In this review of the new translation of The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass, Hans Kundnani gets in-depth with some of the issues of translation Breon Mitchell encountered:

Equally significantly, Mitchell aims to convey the way the language of the original text mimics Oskar’s drum. In one case, Manheim simply left out an apparently incoherent series of words at the beginning of a chapter in which Oskar describes his ability to “zurücktrommeln”, or “drum up the past”. Mitchell restores these words, translated as “Built up, chopped down, wiped out, hauled back, dismembered, remembered”, which suggest the manipulation of memory and convey the percussive effect of the original text.

At our Breon Mitchell Lit&Lunch event, the translator himself discussed just this issue. You can hear the percussive effect itself in action by checking out our audio from the event, where Mitchell reads from the book.

Don’t miss your chance to hear even more translation goodies when Susan Bernofsky comes to town next week. RSVP now on our Facebook page.

(The Translator’s Toolkit is a recurring feature on Two Words wherein we ask translators to tell us about indispensable tools of their art. Here, Willard Wood talks about the unique virtues of the OED online. Wood’s translation of “The Greatest Rabbi on Earth” by Denis Baldwin-Beneich appeared in the Center’s latest anthology, Wherever I Lie Is Your Bed. His translation of The Last Rendezvous by Anne Plantagenet will be published by Other Press in March of this year .)

Making the Oxford English Dictionary

Translators working with English, in either direction possibly, have a good excuse to use the Oxford English Dictionary. It is not wrong to call it an exhaustive historical dictionary of the English language, but it would be fairer to say that it is one of the seven or eight wonders of the modern world, a collective effort that dwarfs the Pyramid of Cheops for labor, and to notice that it has no counterpart in any other living language. It may be slightly out of proportion to the humdrum task the translator normally faces, but if it is within your reach (the main obstacle is a hefty annual subscription fee), why not use it? After all, nothing is ever simple when it comes to words.

The first payoff is just in the completeness of the dictionary. It is not unusual, working in a language with close historical ties to English, to find that a difficult word in the source language actually figures somewhere in the OED. This was the case when a French author who prides himself on his recondite vocabulary came up with immarcescence, which is not in my online monolingual dictionary. A quick check of the OED showed that, with a change of pronunciation, it is in fact a perfectly legitimate if obsolete English word meaning “incorruptibility.” The root comes from the Latin word meaning “to fade” or “to wither.” In the form “marcescence,” it is still commonly used today by field biologists to describe when a plant’s parts wither but don’t fall off, like the leaves of an oak tree in winter.

The OED is also suited to translating texts that must read as though they were written in earlier centuries. Its definitions are arranged from the earliest meaning of a word to the most recent, not as in other dictionaries from the most to least common. And the citations gathered in support of a particular meaning are also ordered chronologically. We may hesitate in translating 19th-century speech, for instance, to describe something as “ironic,” thinking that irony is a particularly 20th-century sentiment. The OED can help us here. Irony, or expressing the opposite of one’s intended meaning, is a classical figure of speech and was therefore familiar to educated Englishmen from the 16th century onward. In its figurative use to mean an outcome opposite to what one might expect (an irony of fate), the term is documented starting in the mid-17th century. Yet the adjective, though common especially in the form “ironical,”seems to have been largely applied to a person’s speech or affect. We would be right then to avoid “ironic” in the mouth of a 19th-century character, at least where the larger sense is meant. It is a shorthand that only became comprehensible in this century for something like: “It is an irony of circumstance that . . .” A small touch maybe, but telling.

Of course, to get to a word via the OED is to take the long way around. The short-cut is to use a bilingual dictionary. To seek a word’s meaning in a monolingual dictionary first is a more conscientious procedure. You then turn to the OED to explore the neighborhood. Say you are looking for the right word for a cannabis or marijuana cigarette. A search for those words in the definitions of the OED turns up the headwords: bifter, bomb, charge, doobie, joint, juju, reefer, stick, spliff . . . and many more, each with a wealth of supporting citations and their dates of use. Now you have something to work with.

The search features of the OED online also allow you to look up word phrases or collocations–even if they don’t figure as independent entries. I often check on whether I am using the right preposition with a verb, for instance, as long contact with the source language tends to warp my sense of allowable English usage, and the OED’s full-text search is an easy road to reassurance or correction.

But the times when the OED really seems worth the cost is when you need to translate a key word in a passage, one that resonates on several registers, and you need to dig down and find something that fits the right nexus of suggestion.

In the opening passage of Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian, the emperor describes a visit to the doctor. A translator is likely to notice that Hadrian uses the verb dépouiller to talk about taking off his clothes for the examination. It means “to strip away,” but it is a strong word, also used about bare trees, about skinning an animal. For the aging emperor, deprived by infirmity of the pleasures of riding, swimming, and the hunt, aware of his death looming like a land-mass on the horizon, and who speaks of love as laying a man bare, it is clear that dépouillement (the word is repeated several times in different contexts in the opening chapter) is a key concept.

Here the OED comes into its own. We find “strip away” and “peel off,” also “shuck,” “lay aside,” “abandon,” “denude,” and “divest.” Among these, or lying nearby, in the quotations from Donne, Cowper, T. H. Huxley, and Shakespeare’s King Lear, is likely to be the right word, similarly strong, similarly marked. Or at least a prompt that will bring the right word to mind. This is what makes the OED online an invaluable part of the translator’s toolkit.

We’re just 8 days from our Lit&Lunch event with Susan Bernofsky on Robert Walser, so I thought I’d present a roundup on some writing by and on Walser freely available online. The variety of venues you can find Walser in these days–as well as the quality of writing you’ll see–is a real testament to how far he’s come as a popular author in the U.S. So here are the resources:

Benjamin Kunkel in The New Yorker on Robert Walser:

As adolescents, he and Karl had apparently perfected the art of perching in a high window and throwing their hats onto the heads of passersby, and their mischief persisted in adulthood. One evening at a party, they challenged the famous playwright Frank Wedekind to a bout of Hosenlupf (literally, “trouser-hoist”), a Swiss wrestling variant that makes inventive use of an opponent’s waistband. When Wedekind, discomfited, fled to a café, his tormentors pursued him, hailing him with friendly, if cryptic, cries of “Muttonhead!” and causing him to get caught up in a revolving door. On another occasion, in a literary salon, Walser interrupted the high-flown talk by seizing a young Englishwoman’s leg and praising her small feet.

Three Stories by Walser, translated by Damion Searls, in Vice magazine (Note that for Walser “story” is a bit looser than for more authors. His short fictions really defy most ideas of what a story is, and they should be experienced.)

THE ITALIAN NOVELLA

I have strong cause to doubt if readers will like a story like this about two people, two little people, namely a charming nice young woman and an honest good and in his own way at least just as nice young man who enjoyed the most lovely and heartfelt relations of friendship with each other. The tender and passionate love they felt, each for the other, was like the summer sun in terms of heat and like December snow in terms of purity and chastity. Their kind mutual intimacy seemed unshakeable, and their fiery, innocent inclination toward each other grew from day to day like a wonderful plant rich in color and as rich in perfume. Nothing seemed able to disturb this very sweetest of conditions and very most beautiful trust, and everything would have been nice and perfect if only the honest good dear and young man were not deeply familiar with the Italian novella. . . .

Waggish on Walser’s novel The Assistant:

But what’s most striking is how the tone and scenario anticipate that of early Kafka, particularly that of “The Stoker” and the novel it became part of, The Man Who Disappeared (aka Amerika). Walser is often compared spuriously to Kafka, but in The Assistant, and not in any of his other work that I’ve read, I think there’s some merit to the comparison. . . .

JM Coetzee on Walser in The New York Review of Books:

In Kafka one also catches echoes of Walser’s prose, with its lucid syntactic layout, its casual juxtapositions of the elevated with the banal, and its eerily convincing logic of paradox. Here is Jakob in reflective mood:

We wear uniforms. Now, the wearing of uniforms simultaneously humiliates and exalts us. We look like unfree people, and that is possibly a disgrace, but we also look nice in our uniforms, and that sets us apart from the deep disgrace of those people who walk around in their very own clothes but in torn and dirty ones. To me, for instance, wearing a uniform is very pleasant because I never did know, before, what clothes to put on. But in this, too, I am a mystery to myself for the time being.

What is the mystery of Jakob? Walter Benjamin wrote a piece on Walser that is all the more striking for being based on a very incomplete acquaintance with his writings. Walser’s people, suggested Benjamin, are like fairy-tale characters once the tale has come to an end, characters who now have to live in the real world. There is something “laceratingly, inhumanly, and unfailingly superficial” about them, as if, having been rescued from madness (or from a spell), they must tread carefully for fear of falling back into it.

A Robert Walser Scrapbook at A Journey Round My Skull–a great list, with images, of Walser resources, many of which are hard to find

An excerpt from Susan Bernofsky’s translation of The Tanners, which she’ll be reading from at Lit&Lunch

UCLA has made available audio from a lecture given by Fady Joudah late last year at UCLA’s Asia Institute. You can listen to it here. The lecture deals with Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, whose work Joudah has translated a great deal of, and the lecture specifically deals with his use of the long poem.

For more on Joudah and Darwish, check out our audio of his Lit&Lunch event, where he read from his translations of Darwish. Also have a look at Wherever I Lie Is Your Bed, where Joudah offers a never-before-translated long poem of Darwish’s called “Rita’s Winter.” Wherever also includes a nice introduction by Joudah, where he puts the poem into context:

Rita is a pseudonym for Darwish’s Jewish Israeli lover when he was in his twenties and he had written five or six poems to her throughout the 1960s and 70s before writing this one, his final one for her, in 1992. Rita was made an icon of contemporary Arabic culture through the Lebanese composer and musician, Marcel Khalife, who sang Darwish’s poem “Rita and the Rifle” (where love is broken because of the Israeli military service). I can say that Rita signifies an essence of Darwish’s poetry, its humanizing of the other, a daring from which Darwish never shied. I can say “Rita’s Winter” is a brilliant poem because it exhibits, among many other things, Darwish’s use of dialogue, an art he developed until he turned his later poems into plays, without calling them plays.

This is a very cool audio performance of part of “It,” poem by the Danish poet Inger Christensen. The six performers here are reading 11 six-line stanzas.

In addition to writing poetry, Christensen also wrote a metafictional novel called Azorno, which we excerpted in Wherever I Lie Is Your Bed. And see below for more info on Christensen and Azorno.

We’ve been talking a lot about Swiss novelist Robert Walser this month as we count down toward Walser-translator Susan Bernofsky’s appearance at Lit&Lunch on Feb. 9. (RSVP now to save a spot!) You might have noticed in my interview with Bernofsky last week that she mentioned one Carl Seelig, a “guardian” of Walser when he was in the mental asylum:

SE: Since you’re working on a biography of Walser, I’d like to ask what you think of his decision to quit writing, which he made in 1933 when he had a full 23 years yet to live. Do you have any theories as to why he chose this, or if he would have been able to produce anything worth reading during that period of his life?

SB: It’s far from certain that Walser ever stopped writing. His guardian Carl Seelig says that when he asked Walser about returning to the literary life, Walser brushed off the idea . . .

Seeling, in fact, regularly conversed with Walser for over 20 years, and you can read a number of these conversations right now. He collected the them into a book called Wanderungen mit Robert Walser (”Wandering with Robert Walser”), published in German, French, and Spanish editions. Though there is currently no published English translation, Walser-fanatic Sam Jones, and some collaborators, have been translating a publishing a free version online.

For instance, here’s a bit from the meeting that occurred on April 15, 1943, which happened to be Walser’s 65th birthday:

I bring Robert some birthday presents, which he coldly puts aside. We have hardly left the sanitarium grounds when he asks me what I was doing so long with Dr. Pfister. I tell him that we were talking about common friends among the Zurich doctors. This explanation appears to calm him, but even so the morning walk to Degersheim and Mogelsberg, in the low Toggenburg, is rather monosyllabic. He doesn’t answer my cautious question about the operation, so I immediately change the subject so as not to irritate him any further. After lunch we go up in elevation in the Herisau suburbs and sit in the sun with three bottles of beer on a terrace, where he is more comfortable and chat with the almost mechanically clattering innkeeper. To finish up we go to a tea house, where he devours eight little tortes with gusto. When we part, he says, most likely in reference to his sickness:

“There have to be unpleasant things in life, so that the beautiful things stand out better. Worries are the best teachers.”

These conversations between Seeling and the notably romantic, unpredictable Walser make interesting reads for anyone, and they’re absolute necessities for the Walser fans out there.

Congrats to translator Edith Grossman, who will be honored on Feb 2 with the $10,000 Queen Sofia Spanish Institute Translation Prize for her work on Antonio Munoz Molina’s novel A Manuscript of Ashes. Those in New York can attend a conversation between Munoz Molina and Grossman at the Queen Sofia Spanish Institute.

An excerpt from Manuscript appeared in the Center’s 2008 anthology Strange Harbors, which is available for purchase here. Grossman was also a guest of the Center at Lit&Lunch, where she read from her translation of Manuscript and discussed Munoz Molina and issues of translation. Audio from that event can be heard at this link.

Following up on the recent MLA focusing on translation, The Chronicle of Higher Education has a look at the prospects of making it as a translator these days in higher ed:

Translation is having a moment, or a series of moments. But its champions say the fight is far from over to have translation—not the theory of it but the hands-on, roll-up-your-sleeves, get-out-your-lexicons variety—recognized as a legitimate scholarly activity. In the United States, it’s nearly impossible to make a living as an independent literary translator. It’s almost as hard to get an academic job as one.

The article quotes several translators who have worked on the Center’s publications–among them, Lawrence Venuti and Esther Allen. The later has an interesting remark on what translating does to a candidate’s tenure chances:

Just as publishers have had an unfortunate tendency not to bother putting translators’ names on book jackets—the idea being that translations are harder to sell—so hiring and tenure-and-promotion committees have preferred not to hear about the translation activities of the candidates whose dossiers they review. It’s almost as though translation is a bad habit, like gambling, that candidates should conceal rather than advertise.

“It actively works against you, which is amazing if you consider that for 3,000 years translation has been at the heart of literary scholarship,” says Esther Allen, an assistant professor in the department of modern languages and comparative literature at Baruch College of the City University of New York.

You can hear more of Allen’s thoughts on translation by listening to the audio of our Lit&Lunch event featuring her and Cuban novelist Jose Manuel Prieto.

(As we gear up for Susan Bernofsky’s Lit&Lunch appearance on February 9 we’ll be sharing various information about her and Robert Walser, whom she’ll be talking about. Today we have an interview with Bernofsky covering some of the more intriguing aspects of his career–among other things, the tiny, nearly unreadable Walser-writings known as the microscripts and his decision to quit writing when he had 23 years left to live.)

Scott Esposito: You’ve translated a number of books by Walser, with more to come plus a biography of him of that you’re working on. As a translator, what is it that has kept you coming back to him?

Susan Bernofsky: Every time I read Walser I find myself nearly jumping out of my chair with delight and disbelief that he has pulled off yet another unprecedented weird strange beautiful literary stunt. He has a way of describing the universe that walks a fine line between the maudlin and the trivially playful–and somehow he always manages to stay right in the middle, in that sweet spot where he achieves a sort of guileless profundity that takes the reader by surprise again and again. His literary fireworks are so controlled, so sly, so knowing, and all the while he’s got such an innocent look on his face. I just love watching him play on his tightrope, and of course it’s a very tempting challenge to see which of his feats can be mimicked in English.

SE: Although Walser was admired by the likes of Kafka, Musil, and Walter Benjamin, it’s only recently that he’s become popular in the U.S. Do you know if it has always been the case in the U.S. that he was overlooked? And did he ever fall into the category of neglected genius in Europe?

SB: Walser died in obscurity in Switzerland in 1956, his work known to only a very few. It was not until the 1960s and 1970s that his novels and stories began to be rediscovered in Switzerland, Germany, and Austria. He was translated into lots of languages soon thereafter (and everyone in Europe knows he’s a major modernist author), but English lagged behind, even though English was the first language into which he was translated in the first place! Christopher Middleton discovered his work as a young professor living in Zurich and translated the novella “The Walk” while Walser was still alive.

SE: Since you’re working on a biography of Walser, I’d like to ask what you think of his decision to quit writing, which he made in 1933 when he had a full 23 years yet to live. Do you have any theories as to why he chose this, or if he would have been able to produce anything worth reading during that period of his life?

SB: It’s far from certain that Walser ever stopped writing. His guardian Carl Seelig says that when he asked Walser about returning to the literary life, Walser brushed off the idea. The quote “I’m not here to write but to be mad” that gets bandied about a lot may be apocryphal. In my opinion, Walser did not trust Seelig and may or may not have been honest with him. There’s one witness, a former attendant from the Herisau asylum, who says that he saw Walser writing all the time during his years there, standing up at a windowsill and writing on tiny slips of paper (like the microscripts we have). But some Walser scholars have challenged this claim, saying the man made it up to get attention.

SE: The book you’ll most be talking about at Lit&Lunch is The Tanners (excerpt at the link), which was Walser’s first novel and was published in your translation by New Directions last summer. What were the challenges and the pleasures of translating this book?

SB: Unlike The Assistant, The Tanners is not thickly plotted–the story tends to meander about, taking lots of surprise detours–so the book gets most of its narrative energy and tension from the storytelling itself. I was very conscious of keeping a sense of forward momentum in the individual sentences and paragraphs.

SE: As I read The Tanners I was struck by the lightness of the prose, how it seemed to maintain a fundamentally joyful feel despite communicating a great deal of weight and existential angst. In the translation, did you try to stay close to the shape and the cadences of the German sentences (as Breon Mitchell told the Center he did in his recent translation of The Tin Drum), or did you go with something a little more Englished?

SB: Thank you, I’m so glad you felt the prose as buoyant! I agree absolutely with Breon–it is crucial to preserve the cadence of the original sentences, which often means nudging the English syntax around a bit. It’s crucial that the information contained in a sentence arrive in the proper order, because to recast sentences entirely, or to break long sentences into parts, makes the universe feel very different to the English-language reader. Each sentence is its own little journey, and I try to keep the itinerary intact. And even though it’s something the reader probably won’t be explicitly conscious of while reading, the paths followed by the individual sentences play a major role in determining what the world of the story feels like.

SE: I’d also like to ask you about a work of Walser’s called The Microscripts that is forthcoming from New Directions in your translation. As I understand it, these were writings that Walser made in such a tiny script that for a long time people simply couldn’t decipher them and thought they were some personal language that Walser had invented. (And I should add that Walser’s novella “The Robber,” which you’ve previously translated, is also a microscript.) When translating these, did you ever work directly from the microscripts, or did you rely more on a fair copy that was easier to read?

SB: We decided to reproduce full-size facsimiles of the microscripts in this collection, and when you see them, you’ll understand why there are no more than half a dozen people in the world who can read them at all (and after many months of study). It took two devoted scholars twelve years to transcribe the six volumes of these texts. That’s two years per volume! In the late ’80s I watched them at work, peering through tiny magnifying lenses and discussing each word at length. These published transcriptions are what I based the translations on. I think of Walser’s miniature writing as a sort of shorthand he developed for his rough drafts, and he wrote like this for many years. There’s been a lot of speculation about why and when he developed this technique. The writing is an enormously reduced Kurrent script–that’s an old form of German handwriting people stopped using around WWII. By the way, I’ll be giving a talk and slide show on the microscripts at Stanford on Feb. 10, at 12:00 p.m. (Dept. of German Studies, Building 260, Room 216).

SE: And lastly, what do you think the future holds for Walser? Do you think this flurry of notoriety means that Walser is with us English-language readers to stay?

SB: We saw a flurry of Walser enthusiasm in the early 1980s thanks to Christopher Middleton’s beautiful collection Selected Stories with an introduction by Susan Sontag, and that set the stage for the renewed interest we’re seeing now. I do think that Walser is now here to stay because the interest in his work is now so widespread and coming from such different quarters. There are entire blogs devoted to his work and I’m constantly getting e-mails from people who love his books, including lots of visual artists. All of a sudden he’s attracting a young audience, too, and I think that means he’s got a fan base that will continue to look out for new books of his in English. Maybe we’ll get to test Hermann Hesse’s famous prediction after all: “If Robert Walser had 100,000 readers, the world would be better.”

Last week I pointed out an article by the Dalkey Archive Press’s Martin Riker on some of the happenings at the latest meeting of the MLA, which has an unprecedented focus on translation this year.

Now you can listen online to the Presidential Address by Catherine Porter from this year’s MLA. Definitely worth checking out.