The PEN/Heim Translation Grant is one of the most reliable indicators as to which texts will come to be considered vital in the English-language literary landscape, with past grantees including George Szirtes translating the Hungarian giant of postmodernism, László Krasznahorkai; Daniel Borzutsky translating the Chilean revolutionary poet, Raúl Zurita, Jennifer Croft translating Polish Nobel Laureate Olga Tokarczuk, and Anton Hur translating the celebrated South Korean genre-bender, Bora Chung. The aim of the grant is to support translators during their vital and difficult work of working on a text, and as a result, the texts that come to English-language readers by way of this gift are often exemplary examples of not only the writers’ intelligence, imagination, and effort—but equally importantly, the translator’s.
In this three-part series, Asymptote has asked the 2023 PEN/Heim grantees to talk about their work in progress; their responses, brimming with excitement, conviction, and connection, are a testament to how much translators put themselves into their labor. Through the varied approaches and languages, they share the important commonality of surety: that the work they’ve been entrusted with has an immense potential to illuminate our reality, enlarge our world, and enrich our experiences of literature.
Here, Mark Tardi ruminates on the importance of discipline; Richard Prins talks about following instinct; and Caroline Froh opens up about the physical effect that reading has on us.
Mark Tardi on Olga Hund:
In The Poethical Wager, Joan Retallack argues intelligently for the creative embrace of life’s unexpected swerves, the “unsettling transfiguration of once-familiar terrain [which tends] to produce disorientation, even estrangement, by radically altering geometries of attention.” Olga Hund’s remarkable and award-winning debut novel, Psy ras drobnych (Dogs of Smaller Breeds) was such a swerve for me, thanks to James Guerin and Klaudia Cierluk, editors at Berlin Quarterly, who commissioned me to translate an excerpt. Hund’s writing pulled me in immediately, and I felt sure that English-speaking readers would connect with the book much like I had.
Dogs of Smaller Breeds takes place in an in-patient women’s psychiatric ward in southern Poland and via the narrator—who may or may not be the pseudonymous Hund herself—we’re offered short vignettes, unabashed and unapologetic glimpses into the lives of women who would be otherwise largely invisible and neglected. In one poignant and heartbreaking segment, Hund’s narrator observes that:
If it weren’t for papers: documents from orphanages, correctional institutions and prisons, hospital records, blue cards and prescriptions; and if it weren’t for their various small objects: a spoon from the canteen, a prayer book, a photo of two Yorkies torn out of a newspaper, a cassette with the inscription “Mother” and the chaplet of Our Lady recorded on it, a tote bag washed and folded evenly—no one would remember that these women, who are here today, were alive at all.
Hund doesn’t attempt to construct a comprehensive picture, which would reveal some neatly packaged truth. This is one of the most compelling aspects of the book—the devastating intimacy and scaled back narratives propel the story forward, à la Fleur Jaeggy or Jenny Offill. For instance, in one scene, the narrator recounts how the women are not so crazy as to have forgotten the abuses they’ve suffered, most often from family and partners. Hund uses a neologism, “męże-węże,” which literally would be something like “husband-snakes,” but the term rhymes perfectly while simultaneously magnifying menace. I rendered this as “spouse-louse,” which loses some of the historical connotations of snakes and viperous dangers, but the parasitical qualities of lice—surviving on the blood of another—echoes other aspects in the novel.
Stylistically, I aim to domesticate as little as possible when translating. Since I’ve lived in Poland for many years, I’m aided by experience: names of people or streets, for example, appear in my mind as distinctly as that of my own landscape. In the case of Hund, the occasionally abrasive shifts in tone can be jarring for the reader, and this affect can be amplified by the sparse continental-style punctuation, which I kept to avoid visually cueing the reader to speech acts in advance.
And then there are the fucking curse words. I’ve always appreciated swear words and I’ve been fortunate to grow up around many talented cursers in my day, not the least of which was my dearly departed mother. Hund’s work certainly freed me up to deploy a few well-placed invectives.
Growing up in a predominantly working-class, Catholic neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side, I’ll admit that I don’t really think in terms of practice (as either a poet or translator), although I know many who prefer this term. (For me, practice calls to mind Thomas Merton saying lauds at the Abbey of Gethsemani, which is a long way from me trying to change my toddler’s diaper while pondering effective assonance or synonyms.) Instead, I’m guided by a sense of discipline, the commitment to seeing projects through, and a simple dictum: Ass in chair. Having two small children, both my wife and I work when we can, in the fissures of time between, much like Hund’s narrative shards aggregate. When some time opens up, however small, Ass in chair. Every day. Soon enough, those scraps add up to paragraphs, pages, and even worlds.
Richard Prins on Katama Mkangi:
I first encountered Katama Mkangi’s Walenisi in an undergraduate Swahili class. Though I wasn’t yet fluent in the language, I was stunned by this novel’s wild and courageous vision. Years later, I suggested translating an excerpt for the collection No Edges: Swahili Stories, published last month by Two Lines Press—which ultimately took its title from a phrase in Walenisi. In its story, the protagonist, Dzombo, is sentenced to death for “talking too much”, shoved inside a rocket, and shot into space, where he beholds “a universe with no edges” before crash-landing on a distant planet that happens to be a socialist utopia.
Toni Morrison said: “All paradises, all utopias are designed by who is not there, by the people who are not allowed in.” As far as utopian architects go, Katama Mkangi had quite the résumé, having served two years in prison for his pro-democratic activism. Exclusion breeds possibility; it is little wonder he then turned to the time-honored tradition of satirizing authoritarian regimes under the guise of allegory and science fiction. The Swahili language, however, did not have a preexisting sci-fi aesthetic or lexicon; Mkangi had to create one. He did so by employing neologisms, imports from other Bantu languages, idiosyncratic syntax, cryptic layers of metaphor, a pastiche of folklore and futurism, and a narrative tone constantly oscillating between registers of the farcical and prophetic. I’ve been told that the work was a bewildering nightmare for a generation of Kenyan high school students—but for a literary translator, let’s just call it paradise.
The translational puzzles begin with the title. Walenisi is the name of the utopian planet, but it is also a contraction of “wale ni sisi”, or, “they are us”. My instinct was to preserve the Swahili toponym, or devise an equally inventive portmanteau, but I’ve warmed to the idea of simply rendering it to: They Are Us. This statement not only expresses the planet’s egalitarian philosophy, but also makes explicit the novel’s allegorical and aspirational premise—that “they” (the collectivist Walenisians) could indeed be “us”. On this planet, everyone is referred to by the prefix “mtu” or “person”, i.e. Dzombo becomes “Mtu-Dzombo”. While my instinct was to translate this word’s political intention, I am increasingly content to leave it be, to let the reader’s intuition and Mkangi’s world-building supply the word’s value. I like to think this willingess to contradict my own instincts is a way of opening up my own voice and inviting other voices in.
Many years ago, I did a poetry MFA. I remember hearing the idea that one does an MFA to “find your voice”. I was distressed by the idea of “voice” existing in the singular; doesn’t the magic of writing happen in those rare bursts where you manage to coax an extra voice out of your mind? Perhaps that’s what drove me to translation, where every textual encounter means trying out a new voice. This also draws me to volatile, multivocal works like Walenisi, which trespass the borders of their own language and help me see beyond the edges of my own lingustic universe—to reveal, in other words, the edgelessness of language itself.
Caroline Froh on Mariella Mehr:
I found Mariella Mehr’s work late one night while perusing a list of titles put out by a Swiss publishing house; the book on the list was Widerworte, or, Words of Resistance. Intrigued, I read the excerpt. I was bowled over within seconds. There was a palpable force behind Mehr’s prose. Her words had a presence, they were commanding, and they seemed to exert their own gravitational pull.
Mehr writes from and of the body, and so my first experience was a felt experience. I remember having to hold my breath, and the sense of everything around me falling away. When I was younger, I had a habit of putting books in the freezer when they felt too alive, as if the cold could sedate them, still their buzzing. Words of Resistance would have been one of those—a freezer book.
Mehr was born in 1947 to a Yenish family, but was soon taken from them at a young age as part of a forced assimilation campaign targeting Yenish and other Traveling People. This government-funded program, “Children of the Country Road”, aimed to curtail their nomadic way of life, and lasted until 1973. This was just one recent effort in a chain of negation dating back to the sixteenth century in Switzerland. And so while Mehr’s very existence was a form of resistance, writing became a means of reasserting her presence, of voicing the silence of attempted erasure.
So much of Mehr’s power comes from her ability to manipulate language. With access to books largely prohibited in her youth, novels and poetry became self-professed tools of survival as she came into maturity. Mehr learned early on that in order to write, she would need to invent her own language, one capable of conveying the various forms of violence she so desperately sought to express. This often takes the form of linguistic deformations and a rejection of normative, hierarchical grammatical structures. She might relegate subjects to object position, turn grammatical gender on its head, or clump words together in long chains that generate their own frequency, creating a hostile reading experience.
Naturally, an ‘invented language’ represents a challenge to any translator. That is why I am grateful for the variance Words of Resistance provides. The volume is a compendium of pieces ranging from creative nonfiction to poetry to activist journalism and literary criticism, which means each section demands a different headspace, a different energy and approach. Further, because Mehr refuses to be corseted by genre, stories can turn into poetry, poetry into sharp treatises, and film reviews into incantations. And so I take my cues from the text at hand. My first few drafts are extremely close to the original, because I need to track what Mehr is doing grammatically. But once I have a handle on that, I can turn back to the piece and ask it what it needs. Most often, I find that my way in is through the body. I know this was Mehr’s approach as well: one essay is titled simply “My Body Wants to Know”. I read aloud to myself quite a bit in later drafts, although “reading” might be misleading, because certain essays have required shouting—or at least something close to shouting. Some require movement, others ask me to play with breath. One piece I can think of involves a dinner table and a lot of wine, and I couldn’t work out how to recreate the rhythm until I returned to the draft after a few glasses myself.
Translating is already an intimate act, but I have found that with Mariella Mehr, it often extends beyond that. Her words require a deeper form of awareness, a full sensory activation. They require care. I was unable to meet Mariella before her passing last fall, but because her presence is so palpable on the page, I often have a hard time shaking the feeling that she isn’t here in the room with me. Then again, maybe she is. “And so I sit down, read. In order to stand right back up again, pace, pace back and forth, in time with the text, its music. In order not to drown in the secrecy between each line, a secrecy which is also mine, woman back and forth. Woman back and forth.”
Read the second part of the series, featuring Stine An, Stoyan Tchaprazov, and Joaquín Gavilano.
Caroline G. Froh translates from the German, with a fondness for Swiss-German prose. She holds an M.F.A. in Literary Translation from the University of Iowa, where she was also a Provost’s Postgraduate Visiting Writer. The recipient of an ALTA Travel Fellowship and a University of Iowa Stanley Travel Award, Caroline was most recently awarded a 2023 PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant to support her translation of Words of Resistance by Mariella Mehr. Her translations and writing have appeared in numerous journals, and her translation of Milena Michiko Flasar’s novel, Mr. Kato Plays Family, is forthcoming from Forge Books. Caroline lives and works in the mountains of northern New Mexico.
Richard Prins is a New Yorker who has lived, worked, studied and recorded music in Dar es Salaam. He is currently pursuing an MFA in Literary Translation at Queens College, where he teaches writing. His poems have appeared in publications like Gulf Coast, jubilat, and Ploughshares, his essays have received “Notable” mentions in Best American Essays and Best American Travel Writing, and his translations of Swahili poetry appear in journals such as Bennington Review, Harvard Review Online and Washington Square Review.
Mark Tardi is a recipient of a 2023 PEN/Heim Translation Grant for Dogs of Smaller Breeds by Olga Hund, a 2022 NEA Fellowship in Literary Translation, and the author of three books, most recently, The Circus of Trust (Dalkey Archive, 2017). Recent work and translations can be found in The Experiment Will Not Be Bound (Unbound Edition, 2023), New Voices: Contemporary Writers Confronting the Holocaust (Valentine Mitchell, 2023), Full Stop, LIT, Interim, Denver Quarterly, The Millions, Circumference, and elsewhere. His translations of The Squatters’ Gift by Robert Rybicki (Dalkey Archive) and Faith in Strangers by Katarzyna Szaulińska (Toad Press/Veliz Books) were published in 2021, and Viscera: Eight Voices from Poland is forthcoming from Litmus Press in 2024. He is on faculty at the University of Łódź.
Artwork by Wang Ning
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