State of translation

We exist in a constant state of translation. We just don’t like it. We don’t like to be reminded that we are translating this experience. Translators remind us of our relationship with language the way not everyone is comfortable with.

—Junot Díaz talks about the translations of his books in various languages (in The Buenos Aires Review)

César Aira's forward march

"I don't read very much contemporary literature. There is so much to read. In the past, I remember that one lady told Borges that she read him, that she admired him so, and Borges asked her: But how come? Are you already done with all the good writers? (laughs) I march to that drum."

—César Aira: My ideal is the fairy tale

Aira on past tense

In the May issue of the Colombian magazine El Malpensante, Guillermo Martínez questions your idea of “diminishing returns” and its influence on cultural criticism and narrative in Argentina.

[Translator's Note: Writing about the “myth of the avant garde” in literature, Aira has said, “To go just one step beyond, as Proust did, requires an unheard of effort and an entire life’s sacrifice. The law of diminishing returns is in effect, by which the innovator covers nearly the entire field in his initial gesture, and leaves those who come after him with an increasingly smaller space, where it is difficult to move forward.”]

I didn’t know Martínez was criticizing me again. The last time I saw him, I advised him not to write his stories and novels in the present tense. Maybe he took it hard. I think almost all the prose works being published by young writers in Argentina are written with the verbs in the present tense. I don’t know why these authors don’t realize how much that detracts from their writing. The story becomes flat, it loses perspective, it takes on an oral tone, but a cheap kind of oral tone, like a witness to a car accident being interviewed by a television reporter.

- from a Two-part interview with César Aira

What to translate

2. What do you think should be the most important criteria in choosing books to translate into English?

Maybe that it be astonishing and that nobody is or could be writing anything like it in English. Sorry, that makes two.

From a short interview with translator Katherine Silver at Publishing the World.

César Aira's favorite Brazilian writers

Machado de Assis, Euclides da Cunha, Lima Barreto, Mário de Andrade, Guimarães Rosa, Dalton Trevisan, Sérgio Sant’Anna, João Gilberto Noll.

-from an interview in O Globo (in Portuguese, but try Google Translate)

Translations are what they are

[Tyler Malone]: I recently attended the PEN World Voices Festival’s panel on translation, and I’m curious from your perspective, what goes into a good translation? It’s a precarious thing. There’s so many things a translator must attempt to carry across. So what are the criteria you use to judge a translation?

[Chad Post]: This is such a tough thing to unpack. And every attempt to explain it just leads to more and more and more questions and comments. Keeping it simple, yet enigmatic, a translation should capture the special something, the overarching “style” of an author’s prose and structure, that makes an individual book unique.

TM: Part of the panel discussion focused on whether the general public, or at least general readers, wanted to know that something was translated. This seems very important to the Open Letter project. One of the panelists suggested it was better not to highlight the translator’s name, and especially not to put it on the cover, because readers generally want to believe that what they are getting is straight from the author, not something filtered through another person. I have a hard time figuring out where I stand on this line of reasoning. I think the speaker may unfortunately be correct, in a way, that readers (and society in general) are obsessed with the idea of one man/woman, one genius, behind a text, and so from a financial standpoint, the less you highlight that “these aren’t the actual words of the writer you think you’re reading,” the more people might be apt to read. But at the same time, this sort of taboo about translation is puzzling and frustrating. Can’t we just appreciate literature in translation as literature in translation and love it in spite of whatever complications the whole practice brings to the table? What are your thoughts?

CP: We don’t live in 19th Century Germany. Let’s try applying this logic to another art form for a second: “I don’t like movies that include the name of the screenwriter and director on the DVD box. Viewers want to believe that this piece of art came straight from the actors.” That’s a dumb example, but I think it’s a dumb argument. We live in an era of overwhelming amounts of information. In most every situation we want to know more, or at least know where we can go to get to know more. In what other situation do we like having some piece of information–one that can add to, or inform, or not, our experience–withheld from us in hopes that a corporation can increase its profits? Not to make this political or anti-corporate, but I feel like that argument is based in the long-standing belief of corporate publishers that their readers are retarded. And that’s insulting. The whole argument is insulting. Sorry, but fuck that.

From an interview with Open Letter publisher Chad Post at PMc Magazine (via Three Percent). The panel referred to here, the one organized during the PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature, is the one we linked to before (Youtube). I'm also dismayed by the panelist's (Lorin Stein) suggestion not to put the translator's name on the book cover.

A fascinating singularity

WH Staying on the topic of Bolaño for a little longer, what do you make of his extraordinary recent fame in the Anglophone world? I don’t think that when you started working with his writing this would have been the case. Has it got something to do with his sudden death? Or was it inevitable that he would receive the recognition that he has?

CA Back when I started in 2002, Bolaño was already very well known in the Spanish-speaking world because he had won the Rómulo Gallegos Prize for The Savage Detectives. But that didn’t mean he was bound to be well known eventually in other languages. The Germans and the Italians had picked up on him fairly quickly, and, interestingly, the first book they both translated was Nazi Literature in the Americas. When the first couple of English translations, By Night in Chile and Distant Star, came out in England, they weren’t published in America straight away. Those books didn’t go very well at all—they didn’t sell very well—although they got good reviews; there wasn’t much interest. It was only a little bit later with the first book of stories, Last Evenings on Earth, which had been commissioned by Harvill in the UK, but was published first in America by New Directions, that there was a bit of buzz around. Only then did I start to think that the others would be translated, because with the first two I really wasn’t sure there was enough interest.

His premature death also may have had something to do with the excitement around his work, but not that much. He’s a writer who invented a commanding, distinctive style, in the largest sense of the word—a way of organizing experience as well as words—which is a pretty rare achievement. That spoke to many readers, for a number of reasons—I’ve heard, for example, that he is an antidote to the North American model of the professional novelist groomed by creative writing schools. There might be something symptomatic about his success, but I think that the main reason for it is that he is a fascinating singularity.

Chris Andrews interviewed in BOMB.

Interview with Ōe Kenzaburo

With regard to your relationship with [Kazuo] Watanabe, what do you consider to be the “task of the translator”, as stated by Walter Benjamin? The German term that Benjamin uses is Aufgabe, which contains both the idea of giving (geben) and abandoning or renouncing (aufgeben)…

K.O.: I am unable to philologically examine what Benjamin means by the expression “the task of the translator”. But I can tell you about my “method” for reading poems translated into Japanese.

When I read T.S. Eliot’s poetry, for example, I set out the original text before me, alongside the translations by Junzaburo Nishiwaki and Motohiro Fukase. I read these three versions and learn them by heart. In doing so, I feel that what the translations give (geben) as well as renounce (aufgeben) helps me to apprehend the original poem.

--from an interview with Ōe Kenzaburo in IF VERSO where he talked about French literature and translation, with more interview links at the bottom. The French-based site IF VERSO is well worth the look too.

Poet-translator, translator-poet

Following on the heels of Sean O'Brien's lecture on the poet as translator, here are two related links:

Teaching in Translation: Poet as Translator by Malena Morling, Words Without Borders

"Watchword" Review and Interview with Forrest Gander by Grant Barber, Three Percent

Literature of the abyss

"I had some problems with Kafka, whom I consider the greatest writer of the twentieth century."

- from an excerpt of an interview with Roberto Bolaño.

Photo story

And yet there are certain features of the photo (something about the arrangement of the objects, the petrified, musical rhododendron, two of its leaves invading the space of the ficus like clouds within a cloud, the grass growing in the planter, which looks more like fire than grass, the everlasting leaning whimsically to the left, the glasses in the center of the table, well away from the edges, except for Kristeva’s, as if the other members of the group were worried they might fall) that suggest a more complex and subtle web of relations among these men and women.

- from "Labyrinth", a story by Roberto Bolaño, translated by Chris Andrews, in The New Yorker. The story was accompanied by an interview with Barbara Epler, New Directions publisher, in the magazine's blog.

See also: interview with Natasha Wimmer about her translation of the Bolaño novel The Third Reich.

Borges!!!

Three conversations with Borges by the Argentine poet Osvaldo Ferrari, translated by Norman Thomas di Giovanni:

On Argentine Identity
The Inveterate Traveller
On Order and Time

The Maker (1960)

Foreword: To Leopoldo Lugones
The Maker
Dreamtigers
Conversation About a Conversation
Toenails
Shrouded Mirrors
Argumentum Ornithologicum
The Captive
The Effigy
Delia Elena San Marco
A Conversation Between Dead Men
The Plot
A Problem
A Yellow Rose
The Witness
Martín Fierro
Transformations
A Parable of Cervantes and Don Quixote
Paradise, XXXI: 108
Parable of the Place
Everything and Nothing
Ragnarök
Hell, I: 32
Borges and Myself

Museum [?]

Of Exactitude in Science
The Dagger
Afterword

Castellanos Moya's five reasons to write

LP: Do you think literature can help deal with trauma?

HCM: Most of the indigenous victims and survivors of massacres are poor and illiterate. Literature is a privilege they don’t have access to. There is no way literature can help them to deal with their traumas. What they need is psychological and economic support, and mainly justice.

...

LP: What compels you to write?

HCM: I started to write in a country where writing didn’t give you any status or money. By that time, in that place, to be a writer was synonymous with being subversive. I guess since the beginning, I have felt the urge to write because of a necessity of expression, because of the perception that I don’t fit in any place, because I know that I’m survivor, because I want to get rid of what infects me, and for a sense of revenge.

– An interview with Horacio Castellanos Moya at Latineos,
via Now That it's Now, the New Directions blog.

BBC World Book Club

http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/wbc/all

The site contains lengthy interviews with authors and their most famous novels.

The podcasts can be downloaded.

Featured writers and books:

• David Grossman - To the End of the Land
• Hisham Matar - In the Country of Men
• Colm Toibin - Brooklyn
• Henning Mankell - Faceless Killers
• Val McDermid - A Place of Execution
• Boris Akunin - The Winter Queen
• Jo Nesbo - The Redbreast
• Javier Cercas - Soldiers of Salamis
• PJ O'Rourke - Eat the Rich
• Bernhard Schlink - The Reader
• Damon Galgut - The Good Doctor
• Kamila Shamsie - Burnt Shadows
• Barbara Kingsolver - The Poisonwood Bible
• Carlos Ruiz Zafon - The Shadow of the Wind
• David Mitchell - Cloud Atlas
• Richard Ford - The Sportswriter
• JMG LeClezio - Desert
• John Boyne - The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas
• Andrea Levy - Small Island
• Kiran Desai - The Inheritance of Loss
• James Ellroy - American Tabloid
• Alaa Al-Aswaany - The Yacoubian Building
• Gunter Grass - The Tin Drum
• Lionel Shriver - We Need to Talk About Kevin
• Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie - Half of a Yellow Sun
• Nawal El Sadaawi - Woman at Point Zero
• Kate Grenville - The Secret River
• Moshin Hamid - The Reluctant Fundamentalist
• David Guterson - Snow Falling on Cedars
• Toni Morrison - Beloved
• Derek Walcott - Omeros
• Alice Walker - The Color Purple
• Annie Proulx - The Shipping News; Brokeback Mountain
• David Lodge - Nice Work
• Chinua Achebe - Things Fall Apart
• John Irving - The World According to Garp
• Khaled Hosseini - The Kite Runner
• Sebastian Faulks - Birdsong
• Jane Smiley - A Thousand Acres
• Patricia Cornwell - Post Mortem
• Edna O'Brien - The Country Girls
• Umberto Eco - The Name of the Rose
• Sara Paretsky - Indemnity Only
• Michael Ondaatje - The English Patient
• Armistead Maupin - Tales of the City

BBC's "Read My Country"

At the BBC site, a radio series where writers are asked for book recommendations from their own countries.

"If you had to recommend three books or poems that would deepen a visitor's understanding of your country and culture, what would they be?"

The Strand spoke to some select writers to get recommendations from their home countries.

Two of the writers interviewed were Miguel Syjuco from the Philippines and Santiago Roncagliolo from Peru.

Miguel Syjuco – Philippines

Miguel Syjuco is a Filipino writer now based in Canada. His novel Ilustrado is the 2008 winner of the Man Asian Literary Award. His three choices for the Philippines are:

1. Noli Me Tangere - José Rizal
2. America Is in the Heart - Carlos Bulosan
3. Dogeaters - Jessica Hagedorn

I will also vouch for the first two titles in Syjuco's list. They were two of the best Filipino literary classics I've read. As for the Dogeaters, I have a copy and I hope to read it soon.

Santiago Roncagliolo – Peru 

Santiago Roncagliolo is the author of Abril rojo (Red April). You can listen to his interview at this link. His three choices for Peru are:

1. Un Mundo para Julius (A World For Julius) - Alfredo Bryce Echenique
2. Travesuras de la nina mala (The Bad Girl) - Mario Vargas Llosa
3. Los ríos profundos (Deep Rivers) - José Maria Arguedas

The other interviewed writers were from Uzbekistan, Nigeria, Israel, Iraq, Kenya, China, Turkey, Norway, India, Australia, Ireland, and Jamaica.

You can listen to these writers talk about their choices and read from their selections at this link.

English talks

The BBC archive of interviews with modern British novelists:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/writers/

"I don’t look so much for feelings and emotions, as for alternative ways of thinking." - short interview with César Aira

César Aira's interview with The Victorian Writer magazine was a short one, three questions, but packed with bizarre opinions, like "art has no effect on a person’s life, nor on society, nor on history."

The interview was reprinted here: http://wheelercentre.com/dailies/post/efdeb45918bb/

 

Three of Aira's translators interviewed

Listen to Chris Andrews, Katherine Silver, and Rosalie Knecht's hour-long interview by Colin Marshall at The Marketplace of Ideas. (SPOILER ALERT: In the third segment of the interview, Rosalie Knecht described the ending of How I Became a Nun.)

http://colinmarshall.libsyn.com/who-is-c-sar-aira-translators-chris-andrews-katherine-silver-and-rosalie-knecht



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