Essays

It’s Time to Talk: On Translations from South Asian Languages

October 23, 2014  |  in Essays  |  by Mahmud Rahman

Mahmud Rahman concludes his insightful series by addressing your questions and responding to the discussion he sparked.

Read all posts in Mahmud Rahman’s investigation here.

In this final post, I want to respond to some issues that have come up among readers. Besides a few comments on the blog posts, this series also generated conversations that came to me via personal emails or messages on Sasialit, a mailing list about South Asian literature.

Huizhong Wu, a literature student at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote me:

I appreciate the insight you give about the lack of institutional support/interest both in the U.S. and in India (at least for translations to the U.S.) but I am curious about the question of audience, which I don’t think you’ve addressed in-depth yet. In your second article you noted that South Asian novels aren’t really widely taught and that the audience for the translations would be a small audience of academics—I’m curious then, who is the audience for translations in general (not South Asia-specific)? Even if other literatures do get translated more into English, is it still for a small academic audience (smash-hits aside)? And does the audience really dictate what academic/smaller presses publish?

If the collective audience for South Asian translations are academics, who will already go out of their way to pay attention to and seek out these books, is there significance in introducing six or ten more translations per year? Especially if the author already had a huge following in his/her home country.

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Lilt is the New Voice

October 8, 2014  |  in Essays, Reviews  |  by Sophie Hughes

A review of Hong Khaou’s newly released drama “Lilting”

Many translators might agree that language is song, a kind of mouth music. Each text has a unique time signature and timbre, and when we translate voice, we have to open our ears before opening our beaks to become songbirds. And translators have a special insight into how a language’s sounds are made up of tones: pitches that help to convey meaning. A toneless voice, whether spoken, written or translated, is like a song without melody.

I learnt recently that mouth music is the alternative name for lilting­­, the subtle rise and fall of words in a sentence, and originally a style of Gaelic singing. Given that the nitty-gritty of literary translation is the picking up on nuances in voice, it strikes me as odd that translators, myself included, don’t dedicate much airtime to lilting. Why don’t we talk about lilting when we talk about voice? Isn’t it odd that translation theorists—boasting the loftiest and loveliest buzzwords in all the humanities—haven’t yet adopted it? After all, lilts are not merely ephemeral: a good prose stylist (and good translators too) can conjure them in writing. In James Joyce’s Dubliners, “The Dead” presents a good example of a lilt woven into a text, one that reverberates off the page when read aloud:

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Why are so few South Asian translations published in the U.S.? (Part V)

October 1, 2014  |  in Essays  |  by Mahmud Rahman

In Rahman’s penultimate post, he speaks with publishing insiders and literary translators to glean some surprising information.

Read all posts in Mahmud Rahman’s investigation here.

In the early 20th century and into the first decades of independent India, there were a small number of translations into English. Across language boundaries, Indians read writers like Tagore, Sarat Chandra, and Premchand. Though the translations were often clunky, these books played a role in building a sense of India as a nation.

Initially there were a handful of publishers who published translations from a few Indian languages into English. Quality translations came from one or two individuals, such as the writer A.K. Ramanujan. Rita Kothari in her book Translating India includes this telling quote: “Prabhakar Machwe, secretary of the Sahitya Akademi in the seventies complained that, ‘even after 25 years, we have not been able to develop a team of ten good, competent translators of Indian languages into English.’”

Things began to turn by the late 1980s.

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The Tiff: How Often Should We Re-translate the Classics?

September 25, 2014  |  in Essays  |  by Antony Shugaar and EJ Van Lanen

Two literary voices sound off in Asymptote blog’s newest regular column

Antony Shugaar, translator, writer, Asymptote contributing editor

I remember reading a science fiction short story many years ago in which a disgruntled author of historical novels gets his wish to witness the crucifixion of Christ. The plot’s twists and turns escape me now, but I know the final outcome is that he winds up crucified on a secondary cross, an all-too-eager witness to the truth behind the familiar version.

Historians are constantly pawing through the rubble of memory, language, and inference in search of an unproven and unprovable truth. Death—of course—intervenes, as does the slow grind of time, but memory and perception get in the way, too. So does institutionalized meaning: once you’ve heard “By the shores of Gitche Gumee, By the shining Big-Sea-Water,” you can never unhear it. READ MORE…

Interviewing Naja Marie Aidt

September 24, 2014  |  in Essays, Interviews  |  by Eric M. B. Becker

Eric M. B. Becker in conversation with the author of Baboon, a short story collection published by Two Lines Press

The first full-length work by Danish writer Naja Marie Aidt—born in 1963 in Greenland, raised in Copenhagen, and currently living in New York City—is now available in English with the translation of her short story collection Baboon, which earned her the biggest literary prize in Scandinavia, the 2008 Nordic Council Literature Prize, and is being published this month by Two Lines Press in a sharp translation from Denise Newman.

Aidt’s writing includes nine books of poetry, short stories, radio plays, plays, films scripts, and children’s books, and her work has been translated into Italian, German, French, Swedish, Norwegian, Latvian, Icelandic, and Czech. Her literary career began in 1991 with the poetry collection Så længe jeg er ung (“As Long As I Am Young”), part one of a trilogy she completed in 1994 and which, like Baboon, plumbs the depths of relationships with family and friends. Baboon is her third short story collection.

Although her subject matter with these new stories is quotidian, Aidt’s characters and their fates are anything but: After their son is tossed from a bike and injured, a husband decides there is no better time to reveal to his wife details of his affair with her sister; a well-meaning couple, forgetting to place a bag of candy in their supermarket basket, find themselves charged with theft above their assiduous protests.

In our conversation via email, shortly after the author’s return to New York from a reading tour in Denmark, we discussed the importance of place in Aidt’s fiction and her ability to recast the familiar as strange, as she puts it, to turn “frustration and sadness into a new possibility, a new freedom,” creating the impression that one is seeing with new eyes. READ MORE…

Why are so few South Asian translations published in the U.S.? (Part IV)

September 3, 2014  |  in Essays  |  by Mahmud Rahman

Perhaps it is we translators who must take the initiative.

Read all posts in Mahmud Rahman‘s investigation here.

An unfortunate reality is that there are not enough good translators working in South Asian languages. There are some in the subcontinent and elsewhere; but in the U.S.—presumably where it is most likely that translators might approach U.S.-based publishers—there are only a handful. If you look at the directories at ALTA, PEN, or Words Without Borders, these languages barely register. You will find a few working in Hindi, Urdu, and Bengali, but hardly any in Tamil, Malayalam, Punjabi, Telegu, Nepali, Sinhala, or other languages.

The emergence of translators here is also largely a matter of chance.

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On the Dearth of South Asian Translations in the U.S. (Part III)

August 25, 2014  |  in Essays  |  by Mahmud Rahman

We can't just blame the publishers when there's a glaring lack of institutional support.

 

Read all posts in Mahmud Rahman’s investigation here.

It would be exciting if an academic publisher steps forward with a contemporary South Asian literature list. Until that day comes, what might be more realistic are initiatives from small publishers. In recent years, besides old stalwarts like NYRB, New Directions, and Dalkey Archive, we’ve seen the emergence of translation-focused publishers like Archipelago, Open Letter, and now, Deep Vellum.

I had a few exchanges with Will Evans, founder of Deep Vellum. As a new kid on the block based in Dallas, Texas, Evans is effervescent about Deep Vellum’s mission. Starting out with a list of five impressive titles translated from French, Russian, Spanish, and Icelandic, their initial plan is to publish ten books a year. In a recent interview with this blog, Evans confidently declared, “Deep Vellum is going to publish translations of literature from every language.”

My conversation with him about South Asian translations revealed that visibility is a problem. Larger publishers may have resources to scout out interesting titles (though one doesn’t see this go beyond certain languages and regions). But smaller publishers rely on information channels that are already in place. READ MORE…

On the Dearth of South Asian Translations in the U.S. (Part II)

August 14, 2014  |  in Essays, Interviews  |  by Mahmud Rahman

How some South Asian translations are making it—or trying to, at least—in the brutal U.S. publishing market

Read all posts in Mahmud Rahman’s investigation here.

Daisy Rockwell is a painter, writer, and translator. From 1992-2006, she made a detour into academia, from which she emerged with a Ph.D. in South Asian literature and a book on the Hindi author Upendranath Ashk. She had become interested in his writing as a grad student.

In an interview with CNN last year, she said: “Ashk asked me to undertake a short story collection shortly before his death, which I did somewhat reluctantly as I was more interested in translating his long novel, Falling Walls (something I’m finally working on now). It ended up being his dying wish to me, however, so I saw the project through. I finished most of the work around 2000, but had a very hard time finding a publisher, even in India.”

Her translation of Ashk’s Hats & Doctors came out from Penguin India in 2013. About her approach to U.S. publishers, she wrote: “I have tried and so far failed to get my translation published in the U.S., on numerous occasions. I have another work forthcoming and I will try with that too. We’ll see what happens. I haven’t had any explanations. So far I’ve approached them myself. Next up, my agent. Mostly I’ve tried academic presses and small presses. I haven’t tried that many, but since no one maintains a South Asia list, really, the entire thing feels kind of scatter shot and I’ve gotten discouraged easily.” READ MORE…

July Issue Spotlight: Sergio Chejfec’s “The Witness”

August 7, 2014  |  in Essays, Reviews  |  by Eva Richter and Patty Nash

A close look at Sergio Chejfec's masterful not-quite fiction, non-quite essay, "The Witness"

Patty: The phrase “of-the-moment” is so annoyingly trite, but for lack of a better expression, Sergio Chejfec is perhaps one of today’s most of-the-moment writers, and the short fiction/systematic essay-musing “The Witness”—translated by Steve Dolph and published in Asymptote’s July issue as part of our Latin American feature—proves beyond a shadow of a doubt just why that is.

They say, more or less, that anyone who’s made the mistake of leaving can’t make the mistake of returning. READ MORE…

On the Dearth of South Asian Translations in the U.S. (Part I)

August 4, 2014  |  in Essays  |  by Mahmud Rahman

“It’s a serious problem when so few titles and literature from so few languages find their way to American readers.”

Read all posts in Mahmud Rahman’s investigation here.

Until about ten years ago, whenever I visited Bangladesh, a journey “home” every three to five years, I would make my way to a small bookshop in Dhaka’s New Market. Zeenat Book Supply was one of the few places that carried English titles from India. There were better shops for books in Bangla, and subcontinental writing in English I could find in the U.S. What I sought at Zeenat was books in translation. These would sometimes be wrapped in plastic, other times coated with dust, the edges dirt-brown. Here I would find fiction that had originally been written in languages I didn’t know: Hindi, Tamil, Malayalam.

When I had the good fortune to visit Calcutta, I would discover more.

What discoveries I returned with! Raag Darbari, Shrilal Shukla’s biting small-town satire. Karukku, Bama’s brave memoir as a Dalit Christian. Desert Shadows by Anand that took me into the corrupt world of an Indian prison.

Unless a used copy lands somewhere by chance, such books are not found in U.S. bookstores. Unless you were teaching Indian literature or someone who keeps up on South Asian writing outside English, you would probably not know about these titles.

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6+ Top-Notch Translation Picks from The New Yorker Archive

July 30, 2014  |  in Essays  |  by Eva Richter and Patty Nash

Hot tips for translation fiends—from The New Yorker's just-launched online archive

About a week ago, The New Yorker delighted droves of readers by opening a great deal of its archives to inaugurate its website redesign. But a summer spent sifting through thousands of back articles, essays, fiction, and poems sounds nice only until you realize time is limited. Not to worry: Eva and Patty, brave Asymptote blog editors, have combed the magazine’s darkest depths to select some of The New Yorker’s best pieces—in translation.  READ MORE…

Borges, the Quixote, and Two Street Markets

July 24, 2014  |  in Essays  |  by Gustavo Faverón Patriau

The author of "The Antiquarian" tackles Borges, contextual understanding… and the singular joys of book shopping

The first time I read “Pierre Menard, author of the Quixote,” I was seventeen and in my freshman year in college in Lima. As anyone who reads Borges for the first time, I was dazzled by the story of a fictional French writer who, at the beginning of the twentieth century, wants to write once again, without plagiarizing or recovering it from memory, Cervantes’s Don Quixote. The most memorable passage of the story comes when the narrator, a friend of Menard’s, and very likely a French fascist, analyzes one paragraph from the novel in two different ways. First, assuming that Cervantes is the author, he concludes that the paragraph is rhetorical and verbose, when written by a seventeenth-century Spaniard. Later, assuming the author is Pierre Menard, a contemporary right-wing surrealist poet, he finds that the same words are fantastically counterintuitive and herald a new form of understanding the world. Since the narrator is a fascist, one suspects that his interpretation is an overinterpretation, the grotesque imposition of ideas that were not there in the original text.

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NYC Mayor de Blasio to Stop at Carlo Levi’s Grassano

July 21, 2014  |  in Essays, News  |  by Antony Shugaar

"I never saw other pictures or images than these: not the King nor the Duce, nor even Garibaldi; no famous Italian of any kind."

When New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio visits Grassano, the birthplace of his grandmother Anna Briganti, he’ll be walking in the footsteps of not only his forebears but also an Italian author whose first book was a cornerstone of one of New York’s best-known publishing houses. The coincidence is more than a geographic one: the reforming mayor will be returning to a family hometown, but also to a place that led to a masterpiece of social reporting and reformist philosophy.

Carlo Levi’s book, Christ Stopped at Eboli (Cristo si è fermato a Eboli), published in 1945, was one of Roger Straus’s first acquisitions: it was “a harbinger of things to come,” according to Hothouse, a history of the publishing house FSG, “a critical triumph and best-seller in 1947.”

The book was written by Levi, a Turin-born Jewish doctor and painter, who recounts a year of his internal exile in Grassano and a neighboring village, Aliano (called Gagliano in the book), for anti-Fascist activism.  

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Translation Tuesday: Poetry by Nala Arung, translated by Tiffany Tsao

July 8, 2014  |  in Essays, Translations  |  by Tiffany Tsao

"Who would have guessed that love would collide / Into the wall that is FPI."

Efpei I’m in Love by Nala Arung

The cover of Efpei I’m in Love, a poetry collection by Indonesian writer Nala Arung, announces that it is “a book of tasteless poetry.” And it is apparent from the outset that its tastelessness operates on multiple levels.

Its title is deliberately lowbrow—a take on the title of the wildly popular teenage chick-lit novel, Eiffel … I’m in Love, published in 2001 and adapted for film as a romantic comedy of the same name two years later.

The Efpei that has displaced the original Eiffel refers to the FPI, or Islamic Defenders’ Front. A hard-line Islamic vigilante organization, FPI has gained national notoriety for using violence to enforce their interpretation of Islamic law. Its members often patrol areas for signs of un-Islamic activity, destroying property and beating up offenders. The organization has also attacked religious minorities, including Buddhists, Christians, and Ahmadi Muslims, whom they consider a heretical sect. FPI is certainly no laughing matter and hardly the stuff love poems are made of—or so it would seem until one reads the titular poem “FPI, I’m in Love.”     READ MORE…