ALTA Literary Translation Roundtable

The Center was at the annual American Literary Translators' Association conference last week, and I'm going to be blogging the panels that we attended. First up is a literary translation roundtable with quite the line-up: Susan Bernofsky, Jeffrey Yang, and Robyn Cresswell representing New Directions; Christian Hawkey and Anna Moschovakis from Ugly Duckling Presse; and Johannes Goransson from Action Books.

This was a great panel with each press giving a very concrete and very different model of how to publish literary translations. The New Directions contingent got things started off--it was the largest press of the group, with about 30 titles per year and a history that stretched back to the beginning of the 20th century. That long history was key, as the family of New Directions founder James Laughlin gave the press large amounts of financial support during the first 25 years, as it built up an impressive backlist. That kind of a backlist is what now allows New Directions to support new and interesting work, although in today's publishing climate big backlists can be hard to build up (particularly backlists like New Directions', which take a while for the culture to catch up to). Notably, ND also stated that in their opinion translations don't cost more to publish than non-translated titles, a point that has been contentious in the past.

Bernofsky and Cresswell talked about their experience working with New Directions as translators. It was clear that they both greatly appreciated the amount of work the editors at New Directions put into making each translation shine, with Bernofsky talking about her new translation of Jenny Erpenback's novel Visitation (which sounds great), and Cresswell about his translation of Abdelfattah Kilito's also great-looking title The Clash of Images.

The latter is a perfect example of a book that only a press like New Directions could publish: it defies easy categorization, and in fact it was discovered by New Directions because they have strong connections with the PEN Translation Fund and have built up a high level of trust and relationships with translators like Cresswell.

In a similar way, Bernofsky discussed the story of how she began translating Yoko Tawada for New Directions. Essentially she discovered Tawada (who writes in German) in an Austrian journal, translated the piece immediately and sent it to the author care of the journal. While Bernofsky continued to work with Tawada and publish pieces in journals, New Directions discovered Tawada independently of Bernofsky, and when they decided to publish her, Bernofsky was a natural choice. This was, in fact, how Bernofsky started translating for New Directions.

Ugly Duckling had a slightly different model from New Directions: they do 24 - 30 books per year, though at a much lower print run than ND (generally between 1,000 and 1,500 copies). They have what they called a very "horizontal" arrangement, with a group of editors who essentially get excited about a project and then see it through every step of the process, from submission to editing, design, and distribution. Though not a translation press per se (they called their aesthetic a focus on "odd people out"), they do a lot of work with translators, particularly because the press happened to get its start via a grant to translate a great series of East European poets. They also mentioned that they like to work with authors writing in English but for whom English is not a first language, as that tends to give rise to interesting uses of language.

One of the notable parts of their model were the various ways they used to get their books out there--they use course adoptions (which can be huge), annual subscriptions for a year of Ugly Duckling books (which get people exposed to new things), Small Press Distribution, and a group of "partner bookstores" that agree to stock at least two copies of each Ugly Duckling title. Their shotgun approach reflected a desire to do whatever they could to get their books out there and into readers' hands.

Ugly Ducking brought a number of books to show during the panel, all of which were very different from one another in design and look, and all of which also looked beautiful. Some of the titles I recall were Christian Hawkey's Ventrakl, a tiny book by Robert Walser called Answer to An Inquiry, and Chinese Sun. They also do a journal called 6 x 6, which is a route for discovering new projects that they want to do full-length.

Lastly, Action Books talked about translating as a conversation between writers and languages. As the smallest press in the group, they seemed to focus more on the personal connections between writers, translators, and cultures that are possible when you publish literature in translation. They also pointed out that this kind of an endeavor reveals that translation is a space that is nonequal in terms of power and interests. Different cultures value translation differently, and when you're sending books between these cultures, this tends to come out, which one would think is one of the points of translation.