kick start

[Bernard]

Are we, in fact, all on the same page re: the value of translation? In addition to Words Without Borders I would like to recommend the three percent blog -- Univ. of Rochester's translation thing. Pretty sweet.

Thanks for repping for translation in 2011, JD.

[John]

3% is the BEST -- I subscribe to Open Letter, their new-books-in-translation series, it's amazing

[jm]

I'm gonna have to check that out - thanks for the tipoff, Bartles & Jaymes.

[elpollodiablo]

While I don't necessarily disagree with the points made re: literature in translation, I don't, myself, enjoy reading it to the extent that I enjoy reading literature written originally in English. The slipperiness of language, compounded by the added level of interpretation, makes me hyper aware at all times of the inscrutability of intentionality and distance between the author, translator and myself. I'd probably enjoy reading in translation much more if the translator's presence were more explicitly foregrounded, through reflective notes, glosses, etc. The only works I've read thoroughly and widely enough in translation that I feel I've come to some deeper understanding of what the influence of different translators actually means are a few Greek tragedies.

Regardless, I'm interested to check out these blogs. Literature in translation is just something I don't k ow much about.

[jm]

Yeah, I think we had a discussion in one of the threads about this, wherein I had said something about not particularly caring for things in translation, because I felt like there were certain things that I would never quite "get" about the text after it's been filtered by a translator.  And also that, in fact, a lot of translation, for a long time, had been done by people whose feet are more firmly planted in the world of language, rather than the world of writing - as such, they were able to accurately translate words without accurately translating meaning (or other prosey nuance).

But the flip side is that I totally love those Proust translations (which I believe B and hh have been reading), and they sort of go to show that a competent translator (especially those translators who are also writers) can work some real magic and make a text as rich and enjoyable in a second language as it was in its first.

[Bernard]

For a good inside peek at some scandalous shit (which is actually very interesting, if gossipy, and I hope will not put you dudes off reading works in translation), check out the post from Mima Simic at 3% today. Gnarly stuff!

John, have you read Matias Enard's 'Zone'? I just finished it, and am not sure what I think. It's the first long book I've read in a long time in a methodical way, committing to finish a good chunk of it every night. It turns out to have been pretty crucial for the way this particular book is written. I tend to tolerate long sentences pretty well, as a Bernhard fan, but in some parts of the middle of Zone I got a bit lost. The chapter breaks helped, as I would tend to read up to a break, since it was a convenient visual stopping point. By the end, though, I found the main character was slipping into my thoughts -- I had a sense of him as a person, so that's a mark in the book's favor. Don't want to say anything too spoilery although it's not really the kind of book you can spoil.

[John]

I have Zone but I haven't gotten to it yet. It takes me ages to get around to anything.

"All literature is translation anyway" is my short version of why lit-in-translation is important, but beyond dumb shit we can argue about, I just enjoy reading translated works as much/more than stuff in English; I don't want my experience of reading to be limited to a tiny, artificially-inflated-in-terms-of-its-importance fraction of what's being written. Also the fact that pretty much every literary breakthrough in the history of the written word comes on the heels of something getting translated weighs heavily for me, but Pollo & I covered this ground on these forums an age ago.

[John]

(In re: Simic, wow!! but that has more to do with bad editing than bad translation - I'd defend, for example, the choice of "too late" over "passé" - but I read that story and yeah, the gender of the narrator is a big deal, bad job from one of my fave publishing houses)

[elpollodiablo]

I have Zone but I haven't gotten to it yet. It takes me ages to get around to anything.

"All literature is translation anyway" is my short version of why lit-in-translation is important, but beyond dumb shit we can argue about, I just enjoy reading translated works as much/more than stuff in English; I don't want my experience of reading to be limited to a tiny, artificially-inflated-in-terms-of-its-importance fraction of what's being written. Also the fact that pretty much every literary breakthrough in the history of the written word comes on the heels of something getting translated weighs heavily for me, but Pollo & I covered this ground on these forums an age ago.

I respect your preference, and was just expressing mine. We could argue the theory all day, though I don't think that's necessary, as I essentially agree with your thesis there; I was more just relating my own prejudicial reading habits. I do think that the proposition that "every literary breakthrough, &c." is a little silly, considering that for the translations to have happened, *someone* was reading that shit in the original language and doing the work of the translation, obviously; I dunno that I can isolate the special specific value for "literature" in works being translated vs. someone learning Greek in order to read the great tragedians, for example. Also I don't quite understand how reading broadly "in translation" without accounting for, say, the skill of the translator and a million other factors makes for a reading experience that is any less limited than reading vernacular literature, beyond the specific topical nature of what's being read. There's also a whole host of political considerations to take into account--consider, for instance, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, who's gone back and forth between writing in English and Gikuyu several times over the course of his career, and translated all of his Gikuyu novels into English himself. He still considers translation, even his own, to be a kind of violence to his text. Now, I ain't wanna hash out intentionality, etc. (unless you really want to), and I'm absolutely not suggesting that translation is itself problematic, just that maybe it's a little more complicated than translation=awesome. Or that it certainly is for me, anyway.

I'm also trying to recall the last thing I read in translation, and I think it was some more Fagles. Maybe my beef with reading in translation stems partially from the fact that I haven't read anything else quite as awesome as say, the Theban Plays.

[elpollodiablo]

Also I should probably note that I've got a huuuuuuge complex about being monolingual so, y'know, totes mcgoats, as the kids say

[alex]

(In re: Simic, wow!! but that has more to do with bad editing than bad translation - I'd defend, for example, the choice of "too late" over "passé" - but I read that story and yeah, the gender of the narrator is a big deal, bad job from one of my fave publishing houses)

It's definitely a case of bad editing, yeah. But it might be related to issues of translation in that she might be right to doubt that these changes would have happened in the same way if the author had been a native speaker - it seems thinkable that the editor felt less bound to the text because it was "just a translation" and "not the original". But yeah, that's unnecessary speculation.

I'm always fascinated to hear Americans discuss about literary translations - it seems so much more of a big deal for you guys than for any of the Europeans that I know (though that could just be a function of the circles I run in, too). I've never heard a European state an aversion to reading works in translation - translation really only seems to become problematic if there's an obviously bad translation. A lot of people who are fluent in foreign languages certainly prefer to read the originals over translations if they can - but even that's probably at least partly simply because it's a good way to keep in practice. And I do know people who, for instance, read English perfectly well, but still occasionally read stuff translated from English, if only because it caught their eye in the bookshop and getting it in the original would have been more of a fuss. (That said, my mother totally blew my mind last year when she heard of a book originally written in Dutch that she thought might interest me. She decided to get it for me as a Christmas present, but figured it might be nicer to get it in Dutch rather than in translation. So she called up the Dutch embassy, asked them where she could acquire Dutch books in Austria, contacted a bookshop they told her about, and ordered the book for me in the original language. Now that was some dedication!) The flipside of translation not being a big deal is that, while few people have reservations about reading stuff in translation, few people (who aren't professional translators) get as passionate about translations as some of you, and some of those publishing houses specialising in translations, either.

[Greg Nog]

translation really only seems to become problematic if there's an obviously bad translation.

For the act of reading a translation to really grate on me, though, it's usually because I dislike something about the book I'm reading; in that case, there's no way to tell whether the book was originally that bad, or if the translator just failed to capture something about the original writer's aesthetic that I might have liked.  This was the thing that kept driving me completely batty about Blindness, which I hated; I didn't have that problem (like a terrible persistent unscratchable itch) when I read Perfume a couple months later, and loved it.

[ellaguru]

Yeah, I think it's a surprising thing to care about. But then, I think it's surprising that we have English departments and not Literature departments, so maybe I'm just easily surprised.

[Black Amnesia of Heaven]

I have a friend who has read Jose Saramango in Spanish and can confirm that in any language he is a source of terrible things.

Meanwhile, I just started reading the new translation of Swann's Way and now officially believe in the super-capacity for human understanding via good translation.

[elpollodiablo]

What do you mean?

[dieblucasdie]

The moral of this thread is that pollo needs to start pirating a whole lot of Rosetta Stone

[elpollodiablo]

[Black Amnesia of Heaven]

I think it's intellectually dishonest to explain things I wrote while day-drinking.

 

[Bernard]

Just got Kismet by Jakob Arjouni, from the Melville International Crime series. Excited! It's good to remember that not all literature in translation consists of hefty, serious, or experimental novels.

[elpollodiablo]

This is part of a departmental recommended reading list for fiction in translation. The bolded items are ones I'm already familiar with or would be interested in; is there anything else on this list you guys would strongly rep for?

Allende, Isabel. The House of the Spirits.
Babel, Issac. Collected Stories.
Biely, Andrey..  St. Petersburg.
Borges, Jorge Luis. A Personal Anthology.
Calvino, Italo.  If On a Winter’s Night A Traveler or The Nonexistent Knight and The Cloven Viscount  or Invisible Cities.
Camus, Albert. The Stranger.
Chamoiseau, Patrick.  Texaco.
Chekhov, Anton. The Essential Stories.
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor. Notes From the Underground  or Crime and Punishment.
Duras, Marguerite. The Lover.
Eco, Umberto.  The Island of the Day Before or The Name of the Rose.
Flaubert, Gustave.  Madame Bovary.
Fuentes, Carlos. Terra Nostra.
García Marquez, Gabriel.  One Hundred Years of Solitude or Love in the Time of Cholera or Autum of the Patriarch or Chronicle of a Death Foretold.
Gide, Andre.  The Counterfeiters.
Grass, Gunter.  The Tin Drum.
Kafka, Franz. The Complete Stories and Parables.
Kawabata, Yasunari. Snow Country or Palm in Hand Stories.
Kazantzakis, Nikos.  The Last Temptation of Christ.
Klima, Ivan.  Waiting for the Dark, Waiting for the Light.
Kundera, Milan.  The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Kurahashi, Yumiko. The Woman With the Flying Head.
Levi, Carlo. Christ Stopped at Eboli. 1963.
Levi, Primo.  The Periodic Table.
Mahfouz, Naguib.  Children of the Alley or Miramar
Mishima, Yukio.  The Temple of the Golden Pavilion.
Moravia, Alberto. The Conformist. 1951.
Musil, Robert.  The Man Without Qualities.
Saramago, Jose. Baltasar and Blimunda.
Satta, Salvatore.  The Day of Judgment.
Serrano, Marcela.  Antigua and My Life Before.
Singer, Isaac Bashevis. Collected Stories.
Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr.  One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch.
Stendhal.  The Charterhouse of Parma.
Tolstoy, Leo. Anna Karenina
Vargas Llosa, Mario. The War of the End of the World.

[John]

Loose takes on that list: Singer is one of the great short story writers of all time and an under-discussed writer these days in my opinion -- I think he may, a la Beckett, have translated a fair bit of his stuff himself though I'm not sure, I may just have gotten that idea at some point. Fuentes is a fucking badass if you haven't read him, I don't know the book you list but I'm prepared to pretty much blanket-recommend "read Fuentes," he's really something. Mishima's on my "for God's sake get to that, why don't you" list but there's so many books, you know? But I am thinking you might really have a good time with that one. Word is that Kazantzakis hasn't really aged well. Mahfouz I tried a few years back and didn't get anywhere but literature from that region is going to have a lot to say in the coming world-lit dialogue & he'll be a key figure in that, and given that I know you're politically engaged, you might lean thataway.

But Singer & Fuentes, those are musts in my opinion, and Mishima probably is too. And so for that matter is Duras but she's another on my "get to it, you're not getting any younger" list.

[elpollodiablo]

Word, thanks. Singer looks promising given the likely course of my thesis work, definitely. Fuentes maybe not so much but I'd be interested in reading a novel featuring Mexico City as a major character.

[alex]

I bought a book by singer in English translation once because I thought the same thing about him translating his own stuff, and only when I arrived home did I realise that, at least for that particular book, that wasn't true. As a result, it seemed kind of pointless to have purchased it in translation into a language that's not my native tongue, and as a result of that, I never actually did read it. Guess I should, though.

Calvino's my favourite on this list, but he's already bolded anyway. The Man Without Qualities should be bolded. I feel a bit hypocritical saying that, as it's not like I ever finished it myself, and actually found it a bit frustrating at times, but the 327 pages that I did read (yep, just checked where the bookmark was) were mostly very good and occasionally absolutely brilliant.

[YojimboMonkey]

The Island of the Day Before isn't my favorite Eco (Foucault's Pendulum is) but it's probably the best translation of a contemporary text that I've ever read, not that that's a very broad category.  I thought the prose was at least as interesting as anything else that was going on in the book, it's very rich.  I haven't read it in 15 years though, and what was "rich prose" to me then might be "florid verbiosity" now so YMMV as always.

[Good Intentions]

Not the fucking unbearable lightness of being. What, does the department want you all trying to pick up undergrad girls?

The Name of the Rose is a pretty spectacular novel -- for my money it's Eco's best work (sorry, Jim).