Category Archives: Spring 2020 Issue XV: Interviewing Translators

Spring 2020 Issue XV: Interviewing Translators, Uncategorized

The Rich Layers of Arabic: Megan Barstow interviews Mohamed Hassan

Mohamed El-Sawi Hassan is a Senior Lecturer in the Dept. of Asian Languages and Civilizations at Amherst College and Director of the Five College Arabic Language Initiative.  His field of research is Applied Linguistics and Translation Studies. He is a contributing editor of Metamorphoses, the Journal of the Five college Faculty Seminar on Literary Translation. His recent translations were published in The Common literary journal in Amherst, and in Wasla magazine in Egypt. He is the co-translator of African Folklore: An Encyclopedia into Arabic. His forthcoming book chapter is “Reshaping Social Practice in Post-Arab Spring in Egypt: Expression of Identity and Affiliation in New Media,” in Cultural Production and Social Movements After the Arab Spring: Nationalism, Politics and Transnational Identity, published by I. B. Tauris.

How did you come to do translations?

My field of study and research is applied linguistics. I studied both Arabic language and English language and it was sort of natural to me to get interested in how translation from one language to the other would work, how to analyze the structure and how to be faithful to the source and target language in a way that would apply to linguistics in general.

What are some of your recent translation projects or your favorite projects?

I’m thinking of a translation project that I was part of. It was an African folklore encyclopedia and it was a team of translators who translated this from English into Arabic for the Arabic reader. The encyclopedia was published in Egypt and it was an interesting journey to get to know about African folklore in the first place, and get to transfer this to the Arabic reader in reader-friendly Arabic language. The cultural parts were very rich and even the English original had a lot of transliterated words from the original African sources so it was particularly interesting to translate. 

Another work was a short story I translated for “The Common,” an open access online journal    based at Amherst College (https://www.thecommononline.org/about/). The interesting part about this translation from Arabic into English was that the Arabic had many rich layers of the colloquial and the standard and it was really a challenge to reflect this kind of discrepancy and functionality when translating this into English.

Given that Arabic has these two registers– the colloquial and the formal–how did you attempt to represent that in English?

Well, the functions between the colloquial and the standard in Arabic are different than those that exist in English. This is one of the areas that unfortunately gets somehow lost in the translation because the effect that this code switching has on the reader has to be transferred into the English somehow, and the language levels are not readily transferable. So it’s a challenge and there is a loss in translation in this area, I would assume. So the writer in this short story specifically made use of these colloquial phrases, colloquial allusions, references, et cetera, as opposed to using the standard Arabic, and I did my best. I’m hoping that the general meaning was communicated but there will still be some challenges. 

How do you decide to take on a translation project?

I usually am interested in translations that would be challenging or that would be interesting to the reader: either the Arabic reader or the English reader. There is also the practical consideration of time, whether I would have the time to finish that [project] or not. I also care about acknowledging the work of the translator: if the book would be published, if the translator’s work would be acknowledged as part of the process. So these are things I care for and I decide based on these reasons. 

In your translation projects, have you ever gotten the chance to actually work with the original author through your translation?

Yes. Generally I would have an idea about the author: if the author is around, I would be in touch with them and get a general sense of the work – but I wouldn’t go into showering them with questions or asking them what they mean. I do my homework in researching the translation and I probably send them the final draft to get their sense about how it generally looks. Generally, yes, that’s a privilege for the translator if the author is willing to be part of the process, but to a certain extent.

That makes sense. Looking more specifically at Arabic and the uniqueness of translating between Arabic and English, what words do you leave in the original language when you’re translating and how do you make those decisions?

I do not leave  words out  because there are certain techniques to handle words. So by leaving words out, do you mean  not translating something?

I guess. For instance, last semester I read “Men in the Sun” by Ghassan Khanafani. One character is called “Abu Khuzairan”. In Arabic, this has the meaning of “Father Khuzairan”, because “abu” means “father”. But in the English translation, the name is simply written as “Abu Khuzairan”. For an English reader who doesn’t have a sense of Arabic, they would just assume that “Abu” is the first name. But in knowing Arabic, it’s more than that. “Abu” is a title as well. I was wondering if you’ve come across situations with similar challenges and you transliterated a name but it lost some of its meaning as a result.

Yes, that happens almost all of the time with references and differentialities in general. There is the  “Stealth Gloss” technique to use to help the reader understand what this word would mean as part of the target language. Footnotes are the last resort because they interrupt the flow of reading for the reader. It’s not the preferred technique but sometimes you have to explain the specifics of a time period or what a proper name refers to in particular. Incorporating what you want to say in the text by explanations, that’s also a technique. But you don’t generally leave out something from the original text in the translation. There is more than one way to handle this type of difficulty. But yeah, definitely, some things if they have been transliterated as they are, they wouldn’t mean anything to the reader in the target language.

Leading on from that, what topics or words have you found to be most difficult to translate between English and Arabic?

Generally poetry would be the most challenging because it has more than one level of meaning. It has logical levels, syntactic, semantic and pragmatic, so it’s generally poetry. Also religious translations would be challenging. Not specific words, but generally culturally related words would be the hardest to transfer, because the concept itself might not be shared between the target language and the source language. So you’re not just transferring the word, you’re also trying to transfer the entire concept behind this word.

In translating from Arabic to English, to what extent can you domesticate the translation? Being that the culture is so foreign to many English readers, especially in America.

I do my best to domesticate the target language to the reader, because they wouldn’t be familiar with the source. That is my concept of translation.  I confer with bilingual editors and sometimes monolingual editors or readers or sometimes monolingual friends to just go over the text and see how it makes sense to them, or not. So I make an effort to make it domesticated to the reader, unless there is a compelling reason to glaringly foreignize some aspect of it, which could be the case in translating jokes or slogans. The punchline, the rhyme, etc, these are elements that sometimes you need to highlight as foreign, but domestication would be the end goal.

At least in my view, there’s not been the same volume of Arabic translations into English in recent times as with other languages, especially western European languages, that have a lot more flow across their languages. Do you think this impacts the number of translations done between Arabic and English? Are there any genres or authors/writers whose voices are not being heard beyond/outside of Arabic audiences?

I would say definitely, yes. I was just reading a statement that says that roughly 3% of books published in the United States every year are works of translation, and of that 3%, only 4.3% are translations from Arabic.  [Interviewer’s Note: This means that 0.13 % of all books published in the United States each year are translations from Arabic. Arabic ranks as the 5th most spoken language in the world, with 422 million speakers. Comparatively, French ranks 10th with only 229 million speakers. However, French is the most popular source language for translated English books published in the United States, by a wide margin. Arabic lands as 10th in that ranking.]

Wow.

So it’s a very small percentage. 4.3 percent OF 3 percent. And that gives you an idea about how little this is. There is a huge cultural production in the Arab countries, among Arabic speakers (over 300 million people and 22 countries) and very little gets translated. There are reasons for that: some would be just that they might  not sell; another is  the vision of what to translate, and then there’s  the focus on some stereotypes that are related to the Middle East and the thought of not going beyond those stereotypes. So these might be reasons for the limited number of translations we see of works from Arabic into English.

So you’re speaking of the consumer market, as in would the works sell?

Yeah, that’s one reason. I’m not sure if it’s the market or the publishers or the readers who decide which Middle East they want to present through the translation and which voices they want to reflect or transfer.

An interesting phenomenon that I’ve seen is that a lot of the works that we ARE seeing in English translated from Arabic relate to war and crisis. It’s an interesting pattern, and I wonder: Is the vast majority of works produced in the Arab world on that topic, or is that just one genre that we see especially translated, whereas other, happier topics might be lost in translation?

That’s exactly the fact. What you’re saying is, yes, it does not represent the proportion or percentage of what’s being published in the Arabic language. What we see translated in English is kind of misrepresenting the actual proportion of, the landscape of, writings in Arabic. So, you get an inaccurate idea about the genre or even the topic of what’s being translated.

Thank you so much for your time. 

 Megan Barstow is a current student at Smith College in the class of 2020. She is graduating with a Bachelor of Science in Engineering and a Concentration in Translation Studies, in which she is focused on translating between Arabic and English. She is based in Haverhill, MA.

 

 

 

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Spring 2020 Issue XV: Interviewing Translators

Conveying the cultural nuances of Japanese: Naila Arksy in conversation with Kim Kono

Kimberly Kono is a Professor in the East Asian languages and literatures department. She teaches courses on modern Japanese language, literature and culture.  Her book Romance, Family and Nation in Japanese Colonial Literature  examines the tropes of romance, family and marriage in Japanese literature produced in colonial Taiwan, Korea and Manchuria during the 1930s and 1940s. She translates short stories that focus on Japan’s colonial period.

 

What made you decide to translate?

There’s several reasons. The first piece I translated was a short story from Japanese to English. And it is a piece that was written during the Colonial period. There weren’t at the time many translations of fiction (from that period). I felt that if more people had access to it, there would be more people to research it, and more people would get a chance to read the work. So the main reason I started to translate was to increase accessibility (to these texts). I think that oftentimes certain canonical writers get translated, and, sort of minor, lesser known writers, if they don’t get translated people don’t really know about them. So that was another way to get some marginalized voices more attention and more accessibility.

Do you focus on a specific genre?

Most of my translations have been short fiction, although I’ve also done professional translation. Between undergraduate and graduate school, I worked in business translation, getting correspondence in Japanese and then translating it for English speaking companies that my company worked with. But that wasn’t as challenging and exciting as literary translation.

It is my impression that some literary translators use short stories as a jumping off point before getting into more lengthy works. Do you agree?

Well, sometimes literary translation won’t necessarily pay the bills, so you have to do other kinds of translation.

Why specifically short stories?

For a long time in academia, translation didn’t count in the path toward tenure. It takes a lot of commitment and a stable academic status and time to commit to translating a novel. So, short fiction was more feasible in my situation. I think poetry is beautiful, but very hard to translate, and I felt that short fiction was in my wheelhouse.

What are some concerns about getting a translation published?

Especially with longer works, you have to be committed to making that work accessible. [Translators of longer pieces] are people who usually have worked with publishers and have translations published regularly. So, people who translate, for example, Murakami Haruki’s work, they have a relationship with the author and the publisher, and the publisher is confident enough that those works will be popular, and so on. There are different concerns for translators. On the one hand, you want to translate works you think are important and useful or relevant for others. But I think publishers are also going to think about whether this translation is going to sell. And those two aren’t always the same book. (laughs)

Do you tend to tailor your translation to specific audiences? How so?

Hayashi Fumiko (1903-1951)

That’s a good question. I try to be as faithful to the original as possible, but when you ask me this question, I think of Japanese literature from the postwar period. Many of those translators did tailor them to an American audience that had most recently seen Japan as an enemy. And so, there was a short story by a woman writer that mentions the war and the female character’s husband wasn’t back from Siberia. That story in the original Japanese has a certain meaning or significance for the Japanese, but for American readers, that story might evoke Japan as an enemy, so they may not have wanted to read it. And so famous translators of the time erased certain references like that. The story I’m talking about is by Hayashi Fumiko, and there are two translations of it, one being more recent. And the more recent translation includes everything, right? The postwar translator modified the ending. The endings are so different… the closing image in the original is of this woman tea-seller walking into a room with other women sewing and their needles are glistening. I think that’s emphasizing the work of Japanese women in the postwar period – it’s active and shiny. There’s hope in that image. And the post-war translator completely erased that image. He said something like “the woman was welcomed into the house with a feeling of warmth.” And it’s like, where did the needles go?

Sometimes I feel like if you don’t have both a translator from the source language’s country and the target language’s country, then maybe they don’t understand how readers of either country interpret the original and translation, respectively.

[Translation] is a difficult enterprise. I think of some pieces from the late 19th century where writers are making reference to classical Japanese texts. And if the reference to falling cherry blossoms is not something you as a reader know, how can the translator evoke that it’s this particular image that a reader in the source language might very well be aware of? And so, one choice people make is footnotes. But in a trade book, if you’re reading for pleasure, do you want to be flipping back and forth with the footnotes?

Have you developed any strategies for translating elements such as themes, slang, or names?

That’s a big question. Well, for names, I could transliterate the characters, but I can’t convey the deeper meanings of the Kanji characters, right? So for example, the author, Kunikida Doppo.

Kunikida Doppo (1871-1908)

His pen name is just transliterated as ’Doppo’, but if you look at the characters, you see that this means “to walk alone.” But if you just read ‘Doppo’, you don’t know that. Or you footnote it… but I think that is something that’s missing in translations. I haven’t figured out an easy way to convey those kinds of additional nuances yet.

How about slang?

Slang is tough. The two that pop up for me are slang that can be part of a regional dialect, and slang that can show that it is a young or old person. So for example, in English you have ‘y’all’. How would you do that in Japanese? I translate from Japanese to English, and if it’s a regional dialect, I find it hard to somehow make it equivalent to a regional dialect in the U.S. So, if it’s someone from Osaka who’s speaking the Kansai dialect, some people have translated that as a Southern [American] dialect. I try to at least convey the feeling of it, but you have to be careful in the use of place. I have seen people make Kansai-ben ‘y’all’, but there’s so much baggage that comes with being someone from the south, or being someone from the Kansai area that do not match up. So that’s a strategy that doesn’t work.

I’m also translating stories from the 1930’s, so even consulting with a contemporary Japanese speaker would not necessarily help clarify what is happening in the original text. We would probably need a third person with background in that time period. So that requires doing some historical research, and not just reading history books, but also reading accounts of people who were alive during the time. I also found reading memoirs of people who were in the colonies and realizing “Oh, that’s what that reference is.” Especially for fiction set in the domestic sphere, much of those details are not going to be in history books.

What role does translation play in your life?

As for my research, I am working every day with Japanese literary texts, so I’m not necessarily formally translating and publishing them, but I’m translating them and trying to sift through them for whatever project I’m working on. I feel that in addition to literary translation, along with teaching I also do linguistic and cultural translation in the sense that I’ve read these works in the original Japanese and the English, so when a character’s name has significance in the kanji, I explain that to the students. Or for example when there are particular symbols for seaweed lying on the beach or cherry blossoms, some students may not be familiar with these [images] as symbols. And so I’m translating in that way for them.

Naoki Sakai writes about translation. He’s a theorist and he writes in English, not Japanese. He’s a little bit challenging to read but he’s really interesting. One of the ideas that he talks about is that in some ways we are always translating, all the time. [He says] Even when we’re not consciously doing it, there’s a way in which we’re modulating the ways in which we talk to others. I’m being recorded, so I’m probably talking to you more slowly and carefully than if I was talking on the phone to my friend. That kind of mediation is a part of that act of translation. He has a lot of things to say on translation, but this is oftentimes what people take away.

This reminds me of a Western translator we talked about in class. He had the idea that every word is a translation from thought into symbol.

Yeah, and another thing Sakai says is that there is never going to be this one-to-one coherence between languages. So, he questions these notions of “original text”and “source text”, and whether a translation is not a translation and actually a completely new text. I’m sure you’re reading Lawrence Venuti.

Well, we actually seem to be moving from the West to the East now, so we’re starting to look at people like Wang Wei… hopefully we’ll arrive at the question of how Kanji or ideograms work.

Well, if you’re looking at challenges in Japanese translation, you could think about how to translate a piece that is from the occupation period. In one Japanese short story, “American Schoo,” a Japanese person is speaking in English to an American, and it’s written in katakana (one of the two Japanese phonetic writing systems) in the source text. So it says “ハッピーバースデー” (happii baasudee, “Happy Birthday”). How do you translate that?

Or if you think about a Korean-Japanese writer who inserts hangul [alphabetic system for writing the Korean language into a [Japanese] text, but then has furigana (phonetic characters written above characters in other writing systems) in katakana on the side, how do you negotiate that? (laughs) So there are all these specific instances particular to Japanese literature that are going to be different from, you know, other languages. I really love that. (laughs)

Yeah, do you know any other language besides Japanese in the world that has three writing systems?

I don’t know the answer to that, but exactly – so if some things are in katakana instead of hiragana (the other phonetic writing system of Japanese), and this is emphasized, do you just put it in boldface in English to emphasize it? There are all these different choices and it’s great.

Do you have any advice for anyone who aspires to be a translator?

Well, I would say, in addition to really working on developing your language skills, I think you really need to immerse yourself and understand the culture. So, to live there. Let’s say you’re going to be a Japanese translator; go and live in Japan. I think this is really important. I also think reading, lots of reading. Not just in Japanese, but also in the language you’re going to translate into, because there are ways in which reading allows you to become attuned to different particular nuances of language that all enable you to have an easier time when translating from one language to another. I think reading in both languages is super important. Because I think that if you’re reading in Japanese, you’re becoming familiar with all these different expressions and so on. But in English, it’s also giving you a sense of a variety of expression, right? Different voices. And keeping up with the new things writers are doing.

Naila Arsky ’20 is a senior  majoring in Linguistics and a concentrator in the Translation Studies Concentration.  Her focus is Japanese literature, though she dabbles in Brazilian works as well. She spent her junior year at Waseda University in Japan during which she translated excerpts of literary adaptations.  Currently, she is working on a short story translation from Japanese to English, and a translation of environmental poems from Brazilian Portuguese to English.

 

 

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Spring 2020 Issue XV: Interviewing Translators

Translating Double Entendre in Chinese Literature: Liann Waite interviews Sabina Knight

Sabina Knight is a professor of Chinese and comparative literature at Smith College. She has studied many languages including (but not limited to), English, French, Russian, and Mandarin Chinese. Although known for her  translations of modern stories and essays (such as her translation of Liu Heng’s 狗日的粮食 Gǒurì de Liángshi or “Dogshit Food” in The Columbia Anthology of Modern Chinese Literature), Professor Knight particularly enjoys translating Classical Chinese poetry.

 

First, I want to thank you for meeting me to do this interview! Now, I was wondering if there’s a reason why you chose to focus on Chinese as opposed to another language?

Perhaps the biggest reason early on was that I was interested in philosophy and ethics. And I thought that it wasn’t very ethical to study only my own tradition. I wanted to study another tradition, and I wanted to study one that had an ancient language, so that I could read ancient philosophy. Another major factor was that I was in love with a certain kind of landscape and nature painting that I thought was Chinese. So, there was an aesthetic that drew me to Chinese as well.

You studied Chinese language, but how did you come to Chinese-English translation specifically?

When you’re learning a language, especially in France, translation is a huge part of what you do. It’s just one very important way that you learn a language. I was doing some translating as part of my studies, and I liked it. But I didn’t think of myself as a translator until my second year of graduate school at Berkeley. I was invited to translate a story by the Chinese author Liu Heng for The Columbia Anthology of Modern Chinese Literature. Liu Heng is a wonderful author, and it’s a really great story, but there were many terms that were very hard to translate. Even the title, 狗日的粮食 (Gǒurì de Liángshi), was tricky. I ended up calling the story “Dogshit Food.” It isn’t the greatest title; I couldn’t think of anything better… The whole project was really challenging. I can’t say that I was eager to translate again right away yet at the same time, the translation was something I got done, and something that I felt a sense of fulfillment doing. I learned a lot doing it too. So it was, on the whole, a good experience.

What is your experience translating Chinese-English? Do you have a certain “mindset” when translating between two languages?

When I was a little girl, we lived briefly in France. My mother could read French symbolist poetry, but she couldn’t really speak French well. When she spoke French, she would sometimes speak a kind of hodgepodge of French and English. I hated that and I would demand, “Either speak French or speak English. Don’t speak both at once!” It made me very upset. To some extent that’s still true. I still find it hard to understand when people mix languages. When a Chinese person throws in English words, often I don’t know that they’re switching to English. The firewall between languages in my mind makes translation especially hard. In order to translate I have to think in one language, then stop thinking, and then think anew in the other language… I’m a slow translator, maybe precisely because it’s not easy for me to switch between languages. I might even say that I experience a certain amount of dissonance when I’m translating.

Do you feel like you bring your own identity into being a translator (i.e., your gender, race, socioeconomic status, etc.?)

That is a brilliant question. First of all, because my dad was a Brit and my mother was a Russian-American and had grown up in a Russian community, neither of them were like many Americans in knowing American cultural references… There were areas that were very rich in my education. But there’s a whole rich area of film and popular culture where I definitely have a deficit. So, I try to avoid translating things where I’m not going to have the vocabulary. I tend toward more literary works composed of the kind of language I know how to use. Maybe because of my British background, I want to be careful with language. Yet I’m conscious that my concerns grow out of a particular subculture. I don’t want to impose those scruples on a text from a different culture. I am aware that I’m more comfortable with certain intellectual and artistic discourse than with much popular discourse… I’ll speak colloquially with people because I want to connect with them. But when I go to write, I don’t want to use certain new terms or patterns that are now acceptable in English grammar. I try to avoid finding myself facing the conflict between my own grammatical habits and that of an author I’m translating.

If characters are speaking very colloquially and therefore aren’t completely grammatically correct in a Chinese text, would you translate it into grammatically correct English?

If the author is intentionally not correct in Chinese, I would want to reproduce that in English. On the other hand, we’re writing in a world where there are all these stereotypes. If I translate a Chinese text into a certain kind of ungrammatical English, it might just sound the way people stereotype Chinese people as speaking. I might be playing into a stereotype and the racism behind it. Ultimately, I don’t want to play into that prejudice. So, such choices are really hard. For example, if I were going to translate Wang Shuo, an author of a genre called Liumang wenxue “hooligan/bad boy literature,” I might use rap. If I were translating him and hit on a passage in which the characters are speaking that kind of bad boy language, I would find the right, equivalent English dialect. So, if I were translating that… I would translate it into Jive, what Black people often speak in the inner city. I would translate it into something that works and that has a value as a subcultural dialect, not just broken Chinese.

How do you translate Classical Chinese to English? How do you convey that Classical Chinese is an ancient form of writing when translating it into English?

Classical Chinese may be the most beautiful language in the world. It may be weird to say that because it’s only written… Nonetheless, it’s very beautiful on so many levels and there’s really no way to reproduce that beauty in English. Yet you try. I usually try to make it literary… It’s literary in Classical Chinese, so I try to make it literary in English. Most Classical Chinese poetry is highly structured. There’s a tonal system for the lines; there’s parallelism between the lines; and there’s often a rhyme scheme, too. There are also set forms, the way we have sonnets and ballads… Often, if there is an important formal aspect that I can’t translate, I figure out an alternative way of conveying that craftsmanship… Many translators render Classical Chinese poems as free verse. Sometimes one has little alternative. Generally, though, I do not want to take a structured Chinese poem and make it free verse in English. Many translators do so because they can then be more faithful to the meaning of the poem. But that approach is seldom true to the spirit of the poem. That’s why I seek some way to preserve some kind of equivalent effect. So, I look for particularly beautiful words, and I do my best to have, if not rhyme, then assonance. I want some kind of meter too, if possible. The point is to give the poem a rhythm and as many other features as possible to convey its craftsmanship. Often, I can’t translate the many double entendres, but sometimes I even do that. I did, for example, in my translation of Du Fu’s春望 (chūn wàng) “Spring Contemplation” for my second book, Chinese Literature: A Very Short Introduction. In that little book, I made this poem a special example precisely because it was one of the only poems that I was able to translate and preserve the double entendres. There’s one double entendre in the English that pretty exactly mirrors the most important double entendre in the Chinese. A blogger caught the depth and difficulty of such a rendering and featured the poem in his blog. I was thrilled. I was thrilled because a reader fully understood… I hit on something with that particular poem. I love when that happens.

When do you know that a translation is finished?

(Without hesitation.) When the deadline comes.

Liann Waite ’20 is a senior at Smith College, majoring in East Asian Studies with a concentration in Translation Studies. She has devoted much of her academic career  to her life-long passion for learning foreign languages,  developing a  professional proficiency in both Mandarin Chinese and French through studies both in school and abroad, as well as an intermediate knowledge of Korean. 

 

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Spring 2020 Issue XV: Interviewing Translators

Ferryman of Lives: Sujane Wu Discusses her ongoing translation project with Bea Edmonds

Sujane Wu is a professor of Chinese Language and Literature at Smith College. Her work centers around Chinese poetry, song, biographical writings and early Chinese history. She is also a professor of Chinese as a second language and a translator of works from Chinese to English. Professor Wu received her B.A. in Taipei, Taiwan at Soochow University, and continued on to receive a Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

 

What is the work you are currently translating?

Ferryman of Lives: When Opportunity Meets Creativity by Wu Jing-jyi, that’s the only translation project I’m working on, in addition to my research. My own research is about third-century Chinese poetry, but in terms of translation, Ferryman is my focus now.

What is the original like?

It’s an autobiography; he was a professor and also the Executive Director of the Foundation for Scholarly Exchange (Fulbright Foundation) in Taiwan.The original is about how his life intersects with Taiwan’s politics and with some cultural and artistic aspects. Actually, he narrated it and someone else wrote it on his behalf, so it’s more like an oral history or an oral narration.

Why did you choose to translate this?

There are a couple reasons, one is because he was very famous in Taiwan. I mean he was some time ago; I don’t think young people now really know about him. He also made many contributions to Taiwan’s scholarly field and art. His specialty is educational psychology, so now he has a lot of students who are chairmen of different universities in Taiwan.

He really brought Taiwan into light on a global stage after Taiwan and the United States severed their diplomatic relationship. This is the first reason; the second reason is more personal, because he is my cousin. He is my father’s oldest brother’s oldest son, but we are actually twenty something years apart. Now he is 81 years old. When I was growing up the first memory I have of him is when he was coming back from the U.S. from the University of Minnesota where he had gone to study for his Ph.D. I remember one time he came back because my grandma was sick. He gave me a U.S. quarter. I did not really know him because we have such a wide age gap so we never really lived in the same house. But because I was the first girl to go to college in my family, he knew–he was already the Executive Director at the FSE (Fulbright foundation)– he knew I needed to support myself. I’m the second child in my family and my parents did not have money for me to go to college. Once I got into college he called and wanted to talk to me. I remember I used the public phone booth to call him at FSE. He said ‘I know you need a job, so you can come here to work as a student assistant at Fulbright.’’ And I was offered a job there at the library. I was so happy because it meant I could pay my own tuition.  So, he is the one who at that particular moment gave me the opportunity.

 

I always have that kind of gratitude towards him. So that’s the personal level. When I read his autobiography there were so many stories I did not know about. So I told him that I wanted to translate his book and bring his individual story into Taiwan’s history, politics, and culture. After this translation  I probably will interview two or three people of his age and write an article about how these individuals contributed to what made Taiwan become Taiwan today. They do not want to talk about their impact themselves, but I think people should really recognize their impact.

What is your hope for this and what is your audience?

My audience would be people who are interested in Taiwan – so general readers, not really academics, but of course I hope someone will use this autobiography in the classroom.  Hopefully this kind of biographical story will bring people a different perspective. I have to get it published first. But, when I’m doing a project usually that is my last concern. I just want to finish and then see.

What is the biggest challenge for you in translation?

I think in general the biggest challenge comes in going from colloquial Chinese to English. Somehow I feel that language itself is a challenge because everybody has a different kind of feeling towards a particular word– a different kind of sensibility, even in Chinese, people disagree. I think language itself has a lot of potentiality, it’s a variable, it doesn’t have a fixed meaning or a fixed way of using it, and that’s the most challenging problem. I always have to negotiate with myself ‘okay so here am I going to do a literal translation or should I change the wording in order to make it readable in English?’

Does this vary with the material and with time?

Yes, I think so. For this particular text,  because it is an oral narration, an oral history, sometimes the sentences are long. The way he uses a certain term, sometimes I find myself confused because now the context has changed. In translating classical Chinese and especially poetry there is a different kind of challenge. You do not want the translation to read like a narrative. The conciseness of Chinese poems also needs to appear in the English translation. But sometimes this is very hard, especially short poems in Chinese. In English you don’t see/use the same format at all. The Chinese line could be five words but in English you might need seven words in order to really convey the meaning. And also, the hidden meaning is so difficult. In Chinese, the first and second line might not have any connection, but in English you need connectors, like ‘and, so, because’. But if I add those words, I feel like I fix the meaning. If you use ‘because’ in the second line, then the first line becomes the cause, but in Chinese it’s not that, so I feel like ‘maybe this is not right’. It doesn’t need to have that cause and effect that you have spelled out in English.

What does your translation process look like?

Usually I will do many drafts– get the meaning out there first and then revise it. I think a lot of translators go through it like that. So, I will read the original several times, and then see what the key meaning is and try to write it out in English then revise it. Sometimes I’ll even revise the entire paragraph. The first draft is always just wanting to get it out, then you read it and if it’s not right, then you revise it. So, struggle, compromise, and then finding a way to get through it.

How long might one project take? What is the range of time?

Wow, a long time. I think this project will probably need another year. I’m hoping more and more to find collaborators. Now I am working with two students and in a way I think it’s a mutual benefit. We are all learning together. This project is totally for my own curiosity. I just want to do something for Taiwan because I’ve never really done anything to contribute to Taiwanese society. My entire adult life has been in the United States. The longer I stay here the more I want to learn more about Taiwan. A life story is better than just reading facts. Because it gives a different layer of emotions, feelings and human beings.

Why do you translate?

At the very beginning it was because of my research. Because something I was researching had no existing translation so I had to do it on my own. But the second reason is that I think it is very important for people who cannot read Chinese to know other cultures through translation, or to gain different perspectives. I think this book is very important because Taiwan has a lot of translations of Western literature. Some kids when they are in high school already read Dickinson and Hemingway. But it seems like the United States doesn’t have equal numbers of translations. It’s fine if you don’t read the language but translations encourage mutual understanding.  For example, although for Americans Fulbright is a well-known organization, nobody really knows how it works, or how Taiwan and Fulbright started. There’s a history and a politics that through translation people will start to understand.

 

Béa Edmonds ’20 is a fourth-year student at Smith College majoring in Chinese Language and Literature with a concentration in Translation studies. Her most recent research focuses on the effect of climate change on women in China in the regions of Beijing and Yunnan. Béa has studied Chinese for over six years, and is involved in the above mentioned translation project with Professor Wu.

 

 

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Spring 2020 Issue XV: Interviewing Translators

Translating Immigrant Literature: Katy Sparks Talks to Giovanna Bellesia

Giovanna Bellesia has been translating for 43 years, first from English or French into Italian and now Italian into English after spending so many years in the United States. After attending Scuola Superiore per Interpreti e Traduttori in Milan, Italy, she earned her PhD in Italian and Linguistics from UNC Chapel Hill and now teaches in the Italian Studies Department at Smith College.

 

What is your favorite genre?

I like short stories that have a message. It’s not so much my favorite genre as what I want to do with my translations and since I’ve been working a lot with migrant writers, I feel that at least that is a little contribution to the problem of people accepting and understanding each other.

I feel like I’m doing something useful that is not just research for the sake of research but is really helping improve the way people see each other across cultures.

I don’t have a favorite genre but I do like short stories because it’s more of an immediate satisfaction. Novels are nice when you’re done but it’s really stressful when you have three or four hundred pages and you have other details you have to watch for, going back to what word or expression you used before, being consistent.

Could you talk more about your work with migrant literature?

I was interested, because of the challenge that many of the authors tend to be native or bilingual writers. If they speak a second language, it might not be their stronger language but if they’re talking about the plight of people from their country, they tend to look at things through the other language and then they render it in Italian. It’s more challenging because you have to try and understand what in their Italian is a little bit different.

I like that tension in novels, especially with Cristina Ali Farah in Little Mother. She is bilingual with Somali and Italian but she did grow up the first sixteen years in Mogadishu [the capital city of Somalia] and she has a real deep knowledge of both languages. But when she writes about Somalia, even in Italian, and Gabriella Ghermandi for Ethiopia as well, they have these images that are part of the oral African tradition. Sometimes I find these images are very creative and it turns out that it is just a common expression in Amharic or Somali. I always think, “Oh, isn’t that wonderful what they’re doing.”

You mentioned how you had met a lot of the authors while you were in Rome. Is that usually how you pick who you are going to translate?

My co-translator, Victoria Poletto, and I have been working with this little group, especially of women, who are concentrating on women. We pick something that we like; if we don’t like it, we don’t translate it, no matter what. And so, if I find a short story I really like, then I send it to Victoria and ask “What do you think”?

We’re happy that these books are going around because, in the case of Gabriella, it’s a real rewriting of the Italian occupation of Ethiopia. And in the case of Little Mother, it’s the story of the Somali diaspora across the world so these are the types of themes  that are important.

You mentioned how you worked with a partner in translation. How does that go?

Collaboration is  a lot more fun to do but it’s also a  compromise and it needs people who are compatible. I can’t believe we’re still friends after three novels and a lot of short stories. I think it works because I’m kind of the authority about the original Italian text and Victoria’s pretty much the authority on the final product. I’ll do 20 pages, she’ll do the next 20.Then we’ll read them together and one of us looks at the Italian, the other looks at the English.

The other thing that is very interesting is how much it has changed in the last thirty years with computers. Before, we didn’t have easy access to the information. Now, it’s at your fingertips. At one point, [an author] talks about this median in the middle of a road and we couldn’t figure out how wide it was. And I just zoomed in with Google Maps and I saw the street… Then she said “le autobus erano gialli e neri.” So we didn’t know whether some of the buses were yellow and some were black or if each bus was yellow and black because it wasn’t clear. And all I needed to do was [search] and there they were, striped.

When it comes to your translations, if you come across a phrase that doesn’t translate well or something that you don’t think you can translate, what do you do with it?

We never start thinking that we cannot, we always think there is a solution somehow. We have, in a couple of instances, used a lot of compensation. We find it an interesting challenge. There are sometimes parts or expressions that are really not translatable but we just figure out how to try and convey the same meaning. It’s only in case of desperation that you put a translator’s note. Translators used to put a lot of those. We don’t do that anymore.

You find a general solution, for example  if you look at Queen of Pearls and Flowers and Little Mother, we added glossaries. The original Italian texts do not have them. When we started translating, we realized that we needed a list of characters.The problem was there were a ton of Somali words and we did not want to put them in the text itself. So what we decided was to put a glossary at the end so we wouldn’t be interrupting continuously. But it wouldn’t have been possible otherwise to translate… there are one or two notes at most. We really tried to get around the awkwardness of notes. And sometimes you just have to decide it’s a translation loss and you try to compensate later.

But most of the problems are with tricky things. For example, the author says that she had an epiphany but in Italian she uses the word “illuminazione” which means enlightening and she talks about light after so if I used the word “epiphany”, I’d lose the connection to light. So then… you use “a lightbulb went off in my mind”.

But it’s not always possible, sometimes it really doesn’t make sense and sometimes it doesn’t make sense in the original either. So if you have access to the author, you ask them and they say “oh really, did I write  that?” Yeah, you did. What did you really mean? And then you try to do it their way.

When do you know you‘ve finished a translation?

A translation is never done. If I look back, I want to change everything. I keep wanting to change it. But at some point you have to say it’s done, closed, put away. Otherwise, you will go on translating forever.

What’s your favorite thing in general about translation, whether the process or the end product?

It’s the puzzles… It’s when there is something that cannot be translated. In one story I worked on, there’s a black bean from Brazil and at one point the narrator says “non sono bucato.” “Bucato” means “with a hole” but, in Italian, “bucato” also means that you shoot drugs…I started looking at all the options and of course you cannot use shoot because shoot has nothing to do with this and so I decided to use something that had to do with crack, “my head is not cracked” and talk about crackheads…Those are the things I like, trying to find a way to really render something that seems impossible to render… That’s what I like the best.

I also like the fact that these books are finished and I can read them. When people read stories that take place far away, people learn more; it makes me feel like I did something useful.

 

Katy Rose Sparks ‘20 is a senior studying Italian Studies, archaeology, and Translation Studies. She has a handle on Italian, Latin, and Ancient Greek while currently learning Hungarian and Portuguese.

 

 

 

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Spring 2020 Issue XV: Interviewing Translators

Lilian McCarthy Interviews Thalia Pandiri, Editor of Metamorphoses

Thalia Alexandra Pandiri is a professor of the World Literature department and chair of the Classical Languages and Literatures department. She has worked and studied around the world, including in Berlin and New York, and she is a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome. Her published translations range from Medieval Latin to Italian to Modern Greek. Recently, she has been translating short stories and a novella by the Greek author Christoforos Milionis; other Greek authors she has translated include Alexandros Papadiamandis and Athina Papadaki. From Italian, she has translated the prose of Francesco Marroni. Her next project is a continuation of the survivor narratives of Asia Minor refugees, while also collecting new narratives from recent refugees to Greece. Professor Pandiri has served as the Editor-in-Chief of Metamorphoses, the Five College Faculty Seminar on Literary Translation since 2000. To visit Metamorphoses online, please go to https://blogs.smith.edu/metamorphoses/.

 

How did you come to translation both personally and professionally?

Well, I grew up essentially bilingual. Greek was my first language, but I learned English when I was still very small, so I was always aware of more than one language and people translating from one language to another depending on who was in the room. Both of my parents spoke a number of languages; my father I think had thirteen or fourteen languages.

Was he an academic?

He was an international lawyer, actually—he just liked languages and kept picking them up. He grew up bilingual in Greek and Turkish and learned French very soon after that, and Italian after that, and taught himself Russian. So then I had French, still very soon after that…

From school or from your family?

From my father, mainly, and then from school. Latin and Ancient Greek from school, and then I was a German major in college, as well as going on with Latin and Ancient Greek. I spent time in Germany. I picked up Italian and spent a couple of years at the American Academy in Rome as a fellow and picked up more Italian! So translation and being aware of translation has always been part of my life. Professionally…

I know a lot of translation is kind of inherent when you’re in academia with languages, but…

Yeah, I mean, translation in terms of Greek and Latin, and in terms of teaching, yeah, but in terms of publishing translations, I guess there are works that either I wanted to see published or that people wanted to have published. Like some Italian/texts/literature? that I’ve translated, and Modern Greek, Medieval Latin. In the case of Medieval Latin, I was commissioned to translate some Hildegard of Bingen, and there was another woman author, a younger contemporary of Hildegard’s, also from the Rhine and also a Benedictine, that I got interested in and who hadn’t been translated when I started working on her.

Who was it?

Elizabeth of Schönau. And so the second book of her Visions was published in an anthology, and then an essay and selections from the first book of Visions was published in a three-volume collection of medieval women writers writing in Latin. I’ve published poetry and prose translations from Modern Greek. Among other things in Modern Greek, I did archival work that involved narratives of refugees who survived the expulsion of minority populations from Turkey in 1922, and translated quite a few of those narratives into English. Some have appeared in journals, others (along with an essay) were published in a collection of essays entitled The Anatomy of Exile. That was published by the UMass Press.

Sounds interesting.

I am now way behind in editing an anthology of fiction by a writer with whom I was collaborating and who unfortunately died a couple of years ago. Greek into English. I have not been as efficient as I could be because I have had so much other/work to deal with. I’ve also done some co-translation from Russian but mainly on the English side of it.

Seems like translating just popped up along the way. There wasn’t a moment when you were like “Oh I’m…”

I’m going to be a translator!! No, no. Translating is a very different experience from interpreting. The most recent time that I have done that in a more or less formal setting was with a lawyer who wanted me to interpret, not to translate, for her and for a pair of clients. The clients spoke very little English and the lawyer spoke very little Greek. A lot of it was over the phone, which is even worse. Some of it was in person and that was bad enough. We would have one person yakking at you in English and then you immediately had to turn it into Greek with contentious clients and a contentious lawyer. The clients would both be talking over one another into your ear and you had to get it back to the lawyer who was saying, “What did they say, what did they say, I want to hear it all!” And it’s that switching back and forth—in a sense simultaneous translation is less difficult because you’re only going in one direction.

That’s a good point.

It’s the switching back and forth that I found really draining. So that’s a whole other thing.

You have this job as editor of Metamorphoses.

I have this unremunerated job for which I get no release time, no administrative help, and no money and very little glory.

Glory! You want glory!

Yeah! I have more glory outside Smith than in Smith, actually. Metamorphoses has a significant reputation outside Smith, even internationally, but I think it’s under-prized at Smith.

Do you enjoy being Editor-in-Chief?

There are times when I feel as if I have an albatross around my neck and it’s a pain and it is really a nuisance having no steady support. Student-interns are great but the thing is, they come and go. So it’s always kind of reinventing the wheel, which makes it hard. So as editor-in-chief I am chief cook and bottle washer. For example, what did I do over January? I myself physically mailed out all the issues. That part I’m not so keen on. I guess what I do like about it is learning new things. We get submissions from all over the world. Not all of them are good, but that’s okay, it’s normal to reject at least 40% of submissions. But we get translations from languages and cultures that are new to me, authors that are new to me. So there’s always something interesting going on. You meet, virtually or sometimes in person, interesting people. So that part of it is good. And some of the contributing editors are really interesting.

It seems like a really cool community.

It is, yes. It’s like graduate school in a sense, in that a lot of it is horrible but as long as there’s enough that makes you think okay, I know why I’m doing this, this is worthwhile, then it’s worth your time. There has to be something that you really like which makes the rest of it okay. I’m worried that there’s nobody else that’s a sucker like I am who will take on this job. You have to do it out of love, and that’s hard to find. In general, there is ever-decreasing support for the humanities and languages.

Can you describe the process you go through when you’re translating? Say you’re translating an essay. How do you start doing that? How long does it take to complete? a year, a week?

It depends on what else you’re doing. If you can’t focus exclusively on what you are translating, it takes longer. But in terms of process: The first thing I do is read what it is I’m going to translate. Then I go through and do a more or less rough translation and make note of particular words or references I want to come back to or be more precise about. It depends what you’re translating. If you’re translating language with dialect in it, then that’s an extra thing you have to hunt down. The same is true of strange references–you need to do research, whether in dictionaries or other texts or consulting with appropriate native speakers. Then you go back and make it better, and go back again and make it better, and then get feedback from somebody with a decent ear, or several people with a decent ear, and then go back again and make it better. And then let it sit with itself for a while, and then go back again and regret what you did and do it again. It depends, it depends very much on what it is you’re translating, how much research you need to do. Some language that’s really hard to deal with is what do you do with terms that need to be in some way glossed to make sense? Then the decision is do you want to include some kind of explanation in the text? Use a footnote? These are decisions. How much do you want in terms of notes, footnotes, endnotes? And again that depends on what something is being published in and what editors or publishers want. Or how much intrusion into a text do you want to have, how much do you want to add. Or in some cases you’re just going to leave the term untranslated…

I was going to ask about that. It’s all context.

T: All of the things that immediately come to mind in the case of somebody who reads the original language and is familiar with the culture that produced the text. That reader has immediate experiential and visceral associations. All of this is lost if you try to import a different set of language and social value conventions and class conventions. And if you do away with dialectal speech altogether, then you’re also losing something. Those are decisions that are really hard to make. Again I think it varies from text to text.

Do you think – I guess this isn’t applicable to the Classical languages – but with the modern languages you work on, do you feel like your process is different between them at all?

Hmm. Not really? I mean, it’s the same in some cases. For example, the connections I make for some things in Greek or English where I immediately have a bunch of associations with a particular reference– it doesn’t really help with translation, it just makes you more dissatisfied with what you’re doing. To some extent I do have the same experience with Italian. But when in doubt, I go to Giovanna [Bellesia], who remembers what it meant to have a particular model of car in the 1950s. You can look it up and check it out, but I am happiest when I can count on the memory-bank of friends. But it’s a cool feeling to come across something that might seem obscure and say to yourself, “ Oh that, I know exactly what the author has in mind.” So the process isn’t that different, it’s just a question of how much research you want to do, how much you’re struggling with it. My problem with some of the Greek texts that I’ve dealt with, is that I have a lot of really visceral associations, as would any reader of the generation before or after me and my generation. It’s hard to let that go. You want people to know what it is that you know. And sometimes you have to let it go—you can’t do it all. What something means to somebody for whom it was an experience – my mom took me when we visited New York or whatever – what do you do when you’re translating that and you have to explain what, for example, an Automat is.

Do you usually or sometimes have some sort of relationship with the original author? Do you communicate with them? Do you like to? Do you ever argue with them?

Yes to all of the above. It depends a lot on the author. There was someone who died recently whom I adored and his attitude was very much: I put it out, I’m done with it, I wrote it, you know, and I’m not going to micromanage the translation but I’ll answer questions if you have questions. There was also a poet whose English wasn’t good enough to get in my way! She was somebody I met and she wanted me to translate. Let’s see, living authors. Occasionally, for some short stories I translated from Italian, there were two living authors, I knew both of them, and we were in conversation. One of them knew English well and one of them knew some English, but they were not involved with the English, they were available if I had questions. One story had a lot of vocabulary having to do with fishing, and with particular river conditions. I talked to some fishermen I know. One term proved really challenging: I could not find a word in English that evoked what the Italian did: time of day, light conditions, water conditions, behavior of fish. The author explained it to me, and I ended up expanding the text to describe what the single Italian word conjured up for fishermen in the south of Italy. What you do come across occasionally is somebody who thinks he or she knows English but doesn’t, not really. But has strong opinions. They are a real pain in the ass. That can happen. And if you’re dealing with the dead, on the one hand you can’t ask them to elucidate what they wanted to say, on the other hand they’re not getting in your way. There is a poet I knew, whom Giovanna knew too, whose husband said the greatest obstacle to a translator is the living poet!

Yes! I remember I read this article with Giovanna about an Italian author and his translator who were really close. The translator said the author would get fixated on these words in English and then be like oh this means this, you have to use this word. And he would say no, that’s not what that means at all!

Right. There’s a poet who really knows Hebrew and knows English enough to know when a translation sounds awkward. And she has a cousin who is sort of a celebrity and writes in Hebrew, which I can’t appreciate, but also in Ladino, which I can. This happens a lot – somebody will flatter the translator or the author and say oh I want to translate you and the author says yes, you have the right to translate. But the translator sucks! So it was impossible to convince [this woman] that these were bad translations. Various people tried and she said no no no. She is fluent in English in the sense that she can go to restaurants and order things and she can talk to you, but she does not have an ear for English. She doesn’t know English really well enough. But you can’t convince her!

Yikes!

She was not really my problem. I was working with her in a group of people, folks who were native speakers of Hebrew, folks who were native speakers of English who were fluent in Hebrew, one of them a poet and translator, and we were all thinking Oh God, shut up! This is not a language you know.

That’s a hard line. How do you know you are keeping current with the language(s) you know and work with?

And there’s no way of knowing. And it’s funny, but what do you know a language for? I was talking to a colleague in the theatre department who is Greek and is a thousand percent fluent in Greek and she was saying, and I feel that too, that her professional writing has been in English for many years now. She doesn’t feel that she can write or give a talk as a professional, a professional article or talk, in Greek anymore. Jargon changes, you know. I had to write an article in Greek for something a few years ago and it was hard!

Yeah, it’s a different way of thinking. What is a recent problem you’ve run into in translation? And how did you solve it, if you did?

I haven’t. A recent problem I’m running into with this translation I should have finished a year ago is dialect. Wordplay. References to very historically, geographically, and culturally specific things that do not need explanation in the text but need explanation in translation.

Is that a moment where you feel like you want to add a footnote?

Is it a moment when I feel like I want to shoot myself?

Ah, okay!

I have not resolved this problem. The problem with too many footnotes is that it depends on what you’re doing. If it’s a scholarly translation you expect people to want to look at footnotes or glosses. If it’s a publication in which you want to include a big introduction and glossary and something else, I don’t know. By and large, when people are reading, how many footnotes do they want? It depends.

 

Lilian Rose McCarthy ‘21 is a Translation Studies concentrator and a double major in Comparative Literature and French Studies. She is also learning Italian and is planning on studying abroad in Paris, France for her senior year.

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Spring 2020 Issue XV: Interviewing Translators

Translating indigenous verbal art: Kelly Lincoln interviews Malcolm McNee

Malcolm McNee is an Associate Professor of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies at Smith College.   He is the author of The Environmental Imaginary in Brazilian Poetry and Art, and and the translator of Eden-Brazil by Moacyr Scliar. He is currently working on an anthology of Brazilian environmental writing in translation.

When did you feel qualified to translate, and especially when did you feel qualified to translate professionally?

That’s a good question. I still don’t know that I feel qualified. I feel like I can read closely; I feel like I’ve been working with the language and traveling in Brazil and in the language, and I’ve been reading widely for over 20 years, and so in those senses I felt qualified. In translation theory, in some of the mechanics and decisions that if you do translation studies you think about – totally unqualified.

When and how do you know if a student is ready to translate?

I don’t have a good answer to that. I think that it really depends on the student, and it has to do with interest and motivation to a certain extent. I think a lot of it has to do with how strong of a writer they are, in English, and also developing those close reading skills. They need to recognize when they are uncertain, and then have a sort of openness to figuring out what to do with that uncertainty. So I think that comes as an individual thing.

Lots of people have metaphors around how they view translation; how you feel about the process of translation?

I find the process can be extremely gratifying in the sense that translation has a tempo that is disruptive of the typical tempo in which we tend to operate. In some ways, translation forces me to read in a way that I often don’t feel like I can read as much as I would like to; it compels a sort of close reading. If I had to give a metaphor for it, translation is one access to a meditative state within my work. That flow state. When it’s good, it’s fully absorbing and you lose that dominant sense of temporality.

How do you know if a translation is done?

Hmmmm. As related to the anthology project [my     current work, being done in partnership with Rex Nielson of BYU], this is going to be a hard question. Because I can make a decision about when my own translation is done, but when it comes to somebody else’s translation work, and where I’m going to restrain myself from imposing choices that I would have made that they didn’t make, that’s going to be tricky. But with my own work, I do have a sense of; if I go through it, what are the decisions that I’m uncertain about? It’s done when I’ve come to a certainty about the decisions or else I understand the limitations of my decision, like in the case that there isn’t a better option. I’m not going to discover a better option. You can read through and tinker, but it’s done and ready for final copy editing when I’ve solved those problems for myself in the text.

Do you ever find yourself, after your work has been published, still wishing you could change things?

Yeah. Within my scholarly book, there was a lot of translation involved because the book was written in English but about, at least in part, on Portuguese language poets. In citing their work, I would include my translations for those passages. So as I went back to some of those poets to think about translating them for the anthology I’m now working on, I made a fair amount of changes to those translations and found stuff where, knowing what I know now or just looking at it again, I would make this change and come up with a different version of it.

Is that frustrating or exciting that you can continue to look at it and still find new things?

I think it’s both. I think sometimes it’s like oh bummer, I shouldn’t have made that mistake, or like wow, what was I thinking. But I think it’s also kind of exciting that it depends to a certain extent upon the purpose of your translation. For the translation within the context of critical commentary, I needed to do it in some way so as to tie it with that commentary. Because the translation is more illustrative of my own argument, which maybe is putting things backwards, but I think it’s to a certain extent inevitable. That’s driving your translation, because a translation in that sense is very tied to interpretation. Redoing those for a different context, I might not want to be making so directly a critical argument with my translation. I want to be a little more attentive or sensitive to other possibilities, about sound or some other aspect. So that’s exciting, but also sometimes as I think about that, I get a little uncomfortable about that authorship of the translation. I know that in translation studies theory, there is the ad absurdum “there is no bad translation.” I don’t really buy that, for myself. There are mistranslations. I have a bit of healthy skepticism about that, I can do whatever I want with this text; it’s serving whatever interest I have at the moment. There is that bit of caution or anxiety or discomfort with that fact, but also I think that it is exciting just to understand that the translation can be done in different ways because it serves different purposes.

How do you hope your work will progress? How do you want to change as a translator? How has it progressed over time?

I guess it’s progressed as my proficiency with Portuguese has progressed. I feel like translation pushes you into new realms of the language. There are always these new lexicons that you’re having to grapple with, that help you start to become aware of your limits in the language. So from the beginning of my practice with translation, it’s been tied to a desire to push my proficiency in Portuguese into new realms. A desire for the future. I don’t see that as a transformation, but just a continued unfolding in that relationship between translation practice and continuing to deepen and broaden my proficiencies in Portuguese. I guess the other question- this is a little more concrete- would be with a subset of translation that’s related to the anthology, which has to do with the translation from pivot language translations. ( A pivot language is a third or intermediary language used to assist translation between two or more other languages.) I have a concrete problem to figure out involving the translation of Indigenous-language verbal texts for inclusion in the anthology.  I’m translated from Portuguese-language translations, which themselves use a combination of existing translations (in Spanish or Portuguese) and original language transcriptions. So, the issues involve source text attribution and permissions.  They also include the question as to whether to base my own translations on single source texts and their approaches and decisions, or to reach beyond them in order to do translations that may somehow better fit some aspects of the vision of the anthology (recovering some socio-ecologically specific terminology or references, for example). We want to include translations of selections of Indigenous verbal arts in the anthology, but in order to do so, we will have to successfully address the above challenges, including, fundamentally, the issue of permissions, so that’s something that I hope to figure out and continue to engage with others who are thinking about those questions.

 

Kelly Lincoln ’20 is a senior at Smith College, double-majoring in Spanish & Portuguese and Comparative Literature with a concentration in translation. She is a student fellow at the Kahn Liberal Arts Institute for the project TranslationS, where she is researching dance and translation.

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Spring 2020 Issue XV: Interviewing Translators

The trajectory of a translator: David Ball in conversation with Shoshana Werblow

David Ball is a Professor Emeritus of French Language and Literature and Comparative Literature at Smith College. He retired from Smith in 2002. Since his retirement, he has published more than a dozen book-length translations, including Jean Guéhénno’s, Diary of the Dark Years, and with his wife, Nicole Ball, Lola Lafon’s We Are the Birds of the Coming Storm, and Abdourahman A. Waberi’s Transit and Passage of Tears. In 2017, Professor Ball was named Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Palmes Académiques by the French Republic. He was president of the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) from 2003-2005. 

How did you come to translation?

I think it came from a long time ago, really loving the poetry of a strange, French poet, named Henri Michaux. And I had the feeling that I just wanted to tell my friends about him, and you can’t tell friends about a poet, you have to see it, and my friends didn’t read French at the time, although I was in Paris. So, I began translating him. And through the years, that finally led to a whole book, actually. And I think that’s really a motive for translation, broadly speaking, “I want to tell my friends about that.” Obviously, if it’s a book, you hope that not just your four or five friends are going to buy it, but that’s the idea. 

How do you experience the process of translation when you’re working on a project?

I can tell you how I work I guess. First of all, unlike what many academics who study translation theory will tell you, I don’t believe translation theory has anything to do with what translators really do. That is, it is a description, and that’s fine, it’s an object of study. It’s like, you know, you can study the physics of baseball, that’s not going to help you play baseball. Interesting in itself, why does the ball curve when thrown in a certain way, and so on. That’s how I feel about translation. So, I translate, I might say, almost instinctively, that is I know immediately what the words mean, of course, to me that’s the sine qua non of translation, you just have to know the language, and translators don’t like to talk about that because it sounds like any dictionary will do that, Google translate will do that, no. A language is a huge complicated thing, and you have to really know it. So I know it,  what it means, and now I kind of think, well, what would we say in English for that? And then I think at the same time that I’m thinking that, I’m thinking of the kind of effect that this author is producing.

This is, let’s say this is a wild image and the words are very strange. Well, I try to do that in English, I want the words to be strange, not necessarily the most obvious words, but the strangest, that will fit the meaning. And, the problem with this, that is glaring in the translation of poetry but is also true in the translation of prose, is that when you’re trying to get the meaning, but also the quality of the text, what it feels like, you have to compromise, you have to sacrifice one or the other to a certain extent. The most obvious example: suppose you’re translating a rhymed poem, unless you’re really great at that and very lucky–and some are, I’m not–it’s impossible to get the English to rhyme the way French does, because French has more rhymes than English, it just does, all the Latin languages do. So, if you want it to rhyme you have to either twist lines in a very uncomfortable way, and you don’t want to do that, or you’re going to have to change the meaning somewhat. Now, which is more important in the poem, you’ll have to decide in each line. That’s why poetry is so hard to translate. It’s somewhat true in prose, because you want to get the effect that the author is getting in her or his language, the effect that as a French reader, when I’m reading a text in French, the text does something to me, I feel it in one way or another. Okay, how can I create that effect in English? 

What is the most recent problem you’ve run into in translation and how did you solve it, or have you not solved it yet?

I’ll tell you the most recent problem that’s on my mind, and it’s not really a problem about translation, well it is, it’s sort of an ethical problem. The last novel I translated, that was just published, is a book called Bande de Français.

In this novel, the novel is a lot of fun, I enjoyed it, there are some very funny scenes in it, it’s interesting. About halfway through I realize this guy is far-right French-Israeli, and I hate that politics. And the only character in the book that’s presented with no sympathy is a journalist that is who is, quote, “telling lies” about the Israeli army, and he’s financed by the European Union. First of all, journalists are not financed by the European Union, that’s a lie, but it’s in the novel. Secondly, he’s obviously not telling lies about what the Israeli army is doing in the occupied territory, he’s looking. So, it was odious to me. So, what do I do? I could have said, I’m sorry, I’m not translating this, but I was in the middle of the project that I was paid in advance for, and I enjoyed the novel. I could simply not translate those passages–but no,  I would never do that. So I translated these passages that I found truly odious, and I did it. I don’t feel good about it, and apparently the book is selling very well. I have mixed feelings about that, people can read things and believe that nonsense. Luckily, it’s not a major thing in the novel, but it’s absolutely there. I also had a feeling of irony about it, almost tragic irony  (not to puff it up to be too important) because I was in a panel for ALTA,  our professional organization of literary translators, where there was a question of translating, let’s say “bad passages”, whether obscene, racist, this, that. And my point of view was that if you translate something, you are ethically bound to translate it. 

Do you correct errors you find in the original text (typographical, or a detail changes from one part to another)?

I think I would, typographical doesn’t mean anything unless you’re not sure of a word. There was something very recently, where, in the novel I’m working on now, the character is talking. It’s a fictional biography of an old master of Tao, in the fifth century BC. It’s sort of a biography, but it’s a novel, it’s fictional. There’s a point where he says he’s mocking the Confucians, who give all kinds of rules for behavior, and one says about bowing, when you bow, your hands should be over la manche, la manche is the sleeve. But he wrote la marche, which means “the step”. That makes no sense, it must mean the sleeve, so we’re going to translate it as sleeve, I think, because with this, as with a number of other books, maybe half of what I’ve done, I collaborate with my wife, Nicole, who is French, and a good translator herself. So, we’ll see what she thinks about that. So, yeah, obvious mistakes I would correct, but you have to be really careful with that, is that what the author meant, or not, and if you’re translating someone alive sometimes you can ask. And we have done that. 

When do you know (if) a translation is finished?

I think you just have to stop, saying I think this is the best we can do. You’ve read it, re-read it, and if I’m working with Nicole, she’s read it, re-read it. We’ve corrected all we can, looked at it, what else are we going to do? But, it happens often that later you think, oh, why didn’t I do it this way and not that way? And in the Michaux, for example, long ago, I made a real dumb mistake and I can’t correct it, it’s in print, and I’m surprised no one picked it up. That glaring mistake is there, and no one ever noticed it except me, as far as I know. 

What words do you leave in the original language? Do you? Why?

Normally I wouldn’t do that at all. I’m trying to think what we did…no, I think you’d have to get an English equivalent, unless it’s a French text and let’s say there’s a German word in it, then you leave the word in German, because it had the same effect for a French reader as it would for an English reader. Again, what counts as the effect you’re producing. 

How have you as a translator changed over time, or progressed, or do you think you’re translating the same?

Frankly, I think I’m a lot better, partly because I know French a lot better. I mean, I thought I knew French many years ago, when I did Michaux, but I know it a lot better now. And also, I’m freer as a translator. For example, French punctuation is different, and in the past we didn’t dare change that and now we do. I just feel much freer. Be careful using that word, because sometimes people say “free translation”, and often I don’t think they should be called translations. I think a translation has to communicate the denotational meaning of the text as much as it can–like the dictionary meaning–as much as it can. And much as I said talking about poetry,  you can’t always do that to the letter, but as close as you can. When translators, often who are poets themselves, for example, sort of take off, that’s fine, call it “after Victor Hugo” or “after James Sacré.[James Sacré taught at Smith in the French Studies Department from 1972 to 2001.  Now living in France, he continues to write and publish poetry, editor’s note.]  Robert Lowell called his translations, not translations, but imitations, that’s very good. He did Baudelaire, for example, but he didn’t translate, he did Robert Lowell inspired by the poem of Baudelaire, that’s fine. But don’t call it a translation! In translation, you have an ethical responsibility to stick to what the damn thing means on the simplest level. 

How do you/do you make this a financially sustainable practice? 

I’ll answer that with an anecdote. Years ago, at our professional conference, the American Literary Translators Association, the keynote speaker looked at the audience, about 300, 400 people, and said how many of you earn your living doing literary translation? Two hands went up. I think that answers your question. Generally speaking, 98-99.5% of the time, you cannot earn a living doing literary translation. There are translators who earn a living, but they’re doing scientific translation, business texts, stuff like that, not literary translation. There are a few who translate, for example, big best sellers, for big publishing companies, and if they have a reasonable contract for royalties, they can earn a living, otherwise not. 

In the languages that you are working with, are there genres or perspectives that are not getting translated in the same volume as others? Are there voices missing in this work?

Well, I think generally, poetry isn’t published as much as other genres, and that’s true for things that are not translated too. It’s not advertised very much, it doesn’t sell very well, so that’s true for translation too. It’s harder, well my own example is I’d like to do  a translation of James Sacré’s poetry as a book, but it’s not easy to find a publisher . So that’s one thing, poetry in general. Aside from that, no, I couldn’t say. In the past, 20-30 years ago, you might have said, there aren’t enough translations of francophone writers, in other words outside of France who speak French. There’s not enough of that, there’re not enough women, that’s no longer true, it really isn’t.

Shoshana Werblow ’20 is a senior at Smith college, double majoring in French and Jewish Studies with the Translation Concentration. She spent the 2018-2019 academic year abroad in Paris with the Smith Junior Year Abroad program.   

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Spring 2020 Issue XV: Interviewing Translators

Translating philosopher Catherine Malabou: Ilse Meiler Interviews Carolyn Shread

Carolyn Shread is a Lecturer in French Studies at Mt. Holyoke College and a Lecturer in World Literatures and French Studies at Smith College. Her research focuses primarily on contemporary francophone female writers through the lens of translation. She has published several articles on the process of translating Haitian author Maire Vieux-Chauvet’s novel Les Rapaces into English. Shread has published ten books in translation including five by contemporary French philosopher Catherine Malabou: Morphing Intelligence: From IQ Measurement to Artificial Brains (2019); Before Tomorrow: Rationality and Epigenisis (2016); Ontology of the Accident: An Essay on Destructive Plasticity (2012); Changing Difference: The Feminine and the Question of Philosophy (2011) and Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing: Dialect, Destruction, Deconstruction (2009). She has also published several articles on Malabou’s work. She currently teaches several courses on translation at both Smith and Mount Holyoke Colleges, including “The Art of Translation,” a weekly guest lecture series. 

Which language(s) do you translate from? 

I translate from French into English. I used to translate from English into French. I no longer do that, now that I know more. 

When did you first become aware of translating as a thing to do? How did you start translating?

That is an  interesting question. Looking back,  I realize the first translation I did was a translation of Paul Éluard’s poems L’Amour la poésie because I loved the poems and I wanted to share them with somebody. It was that impulse of: I want to share this and it’s in a language that this other person can’t access. 

I could also talk about disasters. I think about the early process where you’re just doing [translation]and you are making terrible mistakes. I translated a legal contract for Theodore Zeldin. Theodore Zeldin is an absolutely fluent historian of France, fluent in French, and I translated what must’ve been just a disastrous piece of paper. He gave me a CD ROM with a dictionary on it. Which I didn’t know how to use and completely erased. So, I erased his CD ROM, I gave him a terrible translation and because this man is an exceptional human being, he understood that he didn’t need to destroy me at that point. Instead, he gave me a check and, I think it was last year, I wrote to him to tell him thank you for not destroying me at the moment where you might’ve done so. I am still translating. I’m much better now than I was then.  I was so grateful to be able to thank him for his compassion and his wisdom, at that point, because I’m sure that what I produced was of absolutely no use to anyone. And he probably took it home and recycled it. 

You translate primarily female authors including Haitian activist Marie Vieux-Chauvet and French philosopher Catherine Malabou. What drew you to their works and how do you choose the texts you translate?

I think I’ll start with Chauvet, because that was the first one. It’s hard to trace exactly. I had heard about her and I had been wanting to translate women, knowing that women are not translated. So, there was a political stance there that I wanted to definitely use translation as an amplifying tool for women’s voices. It’s often because you are interested in something not because you’re an expert at it, that you can, through translation, become eventually, if not an expert, at least know more about it. 

Translation is a form of communication, communication has many functions; it’s not all about just expertise. We think that translators should just be in the role of experts, but maybe they are there because they’re interested, because they are curious, because they want to expand beyond what they know.

 I think the chance encounter is obviously a frequent factor in what we end up translating. I happened to be taking a class on the philosophy of translation at UMass and met Brinakle Chang [Professor of Communications at Umass Amherst], who was interested in that topic. He sent me this article and said, “Can you translate this article for a journal, it’s from Catherine Malabou?” I remember I had some interesting exchanges with the editors around the use of pronouns in that article. I think Catherine [Malabou] was copied on those exchanges and became interested and we started being in communication because of that, and because of my position. I wanted to use “her” they said no you have to use “his/her.” And I said, “Why now, do I suddenly have to use ‘his/her’? We’ve used ‘his’ for all this time, I want to use ‘her’.” Out of that first encounter, then [came] a first book, then on and on and on to five books, and I’m now waiting for the next one. 

 

On that note, what is your relationship with Catherine Malabou, and other living authors that you’ve translated?

I love collaborating with a living author. Maybe it’s partly reassuring, but it’s also that it’s a mode of access that you wouldn’t necessarily have.  It’s a way of participating that’s different from those who are the voices that you are translating, but you are definitely a part of that process. I think what’s interesting about translation is that it’s another mode of being in the world; you don’t necessarily have to be a leader; you might be somebody who would be amplifying.

I think it suits a lot of people to have that role and it’s fine because we can’t just have original leading authors in the world, for example. If we just had that, we’d have no translation, and we would be missing out on a lot.

In French, which you are primarily working with, are there any genres or perspectives that you feel are missing, that are not getting translated?

I think that question is really an important one. Especially once you become a little bit more established, but even as you are starting out, that’s a really important question to ask. The most important question is: “What is going to be translated?”  First of all, women are still not being translated. So, if we’re looking at French across the Francophone world and we’re examining who exactly is being translated, we can see that there are particular patterns in place. One of our roles, as translators, can be to advocate through our encounters to bring other voices into the conversation. Within the Francophone world, we know that there is still an emphasis around Paris, Parisian authors, etc., and that there is at the same time a hunger to get beyond that. 

You’ve been teaching your course “The Art of Translation” at Smith [a weekly lecture series on translation] for eight years now. What inspires you to keep teaching the course and how does your collaboration with other translators change the way you view translation? 

Well, it’s a little bit selfish. I think I learn as much as anybody else in the class every single night. I have questions and the course  allows me to bring practicing translators and thinkers about translation into our community, into our proximity, to answer those questions and to build on their insights. –It  really is such an exciting momentum and a tradition at Smith that is unique. What inspires me to do it is that we can do it at Smith; that Smith is willing to support it, that is really fantastic.  (See this semester’s program @a WLT 150 POSTER series Spring 2020) The course  actually works; we have about 70 students who are coming and who are participating and taking something from it and then a part of those go on to the concentration [in translation studies] It’s just so exciting to be able to go out to the world, go to conferences, hear people and think, “Yup. Let’s bring that person to Smith. Let’s try and have that voice be part of the conversations that are being held at Smith around translation.” 

On that note, how has collaborating with all these people changed the way that you do your process of translating? How has your process evolved and where do you hope it’ll get to eventually?

It’s really salutatory to realize that  just as there are many ways to communicate as there are people, there are many ways to translate as there are people. It’s useful to be reminded of that on a weekly basis, so that you don’t get stuck into thinking that the way you do it is the best way to do it or the only way to do it, but that you’re constantly engaging with contradictory approaches. Every week somebody comes in and essentially puts forward a proposal for how they construe translation. Some of them align, some of them are completely in contradiction.  

There’s really a whole community of people who are learning and thinking as a result of them. When [Jay Garfield, Professor of Philosophy and Buddhist Studies at Smith College] was talking about evidential language last night, it was so beautiful and so interesting to think about. I wouldn’t have known about it because I don’t translate from Tibetan, I don’t know Tibetan. I think that keeping shifting your frame all the time is a really helpful way to keep your mind fresh.

Are you working on any translations right now?

I am not, and I think that that’s good. I like to go through periods of lying fallow, so that I’m hungry to translate again.   I did write Catherine Malabou, “Is your book on anarchy going to be ready for the summer?” and unfortunately, it’s not; she’s still writing it. 

When you’re translating, what is your process?

Not reading the whole, in the case of Catherine Malabou. I don’t read it all ahead of time; I like the surprise of discovering it as I am translating. So, I like to discover it is I’m going. I do a lot of back-and-forth between what I’ve translated and what I’m looking to translate next.  Soo every time I get back on the computer, I’ll read back over what I’ve done and then I’ll move. It’s sort of like a type of sewing; I don’t let myself move forward until I’ve done that “re-read over.” When I get to a certain point, I’ll send it to Catherine; she will then read through and leave marks and comments. I’ll have questions for her sometimes about, “Where the hell is this quotation from? You say it’s on this page but it’s not.” So actually, the first thing I do with a philosophical text because they are made up of dialogs and citations of references, is I order all the books that are being cited. I will order them in French and in English because I need to find the quotation in the French book in order to then identify where it is in English book, in the standard edition. The point where I know I’m ready to start doing my translation is when I’ve gone through and identified most of the quotes and that helps me prepare the groundwork in terms of the vocabulary, the terms.  

What makes a translation good? What do you think is the goal of your translations?

A good translation, that’s a really difficult question. I don’t think translation studies has answered that very well.

To you, when you read something, what makes it good to you?

The reason I feel more confident around the Malabou translations is that somehow, my voice became affected by her voice and became her voice in English. So, that felt like a success to me. I didn’t know how to write like that before. It was by inhabiting her work that I’ve done that I became able to have that voice, which I love. It is exciting to be able to write like this. I wouldn’t have  been able to do it by myself; I was only able to do it as a result of reading her in French. I feel very much less confident in the Chauvet. I’m still committed to the product because I think it’s useful. It’s not published yet, for all sorts of reasons. I think that that is part of what establishes a good translation from the point of the translator.

 One of the things I’ve done with all of my Malabou translations is I write these little translation manifestos at the beginning of each of them that are not really translator’s notes. These, for me, were an occasion to develop in conversation with Malabou, because I realized while I was translating her that what she was talking about was actually translation. When you ask about the question of my goals in translation, I guess one of my goals is to keep pursuing the notion of how, in this instance, Malbou’s philosophical concept of plasticity might be a useful way to contribute to debates in translation studies.

 

Ilse Meiler ’20 is currently a senior at Smith College studying chemistry and Russian area studies. She is a student fellow on the Kahn Institute’s TranslationS project.

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