The following is an E-Panel of 6 literary translators who have made it possible for those of us reading in English to enjoy works from authors we otherwise would never have had the chance to enjoy.
C.M. Mayo
www.cmmayo.com
Editor, Tameme www.tameme.org
Madam Mayo: http://madammayo.blogspot.com
Jordan Stump
Liz Henry
http://liz-henry.blogspot.com
http://literarytranslators.blogspot.com
http://badgermama.blogspot.com
http://othermag.org/blog.php
http://blogher.org/topics/world/
Ewa Hryniewicz-Yarbrough
Laura Wideburg
Linda Coverdale
Dan:
Hello, and thanks for participating in this E-Panel, especially now during Reading the World month. What language(s) do you translate from and to what language(s)?
C.M. Mayo:
Delighted, Dan. I translate Spanish, specifically, Mexican Spanish, into English.
Jordan Stump:
From French to English.
Liz Henry:
I translate from Spanish to English. I've also done a little bit of French to English. I co-translated a book of poems from Hebrew to English with the poet, Yehudit Oriah, though I don't know Hebrew.
Ewa Hryniewicz-Yarbrough:
Most of my translations have been from Polish into English, but recently I have begun translating from English into Polish.
Laura Wideburg:
I translate from Swedish into English.
Linda Coverdale:
From French to English.
Dan:
Which of the languages you translate from and to is your native language? How did you come about learning the other language(s)?
C.M. Mayo:
English is my native language. (Mayo, by the way, is an old Irish name, and it's pronounced Mayo as in "mayonnaise," not Cinco de Mayo.) I learned Spanish when I got married and moved to Mexico City in 1986. My husband is Mexican, from Mexico City. For translating, he's my "secret weapon."
Jordan Stump:
English is my native language. I first learned French when I was eleven: my parents were university professors, and we spent a year in Paris while they were on sabbatical leave. Much, much later, as an intolerably lazy and continually-failing college student, I took a second-year French class to get my language requirement out of the way; in that class, I discovered that I could get good grades without doing any real work, since I already more or less knew the language. In short, I’d finally found a major! And then I started taking French literature classes, and fell completely in love with the subject.
Liz Henry:
English is my native language. I learned a little bit of Spanish as a child, but then mostly learned it from books, in school, and from listening to music. My dad had some bilingual editions of poetry books, and I would pore over them with a very bad Spanish-English dictionary when I was a diary-scribbling high school poet. (Now I'm a diary-scribbling 40 year old poet.)
Ewa Hryniewicz-Yarbrough:
Polish is my native language. I began learning English when I was in high school in Poland.
Laura Wideburg:
English is my native language and I began learning Swedish at 17, when I was a high school exchange student. I am Swedish-American on my father’s side, and he encouraged me to do my high school exchange in Sweden, and once there I just fell in love with the language, and I still love the Swedish language, as it is musical and expressive. Once you learn it, however, you don’t really hear the music any longer, which is a shame. But the trade-off was worth it.
Linda Coverdale:
My family is American, but my parents, who spoke French and German, wanted their children to have the experience of living abroad and learning a foreign language, so we moved to France for a year, to Grenoble, because we all loved to ski. When you're ten years old and plunked into a French school where no one speaks any English, believe me, you learn French, and fast.
Dan:
Do you consider yourself bilingual?
C.M. Mayo:
Definitely--- 15 years of living in Mexico will do that to a person. However, I make the distinction between being bilingual in a practical sense, and bilingual in a literary sense; I am the former, not the latter. In other words, though bilingual, I do not write in Spanish at the literary level I do in English. And that's OK. I'd like to make this point: in an ideal world, all literary translators would be fully bilingual in both senses, but we do not live an ideal world--- there are far more writers than there are literary translators, and therefore a growing mountain of wonderful work remains unknown to us in English. Also--- an even more important point--- the best literary translators are not necessarily the ones with the biggest vocabulary or smoothest grammar in the target language. Rather, they are the ones who fuss and nitpick with the English and go back to the dictionary and the thesaurus and then fuss and nitpick again and again until they get the translation just right-- that is, they render the work into English at the literary level of its original. In my experience, many of the best literary translators are poets. Some do not even speak the target language-- they rely on dictionaries and native speakers for help. So, if you're a literary writer, and especially if you're a poet, why not give literary translation a try?
Jordan Stump:
More of less, I suppose, depending on how you define that word. I can say essentially anything that I want to say in French, but I wouldn’t presume to say that my French is flawless.
Liz Henry:
I'm a pretty clumsy Spanish speaker, so not really. It's embarrassing, because I read and understand well.
I've met many other translators who are not completely fluent and I often respect their work. And I've met people who are perfectly fluent but who can't understand the meaning of a poem, much less translate it. Ideally I would speak and understand better, but I make do with what I've got and I'm always trying to learn more. Also, I am sure I'd be a better translator if I had a comparable education in the literature of other languages. My reading in English goes so far beyond the reasonably extensive reading I've done in Spanish, that I feel like I can see what I am missing.
If I had a superpower, I would wish for it to be the ability to speak and understand every possible language!
Ewa Hryniewicz-Yarbrough:
No, I'm afraid I don't. I believe it was Nabokov who compared his native Russian tongue to English in the following way: the first represented an hereditary estate; the second was like a semi-detached house. I feel pretty much the same.
Laura Wideburg:
People speaking to me in Swedish have sometimes assumed that my native language is Swedish, but I know my Swedish is not perfect. One of my Swedish friends calls my speech “the westernmost dialect of Swedish”, referring to the large amount of Swedish emigration to the United States in the nineteenth century. So you could say that I am as bilingual as a person can get without being exposed to the language in childhood. I certainly speak much better Swedish than German, which is my third language. I married a German and also translate from German, but I do not consider myself bilingual in German.
Bilingualism is a tricky concept. I certainly don’t speak English perfectly either, nor do I know every word in English. Most of us are aware that we don’t have one hundred percent command of our own language, but assume that a person speaking a second language must have one hundred percent command to be bilingual. So in effect, we are asking a bilingual person to be better at their second language than it is humanly possible to be in one’s native language. I know more vocabulary in certain subjects in Swedish than I do in English, but I certainly am not a native speaker of Swedish, though I can fool some people some of the time, not intentionally of course.
Linda Coverdale:
Yes, in French and English. I can get by in Spanish and German, but clumsily.
Dan:
How did you get into translating?
C.M. Mayo:
When I was living in Mexico City, I could see that there was an enormous amount of superb writing and poetry in Mexico, and that very little of it was being translated into English. At the same time, I saw how little contemporary US and Canadian literature was being translated into Spanish. As I mentioned, literary translators are few, and many-- certainly not all--- tend to be conservative in their choices. It's a safer bet to translate, say, James Joyce or Ernest Hemingway, than some young writer no one has heard of; similarly, it's safer to go with Carlos Fuentes and Octavio Paz than, say, Juan Villoro. Although Villoro is getting better known every day [http://madammayo.blogspot.com/2006/04/news-from-juan-villoro_23.html]
So, to make a long story brief, I founded Tameme, [www.tameme.org] a journal of English/ Spanish writing from North America (Canada, the US and Mexico). That was kind of like diving into the deep end.
Jordan Stump:
I was lucky enough to be hired as a French professor at the University of Nebraska; as it happens the University of Nebraska Press is invested heavily in the publication of translations of recent French fiction. At the time, the head of the press was the excellent Bill Regier; after I was hired, he took me out to lunch and asked if I’d ever thought about translating, and if I knew of any contemporary authors I might like to work on. And in fact I did: I’d just discovered the remarkable novels of Marie Redonnet. Bill, to whom I owe a great debt of gratitude, suggested I give them a try. I went straight back to my office and started translating, and was hooked from the start. Translation offers a sort of pleasure very similar to that of reading, but about ten times more intense: it’s like a kind of super-reading, which I immediately found (and continue to find) absolutely addictive.
Liz Henry:
In high school, I was curious about song lyrics, and would write them down and puzzle them out. I would also go through bilingual facing-page poetry books and figure things out, and take notes. It was like a puzzle to me and when I realized my opinion of how the poems should sound in English was different than the translator's, I had a pleasant, nerdy, correcting-the-teacher feeling. I liked the feeling that there was more than one right way to do translate the same poem. I continued translating through college, stopped for a few years though I still read a lot of poetry in translation.
In 1999 or 2000 I started translating at a more rapid pace and was taking it more seriously. After a couple of years of that I was desperate to talk to someone else who was doing the same sort of thing. I looked on the web, but did not know or figure out for quite a while that I should be searching on the term "literary translation". I didn't know what to call it. I think I was searching on "translating poetry" instead. It also occurred to me to look on college campuses and try to find some people who I could talk to, and that's how I ended up going back to school in Comparative Literature. I looked at books that I had on my shelf, and wrote email to people and asked them for advice. I think that's how I met Stephen Kessler, who was very, very helpful and who pointed me to ALTA. Other people I cold-called or emailed were not so helpful, and some were downright rude. I'm not shy, and went after this information very persistently, but I always think if it was that hard for me to find out where other translators were, how hard is it for other people who might not be so aggressive?
Ewa Hryniewicz-Yarbrough:
I taught translation theory back in Poland. But when I moved to America, in 1984, I became aware that every single day I was required to "translate" myself--if you will allow me the metaphor. I began to think more about translation as a result of that, and when I talked about it to Steve Yarbrough, who would soon become my husband, he encouraged me to try my hand at it, and I discovered it was something I loved.
Laura Wideburg:
John Marshall at Open Books Poet’s Emporium was the first person to encourage me to enter translation. I had taken a class in literary translation while getting my Ph D in Germanic languages at the University of Washington, but had no thoughts of getting into literary translation professionally until I was in John’s shop. I was writing my own poetry then, and receiving a huge amount of rejection slips. My husband came with me one day, and was bored, so I asked him to read a translation of Thomas Tranströmer to pass the time while I talked poetry with John.
My husband came up to me and said, “Why do people think that Tranströmer is so great?” I looked at the translation (I’m not going to mention whose!) and said, “Maybe you should read the Swedish instead.” John said, “If you think that this translation is not so great, why don’t you try?” ( He was a Tranströmer fan, it should be noted).
So I went home and translated three poems by Tranströmer and John was blown away. “you go into translation, as you have a gift for it,” he said. I was not so sure.
That fall, I was in Stockholm when Niklas Rådström’s Att komma tillbaka till dikten came out. As I was reading it, I thought, “I was born to translate this book.” I did, sent the translation to Rådström, and got his permission to publish. That was four years ago, and I’ve been doing literary translation ever since.
Linda Coverdale:
A friend of mine told me that he'd given my name to Richard Howard, who was looking for someone to take on one of the two Roland Barthes books he'd promised to translate for Hill & Wang. I said, "Oooo, what do I know about translating?" My friend pointed out that I had a Ph.D. in French, was a good writer, and had taken courses from Barthes, so, enough already! Well, why not, I did the one book. I'm currently working on my forty-seventh translation.
Dan:
When you are reading material in the original language, are you thinking in English – translating on the fly, or thinking in that original language?
C.M. Mayo:
Thinking in Spanish.
Jordan Stump:
Sometimes I read one way, sometimes another. Often I read a book because I see it as a potential translation project; in that case I translate along in my head, just to see what it might sound like. I don’t do that so much if (for instance) I’m reading a book because I’m going to teach it, though even then, I sometimes come across a particularly lovely or difficult passage, and the translator in me kicks in.
Liz Henry:
I have never thought about it quite that way. I think I do both and it depends.
But when I am translating a poem, at some point I read the poem out loud a few times to get the meter and rhythm and the feel of its phrasing, how it sounds. I don't try to replicate that in English, but try to do something analogous if I can figure out how.
Ewa Hryniewicz-Yarbrough:
No, I'm not thinking in English when I read a work in Polish, though I do sometimes find myself thinking about how I might translate certain lines or phrases.
Laura Wideburg:
I am definitely thinking in the original language. When I translate, I reread the text and think about that particular text and the translation possibilities. But just reading the newspaper, or a book I am not planning to translate, there’s no English involved in my reading experience. My brain goes fully into Swedish mode.
In fact, with my third language, I also think in German while I read.
When I am asleep and dreaming, I notice that my language in the dream changes according to context. If Sweden or Swedish friends are in my dream, everything is in Swedish. Same for German. Sometimes I interpret in my dreams if there are folks from more than one language group meeting each other, a reflection of my real life I fear!
Linda Coverdale:
When I'm reading French, watching a French movie, or conversing in French, then—there's no other way to put it—I'm simply understanding the French, the way I understand English in similar circumstances. If I hit an unfamiliar word or expression, I fill the gap as best I can with a kind of amorphous contextual meaning, just as I would with any opaque spots in English. When I read a French text I'm considering for a translation, however, a scrap of English will pop into my mind now and then, so without my even realizing it, part of my brain is beavering away in English and wants to inform me that it has found a good way to translate something, so would I please make a note of it. . .
Dan:
Do you prefer to reading one language over the other(s)?
C.M. Mayo:
I am in love with English.
Jordan Stump:
No, I’d say I like them both equally. That said, I do have a great fondness for the kind of thinking that underlies a lot of contemporary French fiction, so given the choice I would sooner read a French novel than any other.
Liz Henry:
I read very quickly in English! And so I enjoy that much more. I can suck down a novel in a couple of hours. Obviously since I know English far better than Spanish, I get more nuances and intertextual references and so it's way more enjoyable.
When I read a translation, and I often read them at poetry open mics, I read at least a little bit of the poem in Spanish, even if the audience is mostly monolingual English-speakers.
Ewa Hryniewicz-Yarbrough:
I can't really say that I do. I think it's important to read widely in both.
Laura Wideburg:
Not really. I am more interested in the work I am reading.
Linda Coverdale:
No, but I prefer reading French authors in French.
Dan:
Do you find it helps to know the author you are translating? Know their thought processes and beliefs?
C.M. Mayo:
The more the better. Though this is rarely possible. E-mail is a godsend-- to be able to just ask, what did you mean by thus and such?
Jordan Stump:
For the past ninety years or so, the prevailing belief among literary critics has been that the author has precious little to do, in the end, with the text. I strongly agree with that. And yet … I always consult with the author as I’m translating, and I pay particular attention to his or her ideas about the effects the book is supposed to produce in th reader’s mind, and to his or her “interpretation” of the book. Beyond that, I don’t think it’s all that vital to know the author’s beliefs; it’s the book itself that defines what the book is, and the translator should let the book be the book, more or less unaffected by things that we might know that aren’t in the book.
Liz Henry:
Yes, absolutely. The more I know about the author, the better I feel my translations are. When I have to take some liberty with the work, then I trust myself more in deciding what direction to take it. For instance, in translating poems by Nestor Perlongher, I think I started with no knowledge of his life, and tried to extrapolate. I felt that I could see a lot of things that I later confirmed were true. When you are reading something written in a mixture of Spanish, Portuñol, French, and Portuguese, and thinking, "wait, is this poem actually about drag queens at a disco having oral sex, with weird references to French literary theory, or am I imagining it?" it is nice to have some outside confirmation of your suspicions.
I have also found this to be important in my translations of women poets from the 19th and early 20th centuries. There are things I don't know or can't know about their lives, but the more I know, the more I can grok what they're doing in the poems. I need to know biography, history, and the biographies and work of all the people *around* "my poet".
This does not stop me from translating anything I please, even from a point of total ignorance of anything but the author's name.
It also doesn't mean that someone who knows a lot about the author is going to come up with a better translation than a better translator and poet who knows less of the biographical details. It is a factor, but artistry and sensitivity to language, and the ability to think like a poet in multiple layers of ideas, are also big factors.
I am very appreciative of feedback from other translators, poets, and native speakers of a language.
Ewa Hryniewicz-Yarbrough:
Most definitely. It's not required, of course, but it certainly helps.
Laura Wideburg:
Absolutely. And I really believe that it does matter if the author and the translator resonate with each other somehow. When I first met Rådström personally, I found out that his favorite authors as a teenager was Ray Bradbury. I do not think it is a coincidence that I happen to come from Waukegan, Bradbury’s hometown, and speak Bradbury’s native dialect and have had the same childhood types of experiences he describes in Dandelion Wine. Bradbury resonated with Rådström, and perhaps that is why Rådström’s work resonates with me. I do think that being able to translate from this non-intellectual part of the brain, which I call “gut-to’gut” translation, makes the translation a better work of art. I am a believer in the emotional reaction to a work being part of the reading experience, and that cannot be translated intellectually, just as a work of literature in one’s native language has to have more than intellectual word play to become a classic.
Linda Coverdale:
It depends. My field is literary translation, and I do mostly fiction. A work of fiction should stand on its own, in which case, a good translation requires technical expertise in the languages of origin and translation, skill in reading and writing (by which I mean sensitivity to the multiple levels of meaning in a text, plus the ability to reproduce faithfully as many aspects of the original as possible), and familiarity with the world of the original language. With French, that means endless details like the brand names of caramel candies, electricity meters in the front halls of apartments, the peculiarities of everyday life in France, historical-cultural-philosophical-political-you-name-it allusions, everything mysterious that a French reader understands immediately and that can't be found in any dictionary. Of course, some books require research. I've studied eighteenth-century sailing ships, the blueprints for Auschwitz, vaudoo, AIDS, Caribbean history, even roulette, because in order to do justice to a text in English, you might need to know more than the author is actually saying. And you might even need to "correct" some detail in the original—with the author's permission, naturally. Reading the other works of an author (particularly one with a distinctive style) doesn't hurt, obviously. It's like studying a particular person whom one intends to play upon the stage, in the hope of noticing something useful. Remember, if you're completely stumped, you can always send off an author query! Unless the author is dead or a reclusive grouch, and then you're on your own.
Dan:
Looking back at the works you have translated – how did you determine they were works you wanted to translate?
C.M. Mayo:
Intuition and personal taste, usually. But it also depends on the project. Since I've already spoken at length about Tameme, http://www.breaktech.net/EmergingWritersForum/View_Interview.aspx?id=12 I'll focus here on my most recent translations, which are in my anthology Mexico: A Traveler's Literary Companion. This was a very unusual project. David Peattie, publisher of Whereabouts Press [www.whereaboutspress.com ], invited me to do the Mexico book for the series, which has included Greece, Italy, Chile, Costa Rica, Spain, Viet Nam, and others. The idea is to give a portrait of the country through the voices of its literary writers. This turned out to be much more challenging to put together than I had imagined. First, of course, I looked for literary quality. But the pieces also needed to be set in or in some way evoke a specific city or region of Mexico. I couldn't have 10 stories set in Mexico City and nothing in Yuacatan, or, for example, all stories about campesinos. I needed to try to find balance among so many different factors that at times, it seemed a Chinese puzzle.
Jordan Stump:
I translate a book because I love it, and because I want to read it with that special intensity that only translation allows. Sorry to repeat myself, but to me that aspect of translation is fundamental: it offers me the entirely egocentric pleasure of a really intense reading.
Liz Henry:
My first really big project was translating "Florentino y el Diablo", which I had as a 20-minute long audio recording - it is a poem and song. Though by this time I was good at understanding song lyrics, there were many, many things I could not understand. This was because the Spanish was very regional, with a lot of terms from the Venezulan llanos or central plains. The frustration of *not knowing* drove me to look up the words online, which led me to the knowledge that the song's author, Alfredo Arvelo Torrealba was a notable poet. I found his work in a nearby university library, found a shelf of dictionaries of Venezuelan regionalisms, and went to work. My dad was also very helpful as a resource, since he grew up in Venezuela and spent some time in the same region of the llanos as the poet.
So, one thing that drives me is puzzlement, frustration, and not knowing. This was also a reason why I fastened on Perlongher. His poems are very difficult and interesting!
Perlongher's poems are also fantastically dirty and I'd say that is also a motivation; I get curious about anything about sex. What can I say - it's not like I'm alone in this. If I'm reading something and then suddenly realize it has a sexual double/triple meaning, like the poems of John Donne... then I'm hooked. I blame Clement Egerton and Francis Parkman's footnotes, too, for my prurient interest in translation. Or anyone else who put the obviously good bits in Latin or French to keep out anyone not "classy" enough to handle them. If you don't know Latin before you try to read Egerton's "Golden Lotus" you will definitely be looking up things in the dictionary by the time you're done as you ask yourself "WHAT did he just do with that plum?"
Another motivation for me is feminism and the need to connect with other women and to find women's history, to find other women writers and to feel that I as a poet have a history. It is not the linear geneology that many people think of as the history of literature, but it is good to know that everywhere in the world, writing women or poetry-making women, have existed... at whatever time and whatever language. The more I look, the more I find this is true.
The last motivation I would like to list here: other people's bad translations. I'm sure I'm not alone in feeling inspired by outrage to leap to my desk, like a superhero, and scribble away, because I think someone's got something wrong. When I consider my own mistakes in translation and how embarrassing they are, I can comfort myself that at least they may inspire some future translator to work really hard as steam comes out of her ears and she throws my book across the room.
Ewa Hryniewicz-Yarbrough:
With one exception, when I was commissioned to do a translation on short notice, I chose to translate works that I loved.
Laura Wideburg:
That’s not always a given! Sometimes a publisher comes to you and says, “Can you do this book?” The book I am translating now was one of those books suggested by a publisher, a psychological thriller by Inger Frimansson called God natt min älskade (Good night, beloved). I am having fun with it, though, which is the point. And there were incredible challenges in each book. Each author’s vocabulary is different, and the tone is different, and one must translate with that in mind. I also think that there is a specific translator’s voice, since each translator has his or her own geographic background, life experience and so on which cannot be taken out of one’s translation work, and probably shouldn’t. Otherwise, a machine could to it!
Linda Coverdale:
By reading them! Criteria: Do I like the book? Can I do a good job? Will I be paid enough? These categories are fluid, so I mix and match them. Sometimes I love a book but I know that I'm not ready for it: that happened with Chamoiseau's Chronicle of the Seven Sorrows. When I wrote a rave reader report on it back in 1988, the publishing company said they would buy the rights if I would translate it, but I wasn't familiar enough with the world of Martinique to understand all of the text. The fish that got away came back, though, and ten years later, after cutting my teeth on two other Chamoiseau books, I could tackle the job with confidence. (And a Caribbean file a foot long.) It was still a huge amount of work, and the fee didn't come close to covering the time and effort involved, but I adore that book, so to me it was worth it.
Dan:
Are there some other authors that you would like to translate in the future?
C.M. Mayo:
Two Mexicans, Guillermo Samperio and Alberto Blanco. There is also a memoir by a French military officer in Mexico the 1860s that I'd like to translate.
Jordan Stump:
A great many. Some like Jean Echenoz, are routinely translated by other translators, and I don’t really have the right to muscle in. Others, like Iegor Gran or Nathalie Quintane, have yet to produce a novel that (to my mind) would work well in translation. Some are older authors that have already been translated, but that I’d love to take on, purely for my own pleasure (a possibility that I will no doubt never have): Raymond Roussel, Robert Pinget, Colette Alain Robbe-Grillet, Georges Perec …
Liz Henry:
I recently read some poems by Maria Villar Buceta and I'm dying to translate her. They seem like odd, quirky poems! I am also fascinated right now by Clementina Suarez and I want to translate her poems about space flight. I haven't read them yet, but was skimming the tables of contents of all her books that I could find in the library while in search of something else, and cracked up laughing that she wrote all these poems to Russian cosmonauts, including the dog Laika. Surely that will be interesting.
Ewa Hryniewicz-Yarbrough:
I'd love to translate the Polish poet Krzysztof Karasek. I'd also like to translate some of the poetry of the Polish novelist and poet Piotr Szewc, whose first novel, Annihilation, was my first published translation. As far as American writers go, I'd like to translate the poets W. S. Merwin and Jane Kenyon. Lastly, I sometimes think about possibly trying to translate one of my husband's novels, though so far he has been very capably translated into Polish by Katarzyna Bienkowska.
Laura Wideburg:
Oh, absolutely! But really I would love to see more of Rådström’s work in English, as I believe he is one of the best authors in Sweden today. But he is hard to categorize and therefore it is hard to find a good home for his works. I would love to translate Jonas Hassan Khemiri, who is Swedish with a Tunisian father, and this background makes his take on Swedish society a bit off-kilter than that produced by the average “Svensson.”
Swedish literature is fairly well represented in English compared to many other literatures, and we have a number of good translators like Tiina Nunnally and Rika Lesser working with some of the best contemporary authors. And the Swedish-American community is well-educated and tends to be well-off, and so there is a market for works in Swedish translation, if publishers know how to work it. By the way, the PBS station in Chicago did a special on Swedish-Americans that pulled in more money than any other two-hour special to date. I think that the Swedish-American community tends to be quiet and therefore underestimated.
Linda Coverdale:
Yes, but I'm not telling—I wouldn't want to jinx anything.
Dan:
Are you aware of journals out there like TWO LINES and Absinthe, that are only publishing translated work?
C.M. Mayo:
Of course! By the way, Tameme www.tameme.org has an extensive links page to many others, including the Dirty Goat, Mandorla and Terra Incognita. The most dynamic I've seen is Words Without Borders. www.wordswithoutborder.org I highly recommend it to anyone interested in literary translation.
Jordan Stump:
Yes and I greatly admire what they do. The number of translations published in the US is scandalously small compared to every other civilized country; journals like those two – and presses like Archipelago, among others – are making a small difference, but there’s still a long way to go.
Liz Henry:
Those are the only ones I know of!
Ewa Hryniewicz-Yarbrough:
I've published work in both. They are superb journals.
Laura Wideburg:
Dwayne at Absinthe published an excerpt of Niklas Rådström’s book Absinthe: The Story of a Blue Titmouse. It’s a wonderful short little book which starts with finding a baby bird and ends up being a meditation on man and nature that is quite profound, not to mention the beautiful drawings of Absinthe (the bird).
Linda Coverdale:
…
Dan:
Can one make a living as a translator?
C.M. Mayo:
Yes, but not as a literary translator. Translators who make a living more often translate legal documents, medical texts, annual reports, and the like. Literary translation is, in the end, a labor of love.
Jordan Stump:
One can, although I’m glad I don’t have to. It seems like an arduous sort of life, always hunting around for new projects … If you could do three translations a year for major commercial presses, you could make a decent living; the problem is that commercial presses are not always as open to audacious new works as smaller, not-for-profit presses, so one may well be obliged to pass up the most interesting books in favor of those most readily publishable by presses whose primary interest is the bottom line. One might end up, then, translating books one does not really love, and to me that would be a terrible thing.
Liz Henry:
Maybe someone can. When people ask me this, I advise them to move to Europe, where publishers need work in translation to satisfy their markets.
I hope that U.S. publishers figure out how to sell translations to English speaking audiences. Right now in the U.S., no, it is not possible, or only for a very small number of people who luck out with a big publisher and a popular novel, and then some more who work super hard and live on almost nothing... I could be wrong, but that is my impression. Most literary translators seem to be teachers, or translator/interpreters, or something else entirely, and translate on the side.
Ewa Hryniewicz-Yarbrough:
No way.
Laura Wideburg:
I sure can’t. I lost money last year. It cost me more to translate literary works than I earned from it. You need a day job or a grant. Or independent wealth and the urge to translate!
If you ever meet a translator who can live by literary translation, let me know how that person does it. I translate technical and medical German to pay the bills. And I have some independent wealth that is dwindling fast as we speak.
Linda Coverdale:
Yes, if you live modestly and work constantly. (I'm talking about literary translation: technical translation can be nicely remunerative.) Most translators I know also teach, lecture, write, work in publishing, and so on. Let me put it this way: I was discussing my fee with a publisher some years ago, and after we'd agreed on a sum that represented what I knew was the top rate his house paid its translators, he blurted out, "Can you actually live on that?"
Dan:
What is the typical number of pages you get through in a day? Or, how long would it take to translate a couple hundred pages of work?
C.M. Mayo:
Some pieces are tricky; others come out smooth as silk. For the stories and novel excerpts I translated for Mexico: A Traveler's Literary Companion, it took me about 4 hours to get a rough first draft of about 10 double spaced pages.
Jordan Stump:
The number of pages per day varies wildly. On a first draft, may be ten or so (I have to snatch whatever time I can between teaching, meetings, grading, and so on); after that, sometimes only one or two pages if it’s an early draft, sometimes twenty or more if it’s one of the later revisions. For a couple of hundred pages, assuming the book is fairly difficult (that’s my preference), and assuming that I don’t have any sort of leave, and so have to go on teaching etc., I’d ask for a year, and would settle for eight months. The fastest translation I’ve ever done was Jules Verne’s The Mysterious Island, for Random House: 800 pages in eight months. It was a wonderful time, but I grew to loath anything that prevented me from working on the translation (students, chatty colleagues, and so on). It’s not an experience I’d particularly like to repeat, although I’ve never been sadder to finish a translation: it had occupied me so completely for those eight months.
Liz Henry:
Since I mostly translate poetry this is hard to answer.
Ewa Hryniewicz-Yarbrough:
It depends. It took me almost a year to translate the first novel I did. The second one took only a few months. Poetry is a completely different story. It can take forever.
Laura Wideburg:
It depends on the work. A poem can take hours of time for twenty lines. The thriller can go ten to twenty pages in the same amount of time, but then I run into a word that I need to research and work with. I’d say a 200-page book will probably take two to three months to do well, adding in the edits that you have to do just as with any English work.
Linda Coverdale:
Impossible question. Every book is different, but the more experienced you are, the better you get at estimating how many pages you might be able to handle in a day. Sometimes you can work in the Thomas Wolfe groove, find the voice, and pour out English with gratifying speed, but there are always Flaubert periods when you get stuck in the La Brea tar pits, endlessly rewriting text where nothing seems to click. I've translated the first sentence of my current book at least twenty different ways. So far.
Dan:
What is your translating process? Do you read the whole work first in the native language and then begin? Do you discuss it with the original author? Do you just start translating from word one?
C.M. Mayo:
I call this the "slice-the-sausage" process:
1. Read it through in Spanish
2. Make a xerox copy of the original
3. Cut it up into sections of approximately 3-5 sentences
4. Tape each section to a blank page
5. Using a pencil, slap down a first rough draft in the space below. I circle the words I don't know or am not sure about, and either look them up immediately or later.
6. Consult with my husband
7. Type it up
8. Go over again very carefully -- using the English/ Spanish dictionary, a Mexican Spanish dictionary, my Webster's, and also a Thesaurus , and again consulting my husband
9. Retype, polish, retype, polish
10. Consult author if possible
11. More retyping, more checking, more consulting, polishing etc --- in short, as much revision can go into a translation as into any literary work.
Jordan Stump:
By all means read the book through to the end first!!! Then start translating from word one: I bang out a very fast, very bad rough draft, and then I start revising, revising, and revising. I usually try to avoid looking at the original when I’m revising; I want the translation to be its own book, and to work as if it were written in English. At some point, though, I always have my wife Eleanor Hardin read the translation aloud to me as I follow along in French: that way I can find spots where my revisions might have brought me too far from the sense of the original, as well as a great many other minor and major sins. I always try to meet with the author as well, but again only after the translation is well on its way to completion. As I say, I want the book to work as though it were written in English, and in the end the only thing that counts is how well the text holds together in English. Once I read through a draft and find a consistent, convincing voice, with its own character, different from my own, then I begin to think the process is nearing and end.
Liz Henry:
I tend to make a very rough and strange draft first, with all the possible ways of reading each word or phrase jumbled together, so with as much ambiguity as possible. And then I try to make sense of it in English. Then I make several more passes through the poem and look up a lot of words and think about them, especially if the poem is very cryptic or uses a lot of regional words. I'll get most of a poem right, and then not be able to make a few lines of it come out to my satisfaction. I like to let the poem sit on the back burner for days, weeks, or months and then come back to it with a fresh perspective. Then sometimes everything falls into place!
I also ask other people what they think. Feedback, collaboration, or editing are all wonderful. I recently realized that I need to contact experts in a country's literature or on a particular poet, if I'm translating something by a person I don't know a lot about. If I can find an expert who will consent to at least skim through a poem, their feedback may be very helpful. And it might be something they're interested in too. In return, well, I have vowed to pass on this kind of help to anyone who asks me, as much as I can manage to help.
With some poems, especially 20th century ones that may not make linear sense, don't follow grammar, and aren't in sentences, I do try to read it all first and just let it percolate. It doesn't help to read it aloud in an early stage, because I don't know how to parse its meanings. So I try to approach the poem as a cloud of possibilities.
When I co-translated with Yehudit Oriah, she did a version in English first from her original Hebrew poems. I don't know any Hebrew. But we went over every word of the poems together and had long discussions of what she meant and of the ramifications of each word, going into the Kabbalah, and etymology, and how that word connected in three different ways with some other poem later in the book! It was very complicated and exciting. Sometimes my misunderstandings... happy catachresis... would inspire her and she'd actually rewrite her original poem a little bit to stick in my ideas. At first this horrified me and made me uncomfortable! I was only there to interpret her poem, not to change it! It was like blasphemy! I should be invisible, right? Then I got used to it, enjoyed it, became very comfortable with our collaboration, and later in talking to other translators at ALTA meetings I found that many other people had that same story to tell. Someone called it "translation's dirty little secret." Of course I do not believe it is dirty and it just goes to show up the pressures on us to believe that art is a solo enterprise. Purity and fidelity are way overrated.
Ewa Hryniewicz-Yarbrough:
I read it carefully and think about it a long time. I may discuss it with the author, but usually not right away.
Laura Wideburg:
I read the book or poem first and notice how I react to reading it. That is my first key in translating it, as I want to bring out some emotional response in the reader, get the reader hooked into the work. Otherwise, why bother buying and reading the book? With Rådström, I had to work to get him to trust me on some translations, but now he is confident in my ability to bring out his work. He just sent me Gästen, his latest work, which is about H.C. Anderson and the time he was the Houseguest from Hell at the Dickens place. Publishers take note!
If I get stuck, I can always e-mail or call and find out what he intended to convey and adjust my translation accordingly. This is what is helpful about translating a work when the author is still alive.
But I also think that translation can be done when the author is not so available to the translator (for instance, if the author has died, it’s kind of hard to communicate!) You just need to work harder at it.
Linda Coverdale:
Before I agree to translate a book, I read the whole thing. (Both times when I didn't do this, I regretted it.) I hardly ever contact the author unless I have questions that can't be answered any other way, and even then, I wait until I have a solid first draft. My authors have almost all been gracious, helpful, and reasonably prompt in their replies. Authors who speak English sometimes want to review the translations, which can be useful; it can also be a problem, as when you find out at the last minute that an author has done some ill-advised (and editor-approved!) rewriting stuffed with grammatical errors, logical impossibilities, and lumpy prose. I have met a number of my authors, which is always interesting, but novels are ferociously private objects, and they have a way of being absolutely independent of their creators, like adolescent space aliens.
Memoirs are a special case, and with Mortal Embrace: Living With AIDS, I worked closely with Emmanuel Dreuilhe because he spoke English and wanted to enjoy watching what he called his swan song take shape. Paul Steinberg, a concentration camp survivor, also knew that he was dying, in fact he was too ill to clarify by correspondence the many textual ambiguities in Speak You Also. Since he was not a professional writer, I really had to work with him on translating and lightly editing the text. When I had a first draft, I went to Paris to give it to him. He would rest all morning so that he could ask me questions and answer mine for an hour or so every afternoon. I can't tell you how glad I was that he had time to read and approve the entire translation, because he died before it was published. Some authors are special.
Dan:
Frequently when reading a translated work, I’ll come across words left in the native language – what is your typical reason for doing this?
C.M. Mayo:
It depends. Sometimes it's simply to give a flavor of the sound. Othertimes, because it's something well known even to many English speakers. For example, in my translation of Monica Lavin's short story "Day and Night," I left "La Llorona" in Spanish (though when it first appears I added, "the weeping ghost woman".)
Jordan Stump:
I, for one, try to avoid this at all costs. I only do this is the foreign word is one used in English as well. If not, if there is a French word that just doesn’t have an equivalent in our language, I circumlocute my way out of the problem.
Liz Henry:
I am lazy.
Just kidding.
A concept that doesn't translate well, a desire to make the reader work a little and make them be aware they are reading a work not set in their own country, not in their language. "Foreignizing." Or to be specifically of its own region or country. For example, even though when I translated "Florentino y el Diablo" I was pretty conservative about leaving words in Spanish, I left "pelo 'e guama" as just that in one place, and translated it in another place as something like "neat felt hat". It is a beaver hat worn by cowboys and it's fuzzy like the hairy pods of the guama tree. I tended to leave words that were more indian in their etymology in the original, to, as well as names of birds, food, or plants. I also know that I've had times where a Spanish poem has French or Latin in it, and I might leave it in French or Latin, but add a parenthetical phrasing of the meaning in English. If you go overboard with this you end up sounding like an episode of "Dora the Explorer", but on the other hand I don't expect a U.S. audience to know Latin or care to look it up.
I very much enjoy poetry that is written to be bilingual or multilingual. Again, it is about making the reader work, or making the reader experience something unknown to them, and over the course of a long poem, a story, or a novel, you can teach the reader a lot of words. I've read work from the early 20th century where they translated the word "burrito" as "a kind of sandwich", while of course now that would look ridiculous and we expect a U.S. audience to know what the heck a burrito is.
Ewa Hryniewicz-Yarbrough:
I try to avoid that. But here's an example of one time when I couldn't: in one of Philip Levine's poems that I just translated into Polish, the poet uses the word "soughing" and calls attention to the fact that it's an Old English word. Translating it into Old Polish would have made no sense, since Phil made it clear in the text of the poem that he
was using an Old English word.
Laura Wideburg:
I like to leave place names in the original language, for instance, I will translate Gamla Stan as Gamla Stan and not “the old medieval center of Stockholm.” I do less of this than other translators, though, since I assume that most people reading a book translated from the Swedish do not have a background in the Swedish language. Most folks tend to leave things in Spanish, for instance, to give a sense of things being originally from a Spanish-speaking context, and most English speakers in this country have some exposure to Spanish, even the ones who don’t know Spanish.
But I assume that no one has exposure to Swedish, although many Swedish-Americans do have exposure to the language and the country from traveling. But I really don’t assume that English speakers know any Swedish at all. And then what am I supposed to do with a word in Swedish, add footnotes and so on to explain? So I just find an English equivalent whenever possible, but without “Americanizing” the text by translating place names. That goes too far, even for me. I find the biggest problem in dialects, which cannot be translated. For instance, I would not want to translate the “Rinkeby” dialect of the Stockholm immigrant areas into Black English. That would not be appropriate. So that is more of a challenge, then, say, a single word I the standard language.
Linda Coverdale:
Not all words can be efficiently translated. A word is a small thing, but it can be powerful, like the "magic word" of a fairy tale, taut with compressed meaning that would dissipate if laboriously unpacked into an explanation. Try Weltschmerz in English. "World-pain." Pessimism? Romantic disillusionment? A melancholy weariness of the state of the world? Phooey. Weltschmerz! Some words are even explosive, in a way. When I translate a French Caribbean novel salted with Creole words by the author, I leave them in, just as I would use the traditional strong spices in preparing a Caribbean dish, because they belong there. In the original French text, these words are insurrectionists, insisting on the primacy of "native" tongues, the different Creoles that were patched together from various African languages under the domination of their colonial master, French. These Creole words must remain rebellious, even in translation, with something of the opacity of a bit of foreign matter, and I either place them in an enlightening context, or elucidate them elsewhere, in endnotes or a glossary.
Dan:
Do you also write your own material? If so, in which language?
C.M. Mayo:
I write in English and have published SKY OVER EL NIDO (short stories), MIRACULOUS AIR (a travel memoir of Mexico's Baja California), and numerous essays and poems in literary journals and anthologies. I am currently finishing an epic historical novel set in Mexico City, Washington and Paris in the mid-19th century. For more about my work, I invite you to visit www.cmmayo.com I have a Spanish language website at www.cmmayo.com/espanol.html which features Agustin Cadena's Spanish translation of my stories, El Cielo de El Nido (Planeta 2003)
Jordan Stump:
No: I sometimes write literary-critical articles for scholarly journals, and I’m now working on a book-length work of literary criticism, but apart from that, my writing is translating.
Liz Henry:
Yes, I'm a poet in English and also write articles, essays, reviews, a few stories and parodies, and I blog quite a lot.
Ewa Hryniewicz-Yarbrough:
I've written a few essays in English and a book review, as well as one short story that I haven't yet published. My husband keeps telling me it's good, though I haven't yet convinced myself.
Laura Wideburg:
I write my own material in both English and Swedish. For creative expression, I turn to English for the most part but I have also written in Swedish when my soul wanted to express itself in that language. I really couldn’t explain why I would choose Swedish those times I’ve written in Swedish. It’s a mystery to me. And I wouldn’t necessarily send those works out for publication. But ABBA write in Swedified English, so may be I should write in Americanified Swedish, why not? It may be just the wildest thing.
Linda Coverdale:
When I write stories, which I do for enjoyment and to help myself understand my life, I write in English, because that's the language I know best. Sometimes I dream in French, though. Once I dreamed in a mishmosh of languages, which startled me so much when I realized what was happening that I woke up. Go figure!
Dan:
Do you belong to any organizations of translators? If so, what benefits have you found by having joined up?
C.M. Mayo:
I've been a member of American Literary Translators Association www.literarytranslators.com since 1998 and have found it invaluable. Their annual conference is so much fun. Recently I joined PEN. www.pen.org
Click here for the PEN Director of Translators: http://www.pen.org/page.php/prmID/267
Jordan Stump:
I’m a member of ALTA, the American Literary Translator’s Association. I always have a good time at their annual convention; it’s fascinating to hear about the joys and travails of other translators. But that doesn’t necessarily translate into any practical benefit for me. Conrad said, “We live as we dream: alone.” I think that’s true of translating as well: however interesting another translator’s experiences might be to me personally, those experiences aren’t really able to teach me anything that I can use in my own experience (and this same rule holds true for studies of translation theory: interesting but not useful).
Liz Henry:
I'm a member of ALTA, the American Literary Translators Association. I went to their conference and had a great time. The other translators were extremely warm and welcoming. I've been going to their conferences for 4 years now. The panels and bilingual readings were great and I met a ton of interesting people. It was great to find out that a lot of them had also started translating sort of in isolation, for quirky reasons, because they loved doing it. And to know that other people got all passionate about it, and faced the same insoluble dilemmas of meaning and form, was very good. So, I had been feeling very isolated and it helped me a lot to join a public intellectual conversation about translation. I was led to a lot of great books from talking to people at ALTA, and started reading translation theory books.
I also met, by total random chance, a great translator in my hometown, Walter Martin, who owned Chimera Books in Palo Alto and then Redwood City. I came into his bookstore to ask him if I coudl run a translation reading series there. We talked about it, and he showed me his book that had just come out -- the complete poems of Baudelaire, from St. Martin's Press. He lent it to me and I was just amazed. So, we swapped poems and translations for years after that and became friends. Through him I was directed to local poets at Waverley Writers, the San Jose Art League, and other venues. I did hold some "open mic translation" events, which were very small but lovely. We all sat around reading our own translations and ones that we liked from books, and had people read in Welsh, Hungarian, Spanish, French, German, Russian, Serbian, Japanese, Esperanto... We had an amazing poet in our community, the late Anatole Lubovitch, who was multilingual and used to contribute a lot to our readings with his sense of humor and broad range of language. Anyway, my point is to say, if you don't have a community of translators near you, you can still try to make one happen.
I was a member of the NCTA, Northern California Translators Association, for a while. They have a good newsletter and I went to a couple of their workshops. Their focus is not on literary translation, though.
Around 2001 I joined LitTrans, an email list that has been useful and informative. I started an email list for ALTA a couple of years ago and now there is also a group blog, at http://literarytranslators.blogspot.com. After a discussion with Bev Traynor, who I met online through BlogHer, I also started a "Carnival of Blog Translation" which continues to happen monthly at various places around the blogosphere. The April one was here: http://caelestis.info/sauvagenoble/2006/04/april-carnival-of-blog-translation.html .
I would love to see online resources continue to grow. There are some great blogs out there! If you go to Technorati ( http://technorati.com, a search engine that only searches blogs) and search on "translation" or the equivalent in another language, you probably will find some interesting stuff. You can also use Google Translation Tools, so very imperfect yet still useful, to read blogs in languages you don't know. It might seem (or be) rude to leave a blog comment in the "wrong" language, but I am in favor of trying it anyway.
I would also like to encourage other translators to think about starting a blog. It is free, it is not difficult even if you're not a natural computer geek, and it contributes to the spread of information in a non-hierarchical way outside the factors which drive publishers and markets. I love books and have a lot of respect for publishers and editors, and yet blogs and the net offer another possibility of increasing communication.
Ewa Hryniewicz-Yarbrough:
No, I actually don’t.
Laura Wideburg:
I started a translation organization three years ago together with Paul Norlen. STiNA, the Association of Swedish Translators in North America. There is an equivalent group in Great Britain, SELTA. We are now 30 members strong, so translators from the Swedish certainly have felt the need for it. We help the beginning translator from Swedish overcome some of the hurdles in the profession as well as pass on news from the Swedish book world and the translation scene. I was already a member of the Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Studies, and many of STiNA’s members came from that association.
I also joined ALTA once my first translations were published, and am presently the Host Committee Chair for the up-and-coming 2006 ALTA conference in Bellevue, Washington. I found ALTA to be a fantastic place to meet other translators and editors of publications which are interested in translations. I met Dwayne from Absinthe at an ALTA conference. I am also a member of ATA and its local chapter NOTIS and editor of the NOTIS newsletter.
So I think I find myself working for the benefit of these societies more than the other way around, but I enjoy it am I am glad to be of service to other translators, especially literary translators, who have one of the most underappreciated jobs on the planet.
Linda Coverdale:
…
Dan:
Well, I’d like to thank you, both for taking the time to answer these questions, and also for making the efforts that have allowed me to read some fantastic works that I’d never have been able to had you not done so.
C.M. Mayo:
Gracias to you, Dan! I know your blog is a labor of love, too.
Jordan Stump:
And thank you for these excellent questions, and for the chance to answer them.
Liz Henry:
Thanks Dan! I'm really looking forward to reading what everyone else has to say! I've been a bit informal in my answers but I hope entertaining and useful to some of your readers.
Ewa Hryniewicz-Yarbrough:
Thank you, Dan. As you might imagine, I have heard great things about you and EWN, so I'm pleased to be included.
Laura Wideburg:
It’s been my pleasure, Dan, and best of luck with the website and all your other projects.
Linda Coverdale:
A college student in a French course I was teaching years ago once asked me—rather truculently—why he should care about learning a foreign language, when he found English perfectly satisfactory. I hopped through the usual hoops: travel abroad, widening horizons, exploring other cultures, blah blah. He wouldn't budge. Finally I told him to put a patch over one eye and see how long he lasted. You can see with one eye, after all, but depth perception is soooo much more convenient, and even fun. (I don't know if I won the debate, but at least that ended the argument.) I'd love to know every language in the world. I'd read myself to death! Thank god there are translations. If good books are good, then good translations of good books are good, too, and this is one case where you can't have too much of a good thing.
Merci beaucoup, Dan!
Posted by: [email protected] | May 25, 2006 at 08:45 PM