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

What Are Poetry (and Translation) Reviews Good For?

Posted on March 30, 2010, 09:56:08 PM

An interesting article by Craig Morgan Teicher at Publishers Weekly considering if poetry reviews can do any good or not. I bring it up on this site because there's a good amount of crossover with regard to translation reviews.
For instance:

Often, poetry reviewers?and publishers?are also poets, which may be because, for the most part, practitioners are the ones interested in poetry. It may also be true that writing about poetry requires a certain esoteric expertise that few have. And while you may not see tons of poetry reviews in glossy magazines, there's an unbelievable amount of poetry criticism being written in small publications, on blogs, and elsewhere online, the subculture around poetry is thriving right now, with M.F.A. programs churning out new young poets?and new reviewers.

Slip in translation for poetry and you'll see a lot of truth in that quote. Then there's this remark by Matthew Zapruder on whether or not poetry reviews sell books:

Zapruder, who as an editor is highly invested in books from his house finding readers, doesn't count on book reviews for that purpose. The importance of reviews for book sales is overrated, he says. I don't think reviews are particularly necessary to help people decide if they want to buy the book or not, since anyone who has access to the Web can Google an author and find a pretty good sampling of someone's poems on on-line literary magazines, especially from recently published books. Prose publishers might keep Zapruder's words in mind when arguing over the importance of releasing free samples of books online to entice readers.

I'd take a similar tack for reviews of translations.
And lastly there's this, perhaps my biggest pet peeve as a reader and reviewer of translation:

Negative reviews, according to Prufer, are very important. Negative reviews help poetry. We articulate our values about any art as strongly by saying why an example might fail as we do by praising successes, he says. But he also points out that negative reviews are uncommon: I conducted an informal poll of poetry reviews and found that 92% of them were entirely positive, with not one note of criticism. Yet I know that 92% of poetry books published today are not masterpieces.

I see the same thing for translations, with critics wanting to honor the intentions of the translator and the publisher more than critique the work. It's never nice to slam a book that you know is struggling for a toehold in a marketplace hostile to translations, but I think faint praise ultimately ends up doing more damage to the art.

Peter Bush's Online Translation Workshop

Posted on March 29, 2010, 07:33:48 PM

We're counting down the days until Peter Bush's Celestina event--this Wednesday! If you'll be at the event, be sure to join the 20-some people who have already RSVPed on our Facebook page.
A while back, LiteraryTranslation.com had Peter put together a cool workshop of the translation he made of a novel by Juan Goytisolo. If you're a translator or a fan of translation, definitely worth checking out. Here's a quick look at it to give you an idea.
First, Peter's summary of the novel:

c) The Cock-Eyed Comedy
This novel, published by Seix Barral, in 2000, tells the story of the successive transmigrations of the soul of the priest, père de Trennes, a character from a novel by Roger Peyrefitte. Trennes roams through Spanish literature and history from the soul of Friar Bugeo, author of the late medieval Cock-Eyed Comedy to the heady Paris of one Saint Juan of Barbès in a sardonic satire on the Catholic Church and the philosophy of Opus Dei founder, Monsignor Escrivá Balaguer threatened by the enjoyment of the flesh lurking behind many a clerical vow to celibacy It is quite fitting that the translation was launched on October 6 in London, the day of the Monsignor's canonisation. The translation has now been launched and is availble from Serpents Tail.

And here's a taste of the workshop:

COMMENTS
a) First draft
i)Literal version?
It is often said that a first draft is a literal version. The word 'literal' implies that the translation is word-for-word and this is nonsense in the field of literary translation. There can be no such thing as a literal translation in a draft process. The first draft is the first stab at the re-writing, at an imaginative transformation:
dormían fuera - were out-of -town - not 'were sleeping away'
se había retirado con tacto - had beat a tactful retreat - , not 'had retired with tact'.

Sounding Mahmoud Darwish

Posted on March 25, 2010, 06:42:25 PM

Pretty cool video here of a deaf man lip-reading from a visual of Mahmoud Darwish delivering a speech, and then delivering the speech himself phonetically.

Sounding Mahmoud Darwish from Edward Salem on Vimeo.

And for an entirely different Darwish reading experience, hear the Center's audio of Fady Joudah reading his translations of Mahmoud Darwish.

Sex and Teeth: A Short Guide to Sexual Innuendo in La Celestina

Posted on March 23, 2010, 07:06:30 PM

(We'll be hosting Peter Bush next Wednesday, Match 31 to discuss his new translation of the Spanish classic La Celestina. Wednesday, March 31. Here he gives you a taste of what to expect. If you're going to join us for Bush + free drinks, let us know by RSVPing on Facebook!)
By God and the Archangel Michael! You are so plump and firm! Such lovely breasts! Celestina's cheerful fingering of Areúsa's body in Chapter 7, like much of the sex in the novel, often comes as a surprise to contemporary readers. She invokes the deity while discussing women's problems and showing desire for a female body. How can this be in Catholic, Inquisitional Spain? And in 1499? The popular myth of the dour, dark Middle Ages doesn't reflect the more complex reality, particularly of Spain and, in any case, the Renaissance is getting under way. The critique of the sexual traffic that passes through the church, convents and the clergy is an indication of that.

But it wasn't all celibate misogyny and sharp-toothed vaginas in the Spanish Middle Ages. There's a considerable amount of sex relished in Hispanic medieval culture--women poets of the Caliphate of Córdoba weren't averse to praising the palm trees of their lovers and songs like I've just been to the poplar trees, mother / watching how the wind stirs them suggest exciting adventures in the fields. Spanish mysticism--with Santa Teresa and St John of the Cross--is highly erotic and draws heavily on The Song of the Songs. Some religious groups engaged in rituals with a highly physical erotic slant.

The originality of Celestina is the amount of open dialogue about enjoying sex by such individualized characters--whores and servants--and how that contrasts with the more uptight courtly love rhetoric of Calisto and Melibea. The latter boils down to earth when Calisto explains his rush to get under the damsel's clothes with the brutal if you want to taste the bird, first get rid of its feathers.

Most of the banter and sexual allusions are clear enough to the contemporary reader. The relation between teeth and sex isn't, I think, much stressed today, but it is a leitmotif in Celestina. I've given the mentions of teeth an edge of innuendo in the translation, so when Celestina asks Melibea for help in curing Calisto's throbbing molar, I hope it's clear what she's suggesting with a nod and a wink to the reader. One can also imagine that the professional readers of the novel in the 1500s followed the publisher's advice to put on a show off accents and banter in order to stir their listeners.

Excellent Alison Anderson Event Write-Up at Words Without Borders

Posted on March 23, 2010, 05:02:15 PM

Over at Words Without Borders, Victoria Pacchiana has done a fine job reporting on our Alison Anderson event from earlier this month. (If you missed it, listen to the entire event right here. And don't forget to sign up for our podcast feed or find us at the iTunes store.)
One thing Victoria touches on is the importance of having a translator conversant with the culture of the source text, which, as Victoria explains, Alison definitely is:

My friend, a budding translator herself, does not, as a rule, purchase books in translation by just any old translator. She needs to know that the translator has had enough contact with the author, and has enough knowledge of the country and language of origin, to understand and truly grasp the essence of a story. Once she has found one of these translators, and concurs that the end-result is a valuable one, she becomes something of a translator loyalist?looking only to the worthy few who, to her, are the ambassadors of the non-English literature world.
It's perhaps for this reason that there was such a large crowd gathered last week at 111 Minna, a small gallery in downtown San Francisco, to hear Alison Anderson speak. Anderson is best known these days for her translation of Muriel Barbery's The Elegance of the Hedgehog which, since its publication in 2008, has remained on the New York Times bestseller list. But Anderson's translation career did not begin with this success. As she told the crowd, it started many years ago out of boredom. As a student of French and Russian, with a Master's in translation, Anderson had experience with the craft through her role as a translator for an international organization. Yet it wasn't until she stumbled across Olivier de Kersauson's The Sea Never Changes?that she entertained translating literature.
Since these beginnings, Anderson's translations have grown into a repertoire that represents the diversity of French culture and literature.

You can get an idea of Alison's knowledge of French culture and writing by looking through this blog's archives. She's read--and translated--a lot of French lit, and it shows.

It is not the kind of book that fascist or military dictatorships are fond of! Peter Bush on Celestina

Posted on March 22, 2010,

(We're bringing Peter Bush to town to discuss his new translation of the Spanish classic La Celestina, on Wednesday, March 31. To help get everyone in the mood for drinks and Spanish lit, here's an interview with Bush discussing why Celestina is the equal of Don Quixote, how Fernando de Rojas upset both the church and the nobility with this book, and some of his most important innovations.)
Scott Esposito: Celestina is a classic that's seen its share of translation into English. So two questions: as a translator, what drew you to this book, and why did you feel like a new translation was merited?
Peter Bush: It's a book I first read at school when I was seventeen. I lived in a small provincial town in England and I was very struck by the brilliant way De Rojas captures the small town spirit. Everybody knows everybody, what they've done, their family history, the class divisions . . . the fight for survival and friendships. That was true in the 1490s and is still so in 2010. I then studied it at Cambridge as part of studying medieval and Renaissance literature and got deeper into the scholarly issues about courtly love, the contemporary historical issues.
The book came out in 1499, seven years after the expulsion of the Jews, the defeat of Granada, the last Arab kingdom in Spain, and Columbus's voyage to the Americas. Ferdinand and Isabel are strengthening the Inquisition . . . Yet here is a book that is fearless in its condemnation of corruption in the church, up front about the pleasures of sex, and the servants and whores, led by Celestina, are the movers and shakers, subversive and with a strong sense of their rights and their language has an incredible energy. De Rojas revolutionizes Spanish literary language. It's the turning point: the start of modern fiction. And he never wrote another work. He is the Renaissance Rimbaud. It was the shock of this new language and new characters that caught readers', but above all, listeners' imaginations

Much later as a translator I discussed the book a lot with Juan Goytisolo who reaffirmed part of my initial schoolboy take, that it is a masterpiece, that it speaks to us today as much as Shakespeare or Cervantes. However, it's not recognized as such in Spain or elsewhere. Part of the problem is the scholarship that is often obsessed with petty issues (e.g. is it a medieval or a renaissance work?) and part the format imposed by the first publishers, that makes it look like a play that could never be performed. Many of the translations into English cut it down for the stage and play havoc with the characters and the brilliant dialogues. The book was written to be read aloud by a professional reader, not to be staged by actors. I decided that a translation that cut out the dramatic framework would give the modern silent reader an experience more akin to a listener in the 1500s, closer to the spirit of de Rojas's work, and show why it is the first European novel. The challenge, I saw, as the translator was to re-create that shock of the new for the modern reader. And I thus rejected what most translators attempt, some pseudo-Elizabethan English. I wanted to fashion an English and characters that steered clear of pastiche.

SE: Celestina features some pretty racy stuff--hymen-selling, illicit sex, female entrepreneurs in prostitution. One critic even claimed that it has all the sex, drama, and violence necessary for an HBO mini-series. What aspect of the book would you say has aged the least over the years?

PB: The main original titles of the work were the Comedy of Calisto and Melibea that then became The Tragicomedy but it was the bawd Celestina and her coterie of whores and servants that people liked. They are the protagonists and they don't just have comic servants' one-liners. Some of them come to a bad end, but they live with relish and great wit and their openness and lack of cant contrasts with the much more recondite and hypocritical attitudes of the Romantic couple, Calisto and Melibea, de Rojas's Romeo and Juliet.

There are no subaltern characters of such vigor, particularly women, in all the plays of Lope de Vega, Calderón and Tirso de Molina or in the picaresque novel or even in Don Quixote. Sancho Panza is a wonderful character but he is always the foil to Don Quixote: Celestina, Elicia and Areúsa are nobody's foil or fool. They haven't aged at all. Their spirit is resilient and subversive and they demand their right to be independent, for a room and life of their own that sounds incredibly modern. Celestina's description of her friendship with Pármeno's mother is a wonderful tribute to their support of each other and, as a feisty seventy year-old, she takes some beating in world literature.
Celestina is an adult novel and that's another reason why it's been marginalized. You can't shrink it down to size for children. And it is too raw and funny for any modern soap. More like Ken Loach.
SE: What were things like in Spain when this book was written? How atypical is it of what was likely to have been written at the time, and is there anything else from that period that's like it?

PB: As I've suggested the 1490s in Spain was a period of great turmoil and change. The seven-hundred years or so of a space in southern Europe where Christians, Jews and Muslims coexisted--cheek by jowl, ghettoized, periods of relative peace and violent confrontation--was coming to an end and would be replaced by the militant, homogenizing Inquisition and Counter-Reformation. De Rojas was a fourth-generation converso Jew and you have to see his novel as coming from that straddling of literatures and traditions that were communicated in Arabic, Hebrew, Latin, and Spanish. Medieval Spanish literature is enriched by all that--there are great ballads, lyric poems and works like The Book of Good Love by the Archpriest of Hita and even books by clerics that have a surprising amount of sex in them, often misogynistic, often celebratory of a wide variety of sexual experience. There's nothing like it in the rest of Europe. Celestina and her partner in magic go looking for materials in Jewish, Christian and Muslim cemeteries alike--nothing was sacred as far as they were concerned. However, it's not till 1528 with La lozana andaluza by Francisco Delicado written in Spanish in Venice and set in a multi-lingual brothel with female protagonists that another equally original work of literature follows Celestina's path.
SE: The book was a bestseller, selling over 100,000 copies during the Middle Ages. Why do you think the book caught on? Or, maybe to put the question in another form, what was it's biggest innovation for the time?

PB: As I've said, nobody had ever written in this kind of language before and created women and servants who were not simply stylized extras. Take this exchange from a rowdy lunch at Celestina's house when Areúsa lets off steam :

You can never keep them happy? Who could ever stand those ladies? Their greatest pleasure is to shout and their bliss is to find fault. When you do something as best you can, they grouse more than ever. That's why, mother, I've always preferred to live in my little house, free and my own mistress, and not in their luxurious palaces, like a prisoner under their thumb.

Very sensible too, Areúsa: you know what you want, go for it, for as wise men say, 'better a crumb in peace than a banquet in acrimony.'

SE: Could you give us some idea of how Celestina is considered in the Spanish-speaking world today? Is this the kind of thing that's on high school curricula, the way that Don Quixote is a common thing to read?

PB: It is considered a classic and at high school students get extracts to read. However, it doesn't get the same exposure as the Quixote. It is not the kind of book that fascist or military dictatorships are fond of! There is a tradition of scholarship that is more concerned with tracking down sources or arguing over authorship than highlighting Rojas's literary originality. The American scholar, Stephen Gilman, is a notable exception but unfortunately, his ground-breaking research situating
Celestina in its historical context is out of print. However, the present Spanish Ministry of Culture has backed my translation enthusiastically by supporting the actual translation and this tour. I think it would help in the Spanish-speaking work, if a version were published that dispensed with the framework of the humanistic drama, as I have.
SE: What kind of translation issues come up with a book this old, as well as one that's written all in dialogue? Do you use a special dictionary?
PB: The Spanish is closer to contemporary Spanish than you might expect. I used various critical editions and caught up on the more recent scholarship on issues of interpretation of particular phrases as well as themes. I used a range of dictionaries and online sources. It was a very difficult translation and I worked on it over three years and had a very considerate publisher more worried about quality than my contracted deadline.
There is a great range of language. It's not simply racy. There are a lot of proverbs, Classical references and, above all, a range of rhetoric, some couched in a romantic courtly love style. The servants aren't averse to erudition either. So, yes, the challenge was inventing the right rhythms for the rhetoric, for the dialogues.
And perhaps the great innovation of de Rojas's is the fact that the servants, Celestina, and the whores stand up to their masters and mistresses in dialogue. There is more than an equality in rhetoric. In that respect, the most difficult dialogues to translate were the exchanges between Celestina and Melibea. Melibea pirouettes endlessly around what Celestina says, cajoling her into seeing Calixto. She wants to, but she can't admit to her desire that quickly and that openly. I hope those exchanges are supple and flow. They went through a dozen or so drafts!
SE: Lastly, some have claimed this book as a precursor to Don Quixote, as well as a book that has shaped the work of recent authors like Borges, Garcia Marquez, and Fuentes. How valid do you think these claims are, and where do you see the connection between Celestina and these classic Latin American authors?

PB: It surely paved the way for Don Quixote but it is not simply a precursor. As I've said, it is of the same literary quality. Rojas has a Shakespearian, Cervantine spirit of invention but in the 1490s! The classic Latin American writers draw on the baroque exuberance of Celestina, the wit and repartee, its subversive artistic spirit. It comes out of a long tradition but is an original, adventurous turning point. It is the Fictions, the Aura, the Hundred Years of Solitude of the European Renaissance.

Celestina Book Group Online

Posted on March 18, 2010, 06:16:43 PM

So once you get your copy of Celestina at our event on Wednesday, March 31, hear translator Peter Bush talk about it, and have him sign sign it, you can look forward to discussing it on Penguin's website

Penguinclassics.com is delighted to welcome the Penguin Classics Book Club hosted by Kathy Gursky, our Penguin Classics Librarian. Kathy's popular book club discussion and blog will be coming here soon, and her first selection will be the recently released Penguin Classics edition of Celestina by Fernando de Rojas.

New International Literature Resource

Posted on March 18, 2010, 05:36:14 PM

The Australian Association for Literary Translation has just made available the first issue [PDF only] of its AALITRA Review. The journal's translations include This is not a short story (esto no es un cuento) by Carme Riera and It Wasn't the Wisteria (no eran las glicinas) by Neus Aguado, and the articles include Interpreting eloquence: When Words Matter as Much as Ideas by Marc Orlando.
The editorial board has some pretty heavy hitters: Esther Allen (Baruch College, City University of New York), Harry Aveling (Monash University, Melbourne), Peter Bush (Barcelona), John Coetzee (University of Adelaide), Michael Heim (UCLA), Francis Jones (Newcastle University, UK), Barbara McGilvray (Sydney), John Minford (Australian National University), Alyson Waters (Yale University).
Looks like a promising resource for adherents of literature in translation.

Translation After the Fall of the Iron Curtain

Posted on March 16, 2010, 05:34:35 PM

So once the USSR was no more, some Russian publishers thought they could make a killing by translating into Russian all the books that had been suppressed during communism. Publishing Perspectives relates the interesting story of how that went:

Funded by a grant from the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Ad Marginem's first book ? an anthology of philosophical and psychoanalytic texts on Sado-masochism ? sold 100,000 copies in 12 months, although hyperinflation devoured a significant chunk of the profits. Encouraged, Ivanov and his colleagues soon issued texts by thinkers ranging from the Marquis de Sade to Walter Benjamin to Roland Barthes.
Ad Marginem Press LogoSince then the Russian reading public's interest has shifted elsewhere, and in the last decade it is not Ad Marginem's philosophy list that has brought the publisher its greatest successes and controversies but rather its fiction. Both the self-proclaimed literary monster Vladimir Sorokin and the radical author-politician Edward Limonov have published important books with Ad Marginem. Operating from a basement apartment south of the Kremlin, the publisher is both literally and figuratively underground. . . .

Despite Ad Marginem's ups and downs, it looks like the Western philosophical books it's brought into Russian have fueled some interesting experiments. Have a look at the article for a list of some very interesting Russian titles, including a few I wouldn't mind seeing translated into English.

Sex, Hymen Procuresses, and Medieval Spain

Posted on March 15, 2010, 09:38:33 PM

These are all things that you will find in La Celestina, which award-winning translator Peter Bush will be reading from and discussing at our event on March 31. To get you in the right mood for this sort of thing, we'll be serving wine, and then get ready for:

The book, divided into twenty-one dialogues in prose, was not meant to be a play, but it boasts the tempo of well-timed drama. The plot is simple enough: Celestina is a procuress who restores hymens and sells the body of young maidens as virgins – over and over again. She is hired by the wealthy Calisto to mediate between him and the beautiful bourgeois Melibea.

First published in 1499, the book is considered by many second only to Don Quixote in Spanish literature. As a classic, it's been translated numerous times, and has even been made into a movie. As we get closer to the event, we'll be talking a little here at Two Words about Celestina as a retranslated work, as well as what Bush has done differently from previous translators.
(Note, this review referenced above covers a different translation than Peter Bush's, which is publishing this spring from Penguin Classics.)

TWO VOICES: Alison Anderson on JMG Le Clezio

Posted on March 11, 2010, 08:42:00 PM by Scott Esposito

A copy of this podcast can be downloaded here. You can also subscribe to all of the Center's audio on iTunes, or in RSS. Literary translation is often a job with little renown and few financial rewards, but translator Alison Anderson managed to strike it big twice in 2008: the French author JMG L... [more]

Teaching Kids How to Translate From Languages They Can't Read

Posted on March 11, 2010, 07:27:32 PM

These days, fourth and fifth-graders at Sutro Elementary in San Francisco are translating poems from Italian, Latvian, Vietnamese, Japanese. Quechua, Latin and Arabic, as well as from Spanish and from the Chinese that is most of the students' first language. Our residency at Sutro represents the fir... [more]

Audio: Alison Anderson on West Coast Live

Posted on March 9, 2010, 06:25:33 PM

We now have audio for Alison Anderson's weekend appearance on the nationally syndicated NPR show West Coast Live, courtesy of the Center. Click the above player to have a listen.And to stay on top of all our audio offerings, subscribe to our podcast feed, using iTunes or your favorite feed reader.... [more]

Marian Schwartz on One Small Piece of the Translator's Craft

Posted on March 8, 2010, 06:47:39 PM

(In honor of the Center's translation workshop with Marian Schwartz on Saturday, March 20, we asked her to write a little bit about the craft to give prospective attendees a taste of what to expect. The workshop is geared toward new translators, covering practical topics like choosing projects, righ... [more]

What should a French Canadian speaking very bad English sound like in a German translation? Translating Infinite Jest

Posted on March 4, 2010, 06:12:05 PM

That's one of the questions Ulrich Blumenbach asked himself while translating David Foster Wallace's monster-sized novel, Infinite Jest, into German. The process of making this translation, which was published late last year in Germany, is detailed today at Publishing Perspectives. Interestingly, th... [more]

Alison Anderson on West Coast Live

Posted on March 2, 2010, 07:04:28 PM

Our March 9 Lit&Lunch guest will be appearing on the nationally syndicated radio show West Coast Live this Saturday at 10:00 am. You can hear Alison discuss The Elegance of the Hedgehog, literary translation, and more on one of these stations or online at KALW.org.... [more]

A Writer Called Christian Bobin

Posted on March 1, 2010, 06:08:31 PM

Not to be lost amid Muriel Barbery and JMG Le Clezio at Lit&Lunch next week is Christian Bobin, who is huge in France but not so much over here. A good way to get an idea of this is to compare his Wikipedia pages in English and in French. To say the least, the French one is a bit more substantial. (... [more]