It's been two weeks since I returned from a spontaneous visit to Rochester, NY, to attend the 35th conference of the American Literary Translators Association. During the three-day-long event, I got to hear fascinating panel discussions about the craft and theory of translation, explore the quirky hangouts of Rochester, and meet wonderful translators from the US and abroad who made me realize that theirs is the kind of professional community I'd like to belong to. I'm particularly grateful to Chad Post and his crew at Open Letter Books, the publishing house where I might intern this spring, for showing me the town, taking me out for beer and darts, and treating me like part of the family.
The conference was a feast of great thinking and debating about some of the most fundamental issues of literature in translation. By habit, I took a ridiculous amount of notes. Over the course of three blog posts, I plan to unload these notes in a more succinct (and more readable) form, so they may serve as future material for myself and as a potentially interesting read for other people.
ALTA Conference: Part 1
Translation Challenges in Modern Russian Prose
Recent developments in the Russian literary and cultural landscape have posed challenges to translators who want to convey Russia's evolving humorous expressions, slang terms and contemporary ideas to the non-Russian reader. One way translators have sought to bridge the cultural gap is through the use of new media (from multimedia to online glossaries), popular reference sites (such as Lurkmore) and interactive, searchable texts. But during the very act of explaining modern cultural references within the text--by way of injections, footnotes and other well-meaning "interventions"-- translators run the risk of altering the effect of the original, and further distancing the reader from the work.
Translators of 20th-century Russian prose experienced this dilemma after the death of Stalin, when substandard country speech (aka "democratized speech") began to make its way into state-sanctioned literature. Writers like Vasily Shukshin, who wrote with warmth and humor about rural themes, used swearing and other "salty" language to break Soviet literature out of its rigid Stalinist style. Translators conveyed this new saltiness by using truncated words, deliberately bad grammar, and orthography that reflected common pronunciation.
Another way to assist the reader was through hypertextual translation: weaving the translator's own explanations, background information and definitions into the body of the text. Perhaps the godfather of hypertextual translation is Vladimir Nabokov, whose translation of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin included his own running commentary within the text itself on the joys and challenges he encountered during the course of his work. Most readers, however, stay away from enhanced texts in the same way that wholesome eaters shy away from fortified foods: they worry that they're not getting the real thing.
The main dilemma for translators is that readers want a monochrome text that reads as though it were not translated at all; against this expectation, one awkwardly translated word or phrase can taint the reader's entire experience. Readers want to feel as though they are reading in French, Japanese or Russian, despite their full awareness that they are processing the text in its English form.
The lessons to translators:
- Don't tell something just because you know it. This includes the injection of biographical notes, scholarly explanations and various "fun" facts that you may find interesting, but which ultimately clog up the text.
- If you must explain something, do so in a footnote or in a note at the end of the book. This will function as an optional resource (as opposed to an intrusive one) for the curious reader, who will turn to the note as a kind of pop-up picture of additional context.
