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


Bernardo Atxaga's California Novel

Posted on May 27, 2010 by

By now readers of this blog should be pretty clear on two things: we're doing two events with Bernardo Atxaga early next month, and Atxaga is widely acclaimed as Basque's leading author.
Turns out the latter fact didn't stop him from starting and ending his latest novel, The Accordionist's Son, in California. Here's Michael Eaude reviewing it in The Independent:

The Accordionist's Son, first published in the Basque language in 2003, is his most accomplished novel (the wonderful Obabakoak is more a collection of linked stories). It is also his most ambitious, as it embraces the history of the Basque Country from 1936 to 1999.
The novel works on at least three levels: as an adventure; as a public story about the history and politics of the Basque Country; and a personal dissection of shifting mood and feeling, with Atxaga's customary precision. It opens with the death of the protagonist, David, on his ranch in California.

Eaude goes on to describe The Accordionist's Son as an ambitious, sweeping history of the emergence of ETA, the Basque armed guerrilla movement still active nearly 50 years after its foundation.
The Guardian also fleshes out this California theme:
On his horse ranch in California, David Imaz whiles away the time until his vital heart operation by looking back at his upbringing in the Basque country of the 1960s and 1970s. The bombing of Guernica and the Spanish Civil War reverberate through his memories as he tries to uncover whether the despotic father he detests has blood on his hands.

This is some bracing stuff, and I'll be interested to hear Atxaga talk more about it during our events on June 8 and 9. He'll also be talking about his fictional village of Obaba, as well as--poetry.



Translation Has Never Been Higher-Profile

Posted on May 25, 2010 by

That's the verdict from the London Book Fair per this article in The National--which does a great job of covering international lit.

The hushed chatter around the unusually quiet London Book Fair is that foreign fiction translated into English has never been so high-profile. Undeniably, this is thanks to the late Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy (which began with The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo), currently standing at over 21 million copies sold worldwide. Roberto Bolano's 2666 has also been a huge success. And prizes such as The IFFP and events like April's Free The Word festival in London have thrust more and more books and authors from the non-English speaking world into the spotlight. As Hahn runs his finger down the shortlist, he mentions novels from Bengal, Germany, Congo, Italy and France.

In this article we also learn what translators do when they don't like what they're reading:
There's just one final intriguing question though: what does he do when there's a passage of a book he's translating which he really doesn't like?
Oh, it happens all the time, he laughs. E-mail has made it very easy to say to a writer, for example: ‘This joke at the end of chapter two is very funny, but it's not funny in English.' And in that case I would always suggest changing it in a specific way rather than leaving it out. Because the original author has two choices: either I persevere with the original, in which case no one will laugh, or we change the joke and keep the laugh.
The job, essentially, is to recreate the experience of reading the book, not the specific sentences of the original. One of the advantages of working with most of the authors is that you get the permission to do just that – they trust you. And it's genuinely a lovely job: you're getting your head completely inside a book, and if that's a place it's exciting to be, that's a fantastic feeling. You're getting to write a great book even if you're not a great writer yourself.




Recent Blog Posts


Susan Bernofsky on The Microscripts

Posted on May 24, 2010 by

The Nation interviews translator Susan Bernofsky on her just-published translation of Robert Walser's Microscripts. Here's a nice quote about the complexity of Walser's sentences:I always need to read Walser twice. Do your translations try to replicate that feeling of bewilderment?German readers als... [more]

Bernardo Atxaga on Linguistic Diversity

Posted on May 24, 2010 by

We'll be hosting Bernardo Atxaga for two events in just two weeks. On June 8, we bring the 2009-10 Lit&Lunch season to a close with Atxaga @ 111 Minna in San Francisco. (RSVP on Facebook) And then, for everyone in the East Bay, on June 9 we're co-sponsoring an Atxaga reading at Mrs. Dalloway's in Be... [more]

Renditions

Posted on May 20, 2010 by

(Today's post comes from David R. Slavitt, whose translation of Dante's La Vita Nuova will be forthcoming from Harvard University Press in August. Per Harvard's website, the book is a sequence of thirty-one poems, the author recounts his love of Beatrice from his first sight of her (when he was nine... [more]

Michael Hofmann on Why Translation Matters

Posted on May 18, 2010 by

At The Telegraph, Michael Hoffmann has penned a lengthy response to Edith Grossman's recent book, Why Translation Matters. Lots of good food for thought there, including:Translators ask for terribly little – just to be read, just to be included, just to be understood – and don't get it. I don't thin... [more]

Audio: Lit&Lunch with Marlon Hom on Angel Island Detention Poems and Chinatown Songs

Posted on May 18, 2010 by

Over the course of 30 years--from 1910 to 1940--the Angel Island Immigration Station processed over 200,000 immigrants, most of them Chinese. Confined to a small cell and awaiting their fate, Chinese immigrants found various ways to assuage their anxiety: one of them was poetry, which they carved in... [more]

Help Bring Poetry Inside Out to 250 Students

Posted on May 17, 2010 by

This week, we're starting a campaign to raise $15,000 to bring Poetry Inside out to 250 new students this fall. We'd like to ask all the translators, publishers, writers, and readers out there to help us. If you love world lit, this is your chance to help bring that literature to young readers.This ... [more]

PIO Students Translate Chinese into Concrete Poetry

Posted on May 13, 2010 by

(Here PIO instructor Andrea Lingenfelter recounts her experiences teaching Bay Area children to translate from Chinese and do concrete poetry—at the same time!)Poetry Inside Out has been offering Spanish-English poetry translation workshops to students in the Bay Area and beyond. The Center fo... [more]

Some Literary Links

Posted on May 11, 2010 by

A new award encourages translation between Turkey and Germany:The governments of Germany and Turkey are preparing to set to bestow the first awards for the translation of German literary works to Turkish and vice versa.A common declaration on the issue was signed Tuesday by Turkish Culture and Touri... [more]

Review of The Subversive Scribe by Suzanne Jill Levine

Posted on May 10, 2010 by

For a while now, one of my favorite working translators has been Suzanne Jill Levine. That's partly because she's a great translator and thinker, and partly because she has translated some of the greats of Latin American literature, and thus some of my favorite authors (the list is huge, but some ar... [more]

New Series of Mitteleuropa Classics From Penguin

Posted on May 6, 2010 by

Over at Three Percent, Chad Post spreads the news that Penguin is launching a new translation series. Here's the info from the man behind it, Simon Winder:This series originates in a visit I made to Krakow last summer where I was talking to a Polish publisher who had known Czes?aw Mi?osz and who ber... [more]

Maxine Hong Kingston on Angel Island Poems, + More

Posted on May 4, 2010 by

We're all looking forward to hearing Marlon Hom's Lit&Lunch on the Angel Island immigrant poetry in just one week. As always, if you can make it, RSVP with us on Facebook.The more I've been learning about Angel Island in anticipation of this Lit&Lunch, the more intrigued I've become by these works. ... [more]

Translation Recommendations From the Center's Facebook Friends

Posted on May 3, 2010 by

Last week on the Center's Facebook fan page we did a giveaway of Olga Slavnikova's 2017, the new Russian novel translated by Marian Schwartz.We'll be doing more giveaways in the future--so if you're interested in free copies of the newest novels in translation, friend us!For this particular giveaway... [more]