HMH Literature in Translation

At Granta, Jaspreet Singh writes about his mother translating his stories from English to Punjabi, about becoming a writer, about translation as healing. 

Here’s just a few lines:

Next day during lunch Mother asked again if I had already read the sample. I said it was very good.

‘How did you do it?’

She emphasized the usefulness of a dictionary. She recalled discussing a few translation challenges with my father.

‘But what you have here is more than a dictionary or discussions. You have preserved the emotional impact. How did you do it?’

She didn’t respond. Within minutes she transformed the kitchen table and started work. My mother translated the remaining stories in the collection during her visit. She would ask me a few pointed questions, and spend her days walking or translating. She used no laptop or desktop, not even a typewriter. In six weeks she had the first handwritten draft ready.

The Big Think talks to translator Christian Wiman on the publication of Stolen Air by Osip Mandelstam, who died at 47 in a Siberian work camp during the Stalin regime. 

BT: In your afterword you call these poems “versions” rather than “translations.” Could you explain the distinction and describe your process in working with Mandelstam’s poetry, including your collaboration with poet Ilya Kaminsky?

CW: I think of translations as passing some scholarly smell test: you can read the words of the translation and be reasonably sure of what the words are in the original. Not of the tone, mind you, and rarely of the form, but you can get the words. The translator is effaced, for better or worse, for the sake of the original. I don’t think that someone who does not speak the original language can ever expect to produce a real translation in this sense.

A version aims at other things, depending on the translator. Usually, though, it’s the tone that he’s after, which of course is paradoxical if he doesn’t speak the language. The tone has to be gleaned from other sources: the poet’s prose, comparing multiple translations, working with native speakers, gut instinct.

I don’t speak or read Russian. I did these versions from word-by-word translations provided by Ilya or Helena Lorman (a scholar at Northwestern) as well as transliterations of the originals (the Cyrillic changed to the Roman alphabet) so that I could tell where the rhymes were happening and get a sense of the sounds. I also worked with a lot of scholarly sources to help me think about the context of individual poems.

I wanted to call my poems versions, but as I say in the afterword, the marketing department wasn’t keen on that, for sound reasons. They won.

Read the rest here. 

Yale University Press has launched a web site for its translation line, the Margellos World Republic of Letters. Lots to read and discover and the Resources page alone makes it worth a visit. From the press release: 

At www.worldrepublicofletters.org, readers will find:

• expanded excerpts of previously published titles, available for free download;
• original content, including Yves Bonnefoy’s interview with translator Hoyt Rogers and statements by Cecile Margellos and John Donatich, director of Yale University Press;
• an essay by acclaimed translator Edith Grossman, excerpted from her bookWhy Translation Matters(Yale University Press, 2010); and
• other features being developed to foster dialogue among readers, including The Margellos WRL blog, a newsfeed, an events calendar, and more. Twitter users can comment or expand on the discussion via the hashtag#wrlbooks.

Via Publishing Perspectives.

Though it remains a commonplace to deplore the state of contemporary literature, too infrequently is proper debt paid to the insurgence of first-rate translations and the tireless, sometimes unrecognized labors of translators and editors alike. Far too frequently, poets, novelists, and critics forget that translation, if not exactly a genre, when it’s worth a damn, is as riveting and revivifying of language as any other formal tradition of writing.

And so Brooklyn Rail sits down to talk with Richard Sieburth.

PEN interviews translator Susan Bernofsky and asks basically everything you’d want to know about the process of translating, starting with:

RIBBLE: Are you aware beforehand of the challenges in a particular translation? Or is it a sort of leap of faith?

BERNOFSKY: I always think I know what it’s going to be, and I’m always wrong. First of all, it’s always harder than I thought it was going to be, and it’s always harder in some way I never thought about. Translating Jenny Erpenbeck, who writes these nice smooth sentences, you think, “Okay, that’s not going to be such a big deal.” Then you sit down and try and translate them, and you realize that this sense of smoothness, like peacefully flowing stream, is nothing but rocks and lumps and really gnarly stuff. She manages to arrange the sentences in such a way that she creates the illusion of smoothness, but in fact the sentences are so complicated.