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 by

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 by

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'.




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