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


Shishkin Takes International Literature Award

Posted on June 28, 2011, 10:12:00 AM by Scott Esposito

The Russian author Mikhail Shishkin, whom we published last year in Some Kind of Beautiful Signal, has taken Germany's 2011 International Literature Award, beating out some impressive competition: they include Mathias Énard, author of the blockbuster French novel Zone; Elias Khoury; José Eduardo Agualusa; and the U.S.'s own Edwidge Danticat. His translator into English is the incomporable Marian Schwartz.

Jumping off from the award, Sign and Sight has an interview with Shishkin, where he makes some intriguing remarks about contemporary Russian literature:

Unfortunately in the course of the 20th century, Russian literature has fallen by the wayside. If you put people in a cage, they cut themselves off, and this gives rise to a form of subculture that has its own language, its own jokes, and the people lose interest in what is happening outside. The orientation towards the outside world was prohibited for years. For decades Russian literature missed out on all narrative developments in world literature. It will have to work through all of this now, catch up, before it can find its way back to independent development. But now it's time to take a step forward. Which is why I think, yes, it's important for an author to live abroad for a while. If you don't, it's like living in a house without mirrors. And you need mirrors to understand yourself.

Shishkin's contribution to Some Kind of Beautiful Signal was a chapter from an as-yet untranslated novel, called The Seizure of Izmail.

You can also read Schwartz's blog post at Two Words about the one essential resource for Russian translators.


The Amount of Time We Spend Reading

Posted on June 27, 2011, 11:05:00 AM by Scott Esposito

The New Yorker's Book Bench blog has a post up about the findings of a new government survey on how Americans use their leisure time. Among other things, the survey finds that Americans have more and more leisure time because of the economic recession and that the recipient of these bonus hours is the television set:

The Journal also notes that the increase in leisure time brought on by the recession hasn’t resulted, as one might think, in Americans finally getting around to all the productive things (like tackling “War and Peace”) they hadn’t had time for before, but in more television-viewing: an average of two hours and thirty-one minutes per weekday.

The study also finds that despite very clear benefits to a lifestyle that includes regular reading for pleasure, teens only read for six minutes out of every weekend. As Mark Bauerlein puts it:

There is, he writes, a strong correlation between time spent reading for pleasure and academic success: those for whom reading has a “personal import” are better able to grasp complex texts of the kind assigned in a college classroom. Of course, leisure-reading rates among all teens, minority and otherwise, are nothing to smile about: individuals age fifteen-to-nineteen read for pleasure on average only six minutes a day on the weekends.

In an earlier article, Bauerlein argued that this is a bad thing because:

Complex texts aren’t so easily judged. Often they force adolescents to confront the inferiority of their learning, the narrowness of their experience, and they recoil when they should succumb. Modesty is a precondition of education, but the Web teaches them something else: the validity of their outlook and the sufficiency of their selves, a confidence ruinous to the growth of a mind.

To which I would add, all of these purported benefits of reading (confront inferiority of learning, expand experience, etc) would seem to be enhanced when reading international literature.


New World Literature Today

Posted on June 23, 2011, 09:56:00 AM by Scott Esposito

The July/August issue of World Literature Today has just been published, and there's quite a bit up online. The issue is headed by a section highlighting "The Many Voices of Italian Literature" with a good deal of the print material available, plus some web exclusives. They also have a large number of reviews of international writing, with about ten of them up online.

In other international lit news, the current issue of BOMB magazine has just been released, with an interview with Kenyan writer Binyavanga Wainaina, conducted by Rob Spillman of Tin House. It's only available free online till July 5, so have a look.


The Danger with Translation and an Ethical Question

Posted on June 20, 2011, 10:39:00 AM by Scott Esposito

The Guardian has an interesting article by former Granta editor Ian Jack about some translators who invented an Albanian author and had quite a bit of luck publishing their "translations" of him in English. As Jack reports it, they even got Time Out Scotland to declare him "'Albania's second greatest living writer' (after Ismail Kadare, later to win the Man Booker International prize)."

These "translators" had so much success with this fake author that Jack was at one poit considering publishing a collection of his work in English through Granta. But of course in order to do that he would have to meet the writer in person, and instead of pursuing some Weekend at Bernie's-esque hijinks the erstwhile translators let the jig be up:

We debated buying a story for the magazine. We even wondered if Kajane had more that could be published as a collection. We needed to get in touch, but our only route lay through his translator, Kevin Phelan, from whom the submissions had come. Phelan said Kajane wasn't easy to pin down, but he himself might be passing through London soon. He was sure Kajane would be thrilled at the idea of a collection. A meeting was arranged, and so one afternoon Phelan turned up in the office from Heathrow, in transit (as it turned out) between Nairobi and Washington.

The denouement will now be obvious, but before the meeting it seemed no more likely than discovering that Syria's leading lesbian blogger, Amina Abdallah Araf al Omari, was a married, middle-aged American called Tom MacMaster living in Edinburgh. Photographs and biographical details of Kajane, after all, appeared in the contributors' notes of serious US journals. We needed to meet or at least talk to him before we could publish – a condition none of his publishers, before or after, seems to have made. Phelan then confessed that Kajane didn't exist. Phelan and a friend, Bill U'Ren, had invented him. The two had met as creative writing students at the University of California in Los Angeles.

Phelan had made a couple of short trips to Albania in the 1980s. U'Ren had never been. As young writers, they'd discovered that their stories, which then had contemporary US settings, attracted little attention; perhaps too playful to fit the fashion for trailer-park realism. Albania changed everything.

Phelan's revelation was transfixing, and nearly as unbelievable as how he and U'Ren earned a living. Phelan was an FBI agent . . .

With translation becoming ever more widespread, this story does bring up some interesting questions. Most journals and anthologies don't insist on meet an author; nor do they tend to insist on any greater proof that said translation is what it is than the translator's word (usually specified in the publication contract).

I will admit that this is a fairly cool hoax--and it does bring up interesting questions about how the fact of being a translation can make various texts more seductive and more publishable--but in the end I have to come down on these two for injecting such dishonesty into the practice of translation. If you sign a contract stipulating that a translation is what you say it is (and I can't imagine that these two didn't sign more than a few of these contracts at various points along the way) you should take that seriously. These guys didn't, and now when I read our submissions I'm going to wonder if I'm being lied to.


Two Voices with Poet and Translator Fanny Howe on A Wall of Two

Posted on June 16, 2011, 03:11:00 PM by Scott Esposito

"My work on a translation for seven years has been part of a long fixation, which I hope to put to rest here." This was the bold statement with which Fanny Howe began her Two Voices presentation on the book of Holocaust poetry, A Wall of Two.

A Wall of Two is one of the few books that could truly merit such a portentous beginning. The poetry in it was produced "at the center of an anti-miracle," as Howe put it in her introduction to the collection, written by Polish sisters Henia and Ilona Karmel in the Buchenwald concentration camp. Howe continues, "[the poems] were produced in that stretch of time in the twentieth century when something that couldn't happen did."

Howe started out by giving an evocative description of the camps in which the poems were composed, describing them as both "sacred" and "marked off as ones where God did not appear." She also discussed the youth of Henia and Ilona and their amazing struggles to survive in the camps, reading the poem "To the German People," which is reproduced in part below:

To the German people

Are you asleep or what
Blind
Can't hear
That's "The Marseilles"
And the crash of the world
Falling down
Heat it
It means freedom is coming
I bet you want that too
A red star on Soviet tanks
Life returning while you sleep
Wake up, people of Germany, get ready
Step in time to "The Marseilles"
You better revive your hearts and souls
As if the love of your life was coming home . . .

Howe then went on to discuss the seven years she spent translating and "adapting" the poems. "I can say that I might never have taken on the job of editing and translating A Wall of Two if I had known how deeply it would affect me," she said, "and if I had not known one of the authors as well as I did." She overcame both lexical translation challenges as well challenges dealing with the long road across 50 years and two continents that the poems took in reaching her pen. Howe elegantly summed this up, saying, "The wrecks I was given to work on were equal to the devastation of the poets' lives. And so in a certain way I was involved in a reconstruction process that was also a mortal struggle."

Howe also recounted the sisters' horrible struggles in the camps, as well as their inspiring lives after the camps. Though exposed to the horrors of the Holocaust and left permanently disfigured by their time in the camps, the sisters went on to become successful writers (in English, as they forswore the use of Polish after writing the poems).

All in all, this was a poignant and powerful conclusion to a successful 2010-11 Two Voices events season, an event that reaffirmed the power of literature in the face of anything. As Howe said of the sisters, "they were determined to see their writing as poetry," Howe said of the sisters. Henia in particular believed that "transforming an experience from a prose description into verse would increase its worth, in a nearly supernatural sense." it is this power of literature that comes across in Howe's presentation and, we hope, all of our Two Voices offerings.


Murakami Going for the Nobel?

Posted on June 13, 2011, 10:58:00 AM by Scott Esposito

The Wall Street Journal has an interesting report that, using the platform of the International Catalunya Prize, Haruki Murakami made some very outspoken remarks regarding the recent Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant disaster in Japan.

The Journal cites the remarks thus:

“The accident at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant is the second major nuclear detriment that the Japanese people have experienced,” Mr. Murakami said, according to Kyodo News reports. “However, this time it was not a bomb being dropped upon us, but a mistake committed by our very own hands.”

He donated the €80,000 ($117,000) prize accompanying the award to Tohoku relief efforts.

Mr. Murakami said Japan, having experienced the trauma of radiation, should have turned away from nuclear power.

“Yet, those who questioned nuclear power were marginalized as being ‘unrealistic dreamers’,” he said, according to Kyodo.

The report also raises the possibility of Murakami as a Nobel contender, a possibility also raised by Japanese translator Stephen Snyder in our Two Voices event with him in May. There, Snyder explicitly calls Murakami's most recent book, 1Q84, to be released in English translation this fall, Murakami's attempt at winning the Nobel. Per reports, it's a much more ambitious, more politically involved book than have been his recent efforts, recalling hsi last giant opus, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.

It seems that Murakami is emerging as a much ore outspoken, politically active writer than he has been for most of the '00s. It remains to be seen where he will head next, and if these sentiments will help him win a Nobel.


A Video of "Quadraturin" by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky

Posted on June 9, 2011, 10:25:00 AM by Scott Esposito

Earlier this week I shared the news that we'll be having a story by the Russian author Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky in the next TWO LINES, to publish this fall.

For an idea of why I think he's a great writer and why I'm thrilled that we'll be publishing him, here's a short video of his short story "Quadraturin." It's one of my favorites, published in English for the first time last year in NYRB Classics' Memories of the Future.


Fanny Howe Discussing A Wall of Two at Two Voices Next Week

Posted on June 7, 2011, 11:38:00 AM by Scott Esposito

Next Tuesday, June 14, we'll be hosting Fanny Howe at 111 Minna St Gallery at 12:30 for our final Two Voices event of the season. The book she'll be discussing is A Wall of Two, which she translated and adapted from the Polish. It is a pretty amazing piece of literature, both for the quality of the book and for how it got to be here.

The basics of the story are that sisters Henia and Ilona Karmel were thrown into the Krakow ghetto during World War II. Subsequently, they were sent to the forced-labor camp at Skarzysko-Kamienna, and this is where they began to write their poetry. From a review in The Jewish Exponent

It was in Skarzysko-Kamienna, where much other literature and music was written clandestinely by inmates, that the sisters began writing their poems. According to Howe, "a non-Jewish worker in the plant gave Henia and Ilona extra worksheets to write on. Using the blank side of the worksheets, the sisters composed their poems in pencil . . . and then concealed them. There was an invention of cultural life at this camp, really a form of reminiscence that included prayer, drawing, song, poetry -- all with references and sources instantly recognizable to those present."

One would think that's remarkable enough, but the story continues:

How these poems survived the camps and were eventually read in the outside world is, according to Howe, a story in itself. In April 1945, the evacuation of Buchenwald began, with the SS sending prisoners on death marches. "Nearly 28,000 prisoners were forced by the Germans to walk in circles along the roads and through the forests outside the camp," explains Howe. "In this process, many of them were deliberately crushed by Germans in tanks and shoved into a pile. Henia and Ilona and her mother were three of these. They were pushed into a field of corpses and abandoned. Shortly thereafter another group of prisoners passed by, one of whom was a cousin of the Karmels. In the chaos Henia was able to tear open her dress and hand her cousin all of the poems. She repeated her husband's name to her cousin and begged her to get the poems to him in Krakow if he was still alive."

Both Henia and Ilona survived the war, eventuallly immigrating to the United States and becoming English-language novelists. (In her introduction to the book, Howe theorizes that the sisters chose this language because "English was exempt from the source of their experiences.")

Though they became successful writers, (Ilona even has a writing prize in her honor), they hid the poems, which were only given to Howe to translated after the sisters' deaths.

As to the poems themselves, the Bay Guardian discusses them in a review:

In many of her bleak little songlike poems, Henia scratches lines as stark as etchings on a prison wall: "Cemetery days / One after the other"; "You don't believe what's happening here, / Do you, my poor horrified brothers?"; "Sometimes a dream stupidly hangs on" — her verse rendered in Howe's minimalist adaptations of literal translations from the Polish. Howe writes that she often chose to prune back "dangling clauses" or "excess adjectives" in order to bring forth the essential images in the poems . . .

Cunning and immediate, poems such as this are sandwiched between remarkable letters and essays, stories and acknowledgements, reminders that if any of the little twists of fate hadn't occurred, everything could have quickly disappeared — not just the wall of words, but the women fighting behind it.

Howe, a wildly successful poet in her own right, will be reading and discussing her translations of these incredible works. If you're free next Tuesday, make sure to drop by and see it!


Future TWO LINES Authors

Posted on June 6, 2011, 11:02:00 AM by Scott Esposito

Some pretty exciting authors that will be appearing in the next volume of TWO LINES have been in the news lately.

First up is Gonçalo M Tavares, whose awesome Joseph Walser's Machine (no relation to Robert Walser) we'll be excerpting in TWO LINES. I'm a little partial since I picked this piece, but I've had the book's greatness confirmed by other people.

Tavares is interviewed in euronews on the subject of, what else, machines.

It’s only by having a man who thinks like a machine that we can understand that machines are violent, inhumane, cruel and destructive. Man and machine are not friends, contrary to what you might think. The machine is not man’s best friend, like the dog. The machine belongs to another world. It has no compassion. It does something or it does not do it. It is built just to do things and that is terrible. I think we have not yet fully understood machines. They have their world, they are not our dogs. They have their philosophy, their way of thinking. And their way of thinking is simply to act. Do not break down. Be effective.

The other author is the Russian Surrealist/absurdist Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, who is the subject of a very nice essay by Adam Thirlwell in the current New York Review.

In 1924 a collection of Krzhizhanovsky’s stories, Fairy Tales for Wunderkinder, was accepted for publication, but the publishing house went bankrupt before the book came out. And so begins the sad history of Krzhizhanovsky’s impossible publications. In 1928 and 1929 he wrote more stories, a screenplay, and a play. None of these appeared in public. On April 23, 1932, the Central Committee of the Communist Party created the Union of Soviet Writers, with Maxim Gorky appointed the first chairman. In the same year, Gorky stated that stories like Krzhizhanovsky’s “would hardly find a publisher,” and if they did, and managed to “dislocate a few young minds,” he added, would this really be desirable?

In effect, his opinion made Krzhizhanovsky definitively unpublishable. The next year, Krzhizhanovsky’s Academia edition of Shakespeare was canceled. In 1934, another play, The Priest and the Lieutenant, went unstaged. A collection of stories that was provisionally accepted by the State Publishing House was stopped by the censors . . .

And that makes us all the prouder to be publishing him, even if no one can pronounce his last name.


TWO LINES ONLINE: Rachel Tzvia Back on Poet Tuvia Ruebner

Posted on June 2, 2011, 11:03:00 AM

(We've just published a poem by Tuvia Ruebner in Rachel Tzvia Back's translation in the June 2011 installment of TWO LINES Online. To help contextualize this work, today we have a post from Back.)

Tuvia Ruebner was born in Slovakia in 1924 to a German speaking Jewish family. The race-laws enacted in those years forced him to stop his studies in the ninth grade and he worked for a short while as an electrician. After an extended journey through Hungary, Turkey, Syria and Lebanon, Ruebner arrived in mandate Palestine in 1941; his parents, sister and grandparents who had remained in Slovakia were killed in Auschwitz in 1942.

In Palestine, Ruebner worked on several kibbutzes, finally settling on Kibbutz Merhavia in the Jezereel Valley. He fought in the 1948 Israeli War of Independence. After years as a high school literature teacher and kibbutz librarian, Ruebner was appointed a professor of comparative literature at Haifa University, where he continued his teaching and academic research until his retirement.

Ruebner published his first poetry collection in 1957 and has since published 11 more collections. Though his native tongue is German, he chose to write in Hebrew, as was the choice of his generation, in a rejection of the Old World and a declared commitment to the revived biblical tongue. His language is elegant and careful, even as it is conveyed in a direct, unflinching tenor. Already from the start of his poetic career, his poetry is marked by a rejection of formal verse and a bold experimentation with the potential embedded in the non-comforming line-break. His verse is always propelled by its musical force and an engagement with the many levels of meaning present in every word.

Ruebner's poetry is personal and political as one. His long life has afforded him a wide view of Jewish fate in the twentieth century, from the catastrophe of the Holocaust to the founding of the Jewish State to the ongoing disaster of the occupation. But Ruebner's poetry engages also universalistic themes of love, nature and loss. Indeed, his own life has been marked by abundant tragic losses, from the massacre of his family, to the death of his first wife in a car accident in the early 1950s, to the loss of his youngest son Moran, who disappeared in South America while traveling there in 1983 and was never found. Amidst these many losses, Ruebner's work maintains a grace and gentleness that are nothing short of extraordinary.

His poetry has received every major award in Israel, including the Prime Minister's Prize twice and the prestigious Israel Prize (in 2008). In Europe, his poetry and translations have been celebrated and extensively acknowledged with prizes including the D. Steinberg Prize (Zurich, 1981), the Christian Wagner Prize (Germany, 1994), the Jeanette Schocken Prize (Germany, 1999), and many more. Ruebner is also widely recognized as an accomplished photographer, and the strongly visual is present in his poetic work.