Two Words: The Blog of the Center for the Art of Translation


See You Next Year

Posted on December 16, 2009, 10:32:16 PM

The Center will be closed through the end of December, so don't expect any updates on Two Words. In the meantime, don't forget to enter for your chance to win books signed by Natasha Wimmer and Breon Mitchell.
And go back to have a look at some of the material we've covered here on Two Words:



Translating Neruda

Posted on December 15, 2009, 08:22:41 PM

Literary translation has been happening for ten years now in elementary and middle-school classrooms via the Center's Poetry Inside Out program. In 2003, Audrey Larkin was a fourth-grader in a Spanish-language dual-immersion program at Buena Vista Elementary School in San Francisco when she was introduced to PIO's translation curriculum. Reflecting on her experience today, Audrey writes:

Literary translation, as I soon found out, and continually rediscover, is terribly difficult. To translate a poem one must first understand a highly complex work of art well enough to exactly transpose its meaning into another language. One must delve into the mind of an extremely gifted writer and see the poem through the poet's eyes. But that is just half the work. To translate a poem well, one must also have a remarkable sense of two languages, of their nuances, their wordplay, their flow, their sounds, and the subtle difference between synonyms. In brief, especially for a girl still learning Spanish, it was, and is, a thankless task, because no matter how much one works, edits, tweaks, and shuffles through a Spanish-English dictionary, the poem simply sounds better in the original language. Still, in the process of translation, one comes to know a poem so well, so intimately, as each word is pondered, considered, and wrestled with, that a little bit of the author's brilliancy is rubbed into the translator, and one understands, even if it is unconsciously, something more about language and poetry. It is inevitable. Thus, through the process of translation I was introduced to poetry.

As a ninth-grader, Audrey participated in PIO's after-school class, Fuego de Palabras, which spent a number of sessions last fall working on the Elemental Odes of Chilean Nobel laureate Pablo Neruda. An ode is a poem written in praise of a person, place, or thing. Neruda dedicated most of his more than two hundred published odes to the most commonplace, everyday things: salt, a lizard, the ocean, tomatoes. Neruda's odes drop down the page in skinny little lines, the reader's eye descending from image to image. Here's how Audrey and her friend and classmate Erida Tosini-Corea translated a few lines of Oda a unas flores amarillas:

estalla
sobre la arena el oro
de una sola
planta amarilla
y se amarran
tus ojos
a la tierra
on the sand
the gold of a single
yellow plant
explodes
and fastened
are your eyes
to the earth

There are two Spanish verbs in this passage, estallar and amarrar. Their English translations, explode and fasten, are not particularly controversial. What provoked a lively class discussion is the way Erida and Audrey chose to re-order the sentence across the lines that ladder it down the page. They moved explodes/ estalla from the beginning to the middle of the passage, making a more natural subject-verb English word-order and keeping it as a one-word line so that explodes seems to explode in front of you: a tiny explosion of yellow flowers against the self-important magnificence of the ocean . . .
Then the two young translators did something a little trickier. The translators held onto the verb-subject Spanish order in which fastened/ se amarran comes before the eyes which are fastened. That sounds weird, one of their classmates objected. Shouldn't it be your eyes/ are fastened/ to the earth?
Erida and Audrey staunchly defended their decision: When you're reading the poem, they explained, your eyes move from the explosion to the fastening.
Interestingly, our two young translators find very different ways to work as poets. Erida Tosini-Corea eschews the example suggested by Neruda in his Odes to write in long lines, first in Spanish and then translating into English, piling up sensory images to attain a synaesthetic vision beyond mere description:
Cae la lluvia
pero el sol acaricia mi mejilla
y susurra melodías intoxicantes en mi oído
llevándome al fin de mi mundo
estoy cegada por colores
disecar un rayo es convertirte en luz
coexistiendo con la extasía
lo que veo es inalcanzable en el arte
e indescriptible en mi lengua
Rain pours
but the sun caresses my cheek
and whispers intoxicating melodies in my ear
leading me to the end of my world
I am blinded by colors
to dissect one ray is to become light
coexisting with ecstasy
what I see is unattainable in art
and indescribable in language

Audrey Larkin, on the other hand, closely follows Neruda's example, writing in skinny lines, dropping just a few words on each rung to create her poem. In her ode to a tangerine, also written first in Spanish and translated into English, the longer she looks at the fruit, the bigger it seems, until it becomes:
un mundo
orbitando
su propio sol
que todavía no se
ha descubierto
los científicos
llenos de instrumentos para
medir eternidad
pero faltando
un
sentido de sabor
a world
orbiting
its own sun
still
undiscovered
by scientists
full of instruments to
measure eternity
but lacking
a
sense of taste

What a wonder: an everyday fruit becomes an undiscovered world which all the science in the universe is unable to measure without the humble human senses!
Translation is the closest possible reading of a text. As Poetry Inside Out's student translators practice the forms and devices of great poets, they begin to re-imagine themselves as creative members of a larger literary community stretching across continents and centuries.


Alison Anderson Interview

Posted on December 15, 2009,

In Wherever I Lie Is Your Bed, we feature Alison Anderson's translation of a chapter from The Lady in White by the enigmatic French writer Christopher Bobin. It's all about that famous lady in white, poet Emily Dickinson. (Anderson previously discussed Bobin on this blog, right here.)
Kim Allen-Niesen of the blog Bookstore People has just interviewed Anderson, with some great questions about Bobin, translation, and Dickinson.

Before translating The Lady in White, did you feel you needed to know anything more about Emily Dickinson than is already provided in the book?
Oddly enough I had never felt drawn to Emily Dickinson as a poet, and this text changed that for me, because of the way we perceive her through Bobin's words. It made me want to go back and re-read the poetry, learn more about her life. I think however that I didn't want to interfere with Bobin's own understanding of her biography, so I didn't explore it on my own.


Win Books Signed by Natasha Wimmer and Breon Mitchell!

Posted on December 14, 2009, 10:13:57 PM

This winter, we're offering our donors a chance to win some great books signed by notable translators Natasha Wimmer and Breon Mitchell! Here's the low-down:



Give $5 or more to the Center between now and Jan 11, 2010, and you'll be entered into a drawing for books featuring Lit&Lunch translators, as well as Wherever I Lie Is Your Bed. It just takes a minute to donate online.

 

First prize is a three-book package featuring two of this year's most exciting translators: Natasha Wimmer and Breon Mitchell. The winner receives translator-signed copies of Roberto Bolano's 2666 and Gunter Grass's The Tin Drum, plus a copy of the newest Two Lines anthology, Wherever I Lie Is Your Bed.

 

Two runners-up will each receive a translator-signed copy of The Tin Drum and a copy of Wherever I Lie Is Your Bed.

 

Every donation really counts, which is why we brought the threshold for this giveaway to just $5. Those who pledge $20 or more will get 3 chances to win, and those who sign up for a recurring donation totaling $50 or more over the course of next year will have 5 chances to win these excellent books.

 

To enter, all you need to do is make a donation online of $5 or more. Last year, your donations helped us:

 


  • Host Lit&Lunch events featuring leading translators and writers like Esther Allen and Yoko Tawada

  • Publish the acclaimed, IndieBound Indie Next List pick Wherever I Lie Is Your Bed, with work from over 20 nations, including Nobel-winner Gunter Grass and an excerpt from the groundbreaking novel Rex

  • Educate hundreds of youths in our in-school program, Poetry Inside Out

  • Expand our online community with the launch of the Two Words blog, our Facebook page, an audio archive of our Lit&Lunch events, and The Art of Translation podcast

 

This coming year, your support will allow us to:

 


  • Continue bringing great authors and translators to the Bay Area for Lit&Lunch, and making their presentations available for listening on the Web

  • Publish the next volume of Two Lines, edited by Jeffrey Yang and Natasha Wimmer, and the next book in our World Library series

  • Create a Poetry Inside Out teacher training program to give teachers the tools and materials to teach the program in their own classroom

  • Continue to expand our growing Web community with a website redesign

 


Talking With Khet Mar

Posted on December 10, 2009, 10:08:11 PM

title=khet-marThe Center is co-sponsoring an event this Sunday at San Francisco's Asian Art Museum with Burmese writer Khet Mar. To give a little idea of what to expect, I did a short interview with Mar to hear a little about her writing and the political turmoil that underlies much of it.
Event Details
Date: Sunday, December 13th
Time: 2pm
Location: Asian Art Museum, 200 Larkin St.
Free with Museum admission
As a writer from Burma, you've had to confront a lot of the political turmoil that has occurred in that country. Do you feel like this political situation dominates your writing?
The political situation has dominated my writing since I started writing in 1989. As I grew up in rural area, I met and saw a lot of poor and uneducated people who have no voices. I want my readers know about that kind of person because people from different fields and different levels do not know about each other. 80% of Burma's poor are living in rural areas. I think that the images of people who are living in a country is an image of that country. I want to act as a representative of these people. At least, I want to express the real situation to readers, although I cannot solve any problem myself. If we do not know about the real situation of ordinary people, we can not do something better for them. I believe that trying to express real situation or images of the era which a writer lives is an important duty for a writer.
In a write-up of a panel on the relationship between prison and writing that you participated in, it stated that you chose to write in allegories and to publish your work as a serial in order to evade scrutiny of government censors. Did that strategy work, in terms of avoiding government scrutiny of your writing?
That strategy works sometimes but not always. I've had to use many different methods to avoid censorship board. But no particular way will work forever to avoid government scrutiny.
What kind of an audience were you writing these pieces for? What do you feel their impact was?
Although I have written most about ordinary people, they can not read my writing, for many reasons. Some of them cannot read, or books and monthly magazines or journals cannot reach the places where they are living. And they might not be interested in reading or they might not have time to read, as they often have to struggle to survive. I am writing for my readers who can try to help those people. When I was teenager, that was the kind of literature I read--the kind that I am writing now. Literature taught me how to face these difficulties, how to respond to the challenges that I had. Reading is a good teacher for me. I want young people to consider how to develop their lives by reading, and then to find a way to help people better.
You've been a visiting fellow at the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, and you're currently a writer-in-residence at the City of Asylum in Pittsburgh. When did you leave Burma? What kind of a change did this represent for you, entering into an environment where you didn't have to worry about government scrutiny of your writing?
I was at the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa in 2009. I left Burma March, 2009 for second time. The most important change is I feel safe here, but I still have to think about government scrutiny of my writing as I want to print some of my writing in Burma.
Even while you've lived in other places, you've been very involved in Burma, particularly in the aftermath of Cyclone Nagis. How does this fit in with your writing? Can you keep the two separate?
I could say I can keep the two separate. While I was doing Nagis rescue works, I could not keep writing. It might be that I do not yet want to write about my experiences of Nagis rescue works, although I know many stories of victims, many scenes of effected areas. But it won't be waste. Those experiences and feelings will be in my heart and in my mind forever. I can write about this when I have a strength to write.
You've worked in various forms--novel, short story, poem, journalism. Do you feel that any one more than the others gets at real-life experiences when you try to portray them in writing?

I always try to get at real experiences in all my writing, but I would say my short story writing gets more real-life experiences, when I try to portray these in writing. I have tried to write most of my short stories not only as a creative work but also as an informative work--but not every my short story. Sometimes, I just want to write very creative or very artistic as much as I could.


More Praise for Wherever I Lie Is Your Bed

Posted on December 10, 2009,

Andrew Wessels of A Compulsive Reader becomes the latest to praise the Center's anthology of translated literature, Wherever I Lie Is Your Bed.
Wessels focuses on the poetry in this book, which I agree is definitely a strong point.

I was also delighted to find a large selection of poetry, which I found to actually be the strongest part of the anthology. I was particularly happy seeing the amount of poetry that was translated from less-common languages. Instead of rolling out the more common Spanish and French poets, we are offered Russian (Mikhail Yeryomin and Arseny Tarkovsky), Hungarian (Anna Szabó and Krisztina Tóth), Yiddish (Celia Dropkin) and Basque (Kirmen Uribe) for example. This foray into languages that get less attention also means that we are presented with a series of poets that were new at least to myself. Reading the anthology becomes an act of continuous discovery, a constant reminder as to how much interesting literature is being written around the world, how much we are missing.


Wessels later mentions some work of poet Ghassan Zaqtan, widely considered the literary heir to Mahmoud Darwish. Zaqtan's work is part of a lengthy focus on Palestinian poetry that is found within Wherever I Lie.
I found this final section of the anthology particularly interesting, which begins with the well-known in English Mahmoud Darwish, and then quickly moves on to a number of poets I had not come across before: Ghassan Zaqtan, Ayman Ghbarieh, Nasser Rabah, and a number of others. I particularly enjoyed Fady Joudah's translation of Ghassan Zaqtan's Like One Who Waits for Me


Witter Bynner Poetry Translation Residency

Posted on December 3, 2009, 09:45:38 PM

For all the translators who read this blog, the Dec 31 deadline for the Witter Bynner Poetry Translation Residency is fast approaching. Get all the details right here.]]>


The Northern California Book Awards

Posted on December 3, 2009, 09:42:39 PM

The Center for the Art of Translation is co-sponsoring the Northern California Book Award in Translation for the best translation by a Northern California translator. We are continuing to collect eligible titles but the deadline for nominations is quickly approaching so please send in any
suggestions for the award.

We are gathering books and ask for your assistance in identifying books that may be qualified for the translation award. Eligible titles include 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 2009. For clarification, Northern California is here defined as Fresno and north to the Oregon border; the publisher does not have to be from Northern California, but the translator
must currently reside there. Anyone can suggest a translation for this award; an awards committee will then select a limited number of finalists. We ask publishers to send 3 copies of any eligible title to the Center.
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, Poetry Flash, and the San Francisco Public Library. The translation award is co-sponsored by the Northern California Book Reviewers (formerly Bay Area Book Reviewers Assn/BABRA) and PEN West Translation Committee.
This year's NCBA ceremony will be held at the San Francisco Main Library on April 18, 2010.

DEADLINE FOR ELIGIBLE BOOKS: DECEMBER 15, 2009
(If the book is due out later in December, we still need all the information in advance of the deadline.)
For all suggestions, please include the author's name, the translator's name, the publisher, the original language, and the title of the book, and send the information to:

admin@catranslation.org


Re-Introducing Poetry Inside Out

Posted on December 1, 2009, 06:51:11 PM

You have been enjoying this lively blog over the last few months now, reading insightful commentary on translating by pros such as Robert Hass and Yoko Tawada. Yet the delicious work of translation is not the privilege of an elite few—it's happening on the ground at schools throughout the Bay Area with Poetry Inside Out, a program for the Center for the Art of Translation. We, the Poetry Inside Out team, are eager to share with you what we do right here on this blog.
You saw a little bit of that in our previous post. Four students grades 5-8 displayed great intellectual, creative and critical-thinking acumen in their crafting of four different yet equally artful translations of Colombian poet Aurelio Arturo's Madrigales.
There is beauty in the process of translation as much as in the results, and it is the process that we will be focusing on in our upcoming postings from Poetry Inside Out. Powerful things ignite in the mind when one translates; for Poetry Inside Out students these are ideas and concepts that they may not otherwise encounter in their academic careers. Our upcoming posts will focus on the following:
Word choice: What do students take into account when they choose between synonyms? How will they decide that one particular word is unnecessary, while another has to be added? How do they defend their choices?
Poetic form: When they tackle the translation of a poem with a specific form, what compromises will students make? Do they eschew rhyme for meaning? Will they abandon a haiku's syllabic pattern in order to save or capture imagery? Do they find meaning in the music and take liberties with the literal content? Perhaps some students will find ways to make all of these things work in their translations.
Faithfulness vs. creative interpretation: The line between faithful rendering and creative embellishment is never static. Some kids will howl over another's creative liberties. Another will defend that liberty with insight. These students may be the future literary translators of America, just warming up. Indeed, even if they don't become literary translators they will nonetheless come to understand the role of interpretation and individual judgment in many aspects of their lives.
Translation circles: As a literary translator myself, I meet with a group of translators each month to pore over, edit and critique our latest versions. We look at each other's work with new eyes, and the process initiates dialogue and many rich discussions of the translation process. The PIO team has already introduced the notion of translation circles to the classroom process. Students work in teams of two or three to translate a poem together. The juiciest part of this work is the discussion these circles spark between classmates, discussions that we'll be bringing to this forum.
The art of the close read: To translate means to read the source text as closely as possible. This is a pivotal piece of the translation puzzle, and we will discuss what happens when students find meaning in what they read, and then make meaning in what they write. Context will play a role in this discussion as well—knowing about the poet, the circumstances of her/his life, the time in which the poem was written and where, all affect what meaning students make when reading a poem.


More Praise for Wherever I Lie Plus an Interview with Karen Emmerich

Posted on December 1, 2009, 06:43:22 PM

Over on The Bookshop Blog they're praising Wherever I Lie Is Your Bed. Have a look:

After spending the last few months consciously trying to read translated books, I found the newest anthology by Center for the Art of Translation, Wherever I Lie Is Your Bed, the perfect introduction to translated literature from around the world. . . . The anthology is a mixture of short stories, book excerpts and poems. The works are stellar; one after another capturing a haunting moment, the beauty of a life, the isolation of a life alone, with an immediacy that some people believe cannot be translated from one language to another.

They also quiz translator Karen Emmerich, who has work in Wherever I Lie, on her favorite bookstores:


1. Did you have a special bookstore in your life when you were growing up, that helped foster your love of reading and writing?



Yes! The Corner Bookstore, which was where Nicolls Road met 25A in Setauket, New York. It was owned by a very short woman named Mrs. Mullins who had big brown glasses and a bun of gray hair, and there was at least one huge cat always perched on a stack of books somewhere, or wandering through the store. A bell rang when you opened the door, not the electronic kind, but an actual bell . . .