Tips on translation

An excerpt from an interview with translator Kit Schluter via The Paris Review:

You compared translation to photography in one of your poems.

Translation and photography have mechanics that, to me, are analogous, in that you have a source—an image, a totality—and the difficulty is bringing that totality into another medium, as well as you can possibly do it. And the printed image of the text, for me, becomes especially important during translation. In order to translate a poem or a story, that is, you need to have all of the material “visible”—in other words, to keep it all in mind—in order to ensure that there aren’t inconsistencies in vocabulary, and that the tone remains consistent throughout. An original text is to translation as physical reality is to a photograph of that reality, in that the translation will never be equal to the original. It will invoke the original, in a sense.

But then again, that’s sort of a tragic way to think of translation, and a simplification. It would drive a translator crazy to believe that a translation will never achieve independence, or autonomy from the original work. In translating, then, what you hope to do—aside from help spread a work into another language’s reading culture—is make a text that will evoke an equivalent emotional resonance, an equivalent visual resonance, within the social spaces of the target language. It’s sort of an art of equivalences, but the equivalent is never exact. It’s the art of fudging equivalences, to make it seem right.

New Russian poets

While looking for contemporary female Russian writers to include in the Summer 2013 issue of Chtenia, which I'll be guest-curating in June, I came across one of the best poets I've read in a while: Polina Barskova. Originally from St. Petersburg, she lives and works in the United States, as a professor of Russian literature at Hampshire College.

She calls St. Petersburg "the home that I have left, the home that is absolutely impossible to leave." I like that a lot. It's how I feel about Moscow. She also studied abroad in Prague as a graduate student at Berkeley (she talks about her experience here). I like that too, for reasons everyone who knows me, knows.

Barskova has been publishing poetry since she was nine, and is acknowledged as one of the best contemporary Russian poet under the age of 40. Many of her works appear in English translation, but the best, in my opinion, remain untapped by the English audience. I hope to change that just a little with the upcoming issue.

For now, I'll share a video of Barskova reading a Russian poem by Vsevolod Zelchenko, another young(ish) poet of incredible talent. It's called "Ballada," or "Ballad," and in it the astute listener will hear allusions to many of my favorite works: to Bob Dylan's winding songs, to T.S. Eliot's "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," and even the first line of Nabokov's autobiography.

Just listening to her read the poem is an experience in itself. She's not merely reading the words; she's savoring them out loud. I'm starting to think that the best way to learn how to read poetry is to listen to another poet do it.

Pruning the classics

Here in the US, Russian writers seem to hold an undisputed pedestal among the ranks of world literary giants. But students in Russia would apparently beg to differ.  As experts in the country compile a list of the top 100 books that they consider required reading, the magazine Bolshoi Gorod ran an article where it polled 600 upperclassmen about their most unloved works of Russian literature. Stunned by the results--and by the audacity of the responses--I decided to post the poll's findings and translate the more memorable things that Russian students had to say about their supposed literary heroes.

Top Russian writers that students would exclude from the reading program


1. Leo Tolstoy

Main works: War and Peace; Anna Karenina; The Death of Ivan Ilyich.

"They should exclude Leo Tolstoy with his novel War and Peace. His chauvinistic views are a serious cause for concern. The novel is simply saturated with condescension towards women. And the saddest part is that Tolstoy portrays it as the right attitude to have: like, yeah, I'm a patriarchal bore, but such is life, and women's fates are already determined."

"I would take out Leo Tolstoy because I didn't read his novel War and Peace, and reading it was really important in order to write a good essay on the Russian-language section of the EGE [Russian equivalent to the SAT]. No novel, no problem."

"I would gladly take out L.N. Tolstoy and all writers like him from the school program. It's like he did it on purpose: sat down and wrote a thousand pages just for his own pleasure, and for the pain of millions of today's students."


2. Fyodor Dostoevsky

Main works: Crime and Punishment; The Brothers Karamazov; Demons; The Idiot.

"They need to take out the dreary Dostoevsky, because he's a completely unintelligible schizophrenic."

"I would exclude Dostoevsky, because he's depressive, maniacal and absolutely awful. When you're a teenager and everything already kind of sucks, and you get Dostoevsky in your reading program, it makes life miserable beyond belief."

"As wrong as this may sound, I would exclude Dostoevsky. I think his works are too heavy. People have to find their way to them on their own."


3. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Main works: The Gulag Archipelago; One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich; The Cancer Ward.

"I'm voting to exclude Solzhenitsyn--he's a blue-collar writer, not an artist."

"He's whiny, tedious and boring. It's like he's asking people to feel sorry for him."

"I suggest we exclude Solzhenitsyn. He doesn't add any literary or artistic value. It's bad for you to read so many lies, especially when they're presented in such crude language."


4. Mikhail Sholokhov

Main works: And Quiet Flows the Don; The Fate of a Man.

"Reading Sholokhov is impossible."

"Sholokhov should be excluded. I can't think of a single person who managed to get through him. And Cossaks aren't Russians, so it's not interesting to read about them."

"They should take out Sholokhov. I really don't think his works have any artistic value, and his Nobel prize should have gone to Bulgakov."


5. Alexander Pushkin

Main works: Eugene Onegin; Boris Godunov; pretty much all of Russia's most famous poems, fairy tales and plays.

"After 11 years of schooling, everybody's had it with Pushkin. They should cut him down by about a factor of three. After such intensive studying, you don't even want to hold one of his books in your hands."

"Take out A.S. Pushkin. His works are considered classics of Russian literature because he wrote badly when those before him wrote even worse."

"Take Pushkin out of the program. His works no longer make sense to most representatives of contemporary youth."


6. Nikolai Gogol

 Main works: Dead Souls; The Government Inspector; "The Overcoat;" "The Nose."

"Dead Souls is like personal torture."

"The program should get rid of Gogol, because he despises Jews."

"Gogol. His delivery is too particular. Teachers who follow the syllabus and stick to the standards of teaching are like death for Gogol. And he didn't die in order to have to repeat himself every time."

______________________________________________________

For those not familiar with Russian literature, this list just about covered the country's most well-known writers. On the other hand, the students listed great Russian writers whom they would include in the reading program instead. These include the sci-fi Strugatsky brothers, along with Vladimir Nabokov and Sergei Dovlatov--with the first being prominent Soviet-era dissidents, and the latter two emigrating from the Soviet Union altogether. Among foreign writers, Russian students preferred Dante, Ayn Rand, Chuck Palahniuk, Roberto Coelho, James Joyce and... J.K. Rowling. I guess some things are the same, no matter what country you're in.

ALTA Conference: Part 2

Translating Murakami in Europe

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami, originally written in Japanese, shown here in its English, Polish, Danish, and Russian translations.

Haruki Murakami is probably the most widely-known Japanese writer in the West. I was excited to see a panel on his work as I was currently reading his Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, and wanted to hear about the challenges of translating literature out of the Japanese. The panel turned out to be fascinating, led by three women translators who, bypassing English completely, translated Murakami from the Japanese directly into Danish, Polish and Norwegian. I found it uncanny their ability to master two languages from strikingly different language families. 

The most compelling points of the presentation dealt with the particularities of Murakami's style; in particular, his philosophical plays on the Japanese language and his deliberately inconsistent use of tense. In several novels, Murakami injects the present tense--a tense not commonly used in English narratives--to play with time, to blur the boundary between dream and reality, or to distinguish the voice of a particular character. To English readers, the present tense is unsettling (it is "the tense of fear," as one of the translators put it) and is generally disliked by English editors. The more familiar past tense, meanwhile, makes the reader's experience comfortable and safe. What Murakami himself said after one of the translators asked him about the subject suggests that the role of tense in a particular language is as much a product of that culture as its grammar, humor, and everything else:

"Western translators should translate into the tense that sounds the most natural to their readers. In Japanese, tense is much less essential to the work than the sound and weight of individual words."

Tense serves an additional purpose for Murakami: it allows him to take the reader on his philosophical wanderings through time. His latest novel, the sprawling IQ84, was purportedly inspired by Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time. This seven-volume masterpiece was Proust's self-described attempt to write a "cathedral-novel" that would do narratively what a great cathedral does architecturally--to cut through centuries and space while enclosing within itself a a sacred, nearly static world. (I have only been able to get through the first volume of Lost Time, and while the language really is as breathtaking as a French cathedral, the centuries you spend reading the thing will eventually crumble your willpower).

I have since finished reading the Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, a dreamy Japanese take on Gabriel Garcia Marquez's magical realism, and look forward to reading the new Murakami, in light of my new insights.

ALTA 2012

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.

Alexander Pushkin (1799 - 1837) is regarded as Russia's greatest poet and the founder of modern Russian literature. To this day, Russian schoolchildren are required to learn his works by heart.

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:

1. 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.
2.  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.

recent reads

Where'd You Go, Bernadette?

by Maria Semple

Ice. It's trippy, symphonies frozen, the unconscious come to life, and smacking of color: blue. (Snow is white; ice is blue. You'll know why, Bee, because you're knowledgeable about these things, but I had no idea.) It rarely snows because Antarctica is a desert. An iceberg means it's tens of millions of years old and has calved from a glacier. I saw hundreds of them, cathedrals of ice, rubbed like salt licks; shipwrecks, polished from wear like marble steps at the Vatican; Lincoln Centers capsized and pockmarked; thirty-story buildings, impossibly arched like out of a world's fair; white, yes, but blue, too, every blue on the color wheel, deep like a navy blazer, incandescent like a neon sign, royal like a Frenchman's shirt, powder like Peter Rabbit's cloth coat, these icy monsters roaming the forbidden black.

Maria Semple's Where'd You Go, Bernadette is referred to in multiple reviews as an "epistolary novel"--a fancy way to describe the ultra-modern lack of narrative that makes this book feel as hip and unorthodox as its heroine, and the city she spends most of her time trying to flee. Stitched together from a trail of emails, police reports and handwritten notes, Bernadette tells the story of crumbling architect Bernadette Fox, a former MacArthur genius gone cuckoo amid the rain and riffraff of Seattle. After Bernadette gradually disconnects from her Microsoft-god husband and disappears without a trace, it falls on her clever daughter, Bee, to find her. Add to the mix a demonic blackberry bush, a swarm of private-school moms collectively known as "the gnats" and a virtual personal assistant named Manjula, and you're not even close to describing the mayhem that animates this unusual novel. It ends with a wild chase across Antarctica--bringing the story, and Bernadette, back to the city she might love after all. I normally wouldn't go for a TV-show type plot like this, but the book's style, in addition to my own love-hate relationship with Seattle, made me appreciate its caffeine-like jolt.

Death and the Penguin 

by Andrey Kurkov

Misha had appeared chez Viktor a year before, when the zoo was giving hungry animals away to anyone able to feed them. Viktor had gone along and returned with a king penguin. Abandoned by his girlfriend the week before, he had been feeling lonely. But Misha had brought his own kind of loneliness, and the result was now two complimentary lonelinesses, creating an impression more of interdependence than amity.

So much for disproving the cold-weather stereotypes: Death and the Penguin, originally written in Russian by dark humorist Andrey Kurkov, sets the reader in the middle of snowy, post-Soviet Ukraine, packing the place with copious deaths and, yes, even a penguin. The main protagonist is Viktor, a struggling writer getting by on writing advance obituaries for the targets of a local crime ring, who adopts a penguin named Misha, not realizing the pet will become his mute and melancholy alter-ego. Misha bears a touching resemblance to the disoriented post-Soviet man, spending most of his time half-asleep in the "hidey hole" behind the couch and emerging only to guzzle frozen herring and to get a sniff of his master's vodka. At times, the English translation--completed, fittingly, by one George Bird--reads with the unsteadiness of a penguin's waddle, but it's not the language that gives the book its charm. It's the combination of crime noir and communist-era humor, which, thankfully, didn't get lost in translation.

translation takeoffs

The latest literary roundup from the Prague-based blog Literalab mentions my friend and mentor, Julia Sherwood, for her recent publication in Two Lines: Passageways, a literary translation journal produced by the Center for the Art of Translation. This past spring, during a cozy and gracious dinner with Julia and her husband, Peter Sherwood--a Hungarian translator and a fascinating man, who happened to be my professor that semester--I was introduced to the magical world of translation, and have been more or less stuck there, blissfully, ever since.

I'm happy for Julia for the recognition of her latest work, a translated excerpt from Slovak writer Ján Rozner’s novel, Seven Days to the Funeral (although I'd be even happier if it were available online!). And my mind is now abuzz with the idea of preparing one or two things of my own to submit to Two Lines, or polishing up some projects I've already started. Oh my goodness. As a favorite author wrote, my little cup brims with tiddles.

Literalab also notes the fantastic Russian poetry translations that made it into the annual Two Lines print publication. I'm sharing one of these poems, with its Russian original, here; a delicate piece by Arseny Tarkovsky, father of the legendary director.

The translators have taken liberty with some of the images and individuals phrases, but have preserved the overall wonder expressed in the poem, using nearly identical rhyme. But the Russian original is still more magical. In the last line, stars are falling onto the poet's sleeve.

Visit Two Lines Online for a treasure-trove of other recently published translations.

I learned the grass as I began to write . . .

By Arseny Tarkovsky

Translated by Philip Metres; Dimitri Psurtsev

I learned the grass as I began to write,
And the grass started whistling like a flute.
I gathered how color and sound could join
And when the dragonfly whirred up his hymn,
Passing through green frets like a comet, I knew
A tear was waiting in each drop of dew.
Knew that in each facet of the huge eye,
In each rainbow of brightly churring wings,
Dwells the burning word of the prophet—
By some miracle I found Adam’s secret.

I loved my tormenting task, this intricate
Placing of words, fastened by their light,
Riddle of vague feeling and a simple answer
To the mind. In “truth” I thought truth appeared.
My tongue was true, like a spectral analysis,
And words gathered around my feet to listen.

What’s more, my friend, you’re right to say
I heard one-quarter the noise, saw half the light,
But I did not debase the grasses, or family,
Or insult the ancestral earth by being blithe,
And as long as I worked on earth, accepted
A gift of coldest spring water and fragrant bread,
Above me unfathomable sky still stood,
And stars tumbled around my head.

_____________________________________

 Я учился траве, раскрывая тетрадь...

          Я учился траве, раскрывая тетрадь,
          И трава начинала, как флейта, звучать.
          Я ловил соответствие звука и цвета,
          И когда запевала свой гимн стрекоза,
          Меж зеленых ладов проходя, как комета,
          Я-то знал, что любая росинка - слеза.
          Знал, что в каждой фасетке огромного ока,
          В каждой радуге яркострекочущих крыл
          Обитает горящее слово пророка,
          И Адамову тайну я чудом открыл.

          Я любил свой мучительный труд, эту кладку
          Слов, скрепленных их собственным светом, загадку
          Смутных чувств и простую разгадку ума,
          В слове п р а в д а мне виделась правда сама,
          Был язык мой правдив, как спектральный анализ,
          А слова у меня под ногами валялись.

          И еще я скажу: собеседник мой прав,
          В четверть шума я слышал, в полсвета я видел,
          Но зато не унизив ни близких, ни трав,
          Равнодушием отчей земли не обидел,
          И пока на земле я работал, приняв
          Дар студеной воды и пахучего хлеба,
          Надо мною стояло бездонное небо,
          Звезды падали мне на рукав.