Posts featuring William Shakespeare

“Translation involves dressing up the original text in a different outfit”: An interview with Canadian writer and translator Émile Martel

The translator should be polite and courteous to the poem, showcasing what he finds, and being faithful to its spirit.

Earlier this year, Sheela Mahadevan had the honour of meeting award-winning Canadian writer and translator Émile Martel in Montréal. In this interview, he provides fascinating insights into his multilingual experiences, the creativity involved in literary translation, and the intersections between translation and creative writing. He also describes the unique experience of familial and collaborative translation in the process of translating the much lauded Life of Pi, written by his son Yann Martel, into French.

Sheela Mahadevan (SM): Émile, you live in Montréal, a city in which code-switching between French and English is commonplace, and you have spent your career writing between various languages: French, English, and Spanish. Could you say a little about your relationship to all these languages, and why you employ French as your literary language? 

Émile Martel (EM): Several thousands of us here in Québec are descendants of the first French colonists who came to this region at the start of the seventeenth century. Our collective identity has always been linked to the fact that we speak French; along with the Catholic religion, this is the bond which has enabled us to survive, especially after the English conquest in the middle of the eighteenth century.

I believe that French is the most bountiful of all languages, for it always faithfully provides me with the words I need to describe a particular emotion, object, or location. And I find it musical when it is read aloud. I don’t think I’ve ever begun composing a literary text in English or Spanish spontaneously and unconsciously; not only would my vocabulary be more limited, but I’d feel like I was translating.

My relationship with Spanish is that of an adopted child. When I came to learn Spanish, I was already somewhat competent in English, but I really wanted to read the works of Federico García Lorca in the original language. My professors at Laval University fueled my enthusiasm; I was granted a scholarship to study in Madrid from 1960–1961 at the age of nineteen, and I spent that year entirely immersed in the Spanish language.

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Honoring the Art of Translation: Radu Vancu

It is [the poet’s] task . . . to build an enormous, resonating device which would reverberate with beauty from all times, all spaces, all cultures.

Though Asymptote has made it a point to celebrate literary translation no matter the time of year, we’re still pretty thrilled that there’s a whole month dedicated to the cause. As we draw towards the end of National Translation Month, Asymptote is taking the opportunity to bring together essential components that complete the cycle of literature as it travels from one language to the next, with the intention of recognizing the meticulous, purposeful, and intimate labour invested into a text during this peregrination—from conception to publication. We have asked four valued members of the literary community, spanning the globe, to bring us their take on translation and its gifts. 

With this first feature, we are honoured to introduce an original text by Radu Vancu, a brilliant Romanian writer and translator (and past Asymptote contributor!) who traverses the international literary arena with a virtuoso expertise and a seemingly time-defiant profusion. In the following essay, he discusses his ongoing project to translate the works of Ezra Pound into Romanian, and thus brings to the forefront the great modernist’s defiance of limits. This poetry, which spans time, language, and cultures, is a testament to the sublime nature of translation, and its endless capacity for encapsulation.

Ezra Pound quickly understood that, in the case of poetry, regeneration is actually reinvention—or, more synthetically and apparently more paradoxically, inventing is actually reinventing. Poetry can live only through the graft of all that is alive throughout all ages, all cultures, all languages. Therefore, Pound came to understand that poetry does not mean only regenerated language, as he originally believed; it is instead a translingual, transnational, and even transcultural body, built (or “excerned,” to use his own word) by the addition of all the “living parts” still active in the geological layers of poetic language.

He says this in more contracted and memorable form in a 1930 Credo: “I believe that a light from Eleusis persisted throughout the middle ages and set beauty in the song of Provence and Italy.” J.J. Wilhelm also observes, in Ezra Pound: The Tragic Years, that this proposition is in full consonance with a small text by Pound, Religio, from 1910—forming thus, in my opinion, an approximate backbone of Pound’s poetics, otherwise so branched and polymorphous.

The poet must coagulate in their work this migrant light which iridesces simultaneously the Eleusine texts, the Provençal ballads, the Italian sonnets, in addition to the ancient Chinese, Greek, and Latin poetry, and so on. It is their task, therefore, to not only regenerate the poetic language—this enormous burden is still too simple—but to build an enormous, resonating device which would reverberate with beauty from all times, all spaces, all cultures. This is why it is hard to capture in translation the beauty of an Ezra Pound poem: because some poems substantiate the ancient Greek beauty, harsh and dangerous (“seek ever to stand in the hard Sophoclean light / And take your wounds from it gladly,” a poem says); some others take the form of Medieval villanelles, ballads, or shapes invented by Pound himself (the villonaud, for example), coalescing in another kind of beauty—seductive, chanting, feminine, sweet; some others reinvent a traditional Chinese aesthetic in the English language of the twentieth century; and so on. What is remarkable and astounding is that you, a twenty-first-century reader of English, can resonate with all these varying types of beauty. Pound’s genius is precisely that he succeeded in making new and alive the beauty of all great poetic languages, including the old or “dead” ones.

His achievement is that he can adapt his resonating apparatus to all the diachronic wavelengths of beauty. The construction of the poem—his physis—also varies according to the oscillation of this wavelength; when “making new” the ancient Greek epigrams, the poem has two or three lines, quite rarely more, and the Idealtypus of the beauty targeted is that of an intense and sarcastic, sometimes quasi-licentious lapidarity. In other instances, when he pretends to be translating from the ancient Chinese, the poems become long, winding, archaic in lexis, but the intricacies of the lines are in actuality an ekphrasis of the Chinese ideograms. In the Cantos, this mechanism builds an enormous vortex-poem, or, more preferably, a poem whose vortex is that of History itself—infinitely commingling fragments of poems, fragments of languages, fragments of historical, economic, biological, political information, and so on. And the beauty of these demented, illegible, and hypnotic Cantos is the very demented, illegible, and hypnotic beauty of our times. READ MORE…

Barren Landscape: Who is Afraid of Albanian Women?

For many Albanian women, the domestic is a space of terror and violence; what could be more heroic than surviving and writing in spite of that?

How is it that a formal literary curriculum can almost completely erase the works of a group of proficient, formidable writers? In this essay, Barbara Halla, Asymptote’s Editor-at-Large for Albania, asks this question of her country’s educational system, while also discussing and revealing the extensive work of Albania’s female writers. 

I could make a long list of my grievances about the Albanian educational system, but I have generally appreciated the breadth of my literary education. In four years of high school, I was assigned some eighty books to read, spanning Western literature from Antiquity (starting with The Epic of Gilgamesh) to Shakespeare, Hugo, Hemingway, and Márquez.

I no longer retain the official list of my required reading, but it is not hard to find a contemporary equivalent. I graduated from high school in 2011, and in eight years, the list selected by the Ministry of Education does not seem to have changed much, which I find questionable. While I am grateful for my literary education, with the years I have become acutely aware of its flaws, the most egregious of which is the complete dismissal of women writers, especially Albanian women. Dozens of books, an entire year dedicated to Albanian literature during my senior year, and yet I graduated without having heard the name of a single Albanian woman writer. It was almost as if they didn’t exist.

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Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

Join as us we celebrate indigenous writers, intercultural connection, and the importance of linguistic diversity.

This week, we return with three dispatches exploring multicultural and multilingual connection. We begin with a reflection on the work of Humberto Ak’abal, an influential Indigenous poet who wrote in both K’iche’ Maya and Spanish. We also explore the multilayered dialogue between China and New York in the Hong Kong literary scene, and get an exciting firsthand account of the recent Creative Multilingualism conference in the UK.

 Paul Worley and Kelsey Woodburn, Editors-at-Large, reporting from Guatemala

As declared by the United Nations, 2019 is the International Year of Indigenous Languages. According to their website, of the 7,000 languages currently spoken on the planet, over 2,500 are currently endangered. In Mexico, the rest of Latin America, and around the world, many hope this global recognition will lead to wider acceptance of Indigenous languages, as well as to increased opportunities for their oral and written expression.

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On Surtitles and Simultaneities: Reflections on the German Theatre Scene

No longer before, behind, or above the original, with surtitles, the translation is now parallel or simultaneous to it.

Lars Eidinger, playing Richard III, huskily whispers some German lines of Shakespeare into an amplifier, furtively glances up to the English surtitles, and spins round to berate a coughing audience member in French. This is theatre in a truly globalised arts scene. But the multilingual nature of many recent productions not only reflects the realities of our contemporary social conditions. It raises fundamental questions about the nature and role of the linguistic mediation of culture today.

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Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

This week's literary updates from the Czech Republic, Iran, and England

This Friday, we present three very distinct reports from the world of literature. Slovakian Editor-at-Large Julia Sherwood looks back at what was a great year of Czech literature in translation and gives us a sneak peek at what to look forward to this year. Her Iranian colleague Poupeh Missaghi reports on language-related issues in a human rights Twitter campaign. And finally, the UK Editor-at-Large M. René Bradshaw tells us where to head for great readings in London this month and next.

Julia Sherwood, our Editor-at-Large for Slovakia, has good news from the publishing world:

Last year proved to be a big year for Czech literature in English translation, with no fewer than eighteen publications from eight different presses at the latest count. They include, to mention just a few, Worm-Eaten Time, poet Pavel Šrut’s elegy for his homeland after the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia, translated by Deborah Garfinkle, and symbolist poet Jaroslav Durych‘s (1886-1962) 1956 novella God’s Rainbow on the expulsion of the German-speaking population from Bohemia after World War II. First published in censored form in 1969, it is now available in full in David Short’s translation as part of Karolínum Press’s Modern Classics series, which also features Eva M. Kandler’s translation of the World War II literary horror The Cremator by Ladislav Fuks, a study of the totalitarian mindset that still resonates today (extract in BODY Literature), and served as the basis for one of the key films of the Czech new wave, directed by Juraj Herz.

Stoppard_and_Bajaja,_photo_by_Pavel_Stojar

On 30 November, a packed audience at the launch of Antonín Bajaja’s Burying the Season (also translated by David Short) at Waterstones Piccadilly in the heart of London included the playwright Tom Stoppard. Stoppard’s father came from the town of Zlín, the setting for this novel depicting the early years of communism in Czechoslovakia. Czech literature scholar Rajendra Chitnis introduces the book as part of an Istros Conversations podcast on Audioboom, while Michael Tate of Jantar Publishing discusses on Czech radio the challenges of bringing Central European literature to English readers.

World Literature Today picked Czech writer Magdaléna Platzová’s The Attempt as one of its Notable translations of 2016, characterizing it as “historical fiction at its best”. In an interview with the Czech cultural bi-weekly A2, the novel’s translator Alex Zucker points out that while more books by Czech authors are now being published than ever before, they don’t necessarily reach many more readers since—like translated literature in general—quite a few are brought out by small independent presses and are therefore not visible in major bookshops and rarely reviewed.

In 2017, we can look forward to Zucker’s translations of two the most acclaimed contemporary Czech writers: Jáchym Topol’s Angel Station is due from Dalkey Archive in May, and Petra Hůlová’s taboo-breaking Plastic Three Rooms will be brought out by Jantar Publishing. Budding UK translators keen to be part of this unprecedented boom in Czech literature in English can participate in the fourth annual international competition for young translators, who this year are asked to tackle an excerpt from Bianca Bellová’s The Lake by 31 March (see their call for submissions). Budding Czech-to-English translators can also dip into the treasure trove of tricky issues, complete with solutions generously shared by Melvyn Clarke, in his blog post Translating Hrdý Budžes.

Acclaimed writer Zuzana Brabcová, who sadly passed away in 2015, was posthumously awarded the Josef Škvorecký prize for her haunting last novel Voliéry [Aviaries]. And as the year drew to a close, scores of students and literature lovers mourned the loss of the legendary Fišer bookstore in Kaprova Street near Prague’s Old Town Square, which closed its doors after selling books since the 1930s.

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