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


See Us At AWP!

Posted on January 31, 2011, 11:34:00 AM by Scott Esposito

If you'll be at the the conference of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs this week, join the Center for some panels that we'll be featured on.

Also feel free to drop by our table anytime at booth D21.

On Friday, I'll be in a panel on the various ways in which translated literature can function as experimental literature in the U.S. Here's the description:

Friday: 10:30 a.m.-11:45 a.m.

Nathan Hale Room
Marriott Wardman Park, Lobby Level F127.

The Experimental and the International. (Hilary Plum, Karen Emmerich, Scott Esposito, Steve Dolph, Anna Moschovakis, Jill Schoolman) This panel considers why literature in translation is often described as experimental: What issues arise as foreign literary traditions enter the U.S. milieu? How does the phenomenon of literature in translation shed light on American conceptions of experimental vs. mainstream? What can happen when highly language-focused (thus experimental?) work moves between languages? A discussion among translators, writers, and book & magazine editors and publishers in the field of international literature.

And then on Saturday, the Center will be sponsoring a panel on the poet as translator, to be moderated by our founder, Olivia Sears:

Saturday: 9:00 a.m.-10:15 p.m.

Thurgood Marshall North Room
Marriott Wardman Park, Mezzanine Level S110.
In the Interest of Language: The Poet as Translator. (Olivia Sears, Wayne Miller, Valzhyna Mort, Idra Novey, Sidney Wade) To translate, one must engage with the original language, but also fully inhabit and interpret the mood, culture, and the voice of the writer. It isn’t an exaggeration to say that translation is the closest of close readings, and that such attention to the nuances of each word gives a poet new insight into the intricacies of language. The Center for the Art of Translation invites four premier poet/translators to explore how translation has informed their relationship with their own words.


Call for Submissions from Norwich Papers

Posted on January 27, 2011, 03:33:00 PM by Scott Esposito

Norwich Papers from the University of East Anglia is offering anice opportnity to translators who like to write about their craft. Here are the submission details for anyone interested in taking this up:

Translation is a problem with two horns: to be caught on the point of free and apparently subconscious decision; or to be pinned by the mechanical application of theory. But perhaps this is not a helpful dichotomy. Rather, we would like to ask where in the muddle translation actually happens, and how balance is struck between conflicting thought processes.

"It just doesn’t sound right" is both the catchphrase and bane of the practising translator. A lot stands behind these apparently throwaway words, and we would like to invite considerations of how they might be unpacked.

Areas of interest include, but are not restricted to:

  • spirit and affect – how can poetics account for the sublime, or literature’s affective power, the hairs that stand on the back of the neck?
  • intentionality--the relationship between translator and author.
  • preservation of non-standard features, especially in texts written to be read as if spoken.
  • critical reception of translations, and the intuitive approval of translations that read smoothly.
  • what is strange about translated language, and why?
  • the stuff and substance of language--can we understand or only intuit the iconicity of sound?

Submission details:

Please submit your papers to norwichpapers@uea.ac.uk
Deadline: Friday April 29th, 2011
Format: Word documents or Rich Text Format (.rtf). Please follow the Harvard style of referencing. Articles should be between 4000 and 5000 words long, written in English.


The Word Exchange: Riddles and Charms from Anglo-Saxons

Posted on January 25, 2011, 10:15:00 AM by Scott Esposito


We're still talking about The Word Exchnge this week in anticipation of our upcoming event on Feb 8 with poets and translators Greg Delanty, Michael Matto, and Robert Hass.

A while back, Nick Laird--one of the 70-some poet/translators to contribute to The Word Exchange--wrote a piece for The Guardian about his contributions to this book. Here he explains just what are the "charms" in The Word Exchange:

The charms are something different again. They're a weird mix of Christian and pagan, and they're incantatory, designed to do work, to cast a spell. They remind you that poetry is an art of invocation. Whereas prose evokes, poetry invokes – it's a summoning act. The charms involve a kind of homeopathic magic, where a small part of the something stands in for something else, and this in itself is similar to what poetry does when it uses metaphor.

He actually ended up translating one of the charms for the book, and here's his description of some of the translation factors that came into play when translating from Old English:

Anyway, I wanted to do a riddle or a charm but I'm so slow at my admin that by the time I went to pick, the riddles had all been taken, as had all but one of the charms. "Against a Dwarf" had gone, as had "The Nine Herbs Charm", "For a Sudden Stitch", "For Loss of Cattle", "For a Swarm of Bees" . . . The only charm unchosen, "For Unfruitful Land", was long and repetitive, comprising lengthy instructions in prose and then the spoken invocations in verse, composed, like all Anglo-Saxon poetry, in hemistichs. Considering that "Anglo-Saxon poetry" covers about 600 years, the forms it takes are remarkably uniform. The equivalent would be for everyone from Chaucer to Carol Ann Duffy to have written in the same style. The hemistich is a kind of verse where long lines are split into two and linked by alliteration. Strict Old English metre (and rhythm) is almost impossible to produce in modern English because of changes in the syntax, and I don't think alliteration works in modern English, at least not in a consistent, line by line way.

And here's one of the 95 riddles in the book. Answer to come later in the week:

I can chortle away in any voice,
an impressario of impersonations
and change. I broadcast my deathless lyrics,
never backward in coming forward.
Ancient soloist of eventides, I perform
for those unwinding at home.
They sit quietly in their houses,
downcast. Ghuess who I am?
I parody as loudly as I can the japes
of comedians. I top the charts,
karaoke the most popular songs.


Hear a Little Old English

Posted on January 24, 2011, 10:49:00 AM by Scott Esposito

We're having our Word Exchange event on Feb 8, so I thought it'd be fun to hear how one of the poems in The Word Exchange sounds in Old English (to the best of our knowledge). Here's audio of "The Seafarer," found, along with a ton more Old English audio, at Anglo-Saxon Aloud.

And here's a transcript of the poem and a translation.

And here's some thoughts on the difficulty of translating from Old English, by way of The Wall Street Journal's review of The Word Exchange:

But while writing modern English according to the strict rules of Anglo-Saxon metrics can be done—the "Rider" poems scattered throughout "The Lord of the Rings" would get a nod of approval from the "Beowulf" poet himself—it's actually a struggle. Mr. Mahon is the only one of the 70-plus translators in "The Word Exchange" to observe the rules all the way through. Most of the other translators maintain the stress pattern and put in what alliteration comes easily to hand.

Mary Jo Salter's "Seafarer" is particularly successful at catching the rhythm because she opens up the short half-lines into slightly longer units, mostly but not invariably paired. "I can sing my own true song / Of journeys through this world, / how often I was tried / by troubles. Bitterly scared." Mark Halliday's long Blakean lines are a good choice as well for "Maxims I-C," with its grim warning: "Ever since the blood of Abel . . . / there has been hatred, envy, greed afoot in this world. / This is where you must live, among thieves and killers." But the translated poems always come out longer than the originals. The hard compaction of Old English is difficult to reproduce.


Interview with Michael Matto, Co-Editor of The Word Exchange

Posted on January 18, 2011, 02:53:00 PM by Scott Esposito

We may be doing our first-ever English-to-English translation event on Feb 8, when we'll be welcomeing poets and translators Robert Hass, Michael Matto, and Greg Delanty. They'll be discussing The Word Exchange, which has just been published by Norton and is a copendium of Old English verse, translated into modern English by a very impressive lineup of poets and translators. (Matto and Delanty edited the book, Hass translated for it.)

Here we talk with Michael Matto about just what Old English verse is, where it comes from, and some of the issues that are dealt with when working in this language.

And if you're planning on coming, give us a head's-up on Facebook.

Scott Esposito: First I'd like to ask you to describe the geographical region we're talking about when we say "Anglo-Saxon" poetry, as well as some kind of an idea what world these poems came from. Who would have read them? (And how?) What were they for?

Michael Matto: The Angles and Saxons were Germanic peoples who migrated in the 5th century to the island we now call Great Britain. One story suggests they were invited as mercenary defense forces for the Celtic people living there, but soon turned on their employers and took the Celt’s land for themselves. In any case, once there they lived mainly in the area that now comprises England (Angle-land) and southern Scotland.

Old English is the language of the Anglo-Saxons. It derives from members of a larger family of Germanic languages. Their poetry would have originally been composed orally and memorized for oral performance. Presumably these performances could vary in exact content, much like a contemporary folk or blues player might alter a song with each concert. However, which extant Old English poems were composed orally and which were written by literate poets remains a mystery, as do the specific circumstances of performance.

Still, I’d assume that poetry was welcome in a number of places, from the drinking hall to the monastery, depending on the nature of the poem. Some of the poems are beautiful expressions of intense longing or feelings of alienation; some are long narrative retellings of biblical stories; some are intended for political spin; some are compendia of gnomic wisdom; some are very clever riddles.

SE:Beowulf is by far the most widely known work of Anglo-Saxon verse, and it comprises about 10 percent of the extant verse. What other works would you say have distinguished themselves, and has everything that we know of been translated at this point?

MM: The most well-known poems are "The Seafarer," which Ezra Pound famously translated, "The Wanderer," and the "Dream of the Rood." Each is an elegant and intricate mid-length poem. Also intriguing are the nearly 100 riddles about everyday items such as tools, weapons, foods, animals, and celestial bodies. I’d venture to say all Old English poetry has been translated at one point or another, though some only into prose. Some poems are taken up regularly by translators, such as those I’ve mentioned.

SE: What's your history with Old English?

MM:I fell in love with Old English as an undergraduate English major at U.C. Berkeley, and pursued it in my graduate work at New York University.

SE: The Word Exchange includes a very useful "Guide to Reading Aloud," so that readers can try their hands at reading the original poetry (printed on the facing pages in this book). If we still know, how was the knowledge of how to speak and read Old English passed down to us today?

MM: Well, it wasn’t. After the Norman Conquest in 1066, English was forever altered grammatically and phonetically by its contact with Norman French. While something akin to Old English vocabulary and grammar continued to develop in the north, the French-influenced English of London (and of Chaucer) eventually became the standard, and Old English was largely forgotten. 18th-century scholars began the resuscitation work, so our ability to read and pronounce Old English is based on the labors of 300 years of ongoing historical linguistic scholarship.

SE: Most of the poems in this collection have a distinctive format where the lines are split down the middle. For example, the first few lines of Beowulf look like this:

Hwæt! Wé Gárdena     in géardagum
þéodcyninga                þrym gefrúnon·
hú ðá æþelingas          ellen fremedon.

Can you explain what this feature is, as well as some of the thoughts behind whether or not (and if so, how) to represent it in a translation?

MM: This split is called a “caesura,” and represents the modern standard format for printed editions. But it is not what the poems look like in their manuscripts. On the manuscript page the poem is written out from margin to margin, as is prose; the lines you cite from Beowulf looks like this in the manuscript:

HWAET WE GARDE-M
na ingear dagum þeod cyninga
þrym gefrunon huða æþelingas ellen
fremedon.

It is as if the regular iambic pentameter of Paradise Lost were written in paragraphs; you’d still hear the rhythm when read aloud. The modern convention is designed to be a visual representation of what the listener would hear in oral performance, which is two compact syntactic units joined by alliteration, but with (perhaps) a slight pause between them.

SE: Lastly, in the introduction your fellow editor, Greg Delanty, mentions that The Word Exchange incorporates translations from a number of poets with no knowledge of Old English. Greg goes on to say that you would give these poets "cribs, glossaries, and interpretive direction," and then the poets would compose the translation. I'd like to ask what kind of instruction you gave and what the working relationship was like, as well as how, if at all, you think this differs from a translation only made by one person.

MM: I offered all the translators as much or as little help as they wanted. Some picked a poem and I later received their work complete; others I met with personally, chatted over the phone, or had extensive email exchanges with. But most fell somewhere in between. Many wanted to understand the meter of the poetry, even if they opted not to try to reproduce it. But interestingly, the poets needed to find their own ways into the work not based on history or scholarly interpretation. Most interesting to me were the ways in which the poets saw aspects of the poems that had never occurred to me, but were incredibly perceptive and illuminating. Still, I did not hold back when I saw moments in the translations that I felt were too loose or perhaps misconstrued the original. I usually prefaced such comments by saying “it may be that you made a conscious choice here, but you should know that the Old English actually means…”. Sometimes these notes led to revisions, sometimes not. I occasionally made stylistic suggestions when an idea occurred to me, but I tried to limit myself to questions of accuracy.

But ultimately I’d say each poem was translated “by one person”--that is, I provided information and feedback, but did not try to shape the poems in any specific way. That’s why the resulting poems are so varied and rich.


Breon Mitchell Receives Award from Modern Language Association

Posted on January 13, 2011, 10:18:00 AM by Scott Esposito

The annual MLA conference occurred last weekend, and translator and frined of the Center Breon Mitchell received the coveted Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for a Translation of a Literary Work for his monumental translation of The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass. Here's part of the very flattering award citation as relayed by Three Percent:

On virtually every page of Breon Mitchell’s new translation of The Tin Drum, the reader finds brilliant solutions to vexing problems. This meticulous work, marking the fiftieth anniversary of the original publication of Günter Grass’s classic novel, accomplishes precisely what one hopes for in a retranslation: it brings us closer to both source and target languages. Mitchell makes us aware that even good work, such as Ralph Manheim’s respected earlier translation, bears improvement, as great consistency, coherence, and tempo are achieved throughout the entire volume in rendering its obsessive drumming theme.

This is a great time to offer congradulations to Breon, as well as to note that we excerpted his translation in Wherever I Lie Is Your Bed. Breon also spoke at length about this translation in our Lit&Lunch event with him, which you can listen to right here.

In addition, Lawrence Venuti received honorable mention for his translation of Catalon poet Ernest Farrés' Edward Hopper, which we excerpted in Strange Harbors.


"I offer myself to be devoured by Spanish peasants"

Posted on January 11, 2011, 11:47:00 AM by Scott Esposito

These are words written by Federico García Lorca that we never before knew were written by him. They are part of a newly discovered manuscript of his poem "Oficina y denuncia," about the U.S. Great Depression. As The Guardian writes,

Christopher Maurer, the professor of Spanish at Boston University who discovered the "extraordinary" manuscript, said that although it was "hidden in plain sight" in the music division of the Library of Congress, "no other scholar had ever mentioned it".

According to the professor, Lorca's use of the word "devorado" ("devoured") was particularly striking, even though it didn't make it into the published version of the poem, as it heightens the poem's Christ-like imagery, and the image of a city that "eats, consumes, cannot digest, and vomits". The poem as published ends with the protagonist offering himself instead "as food for cows wrung dry / when their lowing fills the valley / where the Hudson becomes intoxicated with oil", shifting the image away from the humanity and towards the natural world which mankind has sacked and despoiled.

The discovery is being called "extraordinary." At the very least it is exciting, and it makes a good reminder to have a look Lorca's book Poet in New York, in which this poem is included, to see what an outsider made of the United States at this turning point in history.


Thank You from the Center

Posted on January 10, 2011, 04:37:00 PM by Scott Esposito

We at the Center want to offer a hearty thanks to our community for reaching deep into your pockets this holiday season and supporting our year-end campaign. With donations still trickling in, we've received close to $30,000 to help fund another year of the Center's programs.

Here are just a few things this money will go toward:

  • Hiring a Poetry Inside Out Outreach Manager to help bring translation-based education to even more schools in 2011.
  • Continuing our 2010-11 program of events--the Center's most extensive yet--and maintaining this momentum in 2011-12. And remember, those who can't attend in person can listen to all of our events free of charge online.
  • Expanding the translations we offer for free online in TWO LINES Online.
  • Publishing a new group of titles in our TWO LINES World Library series of regional translation anthologies.

Thanks to all of you for helping make these programs thrive in 2011! And if you see us at an event or a conference this year, please come up and say hi, so we can thank you in person and share the latest news from the Center.

Remember, if you haven't donated yet, there's still time. Our year-end campaign may be over, but we are no less in need of the support of our community. Even a donation of $10 will make a huge difference for the Center. Donations can be made right here.


New Journals in Translation

Posted on January 10, 2011, 11:12:00 AM by Scott Esposito

Some nice new resources in the world of translation have just become available. First is issue 36 of the journal Transcript, which offers its "Literature from Stateless Nations" issue, with essays, interviews, and original translations.

One item that caught my eye there is this interview with Cataln poet Francesc Parcerisas, who will be the subject of an upcoming Lit&Lunch event in March with translator Cyrus Cassells..

What kind of relationship do you have to your own language, Catalan?

Language is the pith of literature, and it’s also a way of ‘seeing’ or at least of ‘saying’ the world. Translators are incredibly conscious of this. Catalan is the language I have heard at home (where we also speak Spanish, as my mother is from Asturias) and is the language I’ve always associated with the world of culture and respect. I believe that the Catalan language is the backbone of our culture. But the situation of the language, in the global world and without a state, is very weak. I sometimes wonder, and I’ve also expressed this in public, whether it will still be around in one or two generations from now. It’s a question of survival, of critical mass, of ecology.

And then the Dalkey Archive Press has just released the latest issue of its Review of Contemporary Fiction, which is all about the French publisher Editions P.O.L. Unfortunately, none of the pieces therein are available online, but as Editions P.O.L has been behind some of the most notable French books of recent years, seems that there would be a lot to learn there. And the collection of recent work from P.O.L authors included therein looks excellent.


Bad Times for Translation?

Posted on January 6, 2011, 01:47:00 PM by Scott Esposito

According to Chad Post--keeper of the mighty Three Percent translation database--the number of translations of poetry and prose into English in the past three years has been in sharp decline. He writes, with his usual verve:

Unless I went blind, or missed two months worth of releases,3 total number of new translations was way down. Like down by 40 titles, or 11%. This is not cool.

And this is the trend from 2008 to 2010 is a pretty steady decline, in spite of all the media attention paid to Bolano, to translation as a whole, etc., etc. Despite all the best efforts of all the best people who are out there championing international literature. This scares me.

Chad's about as well-informed on these matters as you can get, so barring some weird statistical fluke, it looks like this is the case.

What does all this mean? It's hard to say, but here are some ideas.

Chad further parses the data to show that, by and large, it's the same few publishers doing the lion's share of the work, and that their numbers have remained fairly consistent. If that's true, then these trends could be the result of really small, 1- and 2-book per year publishers going out of business during the recession. There's also the likelihood of larger publishers moving toward English-language titles, which they tend to perceive as safer and less expensive to produce.

Of course, this could also just be statistical fluctuation. Three years of data isn't a huge data set, and it's possible that on a longer time scale this movement would just look like regular movement. In that case, I'll be interested to see what Chad's translation database says about 2011. (And if anyone out there has access to data sets for years before 2008, I'd love to hear about it.)

We should also keep in mind that titles published is just one measure. As Chad indicated, 2010 was another strong year for translation being talked about in the mainstream press and for translated authors being bought and praised. From those vantage points, 2010 might be looking better than recent years.


Yet More Praise for Some Kind of Beautiful Signal

Posted on January 4, 2011, 10:29:00 AM by Scott Esposito

The winter holidays brought with them a couple more huge mentions for the Center's latest anthology of literary translation, Some Kind of Beautiful Signal (follow the link for a table of contents, plus excerpts and web-only bonus translations). First we have Anna Clark of the website Isak (a great ... [more]

Translation Event in Austin

Posted on January 3, 2011, 10:19:00 AM by Scott Esposito

Austin readers! The incomporable Marian Schwartz has put together what sounds like a great event with translator Achy Obejas. If you're in or around Austin, check it out. Uncorking Cuba: One Hundred Bottles
When: Sat, Jan 8, 2011 7:00 PM - Sat, Jan 8, 2011 10:00 PM
Where: The Emma S... [more]