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


Co-translation from Korean to French

Posted on November 30, 2010, 12:29:00 PM by Scott Esposito

I'm always a fan of different and innovative ways that translators do what they do. The Korean Herald has an interesting article on the method of Korean-French co-translators Choe Ae-young and Jean Bellemin-Nol:

Together, the two have developed an original, effective process of co-translating. First, Choe translates the entire Korean text to French, with a long list of footnotes that contain explanations of cultural context, synonyms of major words, and alternative ways of interpreting the text. Bellemin-Nol then revises the first draft and rewrites the text into more refined French, taking Choe’s footnotes into consideration. Then the “talk” begins. “From this stage we wouldn’t use my first translated draft at all,” Choe said. “We’d discuss extensively comparing the original Korean text and the second translated version which has been revised by Dr. Bellemin-Nol, for the final copy that would compromise the two drafts.”

Bellemin-Nol said though the two discuss their work in a “cheerful mood” 90 percent of the time, the mood can get very tense for the remaining 10 percent. “I try to keep the original context of the Korean text as much as possible while Dr. Bellemin-Nol brings the perspective of French readers,” Choe explained. “This process requires a lot of compromising and tough decisions.”

The whole article is rather in-depth and well worth a look.

And the book that is being translated sounds quite intriguing . . .

On Friday, Choe and Bellemin-Nol jointly received the 18th Daesan Literary Award for their latest collaborative Korean-French translation work, “Interdit de Folie (Wanting to Go Insane, Yet Unable),” a full-length novel by Korean author Yi In-seong. An extremely experimental literary work, the original text tells the story of a severely traumatized Korean man in the 1980s who suffers from painful personal memories to a degree that he’d rather lose his sanity.


Guadalajara

Posted on November 29, 2010, 10:27:00 AM by Scott Esposito

While you're catching up with your Internetting after the long weekend, definitely check out Publishing Perspectives' coverage of possibly "the single biggest book event in the Spanish-speaking world": the Guadalajara Book Fair.

Edward Nawtoka puts the fair in perspective:

David Unger, the US representative for the Fair (and novelist and City College of New York professor and very nice guy) told me that the fair was actually larger than either London or BookExpo America. It’s not clear if this was meant in square-footage or in number of people in attendance. The fair here in Mexico lasts for nine days– attracting some 600,000 people a day (while the other two English-language fairs are just two…or is it three…so a direct comparison is probably impossible.)

And, of course, every fair needs to have its star:

Easily the biggest event of the day that I witnessed was the line that formed for filmmaker and novelist Guillermo Del Toro, who was born in Guadalajara and appears to be a local literary hero. He patiently signed copies of his new novel (Oscura – translated into English as The Fall) and posed for photos for several hundred people over the course of two hours. He seemed to be extremely generous with the time he took with each person. After watching him for ten minutes, I gave up…only to return sometime later and nearly get run by the Roman phalanx of black clad security that had locked arms around Del Torro and his entourage (yes, he had one, to be sure), who then ushered him into the most secure area on the show floor – the one place that had a narrow opening and a locked door that the public could not penetrate no matter how hard they tried – the Agents Center!


November TWO LINES Online Offerings

Posted on November 22, 2010, 01:10:00 PM by Scott Esposito

 

 

We've just published the latest additions to TWO LINES Online, our online adjunct to TWO LINES where we publish new, original translations every month.

The latest pieces are:

"Birds in the Mouth," written by Granta Best Young Spanish-language author Samanta Schweblin and translated by Joel Streicker. This one is actually an exclusive import from the latest volume of TWO LINES, Some Kind of Beautiful Signal.

It's an incredible, somewhat surreal, fable-like story. Just the kind of thing you would exect form the land of Borges and Bioy. Here's a taste:

"What the fuck . . . ?"

"You take her," she went to the desk and began to crush and fold the empty boxes.

"My God, Silvia, your daughter eats birds!"

"I can't take any more."

"She eats birds! Is she out of her mind? What the fuck does she do with the bones?"

Silvia looked at me, disconcerted.

"I suppose she swallows them, too. I don't know if birds . . . " she said and stood there looking at me.

"I can't take her with me."

"If she stays here I'll kill myself. I'll kill myself and first I'll kill her."

"She eats birds!"

Full story here.

We also have two new poems from the major Irani poet H. E. Sayeh, translated by Fayre Makeig: "Migration," and "False Dawn."

I don't want to say a whole lot about these poems since they're each just 6 lines and should simple be experienced, unembellished. But I will say that they're both wonderful poems, really indicative of why I love both translation and poetry. Print them out and have them with your morning coffee--you won't regret it.


The Best Poet You've Never Heard Of (?) Gets Translated

Posted on November 17, 2010, 10:43:00 AM by Scott Esposito

BookForum has an interesting review of Jonathan Galassi's new translation of the life work of the great "Italian" poet Giacomo Leopardi (scare quotes because Italy didn't exist as a political entity when Leopardi lived). Here's who Leopardi was:

Galassi notes in his introduction that Leopardi is Italy's "first modern poet," whose experimentalism and philosophical themes culminate in what became a major concern for the following two centuries of Western lyric: "a new self-consciousness of the writer's alienation from life, with the constant companionship of pain and the consolation of the power of memory—all evoked with unmediated directness and haunting expressive beauty."

Here's just what the Canti is:

The mere forty-one compositions that make up the Canti, a carefully structured life-in-verse in the tradition of the Petrarchan canzoniere (songbook), contain a dazzling variety of styles and themes, from confessions of private pain and humiliation to philosophical satires and grand pronouncements on current events. Leopardi's engagement with contemporary Continental philosophy and insatiable interest in international literary culture has helped make the Canti the rare work of Italian poetry to find its share of foreign readers and translators.

Though Leopardi "may be the most erudite, philosophically astute, and linguistically refined poet you've never heard of," he has, in fact, been translated numerous times, and very well. Galassi is the latest in a long line of esteemed translators, and, notably, this review goes in-depth into the issues of translation on this work and on previsou versions thereof:

The difficulty of translating Leopardi's verse is well known. Eamon Grennan, whose well-regarded translation of Leopardi's Selected Poems (1997) generally takes more dramatic liberties with the original than does Galassi's, renders the title of the idyll as "Infinitive" and the above lines as "And a notion of eternity floats to mind, / And the dead seasons, and the season / Beating here and now, and the sound of it." Like Galassi, John Heath-Stubbs in Poems from Leopardi (1946) goes for a more literal version, but his capitalization of "Eternity" gives the poem an unwelcome allegorical feel, and his rendering of suon as "noise" instead of "sound" jars the ear. Thomas Bergin and Anne Paolucci are the closest to Galassi—and to Leopardi—with "and the eternal comes to mind, / and the dead seasons and the present living / one, and the sound of it" (Selected Poems of Giacomo Leopardi [2003]). In this passage as elsewhere, Galassi fulfills the promise of his en face edition by drawing the reader to the Leopardian language that shadows his translations throughout.

All in all, it's a fine review, a particularly good example of the genre of translation review. Cheers to BookForum for putting a wonderful-sounding book in capable hands.


Awesome Review for Some Kind of Beautiful Signal at The Critical Flame

Posted on November 15, 2010, 12:00:00 PM by Scott Esposito

The Critical Flame (an outstanding new journal of book reviews and essays) has a remarkably in-depth and insightful review of the Center's new book, Some Kind of Beautiful Signal. Here's one of my favorite passages in the review:

This synthesizing and sharing cultural traditions and art is at the heart of Some Kind of Beautiful Signal, and is readily visible in the Chinese poet Xi Chuan’s “Birds,” which brings together a tradition that links birds to the divine: “Legend has it that Zeus transformed himself into a swan to ravish Leda, and that God transformed himself in a dove to procreate with Mary. The Book of Odes says: ‘Mandated by Heaven the dark bird / Alighted to bear Shang.’” Chuan points out how the image of the bird has been translated — carried across — cultures, as has the idea of translation itself: Zeus becomes swan; God becomes dove. The bird goes beyond language, and, as an image reappears throughout the anthology. Birds appear in a very different form in Samanta Shweblin’s “Birds in the Mouth,” and in Bolaño’s final image of the Nightingale. It is as if Wimmer and Yang, in pulling together their anthology, have deliberately drawn together images and stories that “translate” among each other.

And here's a bit of the review on our special Uyghur folio:

Situated in the middle of Asia and alternately annexed by Russia and China, what is now the Uyghur Autonomous Region in China is a cultural crossroads which a long and rich oral tradition. Yang reproduces a sense of this cultural heritage with his selection of medieval Uyghur quatrains and a facsimile of a page from a Buddhist manuscript, Maitrisimit, alongside politically conscious 20th century verse by Abduhalik Uyghur and Dilber Keyim Kizi. “Uyghurs, my people, wake up, you have slept enough,” Abduhalik Uyghur writes, and Kizi refers to herself as her “motherland’s crazed lover,” claiming “I would rather hang myself with my long braided black hair / than betray my people with empty promises.”

However, we should clarify that the Uyghur folio is most certainly not an "afterthought," as the review implies. The special folio always appears at the back of each book in our TWO LINES series, but it is often the first part of the book that the editors agree on. I can attest to the great amounts of work that Jeffrey Yang and Dolkun Kamberi put into it.


$2,500 Prize for Young Translators from Goethe-Institut New York

Posted on November 11, 2010, 02:37:00 PM by Scott Esposito

This came in today from Susan Bernofsky. Sounds like a great opportunity for up-and-coming translators:

Announcing the Frederick and Grace Gutekunst Prize for Young Translators

The Goethe-Institut New York announces a new prize for emerging translators.

(New York, NY: November 2010) The Goethe-Institut New York is pleased to invite applications for the first Frederick and Grace Gutekunst Prize for Young Translators. The purpose of the prize is to identify and encourage outstanding students of translation and of the German language and assist them in establishing contact with the translation and publishing communities.

The prize, which comes with a cash award of $2,500, is open to all college students and translators under the age of 35 who, at the time the prize is awarded, have not yet published nor are under contract for a book-length translation from the German. Applications will be accepted only from candidates who live in the United States.

Each applicant is required to translate a text into English. Team translations will not be accepted. All entries, to be transmitted by midnight, February 28, 2011, will be submitted to a jury consisting of three experts on translation and literature. The winner of the Gutekunst Prize will be notified at the end of April, 2011. The jury’s statement and the name of the winner will be published on the website of the Goethe-Institut.

The winner of the Gutekunst Prize will be invited to the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize ceremony and symposium, to take place at the Goethe-Institut Chicago on June 13 and 14, 2011. The $2,500 prize will be awarded during the symposium, and the winner will have the opportunity to present his or her translation.

Frederick Peter Gutekunst was professor of German for more than 30 years at Hunter College (CUNY) in New York City. From Frederick Gutekunst’s love of the German language evolved the idea of creating a prize in support of outstanding young translators of German literature into English.

To compete for the Gutekunst Prize, visit: www.goethe.de/gutekunstprize, where you will find information on requesting the application form and the German text to be translated for the competition.


Lit&Lunch with Stephen Kessler on Luis Cernuda

Posted on November 11, 2010, 11:33:00 AM by Scott Esposito

Imagine that you are born in a place with a warm climate and an outdoors culture in which people love to sit out talking late into the night. You live happily in that culture for over 30 years, and then you are suddenly exiled. You exchange your home culture for one known for cold, harsh winters and that extols a reserved personality as much as yours extols an outgoing one. After fourteen years of this, how happy would you be to return to the culture of your youth?

Such was the lot of Spanish poet Luis Cernuda, commonly considered one of the Spanish language's great poets of the 20th century. A peer of Federico García Lorca, Salvador Dalí, and Luis Buñuel, he emerged in the 1920s as one of Spain's most promising poets, yet with the onset of civil war and the looming threat of fascism, he took the opportunity to emigrate to England in 1938, at the age of 36.

In this audio, award-winning translator Stephen Kessler discusses his work with Cernuda's amazing late poetry. Cut off from his readership and his colleagues, Cernuda continued to write, but he was unaware of his growing renown in his native land. Then, at almost 50 years of age, Cernuda moved to Mexico, where he began to write the poetry that appears in Kessler's translation, Desolation of the Chimera. Though Cernuda was lured to Mexico by both the promise of a familiar lifestyle and the love of a young man, the poems in Desolation are, per Kessler, the work of a man writing "as if for himself alone." They are the work of an embittered exile, one who remained unaware of his rising status in the nation of his birth, and thus they are works that spring from Cernuda's displacement and isolation.

We will never know what kind of poetry Cernuda might have created had he stayed in Spain, yet, ironically enough these poems have only increased his popularity. In an interview with the Center, Kessler states that "when I was in Spain in 2002, the centenary of Cernuda's birth, I heard him called by more than one writer the most influential poet of his generation."

We know Cernuda today in the United States largely thanks to the hard work Kessler has done bringing Cernuda's crystalline verse into English, both in his award-winning translation Desolation of the Chimera and his 2004 translation, Written in Water. In this Lit&Lunch event, Kessler speaks about Cernuda's life and the unique pleasures and challenges of bringing Cernuda's verse into English.


The View from the Translation Ghetto

Posted on November 8, 2010, 10:55:00 AM by Scott Esposito

If you're a literary translator, you have to love an article that refers to your work as a "ghetto" and that would consign a book as weighty and important as Anna Karenina to that "ghetto":

With a very low percentage of international literature published in the U.S. each year, boutique publishers, imprints, and university presses assume the task of reminding readers that before Anna Karenina became a classic and an Oprah book club alum, it lived in the "literature in translation" ghetto. The National Endowment for the Arts and other national arts organizations increasingly fund translation projects in the hope of bringing new world literature into the American reader's beach bag.

Of course, one would much rather be in the "beach bag" than the "ghetto," although I think it's arguable whether Anna Karenina was in the "ghetto" or the "beach bag" before Oprah came along.

The occasion for this curious translation terminology is an article at Publishers Weekly about the future of AmazonCrossing, Amazon's new translation-only imprint. The article provides more questions than answers, but the questions are pretty important ones for publishers of literary translation: what kind of translations will Amazon do, and how will they impact the presses (mostly small) that currently dominate the translation space.

It's an interesting article, I just wish Publishers Weekly hadn't seen fit to throw translation into the ghetto.


Students Translating Dante

Posted on November 4, 2010, 11:54:00 AM by John Oliver Simon

Fourth- and fifth-grade students at Sobrante Park Elementary School in East Oakland have begun the 2010-11 school year by translating The Divine Comedy.

The kids at Sobrante Park met Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) under the auspices of Poetry Inside Out, the Center’s in-school literary arts program, that fosters imagination and builds students’ problem solving, critical thinking, and literacy skills through the translation and composition of poetry. Poetry Inside Out has worked with over 5,000 Bay Area students since 2000.

A generous grant from the Stocker Foundation has enabled Poetry Inside Out to get a running start at the beginning of the school year, even while school districts were awaiting the passage of a budget in Sacramento that might enable them to contribute to the costs of the program.

We gave our students at Sobrante Park — Spanish, English, Fante and Samoan speakers, 81% of whom get free lunch — the first three lines, in Italian, of Dante’s epic poem:

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
mi ritrovai per una selva oscura
ché la diritta via era smarrita.

The students sympathized with the poet’s life story: how Dante fell in love with his next-door neighbor, Beatrice Portinari, when they were both nine years old; how political differences led to his being kicked out of his home town, Florence, and how he wrote this 14,000-line poem which explores the entire known universe of his time.

At the beginning of the poem Dante finds himself lost in a dark forest. Guided by the ancient Roman poet Virgil, he makes his way down through the nine circles of Hell and then climbs the mountain of Purgatory, finally ascending into Heaven. Of course, we told them, Dante placed all the folks he was mad at in Hell and all those he admired in Heaven. “Was he God, then?” one kid asked. No, we replied, that was just his opinion.

We started by reading the poem aloud over and over in imperfect Italian to get the music of the words, then dove into a trilingual Translator’s Glossary parsing every word of the text. The students quickly grasped that Italian and Spanish are closer to each other than either is to English (we intend to run with that kind of insight all year). It wasn’t hard to puzzle out the meaning. Here’s fifth-grader Jeremiah W.’s translation:

In the middle of the journey of our life
I found myself in a gloomy jungle
because the proper pathway was lost.

Some kids slyly added their own licks and flourishes to their translations. Another fifth-grader, Diego P., grinned like a cat with a tummy full of canary as he read his translation into Spanish:

En el medio del viaje de nuestra vida
me encontré en una selva oscura
porque el camino derecho estaba perdido en el mundo cruel.

Ah cruel world indeed . . .

Finally, we gave the kids the assignment to write their own original poems in three-line stanzas, beginning with the first line of the Dante and then taking it wherever they wanted. Fourth-grader Celeste C. chose ice-cream with a cherry on top and a surprise twist:

In the middle of the journey of my life
I am going to be an ice cream cone with sprinkles
and a cherry on the top and I will get eaten by my dog.

Fifth-grader Gerardo G. drew on the Greek myths they are studying in class:

In the middle of the journey of my life
I was at war with the gods
I defeated the slayer with Medusa’s head.

Estefanía T., also in fifth grade, writing in Spanish, turned the dark forest into a place of light:

En el medio del viaje de mi vida
yo me encontré en una selva de luz
en el camino izquierdo había un castillo encantado.

In the middle of the journey of my life
I found myself in a forest of light
on the left-hand path there was an enchanted castle.

Fifth-grader Sandra Z. created an entirely fantastic scene with its own rules of engagement:

In the middle of the journey of my life I stared
at the lion made of lightning bolts while the rain-
drop soldiers tried to destroy me with their useless water weapons.

Fifth-grader Deontae P. found a deeper meaning that resonates wit,h Dante’s epic journey of self-discovery:

In the middle of the journey
of my life I was lost in the dark night
of wisdom, but now I am smart.

One more fifth-grader, Janiah O., turned her exploration into a hymn of grateful acceptance:

In the middle of the journey of my life
I went to explore the world. I went to see
what is the world and how the world is made.

I smelled roses and I saw roses, but it
doesn’t matter. I love the world and I like
how it’s made. Thank you for this world.

We’ll keep you posted as these kids continue their Poetry Inside Out journey.


TWO LINES in the Classroom

Posted on November 2, 2010, 01:39:00 PM by Scott Esposito

A cool blog post over at the blog of Clockroot Books (which does excellent work with translated literature) about teaching literature int he classroom--with TWO LINES:

Last week in my undergraduate creative writing class, my friend David Bartone and I co-taught a “translation day” (in preparation for reading Kassandra and the Wolf this week…). It went like this: we selected two poems from the Center for the Art of Translation’s Two Lines anthology “Wherever I Lie Is Your Bed,” in this case Andrej Glusgold’s “I Love Berlin” and “Elementary Particles,” translated by Donna Stonecipher. First we distributed only the original German text. We translated most of the first poem together as a class, using “gut” translations—no dictionaries, just everyone’s own ideas of what was meant, or should be meant, by such words as “Schlaf” and “Herpes,” etc. (success rate with the second was high). Then we divided the class into small groups, half of which had dictionaries, half of which didn’t. The half with dictionaries were to translate the second poem creatively, to make the best and most creative poem; the half without dictionaries were to translate it for accuracy. At the end everyone could vote on each other’s, just to add a little competition. All in all, it was an excellent day and really I should be able to offer here some of the great lines people came up with.

Wouldn't it be a much better world if more undergrad literature courses had a translation day (particularly since most courses use a translation at some point, be it as a book or a text in a class reader)? And of course, wouldn't it be a truly awesome world if translation was taught in these classes with TWO LINES?


Nov 17: Some Kind of Beautiful Signal Launch Party in SF

Posted on November 1, 2010, 03:57:00 PM by Scott Esposito

Who likes free food and wine? And who links to talk about great literature? If you just said, "yes, yes" then you should definitely join us on Wednesday, Nov 17, for our Some Kind of Beautiful Signal launch pary in San Francisco. We'll have translators Kurt Beals, Joel Streicker, and Kath... [more]

"I heard him called by more than one writer the most influential poet of his generation": A Luis Cernuda Links Roundup

Posted on November 1, 2010, 10:15:00 AM by Scott Esposito

Next Tuesday, Nov 9, Stephen Kessler will be the Center's Lit&Lunch guest to talk about his translations of the major Spanish poet Luis Cernuda. (Full event info right here.) Here are some links to get you up to speed on Kessler, Cernuda, and the books themselves. And if you're coming, let us k... [more]