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.
Monthly Archives: March 2018
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.
Asymptote Book Club: In Conversation with Martin Aitken
Love can be a terrible thing, as terrible as its absence.
Continuing our monthly series of Asymptote Book Club interviews, Martin Aitken discusses his translation of Hanne Ørstavik’s Love.
Aitken, currently translating the sixth volume of Knausgård’s My Struggle alongside Don Bartlett, tells Asymptote’s Jacob Silkstone how readers are now more open to the idea that “English isn’t all there is,” and why it’s sometimes better to “switch yourself off as a translator and just read.” And, given the novel’s title, there’s also time for a brief meditation on love’s potential to be “a terrible thing, as terrible as its absence.”
Jacob Silkstone (JS): Love strikes me as a book that changes tone dramatically when read for a second time. Apparently innocuous lines (“He thinks he’ll look out for her on the bus tomorrow,” for example) suddenly take on a tremendous amount of weight. Do you generally read a novel cover to cover before beginning a new translation, to get a sense of where the plot is heading, or do you start translating immediately?
Martin Aitken (MA): This is a very short book, a novella, and every sentence in the Norwegian has been faceted very carefully indeed. The translator’s challenge is to poise the target-language sentences in the same way. I couldn’t envisage embarking on a novel like this without having read it first. I used to jump in at the deep end a lot, with crime fiction especially. There’s always a risk of being caught out by twists of plot when you do that, though of course rectifying mistakes is a lot easier these days than I imagine it used to be. However, with literary fiction I now prefer to spend time with the original before getting started on anything. With a novel like Love, so much of the work is about immersing yourself in the atmosphere of the piece, and I think the best way into that is to switch yourself off as a translator and just read. Getting the sense of the thing as a reader first, listening to its music as you move through the story, is a different thing entirely from the focus applied in crafting the translation.
What’s New with the Crew? A Monthly Update
Stay up-to-date with the literary accomplishments of the wonderful Asymptote team!
Contributing Editor Aamer Hussein participated in the Sixth Annual Lahore Literary Festival on 24 February, 2018 at the Alhamra Arts Center.
Communications Manager Alexander Dickow won a PEN/Heim grant for his translation of Sylvie Kandé’s Neverending Quest for the Other Shore: An Epic in Three Cantos.
Drama Editor Caridad Svich published an article entitled Six Hundred and Ninety-Two Million: On Art, Ethics, and Activism on HowlRound. Her play, An Acorn, recently opened at Trinity Repertory Company in Providence, Rhode Island.
Translation Tuesday: “Surface Effects” by Francesc Serés
The ivy recovered. It spent two years fighting off that ochre evil until it returned to its formerly exultant state.
This week the eminent Lawrence Venuti brings us a curious story from Catalonia about a house consumed by ivy. The existence and appearance of this menacing plant dominates this rural community and the people who inhabit it.
The house came with a garden—like all the others in the promotion. It was large, three floors, and had a slate roof. Not till Cinta and Pere bought the thing did it change. Ivy began to envelop the ochre façade. They had planted it after falling out with the neighborhood. The houses were painted in a bright earth tone, an ochre that possessed a concrete reference. The only distinguishing feature was the uneven discoloration that the sun caused to the paint. At community meetings, Cinta and Pere would dig in their heels against their next door neighbors on either side and, finally, against everybody else. They (she, and he too, although not as much) wanted the ivy.
And so they planted it and installed an American mailbox, which wasn’t permitted either. That broke the perpetual peace that reigned over urbanization in the countryside. They contracted a gardening firm to fertilize the grounds and plant ivy all around the house. The ivy liked the place: it grew like a shot. From my house, just beyond the development, the ivy on the east wall seemed quite like a hand or paw clinging to it. Time passed quickly for the neighboring houses, and the hand continued to grow nonstop till its entwining tentacles reached the nearby façades.
Coals to Newcastle: A (biased?) Slovak overview of a century in American literature
The ambition of the “American” issue of RSL was to resist preconceptions and cross boundaries.
Small cultures import disproportionately more texts—both translated and original—than they export. However, literatures using a language with a limited number of speakers are not just markets for globalised goods. Translations quite naturally also help them develop and sometimes even exist, as cases of small languages that ceased to be the target languages for translations show. Revue svetovej literatúry (Review of world literature) is a Slovak magazine founded in the “golden” 1960s that brought an abundance of new impulses to Slovak literature from all over the world for the past fifty years. Late last year, writer and translator (and Asymptote past contributor) Peter Macsovszky and literature and translation scholar Ivana Hostová edited and co-translated (with the help of a team of translators) an issue of the magazine with a focus on contemporary and twentieth-century Anglophone literature from the US.
In her Buying into English (2008), Catherine Prendergast analyses the semantics and economics linked to the ability of speakers of a minor language—in this case Slovak—to use the language of global communication. She compares the perceived value of English in Slovakia immediately after the fall of state socialism and then in almost two decades in the post-communist Slovakia. The strict restriction of the flow of information between socialist Czechoslovakia and the Western world gave rise to an idealised notion of the Anglophone (and, more specifically, American and capitalist) world. It came to signify freedom and prosperity and was—in the minds of many Slovaks—expected to embrace and accept with curiosity and eagerness the cultures and peoples freed from the socialist regime. Prendergast suggests that the notion was only abandoned after it slowly became clear that “the lingua franca is language-as-battlefield; it is the terrain upon which players in the global information economy grapple for property, respectability, and political voice.” Now it has become obvious that it takes more than pureness of heart and an admiration for the American culture and way of life to extract any interest from what Michael Cronin in his Eco-Translation (2017) has called the crowded Anglophone attentionscape.
The proportion of imported versus exported goods including cultural products can be very well illustrated by the amount of translations produced in the Anglophone countries as opposed to cultural spaces[i] like Slovakia. Therefore, wanting to import even more texts from the dominant to small culture might seem like carrying coals to Newcastle. However, if we try to differentiate between a piece of writing as a commodity that primarily generates economic profit and institutional legitimation and look at the autonomous sections of the literary field—at those works that were not created to make the author famous or rich, but which came into being in order to exist for themselves and in their own right—it may come as a surprise that not much American writing can really be found in Slovak translation. In this context, an issue of a Slovak literary magazine bringing translations of Anglophone writing from the United States seems redundant only at first glance. Most of the literature written in the US that gets translated into Slovak nowadays can best be described as a commodity—currently, the best-selling book in the biggest Slovak bookshops is the translation of Dan Brown’s Origin (2017)—it is the kind of writing that, although undeniably culturally domineering and shaping the receiving context, does not inspire in the sense of creating resistance to the existing (cultural) preconceptions or fluent strategies of reading.
(M)other Tongue: Sign Language in Translation
"I can only access conversation that is intended for me to access—and so all spoken conversation that I pick up is meaningful."
When I began to progressively lose my hearing at three years old, my mother fought for me to have access to both British Sign Language classes and speech therapy sessions, offering me a dual-language gateway. Through travel and education opportunities, I know phrases, sentences and expressions in other languages—both signed and spoken. But it is in English and BSL that I primarily express myself, code-switching when appropriate and, at times, combining the two together to speak SSE (Sign-supported English). This is sign language that follows English grammatical structure, as opposed to BSL structure. For those new to BSL, it can come as a surprise to discover that it is its own language, complete with its own rules, format and words—or rather signs—that have no direct equivalent in English.
And so, on a day-to-day basis, I communicate using my hands (signing), voice (speaking), and eyes (lip-reading), as a giver and a receiver. I enjoy the literal sound certain words make as they hold space in the air. Simultaneously, and without contradiction, I love the shape of language created by fingers, expressions and the body. People also underestimate the use of the whole body in sign language – though it is primarily through the hands that words are expressed; meaning, content and colour is amplified through other parts of the body, in particular, the face.