellers; but no inglorious one among our French and Italian rivals. In this poem, if the reader's ear be guided by the compressed sense of the massive lines, he may feel a rhythm which, should they be read like our modern metre, he will find wanting; here the fulness of the thoughts forms their own cadences. The mind is musical as well as the ear. One verse running into another, and the sense often closing in the middle of a line, is the Club of Hercules; Dryden sometimes succeeded in it, Churchill abused it, and Cowper attempted to revive it. Great force of thought only can wield this verse.

On the AUTHOR, WORKE, and TRANSLATOR, prefixed to the translation of Mateo Alemans's Spanish Rogue, 1623.

   Who tracks this author's or translator's pen
   Shall finde, that either hath read bookes, and men:
   To say but one were single. Then it chimes,
   When the old words doe strike on the new times,
   As in this Spanish Proteus; who, though writ
   But in one tongue, was formed with the world's wit:
   And hath the noblest marke of a good booke,
   That an ill man dares not securely looke
   Upon it, but will loath, or let it passe,
   As a deformed face doth a true glasse.
   Such bookes deserve translators of like coate
   As was the genius wherewith they were wrote;
   And this hath met that one, that may be stil'd
   More than the foster-father of this child;
   For though Spaine gave him his first ayre and vogue
   He would be call'd, henceforth, the English rogue,
   But that hee's too well suted, in a cloth
   Finer than was his Spanish, if my oath
   Will be receiv'd in court; if not, would I
   Had cloath'd him so! Here's all I can supply
   To your desert who have done it, friend! And this
   Faire aemulation, and no envy is;
   When you behold me wish myselfe, the man
   That would have done, that, which you only can!
      BEN JONSON.

The translator of Guzman was James Mabbe, which he disguised under the Spanish pseudonym of Diego Puede-ser; Diego for James, and Puede-ser for Mabbe or May-be! He translated, with the same spirit as his Guzman, Celestina, or the Spanish Bawd, that singular tragi-comedy,—a version still more remarkable. He had resided a considerable time in Spain, and was a perfect master of both languages,—a rare talent in a translator; and the consequence is, that he is a translator of genius.

Translation industry boomin'

From "Found in translation: Global business demands, broadening foreign contacts and multicultural concerns in social services have created a growing market for translators and interpreters," in the October 31st issue of the Sacramento Bee:

In 2004, the last year that federal statistics were available, about 31,000 individuals in the United States were listed as translators and interpreters in schools, health care, courts, airlines, telecommunication and other fields.

This is just the most recent in a wave of articles all of which recognize that in an increasingly interconnected world, those with multilingual abilities are going to be in high demand. There is money to be made; the article cites a going rate $16.30/hr for freelance work, a sufficiently high wage to keep up with the costs of living even in some of the more cosmopolitan areas of the country, those in which the market for translation services is going to continue to rise. But how will this demand continue to be met? Will the financial planners of the American school system cease to view foreign language instruction as auxiliary to learning, rather than an essential component of a complete education? Will vocational training schools proliferate, or will departments of comparative literature on campuses across the country more urgently remind their propsective students that jobs are waiting for graduates? I don't think anyone is expecting machine translation to advance so far in the next five years as to stem the current growth in this industry, so this is a question that is going to remain pertinent.

I'm particularly interested in considering whether there is a distinction to be made between professional (service) translation, and literary translation. An analogy might be drawn to the relationship between commercial copywriter and literary writer. Whence literary creativity, in the working of legal documents, medical transcripts, or business records from one language to another? Is there a perceptible difference between those who identify with professional work, and those who see themselves as working in a literary mode? A rivalry, a bias? This is a question more well-suited for a sociologist, but one which deserves answering if the translation industry becomes sufficiently strong to begin demanding reasonable compensation for the translation of foreign literature into English.

In the Bee article, reporter Darrell Smith asks Argentina-born Monica Nainsztein, owner of Sacramento firm Spanish Media Translations, about her work composing subtitles for studio films:

"I grew up watching movies in Argentina saying, 'Hey, that's not what they said.'" [....] "You're helping people understand. You're connecting cultures, informing people," Nainsztein said. "And showing your family your work on screen? That's priceless."

I am aware of at least once collegiate study abroad program, that for Boston University in Madrid, that offers a course in which students are assigned to writer Spanish subtitles for Hollywood films. That is, to me, a terrific assignment, in which students are confronted literary, commercial, and practical constraints. All this, and the requirement that they produce output that is instantly understood by an audience having only moments to read the text. If someone knows where the topic of the translation of cinematic subtitles is discussed, I'd be glad to read more about it. It's a topic I think we should explore in a future issue of the print journal. Thoughts?