Posted on February 25, 2010 by Scott Esposito

(Before we get into Marian Schwartz’s offering in our Tookit series, a note: The Center will be co-sponsoring a translation workshop with Marian Schwartz on Saturday, March 20. Geared toward new translators, it will cover practical topics such as choosing projects, rights and permissions, and the publishing business. Attendees will also have a chance to undertake a hands-on translation of a passage of fiction. Spacing is limited and registration is required, so if you’re interested make sure you register here.)

Like any proud literary tradition, Russia’s is constantly referring to itself. Probably not more so than any other, but sometimes that’s how it seems when you’re the translator trying to track down a quotation. In the bad old days, before those crazy electrons started flying through the air and into our work spaces, we relied on native informants steeped in their own literature to identify an allusion. Not a bad solution. Tried and true really. But it does require human interaction and is never instantaneous (unless you happen to be that native informant’s significant other, an option that eluded me forty years ago).

A few years ago I attended ATA’s national conference—not a regular stop on my annual rounds—specifically to hear and meet Michele Berdy, an American expat who has lived in Moscow for decades and who writes a fine column for The Moscow Times explicating Russian vocabulary, idioms, and usage for English speakers. She was giving a workshop and delivering the Slavic Division’s keynote speech. Both performances were stellar, yielding multiple insights and new information but also a fabulous tidbit (assuming tidbits can be fabulous). Berdy told of a CD that collected vast quantities of Russian literature from the eleventh to the early twentieth century. Virtually everything by virtually every writer you ever have and haven’t heard of. And it was searchable.

Fast forward a year to Moscow. Locating and purchasing this CD was high on my to-do list while I was there. Friends sent me to Gorbushka, Moscow’s gigantic marketplace for household goods, music, and electronics. In the Metro, I eavesdropped on the various conversations around me until I found a youthful threesome clearly headed for the land of CDs. We all got off at the Bagriotonskaya station and I followed them, as the cops say on TV.

The Gorbushka I entered is a far cry from the black market that sprung up near there in the 1980s, before CDs were widely available in Russia, on a square by the Gorbunov House of Culture. The illegal trade had been brisk. Eventually the government threatened to shut it down altogether, but instead, in the face of furious popular opposition, including spontaneous protest rallies, they repurposed the nearby Rubin factory as the new “civilized and nonpiratical” Gorbushka. I think they were exaggerating about at least one of those adjectives.

The Gorbushka I saw was quite clean and unscary, but there were obviously unlicensed CDs everywhere. Heck, some of these guys weren’t even trying for a reasonable facsimile, and they had nothing against charging the MSRP for what looked to me like pretty sketchy goods.

Eventually I came to an out-of-the-way corner at the back of the second floor (doesn’t this sound Russian already?) where I found a high-quality vendor with an encouraging assortment of CDs—and they all looked legal, i.e., quality-controlled. After all, what good would a cheap but botched CD do me once I got back to Austin?

Indeed, there it was: Русская литература от Нестора до Маяковского (Russian Literature from Nestor to Mayakovsky).*

The CD holds the equivalent of 100,000 book pages, more than 3 million words, or about 200 500-page books. 120 Russian writers and poets! The compilation uses the authoritative original texts and provides both publication data and bibliographical information on the author. Hyperlinks take me to author’s notes. There’s even a brief bio and portrait for each author. This is not just a tool for identifying identify literary quotations. I can also search for names, concepts, and themes in various combinations. I can even . . . read.

My own discovery was that with this tool I could trace the usage of specific words and expressions over Russian literature’s entire public-domain history. I could discover how a word’s meaning and use had or hadn’t changed. When I find a word’s lineage I learn something about a writer’s artistic influences and his or her influence’s influences. It’s a completely new way to explore writing.

I have shelves and shelves of books in the original Russian, but more often than not I don’t have what I need at a given moment. I’m often missing a particular Chekhov story or Mayakovsky poem, let alone that very special Rozanov essay.

Now I have everything.

*Last I checked, the CD was still available from DirectMedia for 350 rubles, about $12, at www.directmedia.ru.

Posted on February 2, 2010 by Scott Esposito

(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 .)

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.

Posted on January 11, 2010 by Scott Esposito

(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, Margaret Jull Costa talks about her favorite dictionaries. Costa is the fiction editor of the Center’s latest anthology, Wherever I Lie Is Your Bed, and has translated some of the most important writers to have written in Portuguese and Spanish. Her translation of Your Face Tomorrow: Vol 3 by Javier Marías is just out from New Directions.)

Dictionaries are a translator’s constant companions. In my house, there are dictionaries in almost every room, and even those I rarely use sit on my shelves possibly harboring the very word or phrase omitted from any other dictionary. I use both bilingual and monolingual dictionaries, although since there is no very reliable or extensive Portuguese-English dictionary, I rely largely on the wonderful Novo Aurélio and my now rather ancient Larousse Dicionário Prático Ilustrado. The best monolingual Spanish dictionary, for my money, is the Diccionario del español actual produced by Manuel Seco, Olimpia Andrés, and Gabino Ramos, although the venerable María Moliner dictionary is another marvel of the lexicographical art. And the Oxford Spanish Dictionary, I think, remains the best bilingual Spanish dictionary. I move between bi- and monolingual, crosschecking that I have found the exact meaning I want. Bilinguals are very handy, and I wouldn’t be without them, but they can never be as complete as a monolingual.

I consult bilingual dictionaries, obviously, when I don’t know a word or phrase, but also in order to jump-start my reluctant memory or to get a steer in the right direction. I might not necessarily use the translation I find there, but it often acts as a prompt towards finding the word I need. The best dictionaries provide contextualized examples so that you can see where and how the word or phrase is used and the entry itself is there on the page with its companion entries, which, you never can tell, might provide another lead entirely. One reason why I’m not a great fan of online dictionaries is that they tend to give you just one measly entry at a time. On the other hand, I do subscribe to the on-line Oxford English Dictionary, which is regularly updated, and has proved invaluable whenever I’m translating 19th-century authors and need to know precisely when a word first came into use. It also lists in the margin the headwords of the neighboring twenty or so entries.

And then there are thesauruses, without which I would be lost. However comprehensive your knowledge of your own language, there are times when the word you want won’t necessarily come when called, and there are always words you don’t know. For example, in a series of novels set in 17th-century Spain, various thesauruses (on paper and on-line) provided me with an unusually wide variety of words for, say, prostitute or ruffian or knave.

Given the constantly changing nature of language, no dictionary can ever be complete or fully up to date, and that is where the Internet comes in. I can Google a phrase or word or sense that appears in none of my dictionaries, but which I find in dozens of contexts on various websites. I can usually tell from the context what the translation should be, but if still in doubt I turn to one of my faithful human dictionaries, my native-speaker friends.

The translator’s life is a rather solitary one—it’s just you and the text—and dictionaries are our loyal and silent companions. I worked as a lexicographer myself for a few years and know how much work goes into compiling a dictionary, sifting out meaning from meaning, making painful decisions about what to include or exclude, finding one translation that fits all, when you know that a word can often be translated in a dozen ways depending on context or tone or register. I’m always, therefore, deeply grateful to my dictionaries and to the unsung heroes who labored to produce them.

Posted on September 9, 2009 by Scott Esposito

(We’re kicking off a new feature at Two Words that’ll collect together a list of resources for translators: The Translator’s Toolkit. Our first offering comes from Two Lines translator C.M. Mayo. In addition to translating for Two Lines, C.M. has done work for numerous journals and presses, as well as her own chapbook series, Tameme. She’s also the author of the recently published novel The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire, as well as the widely-lauded travel memoir, Miraculous Air: Journey of a Thousand Miles through Baja California, the Other Mexico, and Sky Over El Nido, which won the Flannery O’Connor.

On September 25, C.M. will be participating in a Library of Congress Translation Event celebrating Hispanic Heritage Month and 450 years of U.S. Hispanic poetry. It will be held at the Pickford Theater, and interested parties can R.S.V.P. with Cynthia Acosta at (202)707-2013.)

Trying to tackle a long translation . . . well, sometimes just thinking about it makes me weary. I’ve found that, for getting down a first draft, it works wonders to slice it up—yes, like that proverbial sausage—into bite-size pieces. Here are the tools I use:

1. Two print-outs (or copies) of the original work
Why two? Read on.

2. Plain paper, and lots of it

3. Scissors
Nice and sharp!

4. Tape
I take one copy of the original work and cut it up into bite-size pieces (two to three sentences—a brief paragraph at most) which I tape to the top of a page, leaving the rest of the page invitingly blank.

5. A pencil
In that nice big blank space, without the aid of a dictionary, I jot down the slobbiest, haziest first draft and sometimes it’s got gaps so big you could drive a Hummer though them. Who cares? It’s only a first draft. Additional trick: oftentimes I grab a few pages from the stack, say, six to seven, maybe as many as 10, and fill them in during odd moments of a busy day.

6. Source language—English Dictionary
After I’ve filled in all (or some) of the pages as best I can, I go through them again, looking up the words I didn’t know or wasn’t 111% sure about.

7. Yellow highlighter
Then I go through it again, smoothing, filling in, and highlight any words and phrases that remain mysterious or awkward.

8. Dictionary of the English language
Usually by this time I feel ready to type the whole thing up (and toss out that embarrassing, scribbled, taped-together draft.) There may still be some questions; usually a dictionary is indispensable.

9. Dictionary of the source language
So is this.

10. Thesaurus
And this. By now I’m in the fourth or fifth draft, polishing, polishing . . .

11. Native speaker helper
When the translation has been polished and typed and polished and retyped, even if I think it doesn’t, I’ve learned from experience that it does still need to be checked by someone else, preferably a native speaker (triple bonus points if you can also get the help of an experienced translation colleague). I translate contemporary Mexican poetry and fiction; luckily for me, my native speaker helper is my husband. How people translate 10th-century Chinese, I have no clue.

12. Time
Time heals all swollen heads. You can be 99% assured, your super-polished translation still has some rough spots. To be able to see those spots, however, you need to let the translation sit in a drawer for at least a few days—though I find a minimum of three weeks is optimal—and then give it another go over. And then another. And another.