Posted on January 22, 2010 by Scott Esposito

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.

Posted on September 1, 2009 by Scott Esposito

Lawrence Venuti’s introduction to the special Catalan lit section in World Literature Today should be required reading for anyone concerned they’re missing out on good literature that’s not being translated.

Unfortunately, WLT has put it online in a format that makes it impossible to quote from, so I can’t insert a tantalizing quote here. But follow the link and read it, and you won’t be disappointed.

Posted on August 4, 2009 by Scott Esposito

In last year’s anthology from the Center, translator Lawrence Venuti contributed two poems from his work with poet Ernest Farres, who writes in Catalan.

The translations were from a series of poems Farres wrote based on work of the American painter Edward Hopper, and Venuti’s translations in Strange Harbors appeared with reproductions of the paintings on which they were based. This is how Venuti described Farres’ project in his translator’s introduction:

How does the poet treat the painter? With the deference commanded by prestige and power or an irreverence provoked by marginality and exclusion? What unique problems are posed by translating ekphrasis, the verbal representation of visual art? Most importantly, what intentions might guide a translation into English, the globally hegemonic language?

These questions have become my preoccupations as I translate Ernest Farres’ 2006 collection, Edward Hopper. Not only does Farres boldly address an American icon, but in the opening poem he claims Hopper as his alter ego. “If Goethe was reincarnated in Kafka,” he writes (in my version), “Hopper in a transmigration most apt / pulled it off in me.”

Venuti’s complete translation of Farres’ collection, Edward Hopper, is available this fall from Graywolf Press. You can read more on Venuti’s translation process online in Calque #4. For more of Venuti on Catalan writers, his introduction to a Catalan-themed feature in World Literature Today will appear early next month.