The following is the third E-Panel of 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.
Adam Sorkin - http://www.spuytenduyvil.net/authors/AdamJSorkin.htm
Christopher Bakken - http://webpub.alleg.edu/employee/c/cbakken/
Steven Stewart - http://www.amazon.com/Devoured-Moon-Rafael-Perez-Estrada/dp/1931236372/ref=sr_1_3/104-4129247-2361545?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1184768362&sr=1-3
Chris Andrews - http://www.fritss.unimelb.edu.au/research/publications/andrews.html
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)?
Adam Sorkin:
And thank you, Dan, for inviting me to take part. I translate from Romanian into English, mostly poetry. Through contacts and friends, I’ve also been asked to work on some poems from Flemish (Dutch), Georgian, and soon Serbian. But, not at all knowing these languages (in two cases, not even the alphabets), for me this is less translation than the application of whatever skill and craft I can bring to a “raw” poem so as to turn it into something more or less alive in English.
Christopher Bakken:
Modern Greek into English.
Sean Cotter:
All my translation is into English. I translate Romanian the most, and I have published work from Spanish and German, as well.
Steven Stewart:
I primarily translate from Spanish into English. I have done some English into Spanish, though as a non-native Spanish speaker I’m not confident doing that alone (I’m currently working on translating American poet Robert Duncan’s book Bending the Bow into Spanish along with Mexican poet Antonio Ochoa). I have also co-translated some Korean poetry into English along with the author (I don’t speak any Korean) and have done a few translations from Old English and French into English by working with original texts and existing translations.
Chris Andrews:
English is my native language. I learnt French at school and university, and through living in France for a while. Spanish I learnt at university and traveling a bit in Latin America.
Dan:
Which of the languages you translate from and to is your native language? How did you come about learning the other language(s)?
Adam Sorkin:
English. I’m not fluent in Romanian, especially in oral situations. I mostly learned it on the page, a kind of passive knowledge. I didn’t really study Romanian; my experience with Romania and Romanian goes back to when I was a Fulbright lecturer at the University of Bucharest in 1980-81, when it was difficult for people to talk to me unless they had some sort of official permission and reported the contact. This limited conversation mostly to markets and maneuvering on and off crowded buses and trams: for such things, one hardly needs sentences or verbs, and it’s possible to joke now that in that time of increasing scarcity for Romanians, for me it wasn’t meat or cheese or sugar but parts of speech that were in short supply. Since I mostly work with a co-translator (and when I don’t but instead muddle along with my limited knowledge and a dictionary, a native speaker friend always checks my work), this is less of an impediment than it might seem.
Christopher Bakken:
My native tongue is English, which I manage to speak proficiently on my best days. I learned my Greek while living in Greece, mainly on the soccer field and in tavernas. As a result, my spoken Greek (barbaric, coarse and utterly demotic) is quite a bit better than my “reading” Greek. I did endure some classroom study of the language during my Ph.D. program at University of Houston, which allowed me to deal with the grammatical architecture of Greek, finally, and to match what was happening in the mouth to what was happening on the page. Actually, the past four years of translation has improved my Greek substantially—it’s not the approved method for learning a language, certainly, but it does work.
Sean Cotter:
English is my native language. Spanish I learned in college and a summer school in Santander, Spain. German I learned also in a summer course, in Staufen, and I interned for a summer with a catalog company in Hamburg. I learned Romanian while a Peace Corps volunteer, for two years. I lived there for another year on a Fulbright.
Steven Stewart:
English is my native language. I learned Spanish while living in Spain for a couple of years in the early nineties. I also studies French in high school and Old English in college.
Chris Andrews:
English is my native language. I learnt French at school and university, and through living in France for a while. Spanish I learnt at university and traveling a bit in Latin America.
Dan:
Do you consider yourself bilingual?
Adam Sorkin:
As should be clear from what I’ve said, not at all. Working with a collaborator has it’s advantages – the translation team can be said to be bilingual. Usually, combining both of us, the translation pair can be said to be bilingual in common speech (from the demotic to the most formal) and in the registers of poetic language, and equally so in the source language and the target language.
Christopher Bakken:
My standards for being bi-lingual are rather strict and according to those standards I don’t make the cut. Greeks are very kind—any barbarian who makes a casual attempt to speak their language is rewarded with generosity and praise. Most of the Greeks I encounter when I’m in Greece (which is frequently), tell me my Greek is quite good. It gets better when I drink ouzo, no doubt.
In fact, I suspect my accent is good, I speak with a sense of humor, and I have a good command of the ways in which the culture is embodied in speech: through gestures, shrugs, expressions, the kinds of things that work outside fluency, yet involve actual communication in the Greek way of being. But fluent? No, I am not.
Sean Cotter:
No, I am still working on my English.
Steven Stewart:
No. To me, bilingual means that you are equally fluent in both languages. While I think my Spanish is very good, my Spanish will always be inferior to my English and will always be that of an outsider (which isn’t such a bad thing for a translator; it gives me perspective).
Chris Andrews:
No.
Dan:
How did you get into translating?
Adam Sorkin:
I think it’s the way many translators do – by happenstance, luck, fate, what you want to term it. In the spring of 1981, a young colleague in the English Department at the University of Bucharest, both a lecturer in English and a poet and novelist in her native tongue, asked me to look over her translations of a selection of poems from the well-known lyric poet from Timi?oara, Anghel Dumbraveanu. I did and immediately got hooked on translation, which I felt was a sort of return to a creative part of me that had somehow gotten lost in the process of becoming an academic. Once, if asked, I would have said I aspired to be a poet, not an academic.
Christopher Bakken:
A friend started translating my own poems into Greek and once I got involved in the translation process with her (the puzzling out of compacted images, the agony over certain elements of diction, the complete submersion in language that any poet is a sucker for) I couldn’t stop there.
Once she had completed bringing me into Greek, we began working together on translating some Greek poets who had not yet found a way into English. It was purely selfish for me at first: I loved excavating another poet’s language so methodically and found it helpful to my own sense of creative process—in short, it fueled my own poetry in exciting ways. But slowly we developed a sense of responsibility about what we were doing—the need to get it “right,” if you will—and rather than merely tinkering we started working in earnest, questioning ourselves and our methods rather unconsciously, but questioning them nevertheless, and laboring in the direction of translations we could put before readers who did not have any Greek without feeling like we were being dishonest to the original texts.
Sean Cotter:
I wanted to combine my interest in foreign languages and creative writing, so I went to graduate school for translation. The more I studied, the more I understood how bizarre stories of translation can be, and how much we need to develop ways of talking about translation that go beyond “spirit versus sense” etc. One example: Norman Manea’s novel, The Black Envelope, was written in the 1980s in Romania. Because the published version was brutally rewritten by the censors, Manea kept the original manuscript, only to lose it while immigrating to the United States in 1987. When the book was published in English, the translation was done, not from the original, but from a new version Manea based on the censored version. How is the translator to take the complicated history into account? Several paragraphs of the new Romanian version were not translated into English. The translation was published before the new Romanian version. When this new original was published in Bucharest, it included excerpts from reviews of the translation. This kind of story is more the norm than you might guess.
Steven Stewart:
Learning a new language turned me very naturally toward translation. Even when I was fairly new to the Spanish language, I would take poems and other bits of text in either English or Spanish and translate and backtranslate them. As I progressed I would translate Pablo Neruda and Antonio Machado poems and then find published translations of the poems with which I’d compare my versions. I found that I liked many of the choices I made, and I paid close attention to and learned from what the other translators did better. On a trip to Spain in 1999 I found a book by Spanish poet Rafael Pérez Estrada that I was really taken with; it was at that point that I decided to try to translate for publication (I later published a book of selected poems of Pérez Estrada).
Chris Andrews:
I began in the 90s by translating a couple of travel narratives for Lonely Planet, a company that publishes mainly guide books and is based in Melbourne. The books were Luis Sepúlveda's Full Circle (about South America) and Ana Briongos' Black on Black (about Iran). I would have liked to be translating literary fiction too, but it's extremely rare for an Australian publisher to commission the translation of a novel, so I wrote letters to British publishers and translated some stories, including an early story by Cortázar, "The Season of the Hand", which was published in the Melbourne magazine Meanjin with the permission of Cortázar's literary executor, the translator Aurora Bernárdez. In 2001 I visited some publishers in London, including Christopher Maclehose at Harvill, who had recently bought the rights to Roberto Bolaño's By Night in Chile. I had been reading Bolaño enthusiastically and expressed my interest, but they had a translator lined up for the book. When that translator wasn't able to do the job, they needed someone to step into the breach, so they asked me to do a sample, then the rest of the book. It was a lucky break. New Directions bought the translation of By Night in Chile, and that's how I came to work with them, translating books by Bolaño and by César Aira.
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?
Adam Sorkin:
This is not a question for me. I translate, definitely, and it’s not on the fly, but rather like one of those slow “fast trains” I take across the gorgeous mountain ranges and high plateau landscape from one northern city in Romania to another.
Christopher Bakken:
What a fascinating question. I’ll assume you are talking about material that I’m trying to translate. If I’m reading casually, there’s no doubt I’m more or less thinking in Greek, but when it comes to material for translation it is more complicated, especially since I work with a native speaker. Since I often read with a dictionary in hand, I think the answer would be that I’m reading in both languages at once.
Sean Cotter:
The question of “thinking in English” touches on a larger issue in Translation Studies. There is a school of cognitive science that studies what happens in the brains of people who read more than one language. Can a native speaker of English think in German the way a native speaker does? Maria Tymosczko has suggested that Translation Studies use cognitive science to address questions of accuracy in translation: a good translation would elicit the same cognitive experience as the original. This, for me, is not a very interesting approach to translation. Would we be interested to prove that a reader of an untranslated work is having exactly the same cognitive experience as the author? I think we are more interested in the fact that the same text can generate a variety of readings.
To answer your question: I do not translate on the fly when reading the original. The original is the original, the translation is something else. If I am reading because I am going to translate the work, I might take note of passages that will present particular trouble, and try out possible versions in my head.
Steven Stewart:
Mostly in the original language I suppose, though I’m regularly thinking in both Spanish and English, so I’m probably going in different directions at times. It’s not uncommon for me to be reading something in Spanish and not be aware that I’m reading in Spanish, if that makes sense.
Chris Andrews:
I don't think I translate on the fly very much when reading a text for the first time, although I do notice things that seem hard to translate. However, once you actually get to work, the problems that initially seemed hard can turn out to be tractable, while new problems emerge from what seemed perfectly straightforward passages in the source language.
Dan:
Do you prefer to reading one language over the other(s)?
Adam Sorkin:
I like reading other languages in the skilled English versions of my many translator colleagues. That’s in one sense what translation is all about, isn’t it? To transfer the reader’s experience, to transport the reader’s self, to another place, another time, another tongue, another sensibility. The translator has to make him or herself into another self, another voice, another psyche, sometimes another gender, as well, but the carrying across of translation is also from the other direction, from the reader’s experience through the work to another way of speaking, thinking, being.
Christopher Bakken:
Yes, I prefer reading in English. First, as a poet it is the language I’m married to (and I’m faithful to that beloved tongue). Second, reading in English is easy for me—I’ve been doing it since I was five years old. Reading in Greek is not usually a fluid experience, nor is it one I take great pleasure in (though reading Cavafy or Ritsos in Greek is truly sublime).
Sean Cotter:
No. There are authors I prefer over other authors in each language.
Steven Stewart:
It often depends on what I’m reading. I do tend to read more quickly in English and get more from it. Nevertheless, there are quite a few writers whose work I only enjoy reading in the original Spanish. Neruda and García Lorca, for example, simply don’t work for me in English, no matter how skillful their translators are.
Chris Andrews:
No; I don't have a preference; the pleasures are different. Reading in a second language can give you an exciting sense that you're setting off to explore a country or a continent that remains partly or largely mysterious, but when I think of all the things I would like to read in English, the various anglophone literatures can seem almost as unfamiliar. Like many translators, I like to keep some good literary prose in English handy when I'm revising a translation, to remind myself how it can sound and flow.
Dan:
Do you find it helps to know the author you are translating? Know their thought processes and beliefs?
Adam Sorkin:
Absolutely, except when the author claims to “know” English better than the native English translator. That has rarely happened to me, but I have colleagues who have found that, for instance, the false friends in going from a Romance language to English feel so much more comfortable to a Spanish or French or Italian or Portuguese speaker that the writer wants, no, insists, that the translator use them. I’ve had the problem with dictionary meanings that aren’t the right phrasing for the context. The solution I usually resort to is silent assent, later editing to undo the awkward or misleading phrase. If questioned by my fellow translator, I can always resort to, “Oh, the copy editor did that,…” although usually there is no such person.
Frequently, I work directly with the author, and I find that an author (once trust is established) is usually amenable to whatever is reasonable and makes the poem or prose piece more effective in English. I’ve not been silent when I think a change might help the original, and I’ve known writers to like the English variant better, and thus revise the original to include it. I sometimes think that the love of pragmatic detail in English-language tradition and the analytical necessities of English syntax lead to some of these shifts from expressive vagueness to evocative exactitude in both grammar and reference.
Christopher Bakken:
Yes, though it is certainly messy. Getting to know Titos Patrikios, the poet I’ve been translating these past five years has been once of the great experiences of my life—he’s become a close friend and also a mentor in many ways (he’s exactly twice my age). But that’s a personal response to your question, I realize.
Much of our manuscript was actually roughed out during one week in December on the island of Rhodes—along with the poet himself. Because his poetry is so rooted in the recent, violent history of Greece (one that is almost forgotten by Greeks, since it is so painful), having him there to provide context for the work was a great luxury and I’m sure it has helped us create translations that are more historically and politically accurate.
Really, more than anything, having him there, listening to his human voice, made a big difference—I wanted the sound of his voice to come across in English, the voice I hear in my head when I read his work in Greek. I’d like to think that vocal presence, that physical presence, affected the timbre of our translations.
Of course, it can be very detrimental to have the poet there too—some of the compromises and negotiations involved in the process of translation have to be made with a kind of ruthlessness that’s not always easy when the author is in the room. Also, we were in the process of selecting poems from his entire oeuvre to use in our volume and at times it felt a little like we were rejecting his progeny, at times even rejecting poems he felt very strongly about. That led to a few delicate moments.
Luckly, Titos yielded to us at every turn, often preferring our English versions to his originals.
Sean Cotter:
Yes, in two ways. It helps to know something about the author, because it gives you more possibilities for reading. For example, when I work on Nichita Danilov, I know that Eastern icons are important to him. This knowledge gives me a different possible way to read his portrait poems. A good translator has what a good literary critic has (according to T. S. Eliot): infinite knowledge.
The invaluable benefit of knowing the author, however, is cover. Translations are sometimes subject to unreasonable levels of suspicion. If I can say that the original author has seen and approved the translation, then readers are more open to engaging with the choices I have made. Emil Cioran once observed that the worst part about being an author in a second language is that you don’t have the right to play with the language; your aesthetic choices are read as mistakes. I think that translators’ choices are often read in the same way. If your translations carry the author’s imprimatur, then you are read with more indulgence.
To continue with this idea of mistakes for a moment: I keep a notebook of my translation mistakes, to use in my own work. My favorite line is one Liliana Ursu did not write, “She kept her poems in the hollow of her spine.” The actual line hides the poems in a spinet piano. The other possibility that comes from knowing the author is that he prefers the mistaken translation to the original line. This has happened to me, too. The poet changed the original to match the (formerly mistaken) translation. What then?
Steven Stewart:
Yes. Good translation is not just a matter of putting words from one language into another language. It is instead a multifaceted activity that entails a good deal of research. Nevertheless, with regard to translating poetry, I find that it’s at least as valuable to see or hear poets read their work aloud as it is to know what they think or believe. I like to get a sense of their speech rhythms and manners of expressing themselves.
Chris Andrews:
I have found it very helpful to be able to ask the authors questions by email, and they have all been generous in their replies, but I haven’t actually met them, with one exception. I think it's definitely a help to know the author's work beyond the book you're translating. There are some things that are very hard to understand in the context of a single book, for example the relation between autobiography and fiction in Cesar Aira’s work. In order to understand the game he’s playing, you need to see how his first person narrators give contradictory accounts of their lives in a range of novels.
Dan:
Looking back at the works you have translated – how did you determine they were works you wanted to translate?
Adam Sorkin:
From the start, I’ve listened to advice. I’ve become very close friends with a number of writers and have learned to trust their recommendations. From the start, also, I’ve asked quite a number of contacts, again and again, sort of taking my own little survey of literary reputation. I explore Romanian poetry by translating it. Sometimes I’ve just fallen into doing more than a half dozen or so poems, even a whole book manuscript. Other times I’ve as it were pursued a writer and his or her permission; one such instance was when I wanted to go far afield from poetry to translate the traditional folklore-like stories of the Romanian Roma writer Lumini a Mihai Cioaba. I am not methodical; if I were, I probably wouldn’t like myself.
Christopher Bakken:
They were poems I admired, poems I believed other people would find important, poems other people deserved to have the opportunity to read.
Sean Cotter:
Sometimes writers ask me to translate particular works or participate in translation projects, sometimes I am simply drawn to works I think are interesting and would interact in interesting ways with contemporary American literature. Once I picked an author simply because I thought he had a good sense of humor.
Steven Stewart:
I’ve always had the luxury of being able to translate works that I really like. I’ve translated a lot of aphorisms, prose poems, and microfictions—genres that I enjoy reading. I have to feel passionate about a work—it has to electrify me—for me to be able to put in the time and effort necessary to translate it. And, luckily, works that appeal to me in this way have tended to appeal to others as well (editors and readers).
Chris Andrews:
When you're translating prose fiction under contract, the publisher calls the shots. As a translator you can write enthusiastic reader's reports and translate sample chapters, but the publisher has to decide whether or not to make an offer for the rights. And that's as it should be; publishing requires a different set of skills from translating. Having said that, I've been very lucky in recent years: I've been able to work on books — by Roberto Bolaño and César Aira — that I wanted to translate before the opportunity arose.
Dan:
Are there some other authors that you would like to translate in the future?
Adam Sorkin:
Oh, I could go through a whole litany of names, but to almost no one here would they mean anything. There are a lot of new, young poets whose work I’d like to sample, at least by doing a few poems each, maybe more. Will I mention any? I tend to be a bit superstitious about listing future projects. I think it’s wise to not commit vague intentions to published promises. So I’ll just say that Romanian culture has been extraordinarily fortunate to be rich in excellent poets, and it continues to be so. In parallel, I myself feel fortunate to play a part in making these writers known to a wider audience through what, at least for the present, is the world’s imperial language, the broadest communication medium of exchange.
Christopher Bakken:
Yes, almost every Greek poet since WWII, since so few of them have been translated into English with any real depth. But we’ll probably start with Manolis Anagnostakis, Marigo Alexopoulou, and Nikos Karouzos.
Sean Cotter:
An infinite number.
Steven Stewart:
I would really like to translate the microfictions of Argentinean writer Marco Denevi. Apart from that, there is so much great work left to translate of the writers I’ve already been working on (including Carlos Edmundo de Ory, Eduardo Milán, and Rafael Pérez Estrada) that I would have a lifetime’s worth of work to do if I were to limit myself to that. Nevertheless, I’m always encountering new writers whose work I want to translate. In the future I expect I’ll do translations of writers I as of yet haven’t even heard of.
Chris Andrews:
There are, but it will depend on publishers, as I said. And there are books I would like to see translated, whoever gets to do it, like Rodrigo Rey Rosa's La Orilla africana (The African Shore). A fantasy: I would like to try translating Le cri du sablier by the French writer Chloe Delaume, to see if it's possible.
Dan:
Are you aware of journals out there like TWO LINES and Absinthe, that are only publishing translated work?
Adam Sorkin:
Well, yes, and I’ve published material in both. I’ve been on the Advisory Board of Absinthe from the start, not that I really do anything – just to support it. There’s the excellent Circumference, too (I suppose I’m being nice in mentioning them, for they’ve consistently rejected my submissions!), and a new online journal, Ezra, and the established online journal of international literature, Words Without Borders, as well.
Christopher Bakken:
Yes, and I admire both journals. I’m also aware of a forthcoming anthology of contemporary European poetry in translation that seems long overdue—it has been organized by the gentlemen who edit the journal PLEIADES and I think it will make quite a splash. Almost all American readers, myself included, are pretty ignorant of what is happening in European poetry now. Journals and anthologies like these help correct that a little.
Sean Cotter:
Words without Borders and Poetry International come to mind. The American Literary Translations Association keeps a list of journals interested in translation on its website (www.literarytranslators.org).
Steven Stewart:
Absinthe is one of my favorite journals. I admit that when I read any literary journal I look for and go to the translations first. Not merely, I believe, because I’m a translator myself, but because the works in translation tend to be richer and more interesting. There tends to be a sameness or monotony to much of the poetry and fiction currently being written in English, and it’s necessary to look outside to find something that sounds fresh and interesting.
Chris Andrews:
I know their websites, and they seem to be doing some very good prospecting.
Dan:
Can one make a living as a translator?
Adam Sorkin:
Some who get commissions or contracts from major publishers probably can. This would be for prose, not poetry. Likewise, if one specializes in medical or legal or technical translation, well, that’s another, more prosperous situation. But literary translation is usually unsung and unrewarded. I think most of us teach or do other things to pay the bills.
Christopher Bakken:
Yes, if you translate court documents, divorce settlements, property titles, or if you work for the UN. But literary translation…..um, nope.
Sean Cotter:
As a literary translator, it is very difficult. I do not know anyone making a living from translation who solely translates literature. A large number of the members of ALTA, for example, are professors.
Steven Stewart:
Perhaps some people do make their living as literary translators, but if they exist they are few and far between. I personally couldn’t make my living translating; I’m too committed to translating work that has little to no commercial viability. Nevertheless, whatever money I do get as a result of my translating (including recent grants from the NEA and the Idaho Humanities Council—thank you to both organizations!) is welcome and really helps.
Chris Andrews:
I haven't tried, but I think it would be difficult. It's not just a question of how much or little you get paid as a translator, but also of the insecurity of free-lance work. Work can dry up if the author with whom you are principally associated doesn't catch on, or if the publishing house changes direction and decides to commission fewer translations. I think it's harder to make a living from translating into English than from translating into many other languages, because English-language publishing is linguistically insular in general, and the translation of fiction is mainly undertaken by small literary publishing houses or imprints. At the commercial end of the market, there is, of course, some interest in finding another book like The Name of the Rose, but not much steady investment and involvement in translation, whereas in Europe and Latin America, for example, many mass-market titles in English are translated, as well as literary fiction.
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?
Adam Sorkin:
Since I work collaboratively, I’d never undertake this directly. I work with my co-translator’s first English draft, always going back to the original, then going over the English, then back and forth a lot. I’ve translated a book of short stories, as well as the book of Gypsy tales I mentioned, and a long essay on Bucharest in terms of its smells, and it’s slow going for me. I’m painstaking, nitpicking. I like the feel of words in my hand and on my tongue, their heft, their taste. I’m drawn more to poetry.
In a later stage I read the English only, by ear, for the rhythms, the flow. Then I go back to see if I’ve distorted anything. Maybe I have, but I like it too much. Sometimes, of course, one has to give up what one knows is good, because it isn’t in the original. Anyway, then I’m back to English-only again. Whether it’s prose or poetry, it has to read well in the target language or it ought not to have been done at all. That doesn’t necessarily mean fluently or unobtrusively, if the original was demanding or fractured or quirky or murky in its style. But there’s nothing wrong with fluency and seamlessness in style. I don’t think a translation has to sound like a translation in order to reveal its problematic status as a derivative literary work.
Christopher Bakken:
I’m only now starting to translate some prose, which goes much more quickly (ten “rough” pages a day if we’re really cooking). Poetry is slow—a few short poems in a morning, depending on whether I’m in Greece with my collaborator or whether we’re working by email, which slows things down considerably.
Back on Rhodes with Patrikios, we translated up to twenty short poems a day—fueled by immense amounts of Greek coffee and wine when the coffee ran out. That was an astonishing pace.
Beyond that, there’s always revision, revision, revision. The actual hourly wage cannot work out to much.
Sean Cotter:
It depends on the work. Imagine the difference between reading a Harry Potter and Finnegans Wake. There are also works written in a straight-forward language that reference fields of knowledge I know nothing about, such as Napoleonic military history, and these translations require a great deal of research. It could take a half-day just to use the right kind of cannon.
What you do during the day is one thing, and what you do at night is another. Frank Bidart tells a story about translating a short poem by Catullus, in which he decides not to use the word “crucifixion” because the Christian connotations are anachronistic. Some ten years later, if I’m remembering the details correctly, God appears to Bidart in a dream and instructs him to re-translate the poem, using “crucifixion.” So, how long did it take him to translate the poem?
Steven Stewart:
As a sometimes sporadic translator of poetry, I don’t really have an answer to this question. I’ve sometimes done upwards of 20 pages of poetry in a day; I’ve sometimes spent weeks working on a single page. A lot depends on how busy I am with work and my family responsibilities.
Chris Andrews:
I'm pretty slow: about three pages a day, so about half a year for a two-hundred page book, including revision.
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?
Adam Sorkin:
I think I’ve anticipated this in previous answers. I’m flexible, depending on the situation, so it’s all that you mention, including starting with my own plodding horse going directly ahead, plowing the row from word one on and on. Even when I know the author, I’ll often not have much of a discussion until after I’ve translated a first draft, or reworked on. And I make clear that I hope the author will chastise me, when needed. I’m the English expert, but that doesn’t prevent wrong choices, a bit of unfaithfulness for which I might need to get my hand figuratively slapped.
Christopher Bakken:
When I begin work on a new poem, I plow my way through the Greek first, trying to rough out my sense of what the poem is doing in the original. Then I turn to the rough English trot that my collaborator sends me and I compare my mangled version and her more or less literal trot. From that point on, most of my work is in English, with the Greek poem open on the desk, glaring at me the entire time, reminding me where I hope to go. My task is to make a poem in English—an English poem that still sings like the original. I often err on the side of singing. The my collaborator gets the text back and a kind of beautiful tug of war begins—she tugs back toward the “faithful” trot and the Greek original, while I tug toward lyric expression and music. What we end up with is the product of much compromise.
Sean Cotter:
It depends what the “work” is. If it’s a poem or short story, then I read the entire piece before beginning. To go back to an earlier question, one of the problems of working with an author you know is that the work might change during the course of collaboration: a collection of poems can expand, shrink, or be re-arranged. It may not be possible to read the entire collection before beginning. Translators often work under time constraints: editors need a work finished, or the translator only has the summer free to work. It is not uncommon to dive into the translation without reading the work.
Steven Stewart:
If I’m just translating individual poems or stories from a book, I’ll read the book and take notes of which pieces I want to come back to and translate. Then I’ll let some time pass before I translate. If I’m translating a whole book, I just dive in. I actually think it’s important for me to not be aware of or thinking about the end of a piece while I’m translating the beginning. While working in this way can create more revision work for me later on, it helps infuse the translation with a necessary tension that all good art depends upon.
Chris Andrews:
I read the whole text first, do a first draft, and generally collect my questions for the author, or for native-speaking informants, while revising the first draft.
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?
Adam Sorkin:
Sometimes the “thereness” of another place, another experience, has to be preserved, not necessarily as an exoticism. Nor when I can’t get the range of associations or a pun; translation always means interpretation, analysis, making choices. Usually when I leave a word in the original, it a cultural term. Two examples from Romanian: mamaliga (the boiled cornmeal that is a staple, poor-folks, peasant food) and ?uica (tswee’ka, Romania’s plum brandy, also called by the term derived from the Hungarian, palinca, especially when it’s Transylvanian and stronger – many of us might know this drink as slivovitz, under which name I can find it on the shelves of my local state liquor store here in Pennsylvania). To call the first corn meal mush, hominy, polenta, or what have you, is to falsify culture, place, time. And the Romanian word happens to be in the OED (I just checked it online), with an 1808 citation. The second, too, is there, first cited as of 1927 – although I do sometimes use “plum brandy” to gloss it quickly, when the reference appears frequently. As these examples suggest, English itself favors this kind of assimilation of words from other languages, and this isn’t news. Romanian, by the way, has been doing this a lot very recently, as well, often with tech terms, but also all the claptrap and advertising lingo of modernizing, and usually from American English (some examples: “computer,” “hamburger,” “email,” “trainer,” “weekend”…
Christopher Bakken:
In one Patrikios poem, a snippet of a famous song sung by resistance fighters was quoted in a poem—to translate that little fragment into English would have missed the point entirely. I wasn’t important to know what was being said in the song; the readers just needed to hear that bit of song on its own. That moment of haunting would have been destroyed if it had been crammed into English.
Sean Cotter:
There are many reasons this might be done, some aesthetic, some political, some practical. In my case the reasons have been practical: the word has no English equivalent. Foods often fall in this category. I was working on a poem to which the Balkan setting was central, and which ends with the presentation of a plate of mici. These are small, grilled garlic and meat concoctions that resemble sausages. You can see that that description would not make a pithy end line to the poem. Literally they would be “smalls,” which I like but could not use: “He received a plate of smalls.” I only see three solutions to this kind of translation problem: to keep the word in the original, to make up a new English word for the translation, or, the only honorable solution, to think more long term: introduce the food to English speaking-countries, cook it at home, and convince restaurants to serve it. Wait to see what they call it on their menus, and use that word in the translation. Alternatively, I suppose, one could wait for fast food to usurp the place of mici in Romania, and then translate the line, “He received a plate of chicken nuggets.”
Steven Stewart:
I try to avoid doing that. The only reason I would do it is if the original word could create some sort of necessary effect in the translation that I couldn’t achieve any other way. An example of a translation that uses words from the original language to a stunning effect is John Felstiner’s rendering of Paul Celan’s “Death Fugue” (http://mason.gmu.edu/~lsmithg/deathfugue.html).
Chris Andrews:
I try to avoid doing that, but occasionally it is the best solution, particularly if there is metalinguistic reference to a particular item in the source language . For example, in Bolaño's Amulet, the narrator, Auxilio Lacouture, who is from Uruguay, says how she hates the Mexican slang word chido (great). The Mexican-ness of the term is essential to the meaning of the passage, so the point wouldn't really come across if an English slang term was used instead. In similar contexts, Natasha Wimmer occasionally keeps a word in Spanish in her translation of The Savage Detectives, and I think it works really well.
Dan:
Do you also write your own material? If so, in which language?
Adam Sorkin:
I must claim that my translations are “my own” and form the body of my creative work insofar as I have any. I think translation is a co-creative, or re-creative, performance art, so this claim isn’t necessarily outlandish or egotistic.
Christopher Bakken:
Yes, I am a poet (and sometimes a prose writer) in English.
Sean Cotter:
Yes, I have published in English and Romanian.
Steven Stewart:
I do write my own poetry, primarily in English. I sometimes compose in Spanish, though I don’t consider anything of mine begun in Spanish finished until I’ve translated it into English.
Chris Andrews:
Yes: poems in English.
Dan:
Do you belong to any organizations of translators? If so, what benefits have you found by having joined up?
Adam Sorkin:
I’ve been a member of the American Literary Translators Association, or ALTA, since I first found the group and went to a meeting in 1995, at Austin, Texas, as it happened. I was amazed and gratified to find others doing the same thing I was, grappling with literature in interpreting it, reading the text closely, transposing it into the key of English, and facing similar problems, dilemmas, misunderstandings, maybe imposing parallel solutions, maybe despairing at analogous impossibilities, but finally (to shift metaphors again) somehow crossing the whole landscape of translation, including what delectable peaks there are and the more familiar sloughs of despond. I had viewed myself as working in isolation, and it wasn’t so – though it is always the writer’s isolation when one does one’s thing. The friendliest and most supportive group one could find, by the way, and the conferences are truly enjoyable, a gathering of old friends. Much less ego preening than at other conferences I’d been to in English. Perhaps this is because as translators we are more or less seldom the name on the cover, more likely a mere footer on the page.
Christopher Bakken:
No, but I’ve heard from Sean that the parties at ALTA aren’t to be missed, so I should probably join one of these years.
Sean Cotter:
I’ve been active in ALTA for ten years. The great benefit has been the people in the organization. They are creative, fun people who love to talk about other authors, not just themselves. I have also encountered lots of good literature for the first time at these conferences, and the depth of knowledge about the profession is very useful. It can also be a good place to find publishers.
Steven Stewart:
I belong to ALTA, the American Literary Translators Association. ALTA’s website provided me with very useful information when I was first trying to publish my translations. I’ve also gotten some ideas for places to submit my translations to from the ALTA website (I have a book of translations forthcoming with the University of Nebraska Press, and I got the initial idea of submitting to the press from there). The thing I like best about ALTA is the possibility for a community that it offers, especially through its annual conference. I’ve met a lot of great translators (and great people) through ALTA.
Chris Andrews:
No, I don't.
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.
Adam Sorkin:
Dan, this has been fun. I appreciate your putting us virtually together, and I’m happy to hear that my translations have at least one reader somewhere.
Christopher Bakken:
Parakalo (that’s “you’re welcome” in Greek).
Sean Cotter:
My pleasure. Thank you for reading literature in translation.
Steven Stewart:
Thank you. It’s been a pleasure.
Chris Andrews:
It's a pleasure. It's nice to hear from adventurous readers.
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Posted by: Mike Artherton | July 19, 2007 at 05:52 AM
As a translator, like many of those you have interviewed, I have chosen to translate works I love and think should appear in English.
However, the task of transforming a beloved manuscript into a published book is often
very difficult. Publishers of translations are hard to come by.
It would be interesting to know how other translators have dealt with less appealing aspect of the translation process.
Thanks,
Estelle Gilson
Posted by: Estelle Gilson | August 14, 2007 at 02:14 PM
We are looking for emerging writers who may want to write for our magazine Voices Today to be launched from Bali, Indonesia, very soon. Our present list of writers are from Greenpeace, India, Norway, USA, Indonesia, Australia and Jordan. Voices Today is a platform for voices that need to be heard - struggling writers/poets/painters/ rice farmers/prostitutes/intellectuals/bus drivers/etc. Please do contact us.Mark Ulyseas, Editor, Voices Today, Bali, Indonesia. [email protected]
Posted by: Mark Ulyseas | June 08, 2009 at 12:35 AM