Essays

How Literary Translation Upgraded my MFA

June 10, 2015  |  in Essays  |  by Katrine Øgaard Jensen

Our new blog editor Katrine explains how literary translation transformed her creative writing MFA & writing practice overall.

First, I did it for the money. I used to work as a freelance journalist, and to support myself on the side I translated tv-shows, computer games, websites, you name it.  It paid well. So when I came to Columbia University to pursue an MFA in Creative Writing, I thought: hey, I’ll just do a double-concentration in fiction and literary translation so I can support myself as a translator of books while trying to make it as a writer. Ha! Ha.

I remember the writing program hosted a mingle with drinks on the first evening of our intro week, and halfway through the event I was already drunk on a) wine, b) nerves, and c) an incredibly long conversation with poet Timothy Donnelly about the great Danish poet Inger Christensen and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. READ MORE…

Poem as Firework, Poem as Bone China: A Dispatch

June 4, 2015  |  in Dispatches, Essays  |  by Jen Calleja

A dispatch from the "Found in Translation" event at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London

We run through groups of snail-paced tourists from Trafalgar Square to arrive just in time for the start of “Found in Translation” at the ICA, almost walking directly into Michael Hofmann on entering the filling cinema. We take our seats just as he walks down to join fellow poet and literary translator Jamie McKendrick and German poet Jan Wagner on stage. While everyone settles down to an ominous soundtrack straight out of Star Wars, I take in the two rows of bulbs, like the lights that surround the mirror in a theatre dressing room, running the length of the ceiling. Some of them are out, which fits an event that glows but never quite reaches its full brightness.

In the introduction, Jan Wagner is sprightly and upright with a schoolboy haircut, Jamie McKendrick cradles his leather satchel before sliding it onto the floor, Michael Hofmann plays with his hands, lets them hang down either side of his chair, then finally folds them in his lap. Microphones are reluctantly taken up. McKendrick hugs his to the side of his head, Hofmann whispers to his like a little friend. READ MORE…

What’s a Tomme Cheese?

May 27, 2015  |  in Essays, Food and Literature  |  by Nina Sparling

In her continued column about food & language, Nina Sparling examines just what—and how—"tomme" cheese has come to mean

Some words for foods are easily translatable. The word’s functional meaning shifts effortlessly between tongues. Tomato and pomodoro both indicate Solanum lycopersicum, member of the nightshade family. Poulet, pollo, and chicken look the same rubbed with oil and garlic roasting in a hot oven. In these cases, there is little room for deliberation: oil, butter, wine. Rice, wheat, corn. Their translations are patently accessible. Learning the words for foods in other languages is particularly satisfying. There’s immediate sensory recognition: the words indicate familiar tastes, smells, textures, and sights. The intimacy with what we eat follows. In learning to say tomato in another language, we begin to feel in it also.

But this question of feeling is where it gets finicky. While most anything carries a “literal” meaning in another language, its usage and implication remain awkward in translation. A New York bakery and a Parisian boulangerie operate in different ways. In both places flour is mixed with yeast and water, let to rise and baked. Yet we do not eat bread in the same ways, and the bread we eat is not the same.

Take, for example, the French word tomme. My first day of work at the cheese shop a colleague asked me what kind of cheese I liked. Tomme, I said. He was quick to call me out.

“Tomme is not a kind of cheese. Be more specific.” READ MORE…

From the Archives: “Resistance Is Futile” by Walter Siti

May 21, 2015  |  in Essays, Translations  |  by Patty Nash

In this ongoing series, a look at fiction from our January 2015 issue translated by Antony Shugaar

What is “autofiction?”

I don’t know. I really don’t. “Autofiction” belongs to the category of words I’ll habitually skim over in lieu of context clues. (Also in this category: “antifiction,” “matron literature,” “ergodic literature”—any ideas?). Critics toss around categories such as these so flippantly, practically taunting their readers to look them up on Wikipedia, but unless I get the sense that the term is particularly operative, I am likely to continue reading.

I came across “autofiction” more recently: after reading the incredible excerpt from Walter Siti’s Resistance is Futile from our latest issue (translated from the Italian by longtime blog contributor/superstar translator Antony Shugaar). In his translator’s note, Shugaar says that Siti’s “approach is called autofiction” and that “Siti seems to swing it over his head recklessly like a heavy gold chain.”

I’m intrigued. But first and foremost, I’m intrigued by the excerpt itself, because Resistence is Futile is incredible. Written in increasingly circular retrospect, the story’s more a taut deferral of linearly cruel memory than anything resembling realist fiction, but that’s not to say it isn’t visceral, gutting, utterly material, and wrenching, as it recounts the youth of an unfortunately corpulent young boy, Tommaso.

The boy’s fat—that’s because he was a slow eater as an infant—and worse still, even that’s because the mother may or may not have “somehow been jinxed, conceived under a bad star” after she “got it stuck in her head that the child had been generated the very night that her husband came home drunk (and as far as that went, nothing out of the ordinary), cursing and washing the blood off himself.” READ MORE…

I Have Changed Nothing: Seven Paradoxes in Pursuit of Arthur Waley

May 20, 2015  |  in Essays  |  by Josh Billings

Fourth in Josh Billings' "Lives of the Translators" Series

Skiing

Of all outdoor sports, skiing is the most dependent on “conditions”; so it is with some confusion that we come across this incredible sentence, from Arthur Waley’s short essay “Waiting for the New”:

But the truth is that for the skier time does not count.

As truths go, this one sounds strange—especially coming from the man who essentially introduced ancient Chinese and Japanese literature to 20th century-English readers. But Waley knew what he was talking about. Over four decades and over two dozen books (an output rivaled only by his fellow Fabian, Constance Garnett), he developed an exquisite ear for the way that time changed words. At the same time, as a poet, he understood that the gulfs separating two seemingly distant eras could be bridged, unexpectedly, by a single act. Later in the same article, he described the skier’s patience:

Waiting is waiting, whether it be for a night or for six months; and inversely the prospect of a ski-run is as exciting, day after day, to the rentier or pensioner who spends Michaelmas to May Day on the snow, as to the breadwinner who snatches a fortnight at Christmas. Each, on waking, thrills at the thought ‘today I am going to ski’; each has sat for hours in heavy and perhaps wet skiing boots, merely to put off the moment when he must confess to himself ‘today the skiing is over.’

The skier in Waley’s description no more ignores the weather than the translator would ignore the echoes of an archaic verb tense; on the contrary, he steeps himself in the conditions of his art, sure that if he waits long enough, his moment will come. The clouds will part and time collapse like a Mad Fold-In, creating a moment that is simultaneously a repetition of previous moments and unique. The name that Waley’s article gives to this miracle will be familiar to readers of either ancient Chinese literature or 20th century poetry. It is “The New.”

Biography

In a note to his 1934 translation and study of the Tao Te Ching, Waley explains the concept of fan-yen:

The ‘which of you can assume murkiness…to be clear’ is a fan-yen, a paradox, reversal of common speech. Thus ‘the more you clean it, the dirtier it becomes’ is a common saying, applied to the way in which slander ‘sticks’. But the Taoist must apply the paradoxical rule: ‘The more you dirty it, the cleaner it becomes.’

As a tool for thought, paradox has a long history in Western and Eastern literatures, but its use in biography has been limited. The mythmaking urge is too great, which means that most of the time biographers from Samuel Johnson to David Remnick have found themselves “cleaning” their subjects’ lives in a way that may sound and even be true, but which hides a certain messiness. The life in question becomes a story with a plot and theme—which is all well and good until you think about your own life, and the thousand things that any story about it would have to leave out in order to make any sense.

The life of Arthur Waley breaks the biographer’s storytelling urge in a number of ways, not the least of which is the fact that Waley didn’t write much about himself. He kept no diary and destroyed his letters, leaving a space, or network of spaces, where most of his contemporaries left maps. Perhaps most importantly, his insane productivity occurred almost exclusively in translation—a discipline that traditionally prides itself on self-erasure. Because of this, any attempt to make a story out of him has to confront the fact that there is, ostensibly at least, not much “him” to make a story out of. READ MORE…

Working Title: Pereira Maintains

May 14, 2015  |  in Essays, Reviews  |  by Anna Aslanyan

“A single phrase, used regularly throughout the text, changes it drastically, invoking a sinister atmosphere. Who is Pereira telling his story to?”

“In a special action of the case the plaintiff declares, that he is a hackney coachman.” “The defendant maintains that he accidentally stood naked in front of the window.” These excerpts are taken from courtroom reports dated, respectively, the late 17th and early 21st century. Although the reporting verbs used in these two cases are, technically speaking, interchangeable, “declare” would look more out of place in the second example than “maintain” in the first. Today we usually declare love or bankruptcy, war or independence, profits or goods, but rarely our personal details.

The protagonist of Sostiene Pereira, a 1994 novel by Antonio Tabucchi, declares a great many things in Patrick Creagh’s translation, titled Declares Pereira and first published in 1995 by Harvill, a London-based press with an interest in European literature. When the book was reprinted in the US, the title lost its inversion, becoming Pereira Declares (perhaps in line with the advice given in Self-Editing for Fiction Writers, whose authors, Dave King and Renni Browne, think that “‘said he’ fell out of favor sometime during the Taft administration”), and the story, initially billed as A True Account, became A Testimony (and thus closer to the original Italian subtitle Una testimonianza), but the declarations remained in the text. They stayed there until 2010, when the independent British publisher Canongate reissued Creagh’s translation as Pereira Maintains. The only difference between this version and the earlier ones is that “declares” is replaced by “maintains” throughout—a change that, despite being easily made with a find-and-replace tool, produces a profound effect.

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Swedish Camels, Part II

May 13, 2015  |  in Essays  |  by André Naffis-Sahely

An ignoble literary translator’s journal by André Naffis-Sahely

My experience with publishers thus far—eight books with eight different imprints—has not left a positive impression. Editors often grumble about having to actually edit manuscripts because they’ve been assigned too many titles to look after, and as a result, they end up emotionally and intellectually detached from their own projects.

*

The old-fashioned editor was part sleuth and part sidekick. Above all, they displayed an unwavering commitment to what they believed would enrich the public consciousness. Alas, I wager the modern equivalents of Maxwell Perkins, Diana Athill, Carmen Callil, and Gordon Lish simply wouldn’t get past the interview stage any more. Who wants to take those sorts of risks, or better yet, invest that kind of money? Publishing in London, for instance, is neatly dominated by youngsters in their twenties and early thirties, who should by all rights be paid interns—stress on paid—but are instead hired because it’s easier to pay them ridiculously low wages rather than for those companies to hire real professionals.

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Spotlight From the Archives: “Towards the One and Only Metaphor” by Miklós Szentkuthy

May 5, 2015  |  in Essays  |  by Patty Nash

"Anyone who has experienced a life of total contemplation and total work knows what a pain mornings are."

The excerpt of Miklós Szentkuthy’s Towards the One and Only Metaphor, translated from the Hungarian by Tim Wilkinson in our April 2013 issue, is the very first thing I ever read on Asymptote. This was long before I was a blogger (much less blog editor), and perhaps the first time I felt enraptured enough to sustain interest in reading something literary off a screen. It was my induction into the literary Internet. It seems so long ago to me now, and so absurd—online journals portend equity and unlimited access! Poems can be shared, clicked on! Stories bookmarked and hung on (Facebook) walls! And it’s all for free!

But until that moment I was rather unimpressed with the prospect of reading something from a screen that had not been printed, circulated, tattered with time and dead tree. But here is where it changed: where I was so arrested by a piece, I knew immediately how important this kind of Internet literary journalism is—for writers, for translators, and for readers most of all. READ MORE…

What We’re Reading in April

April 30, 2015  |  in Essays, Reviews  |  by Ellen Jones and Mui Poopoksakul

“Full of startling colours, and featuring scenes both disturbing and erotic, The Vegetarian is the most powerful novel I have read this year.”

Ellen Jones (criticism editor): Three of the best things I’ve read this month have been slim, 100-odd-page volumes in translation. The first is Takashi Hiraide’s The Guest Cat, translated from Japanese by Eric Selland. The book was recommended by a great lover of cats who insisted I read it in hard copy rather than on my Kindle for the hypnotisingly green feline eyes on the book’s jacket. My family has always had cats, a number of them so embarrassingly rotund—despite years of controlled diets—that we’ve had to wonder whether a well-meaning neighbour wasn’t regularly spoiling them with choice titbits from the table or bowlfuls of cream. So I found much to relate to in this quiet story of a young couple’s relationship with a local cat, whose daily visits revitalise their marriage and ignite an enthusiasm for gardening. Hiraide’s writing (he is primarily a poet) had rarely been translated before, but The Guest Cat has become a bestseller in the United States, France, and now Britain; the ubiquity and inexhaustible popularity of cat photos and videos on social media speak volumes about this book’s potential appeal. But there is so much more to it than a plot summary might suggest—it meditates on the transience of life and beauty, and masterfully maps out a domestic space with the precision of an architect. This is undoubtedly a book for cat people and dog people alike.

READ MORE…

Have I Taken Language as a Loan?

April 29, 2015  |  in Essays  |  by Shadab Zeest Hashmi

Shadab Zeest Hashmi wonders if language is "luggage," borrowed—or her very own

Home and flux mean the same in a land named after a severance, or the great “partition” of the subcontinent: a paradox of freedom-and-loss, umbilical-cord-and-scissors. Born in Pakistan, a country that emerged on the world map after the collapse of the British Raj and the largest mass migration in human history, “permanence” is forever in the shadow of exile.

If poetry seeks who we are, I’ve found myself searching in language, not land. Land, in its aspects worth remembering, becomes language. If I carry language, I carry land. What is exile, then, if not a road paved for poets, permanent wayfarers?

I came to America as a college student. In Passage Work, the first series of poems I completed as my senior thesis at Reed, I wondered: why write in English, the language of the colonist? Have I taken language as a loan for poetry? Have I betrayed Urdu? In these earliest poems, I call language “luggage,” a historical-personal luggage, both burden as well as reason for being. READ MORE…

Swedish Camels

April 27, 2015  |  in Essays  |  by André Naffis-Sahely

An ignoble literary translator’s journal by André Naffis-Sahely

We were driving along the Sheikh Zayed Road from Abu Dhabi to Dubai, a hundred and fifty kilometres of desert back then unmarked by a single building or feature from one city limit to the next. It was the mid-1990s, and my father, an architect, had just relocated the family to the United Arab Emirates, where we joined the tribe of impermanent aliens that constitute over eighty-five percent of the country’s population and workforce. At the top of this pyramid: the Emaratis themselves, former Bedouins who shuffled back and forth between town houses and their farms in distant oases in their 4x4s, safely ensconced behind blackened glass. The couple of decades since the oil crisis in 1973 had seen the establishment of one of the world’s most lavish welfare states, whereby Emaratis were being gradually etherized with “sit-down money”—an expensive version of what has also befallen Australia’s Aborigines, among others—meaning that if your grandfather had once lived in a tent and dined on dates, bread, and salted fish, attuning his life to the rhythm of the sea and the sands, you would instead have gone to Yale on a scholarship and found a managerial post at some state-owned corporation waiting for you on your return; you might never go to the office, but that wouldn’t get in the way of your salary, your house, your satellite television. It all happened in the space of a single generation.

It was either our second or third weekend excursion to Dubai, but this one was special. My father had promised me a rare sight: a Swedish camel. They were blonde and had blue eyes, but you couldn’t inspect their irises up close, as they were even grumpier than your average camel and would probably tear away a finger or two. My father’s warning left a vivid impression. I spent the two-hour trip with my nose glued to the window as my father pointed out three or four of the beasts, barely visible in the blurry distance. “Are they really blonde?”—“Yes!”—“And blue-eyed?”—“Yes!”—“Why did they leave Sweden?”—“Because it was cold!”

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Women, Cooking

April 20, 2015  |  in Essays, Food and Literature  |  by Nina Sparling

On women, place, and nourishment

I have never been able to cook from Madeline Kamman’s When French Women Cook. I read the recipes and my mouth waters: noisettes de porc au pruneaux from Claire in Touraine and tarte à l’orange from Magaly in Provence. Yet I cannot convince myself to cook them. The lists of ingredients appear too systematic for food that has more to do with familiarity and wisdom than measurement.

The herbs in my fridge have spent too long away from the earth, the red ocean perch far too many hours out-of-water. The stage is wrong: a railroad apartment in West Harlem with dusty windowsills and dreamed-of copper pots could never measure up to a grandmother’s worn-in kitchen. I dream of meeting these women, listening to them, absorbing their habits and tricks. More than their food, I want their knowledge. READ MORE…

Working Title: The Importance of Being Titled

April 16, 2015  |  in Essays  |  by Anna Aslanyan

A new column on titling things in translation

“What do I call it though?” My friend was quick with her response: “What about Déjà Vu?” “Yeah, that would make a great title,” I sighed, “but it’s already been used for an Italian edition. That would be plagiarism.” The book we were trying to christen was Remainder, by Tom McCarthy. Having translated the novel into Russian on spec, I had just heard from Ad Marginem, a Moscow-based publisher: they liked it and wanted to publish it; I went over the text and was happy with it; the only thing missing was a decent title. “Остаток”, the Russian word for “remainder”, wouldn’t do: although it captured the main meaning—what remains, is left over or still to come—it sounded feebler than the original, didn’t have the same ring to it.

When you are about to start translating a piece of writing, even a straightforward one, like a bus timetable, you may be excused for not having a working title in mind, but when you get to the end you are reasonably expected to have come up with some idea. You should know by then what the original title is meant to reflect: the contents of the book, the zeitgeist, practicalities of publishing, the author’s stance or something else. As a translator, you should also realise that your task is not to translate the title into a different language, but into a different culture that, apart from its linguistic aspect, has many other dimensions. This applies not just to the title, of course, but also to the entire work, be it an avant-garde novel or a pudding recipe, a love poem or a price list. READ MORE…

Saudade and the Untranslatable

April 9, 2015  |  in Essays  |  by Emily Wolfteich

Emily Wolfteich asks: Does untranslatable mean unattainable?

It began with a tattoo—or, rather, the idea for one. Small, I thought, with narrow script like the scratch of an EKG, on the back of my neck or perhaps my shoulder blade. Beauty in simplicity. It was the first tattoo I had ever considered; I needed something that had meaning to me, and this word in particular—this untranslatable word meant to evoke rather than merely name, to be felt rather than read—was as familiar to me as if I’d always known it.

The definition of saudade is as varied as its definers, and the latter span miles and centuries. Most understand it as a sense of sweet nostalgia for someone, or something, that one has lost and may never find again. Manuel de Melo called it “a pleasure you suffer, an ailment you enjoy.” Saudade describes the lingering losses from the past, whether they be people left behind or times of our lives that we are loath to forget, and the bittersweet pleasure of those memories. It describes a thousand nuances of the same state of being. More than nostalgia; less than yearning. And very, very Portuguese. Maybe, in fact, too Portuguese for me to own it.

What do we mean when we say that a word is untranslatable? Do we mean that it’s inaccessible? The idea of translation is that we can convey meaning from one language to another, but that’s of course not always so simple. Many languages have their own words that lack direct translations—the French have retrouvailles, the idea of finding someone again after a long time, and the Germans amusingly have verschlimmbessern, a verb that means to make something worse while trying to improve it. It’s not that we can’t explain these words—only that it will take us a bit more time.

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