5 Women Translators’ Words About Their Work
A look into introductions, afterwords, and other notes in honor of #WITMonth.
When we find ourselves looking to learn more about a particular translator’s method or philosophical approach to their work, it becomes clear that their projects speak volumes for themselves. We read between the lines, feel the musicality or rhythm of a phrase cleverly emulated in English, or compare a translation to its original, noting how the translator(s) chose to bring a complicated, culturally-specific reference into the hands of an Anglophone audience. Reading a translated text attentively and recalling its original linguistic and cultural context leads us to reach impactful and often unexpected insights about the practice of translation and the ethos of the translator themselves.
Still, when translators are given the space to tell us more about their method of engaging with a text (or their personal relationship to it) in explicit terms, our experience as readers is enhanced and becomes even more gratifying. Translators’ notes, prefaces, and afterwords are art forms and rich outlets for comparative linguistic scholarship and literary criticism in their own right, sometimes proving to be equally as thought-provoking as the texts they introduce or explain.
Here are windows into five pieces written by translators and included in their book-length projects, which you can purchase and read in full by clicking on the links to their corresponding publishers. Since August is Women in Translation Month, celebrating the work of these remarkable translators— all of whom are women— is even more timely and important.
Idra Novey — Translator’s Note in The Passion According to G.H. by Clarice Lispector
Novel translated from Portuguese
Idra Novey’s translation of Clarice Lispector’s novel (or spiritual voyage, or monologue about killing a cockroach and reaching the primeval depths of existence) was published in 2012 as part of New Directions’ project to retranslate and release the iconic Brazilian author’s complete works under Benjamin Moser’s editorial supervision. Novey opens her note at the end of the book with an anecdote about Lispector that she heard from a friend, wherein a devoted reader in Rio manages to meet with the author in person, “convinced… [they] would have a life-changing connection,” only to flee Clarice’s apartment when her arrival was met with a direct glare and an intimidating silence.
Novey likens this story to her experience translating Lispector, who died in 1977 and whose input on the new translation is, as a result, inaccessible— even “mystifying.” Still, she explains that reading Clarice Lispector is what first convinced her to learn Portuguese, and that engaging in dialogue with Clarice’s writing on the level of words and rhythm as a translator has nonetheless managed to be deeply transformative. She ends her note with a passage that manages to be one of the most vivid and viscerally beautiful conclusions I’ve seen a translator draw from their work:
“Even after rereading this novel so often and so intently that I know a number of passages in it by memory, I still feel as if every hair on my head has caught on fire when I reach the end of it. The experience of translating G. H. has left me feeling bald, and not as if I lost my hair in the process so much as discovering that like G. H., like the roach, I am actually all cilia and antennae and would never have come to know this without gradually, painstakingly experiencing every word in this book.”
Haleh Liza Gafori — Introduction to Gold by Rumi
Poetry collection translated from Persian
In recent years, translating the work of the thirteenth-century Persian-language poet and Sufi mystic Jalal al-Din Muhammad Rumi has become a heated topic in Iranian, Muslim, and literary circles online, causing articles and debates about “the erasure of Islam from Rumi’s poetry” to crop up. As Rozina Ali explains in the New Yorker(opens in a new tab), some readers claim that the translators who brought Rumi to Anglophone readers have largely held flawed approaches, originally rooted in nineteenth-century Orientalists’ inability to reconcile their understandings of Islam with Rumi’s universalizing voice.
Beyond the issue of buffing out explicitly Islamic references from Rumi’s poetry, readers have also raised broader semantic concerns about Coleman Barks’ hugely popular translations, often recommended by spiritually-inclined Anglophone celebrities and shared as inspirational quotes on social media. While Barks has devoted much of his life to Rumi’s work and has played a key role in expanding its mainstream readership, “he is not a translator so much as an interpreter: he does not read or write Persian. Instead, he transforms nineteenth-century translations into American verse(opens in a new tab).”
Haleh Liza Gafori’s slim translation of a selection of Rumi’s poetry feels like a breath of fresh air. I was particularly grateful for her introduction to the book, where she elegantly demonstrates what a difference careful attention to a source text in its original language can make. While Barks’ rendition of the opening line of Ghazal 2144 (based on A. J. Arberry’s earlier translation) reads “What happens in the world, / what business of that is yours?” Gafori’s reads, “Whatever the ways of the world, / what fruits do you bring?” She explains:
“The second part of the line reads ‘Kaareh to koo? Baareh to koo?’ where the word kaar means work, action, or career, while baar means fruit, cargo, or harvest. Arberry, I suspect, has left out fruit in deference to the common expression ‘kaar o baar,‘ meaning business. Rumi, however, uses the two words separately so it is clear he is not making use of that idiom. Read as a whole, the poem… challenges readers or listeners to consider who they will be. What generosity and kindness can they muster in times of public or private crisis? The fruit is the essential thing, the gift; the business is the matter of cultivating it and offering it up.”
Corina Copp — A Translator’s Note in My Mother Laughs by Chantal Akerman
Memoir translated from French
The uniquely aching explorations of mother-daughter relationships, the passage of time, psychological alienation, and the ambiguities of spectatorship found in Chantal Akerman’s work as a director carry over just as poignantly to her writing. Much like many of her films, My Mother Laughs straddles different genres, leading us down into the most vulnerable and dark parts of her life in gritty detail here, leaving us to float at a distance in more contemplative moments there.
Corina Copp’s note at the end of My Mother Laughs explores the significance of slow time and disjuncture in Akerman’s writing and offers a look into how, as a translator, she sought to communicate this to Anglophone readers on a more subliminal level. Zeroing in on Akerman’s use of the French word décalage, Copp explains that she found herself at a crossroads in translation each time the word appeared: Would it make sense to use “jet lag,” the most common, casual translation of the word, or something that touched more on the underlying current of dislocation, distance and time in Akerman’s work?
As Copp eloquently explains, “The option— whether to use ‘time difference,’ ‘jet lag,’ maybe ‘time lag,’ for décalage— reveals, of course, the interval between one language and another, while décalage means, more theoretically, a ‘gap’ in time or space that allows for a particular voice to construct and, importantly, reconstruct itself. Décalage resists translation and embodies it.”
Judith Hemschemeyer — Preface to The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova
Poetry collection translated from Russian
When I found this massive edition of Anna Akhmatova’s poems at a used bookstore a few years ago, it felt like I had struck gold; not only was it a complete collection of her work, but it also included biographical essays, a lengthy translator’s preface, and dozens of photos of Akhmatova that I had never seen before.
Judith Hemschemeyer’s text at the beginning of the book is extensive and far-reaching; like Haleh Liza Gafori’s introduction and Corina Copp’s note, it includes examples that tease out and explain her choices as a translator on a verse-by-verse level. Similar to Idra Novey’s motivation to learn Portuguese, Hemschemeyer writes that reading translations of Akhmatova’s poems in the American Poetry Review in 1973 is what convinced her to learn Russian. But what most compelled me about Hemschemeyer’s introduction was her account of how Akhmatova the person came to life throughout the translation process:
“Because of the high achievement of Akhmatova’s poetry, I never begrudged the hours and years of labor it took to solve these puzzles, these poems, one after the other… As time elapsed, I learned about her not only through her poems, but through the writings of her contemporaries, and the more I learned, the more I admired her courage, her moral integrity, her wit and, yes, her sense of humor under the direst of circumstances.”
Elizabeth Heighway — Introduction to Contemporary Georgian Fiction
Anthology by various authors translated from Georgian
In her introduction to this large, far-reaching anthology of short stories and novellas written by Georgian authors across fifty years, Elizabeth Heighway offers some helpful context as to the history of Georgian modernist literature, delves into the complexities of emulating individual writers’ narrative styles in English, and touches on her experience as a British translator working on a book largely destined for American audiences.
Georgian’s steep linguistic and grammatical differences from English lead to plenty of puzzles in translation that demand particularly creative solutions. Georgian pronouns are gender-neutral, meaning that “there is no grammatical difference between he, she, and it.” While this is a grammatical feature found in many other languages, including Persian, Armenian, and Turkish, Heighway had an especially complicated situation at hand:
“[A lack of gender-marked pronouns] does not normally pose a particular problem to the translator, who uses context to determine whether she needs to use he, she, or it in English. One of the stories in this collection, however, used Georgian’s lack of gender marking as a central narrative device, and it was necessary to find ways to avoid all references to gender in the translated text, which required quite considerable and innovative restructuring of sentences.”
