[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Fascinating and of great interest.
>
> June 2005
> Damien Weaver
> features
> A Thankless Job: A Translators Roundtable
>
> Most of us English speakers are too lazy, busy or stultified
> to read Goethe, Gogol, Kafka, and Mishima in their original
> languages. Many of us, however, have at some point cracked
> open a legendary work, translated from a foreign tongue, and
> finished it wondering: is that really all? What am I
> missing? Then, and perhaps only then, do we seek out the
> small-font name tucked below the cover art, huddled even
> smaller alongside the bar code on the back cover, or
> languishing with the Library of Congress classifications on
> the copyright page. We eye the name with disdain,
> speculating unpleasantly about his or her qualifications. O
> the unlucky translator, invisible in success, responsible
> for so much!
>
> They've been indispensable since the dawn of literature,
> laboring over the masterpieces of others, coaxing them into
> approximation. Four gifted translators-into-English of four
> very different works gave generously of their time for this
> roundtable, mostly concerning their experiences with a
> recent book. May we introduce, with the respective works on
> which the roundtable is focusing:
>
> Ms. Dorna Khazeni, who translated controversial novelist
> Michel Houellebecq's 1991 essay "H.P. Lovecraft: Against the
> World, Against Life" (Believer Books, 2005) from French; Mr.
> Benjamin Paloff, who translated then-teenaged Dorota
> Maslowska's intense, unconventional debut novel Snow White
> and Russian Red (Black Cat, 2005) from Polish; Mr. Mark
> Polizzotti, who translated the gentle, erudite spy spoof
> Chopin's Move (Dalkey Archive Press, 2004) by Jean Echenoz,
> past winner of the Prix Goncourt and Prix Médicis, from
> French; and Mr. Peter Wortsman, who translated a collection
> of 18-century Viennese innovator and bon vivant Peter
> Altenberg's slice-of-life prose poems, titled Telegrams of
> the Soul, (Archipelago Books, 2005) from German.
>
> This obliging foursome's responses, submitted through
> e-mail, have in some cases been delicately trimmed, massaged
> and repurposed, but except where paraphrase or clarification
> are indicated by brackets, the language is entirely,
> gloriously, originally theirs.
>
> *********
>
> To begin with, what was your background in translation, and
> how did you come to translate this work?
>
> ------
>
> Paloff: I work comparatively in three Slavic literatures
> (Czech, Polish, and Russian), as well as with contemporary
> American literature, and translation is a natural feature of
> my work. I have been studying translation theory far longer
> than I have been facing the practical rigors of translation.
> My earliest translations were a hodgepodge of poems, essays,
> screenplays, and articles, some done for love, others as
> contract work in college.
>
> The Maslowska project was spearheaded at Grove Press by Amy
> Hundley, a truly excellent editor, and I assume that she
> made the final decision about who would translate the novel.
> [Candidates for the job were] asked to translate three short
> passages. Working on the sample was as important for me as
> it was for Grove: this was my first chance to see if I could
> invent a hybrid language that would be readable in English
> and faithful to Maslowska's Polish.
>
> ------
>
> Khazeni: I haven't done a lot of translation, actually. But
> I had translated some short fiction from Farsi and from
> French and a lot of non-fiction. I also work as an interpreter.
>
> ------
>
> Wortsman: I had all but given up translation, having been
> burnt in the past by a publisher who essentially cheated me.
> It is such a thankless task. There was one review in
> particular of a past -- and I might add, critically
> acclaimed -- translation of mine, Posthumous Papers of a
> Living Author, by Robert Musil (originally published by
> Eridanos Books in 1987 and reissued by Penguin 20th-Century
> Classics), in which the reviewer noted everything from the
> rich complex style of Musil to the quality of the paper, the
> cover and even the cloth bookmark, but did not say a single
> word about the translation.
>
> In this case, I happened to meet Jill Schoolman, the
> publisher, at a party. She knew my work and asked me to do
> something for her. I said, "No, I don't translate anymore,
> but if I did, and I'm not saying I will, somebody really
> ought to do Peter Altenberg."
>
> Altenberg is a literary godfather to me. I am his "love
> god-child," -- not his bastard, since there is no anger or
> shame in my confession of a literary illegitimacy I
> discovered long after the fact.
>
> I tried my best to resist translating, but the whole project
> poured out of my pores. I've never worked so quickly and
> don't suppose I ever will again. It was all over and done
> with, including the process of [selecting the pieces], in a
> matter of months.
>
> *********
>
> What were the unique challenges of this job?
>
> ------
>
> Khazeni: I don't think I was prepared for the stylistic
> challenges that Houellebecq's writing presented. His
> sentences appear so deceptively simple, [but] upon closer
> inspection you realize they aren't constructed in anything
> resembling a straightforward way. He often expresses a
> thought with great economy using syntax that's unusual.
> There are lots of really short sentences -- exclamations,
> almost -- sometimes lacking a verb. But it all reads really
> fluidly and beautifully in French. It was so much harder
> than I'd anticipated to try to turn that language into English.
>
> ------
>
> Polizzotti: In the case of Echenoz, I feel particularly
> fortunate because his style seemed to "connect" with a style
> that felt natural to me. Plus, over twenty years of knowing
> each other and working together, I've noticed a certain
> effect of symbiosis: even in our correspondence I often find
> myself unwittingly "speaking Echenoz." I think it also helps
> that we seem to share a number of likes in literature,
> movies, and music: we had a not dissimilar formation.
>
> Stylistically, Echenoz differs from a number of the authors
> I've translated in that he tends to be much sparer in
> emotion and extremely economical in expression, which I
> value and admire. Although one can find bits and pieces of
> many precursors in his work, ranging from the New Novel to
> American pulp, the writer who seems to have the greatest
> stylistic affinity with him (or vice versa) is Flaubert. Not
> surprisingly, [Flaubert's] Bouvard and Pecuchet, which I'm
> now translating for Dalkey, is Echenoz's favorite book.
> Having translated Echenoz's novels beforehand makes me feel
> a lot more comfortable with Flaubert than I might otherwise
> have.
>
> ------
>
> Wortsman: In this case, the translation was a labor of love.
> That having been said, I do try to feel my way into the soul
> of the author to find the apt term and tenor. For instance,
> does one translate the German "man" as "one" or "you" -- as
> in "one says" or "you say?" That's always a question. Then
> there are words and even notions that don't exist in the
> English of our time. In the piece "Autobiography"
> ("Selbstbiographie") I searched and failed to find the
> precise English for a "Liebig-Tiegel," a kind of device that
> no longer seems to exist. Not even the librarian at the
> Austrian Cultural Institute had ever heard of it. So, by the
> logic of the sentence and context I came up with "reduction
> pot" -- as in "The life of the soul and what the day may
> bring, reduced to two to three pages, cleansed of
> superfluities like a beef cow in a reduction pot."
>
> [With regard to] the particularity of Altenberg's cadence, I
> would have to confess that I worked more by intuition than
> anything else. Being the son of Viennese-Jewish refugees and
> having heard this uniquely Viennese German spoken throughout
> my childhood, I heard the lines, rather than read them, and
> the act of translation was more of a filtration through the
> invisible channel linking heart and ear.
>
> ------
>
> Paloff: I did have some difficulty with the ending, though
> not just because the voice changes in the last few pages. By
> that point in the novel, it was fun to face the challenge of
> reproducing that shift. But that last section, with the
> exception of the last page, is no longer spoken by Nails,
> [the main character and the narrator until then], but by an
> anonymous young woman who provides a very glancing
> commentary on some of the novel's themes. In Polish, it is
> very obvious that this new speaker is a woman: grammatical
> endings for verbs are gendered in the past tense, so there
> is no need to remark on the speaker's gender. I got around
> this by beginning the passage, "Indeed, we're girls talking
> about death..."
>
> *********
>
> Did you have any interaction with the author?
>
> ------
>
> Polizzotti: The obvious advantage of working with a living
> author is that you can query unclear wordings or points of
> fact, though the Internet has made this less necessary than
> it used to be. In some instances, Echenoz and I have even
> made a few minor changes to some of the books -- small
> inconsistencies that the French copyeditor hadn't noticed,
> things like that. In the case of [the earlier novel] Piano,
> we had to find a suitable singer/actress to replace the
> original's Doris Day, after the US publisher decided to
> change it for legal reasons (in the English edition, her
> part is played by Peggy Lee). The title Chopin’s Move was
> also the product of some discussion back and forth, because
> Dalkey felt, rightly, that the literal title Lake (the
> French title is Lac) wouldn’t convey much to an American
> reader. The other advantage is that a living author uses
> contemporary language and settings, which require far less
> research and second-guessing than older works.
>
> ------
>
> Paloff: Maslowska and I have met, but I did not consult her
> directly on the translation. I have found in the past that,
> if I can get linguistic or cultural queries answered
> elsewhere, I have a much easier (and happier) time finding
> original solutions to the original problems posed by a
> literary text without having someone peering over my
> shoulder. Odd as it may sound, even though we may share the
> same ultimate goal -- a good book -- translator and author
> often do not have the same investment in the process of
> translation. There have been cases where I have found this
> to be otherwise -- for example, in translating critical or
> theoretical literature -- but generally I prefer to stand
> alone with the book.
>
> ------
>
> Wortsman: My affection for Altenberg is profound and
> sincere. I think of him as an old friend who just happens to
> be dead, but whose voice continues to echo in the texts. I
> am also convinced of the modernity of this voice. My intent
> was to take him out of the nostalgia ghetto of fin-de-siècle
> Vienna and present him as a voice which, though uttered in
> another time and place, speaks with an almost uncanny
> prescience to our own moment.
>
> His creative method had a peculiar impact on my translation.
> It was as if Altenberg haunted me. In the past I have always
> labored profusely over every word, in my translation as in
> my own writing, but in this case it was as if the
> translation dictated itself and all I had to do was type it
> out. I am taking a touch of poetic license here, as there
> were passages I had to struggle with, but by and large it
> really was as if dear old Altenberg was whispering the words
> in my ear.
>
> *********
>
> To what degree does your sense of the original author's
> intent shape your choices?
>
> ------
>
> Khazeni: When I'm translating, I attempt to be as faithful
> as possible to the text that I am working with, in terms of
> language, tone, voice, nuance, as well as syntax, rhythm and
> structure. At the same time, there's a point at which you
> also work with your instincts of the language you are
> translating into. It's not as black and white as working
> this one way all the time or this other way. I can't say,
> "This is my system." I approach the sentence and translate
> it as I read it, so I'm both reading it in the original
> language and translating into English. My translation is an
> extension of my reading. But it's also a function of the
> fact that I read and write English. So these things dance
> around each other, my reading, my understanding and my
> translating. It is also a fact that there are things you
> come across that you're not sure about, "Did he mean this or
> that?" you wonder. "If this three word phrase doesn't make
> any sense in English, do I add a verb? Or not?" In my
> limited experience, the answer varies. I also tend to
> believe that there's not one way of translating anything. I
> imagine that there can be more than one good translation of
> a work and that each will have different merits. Each will
> be a reading as well as a translation, though, other than in
> some inconceivably extreme case, the differences are of
> nuance and the original work is what comes across in each one.
>
> ------
>
> Polizzotti: As mentioned earlier, one great help in
> translating Echenoz is that I feel close to his sense of
> humor and tone, and our personal contacts over the years
> have helped further this. So in that sense, I suppose I can
> "hear" his voice more easily in the English, when I feel
> I've gotten it right. But any text, to a large degree, has
> its own internal logic and shape, and you don't need to know
> the author personally to immerse yourself in this. By the
> same token, there are certain books I simply wouldn't take
> on because the writer's voice is opaque to me, or
> antipathetic. This is more an issue with fiction than with
> nonfiction. Not every translator is well suited to every book.
>
> *********
>
> What's your greatest satisfaction in translation? The
> day-to-day engagement with a text? The finished product?
>
> ------
>
> Khazeni: It's definitely not the finished product. You
> always worry that maybe you should keep tweaking it. I do,
> anyhow.
>
> I really love the process. I like the reading of a text with
> that devotion and the inquisitive attention that translating
> requires. Pondering and weighing the words of it, the place
> of each sentence, the concert of all of them. It's a very
> pleasurable way of being with a text. Sometimes too, I'll
> read something that I think is really important, or that I
> know a friend would love to read, and then it's a kind of
> sense of mission: I feel I have to translate whatever it is
> so others can read it.
>
> ------
>
> Polizzotti: The part I enjoy best is revision, after the
> basic draft is on paper and all major vocabulary issues have
> been resolved. In other words, the process of turning it
> from a mass of Translatorese into something that sounds,
> first like English, and then like English the original
> author might have written. I generally reread and revise
> each complete draft half a dozen times, sometimes more. And
> it's never really finished, of course -- you could revise
> forever.
>
> ------
>
> Wortsman: Altenberg brought me back to translation as a
> craft which I have resumed as a daily exercise, for an hour
> or so, a priming or loosening up prior to leaping into the
> chilly waters of composition. As a trilingual author --
> English, French and German -- translation helps me align my
> tongue with my soul, to clear the throat and let the voice out.
>
> ------
>
> Paloff: I treat a translation the same as I do any other
> piece of writing, which means many drafts, many revisions,
> and development over time. When the language of a project
> fails to evolve, I become very skeptical of my work. The
> upside of this is that the project generally picks up nuance
> and flavor as it goes on. The downside is that the process
> never really ends, and I am never really satisfied with the
> outcome, even once it is published. If translation is truly
> something that "begins in failure," as Robert Pinsky once
> said, then the best I can hope for is "good enough," and I
> put a big burden on myself to make "good enough" really
> good. I learned a great deal about the Polish language from
> translating this book, and that continues to serve me well.
>
> *********
>
> Did you bring to the job of translation, or accumulate
> through the process, your own critical analysis of the
> book's underlying "big picture" ideas or messages? How did
> your evolving sense of the work affect your translation at
> the word-to-word level?
>
> ------
>
> Polizzotti: Not so much in the translation. This has been
> relevant when I've written an introduction to the book, but
> even then that kind of analysis comes after the fact. The
> only "big picture" work that goes into the translation
> itself is a first reading straight through, so that I know
> where the book is going and what clues I might need to pick
> up on along the way. Otherwise, the work happens at a very
> local level, in trying to reproduce as well as possible the
> tone, voice, mood, information, rhythm, and "feel" of each
> sentence and each paragraph. That said, at the local level,
> one often has to interpret and analyze. It sometimes happens
> that the meaning of a sentence in French and the meaning of
> its literal translation into English are two different
> things, and one has to alter the wording a bit to preserve
> the author’s intention.
>
> ------
>
> Paloff: What makes [Snow White and Russian Red] a worthwhile
> book for me is that my understanding of its linguistic and
> rhetorical nuances changed a great deal the more I worked on
> it, the more I read (and wrote) it. This is what good
> literature does, I think: it changes as we read it, and it
> continues to change as we change. It is difficult for me to
> say whether my appreciation of the book evolved so much
> because I was working so closely with the language, or my
> work with the language evolved so much because my reading of
> it was developing.
>
> ------
>
> Khazeni: I don't think the work's underlying ideas or
> messages affect my word-to-word work. But I do think the
> more I know about a writer's body of work, the easier it is
> for me to approach the translation. It informs the
> translation on a deeper level, perhaps. It's not always
> possible and sometimes you just go at a piece cold, with no
> context, but in Houellebecq's case, having read his novels,
> it was interesting to see him develop his intellectual
> thesis in this literary essay. Working on a sentence-level,
> I was always aware of him as the probing intellectual writer
> of, say, Elementary Particles, so it made me more acutely
> aware of the precision of his thinking and language.
>
> *********
>
> We'll conclude with a round of specific questions. Mr.
> Polizzotti, if you had to identify a primary aspect of
> Chopin's Move that you worked to bring across, what would it be?
>
> ------
>
> Polizzotti: Ultimately, to me, Echenoz's books are all about
> the act of writing. The plot is somewhat secondary, like
> Hitchcock's MacGuffin. A crucial part of this is the
> particular humor, which is perhaps the hardest part to
> preserve, and which involves a combination of timing,
> concision, reference, sound, and even whether or not the
> reader has kept certain earlier details in mind.
>
> What I'm trying to recreate more than anything is the effect
> the original text had on the French reader. This could
> entail any number of small departures -- anything from
> changing a cultural reference to making a small addition or
> deletion to clarify a point -- but, paradoxical as this
> might seem, always with an eye toward preserving the
> integrity of the original. By clinging too faithfully to the
> sentence structure or cultural system of the original,
> you're more likely to end up with gibberish, with something
> the reader finds incomprehensible. Where's the advantage in
> that?
>
> Up until Piano, most of Echenoz's books would appear in the
> UK in a British translation, which to me sounded a bit
> unnatural, even as mine no doubt seemed to them. British and
> American English are moving farther and farther apart, it
> seems to me, and it is becoming increasingly difficult to
> have a translation truly "work" on both sides of the
> Atlantic. Even Piano, which was published in my translation
> in the UK, underwent some Anglicizing first ("chap" instead
> of "guy"; various turns of phrase that struck them as too
> American). Personally, I wouldn't want to show that edition
> as an example of my work -- the difference is subtle, but it
> makes the whole thing sound "off" to me. And not because
> it's British English, but precisely because it's a
> bastardization of the two. There are sentences in that
> version that I simply would never have written.
>
> *********
>
> Mr. Paloff, how vital to your translation was maintaining
> cultural fidelity?
>
> ------
>
> Paloff: The question of cultural fidelity in translation
> will rattle translators for all time. I think it's something
> that depends very much on the text itself, and on the
> translator's own intentions in bringing the work into the
> target language. There's a point when translation becomes
> adaptation -- look at all the versions of Latin poets that
> suddenly make reference to American pop culture -- but we
> would be much poorer without these as well. Because
> Maslowska's book is about intercultural conflict -- those
> few who have written about the novel as a cautionary tale
> about drug use have given it a very superficial reading --
> it would not have worked to change the cultural references,
> though this was hardly necessary. McDonald's is the same
> company everywhere. The mistake we sometimes make is when we
> think that McDonald's means the same for a Pole as it does
> for an American, and this is simply not the case. There were
> a couple times when I needed to use a couple more words than
> Maslowska does. When she says Arka Gdynia, her readers know
> that it's a soccer team, thus: Arka Gdynia Football Club.
>
> The language of Snow White and Russian Red is nothing like
> what one learns in the classroom. For one thing, it is
> delightfully vulgar. For another, it creates a hybrid of
> high and low diction that moves at a rapid tempo and
> sometimes strains the limits of sense. Fortunately, I've
> spent enough time in Poland to know a lot of the things they
> don't teach you in school. The rest I picked up from a
> variety of sources: plenty of reading in Polish, native
> speakers, dictionaries (including specialty dictionaries
> ranging from slang to technical language), and the Internet.
> The last of these was extraordinarily helpful; the Internet,
> as a ubiquitous presence in Europe and North America, is an
> increasingly necessary tool for the translator of
> contemporary literature. I picked up a lot from reading
> Polish chat-rooms and blogs, where people almost
> unconsciously translate their spoken language into text.
>
> *********
>
> Mr. Wortsman, how did you decide when to keep Peter
> Altenberg's emphatic punctuation, and when to lighten a ?!?
> to a ? What influenced these decisions?
>
> ------
>
> Wortsman: This was one of the rare cases in which my
> wonderful publisher-editor, Jill Schoolman, interceded,
> gently suggesting a lightening of the opulent punctuation.
> In my original translation I was religiously faithful, but I
> came to agree with Jill that the contemporary American
> reader might be put off by this eccentric and ever so
> slightly hysterical use of punctuation. In Vienna they
> slather "schlag" (whipped cream) on every cake. This is dear
> PA's indulgence. I have always envied the license in Spanish
> to start a sentence with upside-down punctuation, thereby to
> whisper from the start which way the sentence is going, so
> the profusion of question marks and exclamations points --
> like punctuational walking sticks and canes -- did not
> bother me.
>
> *********
>
> Ms. Khazeni, where Houellebecq's original quoted Lovecraft,
> you made the decision to insert Lovecraft's original words
> instead of re-translating the translated-to-French Lovecraft
> Houellebecq worked from; what difficulties did you have
> tracking down the passages Houellebecq was excerpting, and
> what was your method? Did you perform a literal translation
> of the French excerpt, and then look for something similar
> in Lovecraft's originals?
>
> ------
>
> Khazeni: I do believe Houellebecq's only read HPL in
> translation. [As far as] "the decision to insert Lovecraft's
> original words," I don't believe it could have been done any
> other way. It's extremely dicey to attempt to retranslate
> back into the original language from a translation of
> someone's original voice. Not a good idea, I'd say. I had
> qualms about the way we had to handle the situation --
> dropping the quotes and retranslating passages-- but it
> seemed like the only solution. Mr. Houellebecq was satisfied
> with the final result, based on my conversations with him
> during his recent visit.
>
> I really didn't have a very scientific method. Early on, I
> figured out that many of the quotes came from Lovecraft's
> letters. Often there'd be some clue as to when
> chronologically in Lovecraft's life this or that quoted
> comment was made. If, for example, the sentence Houellebecq
> had written in French had something to do with [Lovecraft's]
> impressions of New York, I'd figure out what year it was
> [Lovecraft] first visited New York and then I'd sift through
> all the letters around those dates looking for something
> that resembled the quotes. It was kind of crazy that it
> worked, this non-method. Each time I stumbled across the
> exact passage I'd feel so relieved and gratified. Then there
> were the times when I didn't find the equivalent in
> Lovecraft's letters (or fiction, as the case might be).
> [Lovecraft scholar] S. T. Joshi was so grand and generous to
> help us look for missing original quotes, but in the end, we
> were still left with a few mysteries.
>
> I think I reached the conclusion that [since] in the
> introduction Houellebecq wrote to the Lovecraft book, ten
> years after its first publication, he refers to it as a sort
> of first novel, one might be led to assume that the
> Lovecraft of this essay is in part a character of
> Houellebecq's creation.
>
> *********
>
> Thank you all for your contributions and for the enthusiasm
> of your responses. Thanks also to Chad Post at Dalkey
> Archive Press, Kara Mason at Archipelago, and "John" at
> Believer Books for putting me in touch with your talented
> translators.
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