Interviews

Penny Hueston on her Latest Translation: Men by Marie Darrieussecq

September 19, 2016  |  in Interviews, Translator's Profile  |  by Madeline Jones

Translating is an act of empathy, of finding something like the appropriate “melody”, but keeping what is idiosyncratic to the writer.

Penny Hueston, translator and editor at Text Publishing—a Melbourne-based independent publishing house—shared with me the process of translating the inimitable French author Marie Darrieussecq, how her editing and translation processes relate, and her next translations we have to look forward to.

Madeline Jones (MJ): How did you first begin translating?

Penny Hueston (PH): After spending about four years in Paris doing post-graduate studies, I returned to Melbourne and was asked to translate various articles—by the literary critic Gérard Genette, for example—for the French issue of a literary magazine, Scripsi. I also translated, with the poet John A. Scott, poems by Emmanuel Hocquard and by Claude Royet-Journoud. Poetry must be the hardest writing to translate.

MJ: Would you say translating followed naturally from your editing career, or how do the two processes relate to one another for you, if at all?

PH: I suppose you could say that translating is a form of editing. In a sense, both my fields of work are about being more or less invisible; at least that is how I conceive of my work as an editor. Julian Barnes seems to nail a similarity between the two processes: “Translation involves micro-pedantry as much as the full yet controlled use of the linguistic imagination. The plainest sentence is full of hazard; often the choices available seem to be between different percentages of loss.” Damon Searles’ take is that translators “gerrymander unscrupulously”, which could also apply to editors! Javier Marias could be talking about editors when he says of translators: “You have to choose every word. And like an actor, you have to renounce your own style.”

READ MORE…

A Fractured Peace: Artist Schandra Singh speaks with designer Shaill Jhaveri

September 15, 2016  |  in Interviews  |  by Shaill Jhaveri

It is over-stimulating, heartbreaking and beautiful. It's like falling in love and having your heart broken every day.

Although considered one of the fastest-growing markets in the world, the Indian art market is still very much in its infancy. Painting dominates it. Artists are broadly divided into the “moderns”: the more mature “legacy” artists whom collectors feel more secure in buying, and the younger, more current “contemporary” artists, who push the boundaries of Indian art. There was not much of a market till the 1990s, when a more vibrant art scene emerged for established and younger artists alike. Since then, despite economic ups and downs, Indian artists and artists of Indian origin have been making their presence felt across the globe. And the world is paying attention, not just to India, but to artists from throughout South and Southeast Asia.

Growing up in India, I was initially attracted to the Indian portrait painters, especially the sumptuous portraits of a royal India, with the Maharajahs showing off their impossible jewels. Later, I was drawn to the more accessible colored photographs, hand colored over black-and-white prints, stiff but theatrical, with the textiles and jewels jumping off the images. There are the overwhelmingly opulent paintings of the 19th c. Raja Ravi Varma from the princely state of Travancore, who fused European academic art into Indian traditions. Then, there are the haunting self-portraits of a half-Indian, half-Hungarian Amrita Sher-Gil. Of the younger artists, the portraits by Surendran Nair, precursors to his more stylized flat narrative paintings, are so very powerful, as is the realism of Abir Karmakar. The digital portraits of Mahatma Gandhi by Aditya Pande push Indian portraiture into another arena entirely.

Today, a lot of the geographical and cultural boundaries have blurred. A young Pakistani artist Salman Toor lives between Lahore and New York City, and finds that he paints himself in a lot of the figures of his poetic canvases. 

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In Conversation with Adam Morris

September 12, 2016  |  in Interviews  |  by Ryan Mihaly

I regard one of the functions of literature as social interaction, of reaching and challenging other minds. Otherwise, why write at all?

Adam Morris and I emailed over the course of July about his translation of João Gilberto Noll’s novel Quiet Creature on the Corner from Two Lines Press. The novel follows a young, freshly unemployed poet-drifter in Porto Alegre, Brazil who lands himself in jail after committing rape. Then, without explanation, he is taken to a country house owned by German immigrants Kurt and Gerda where the world suddenly turns irrational. As the protagonists’ world turns surreal, the real world churns on around him, as Lula runs for president for the first time, and the Landless Workers’ Movement stages protests on the street.

                                    –Ryan Mihaly

Ryan Mihaly (RM): I want to start with a grammarian’s query as you say. Some of Noll’s sentences are relentlessly long and often change tense. They almost read like transcriptions of a casual conversation. Was there ever a temptation to break up Noll’s comma splices with something like a semicolon or em-dash instead of a comma?

Adam Morris (AM): You are really taking a risk with this question. I have worked as an editor for many years and am opinionated about grammar and punctuation. I’ll try to be brief.

Semicolons are not used in Brazilian Portuguese and are falling into disuse in English, except among the most pedantic writers. So I discarded that option out of hand. The narrator in Quiet Creature is not a pedant and is, as you say, speaking in a conversational tone. The em-dash was another available option, and unlike the semicolon, its prevalence is increasing. I often find it to be the signature of juvenile or lazy writing, which seemed suitable for the adolescent narrator of Quiet Creature. So I tried using it for some of the more blunt comma splices in Quiet Creature. But when I reread what I’d done, I discovered I’d lost the narrator’s voice. In English, the em-dash commands more of a pause than I heard in his wandering drift. His narration is not choppy or staccato, but a sort of numbed fugue of uneven pace. So the em-dash had to go. A few of them remained, and some turned into commas, but I got rid of most.

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The Copy in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

September 5, 2016  |  in Interviews  |  by Alexis Almeida and Victoria Cóccaro

In the permanent anxiety surrounding whether or not a work is or is not original, a fear emerges when living in a colonized society.

Today, we’re trying out a new form with this sharp and engaging interview brought to us by Alexis Almeida, an Assistant Editor of Asymptote. Victoria Cóccaro interviewed artist and writer Leticia Obeid in Spanish; Almeida translated it into English. Much of Obeid’s work deals with ‘the copy,’ reproduction and interpretation—questions translators face as interpreters and writers. Here is the English translation, with the original Spanish below it.

Leticia Obeid is a visual artist and writer. As a writer, she has published the novela Se conoce que si (2012) and the artist book Escribir, Leer, Escuchar with Blatt & Rios press, as well as the novels Frente (2013) and Preparación (2015) with Caballo Negro press. In her visual art, which you can see here, she stages a dialogue between these artistic practices, while at the same time interrogating their supposedly separate bearing. Through the different forms she explores—video, drawing and illustration—she poses questions about what reading is, what writing is, and above all how the word can become an image, line, or sound. The line turns into a form of temporality and experience in her work, whose residue is the materiality of its footprint. Like a 19th century naturalist who copies in her notebook with her pen an infinitude of species that reveal themselves phenomenologically, she uses handwriting as a tool to materially experience thought and existence. Reading, writing, translation, image, word, and copy could be terms that vector—without diagramming entirely—Leticia Obeid’s work, which is also a kind of thinking about visual art, a kind of putting pressure on its assumptions and limits, allowing it to travel through (travel, travel-writing, other vectors) other artistic practices.

The following interview emerged from Leticia’s participation in Mi Bibliografía / My Biography, a series that I coordinate together with Marcos Perearnau at La Sede, a cultural space in Buenos Aires. With this as a pretext, I lingered to think about her work and found the idea of the copy operating as much in certain themes as in techniques she developed, I think, to explore this idea. My hope is that the reader will think about the way the idea of the copy operates in her artistic project, how it sets down in certain procedures, and also throughout the scope of Argentine and Latin American art in general. For this we’ll focus on five points: the link between the copy and tradition, Leticia’s work, experience, language, and our present moment. –Victoria Cóccaro

Victoria Cóccaro: We might consider that since its beginnings Argentine literature has activated a certain artistic potential in the copy. Practices like stealing, appropriation, reading, and rewriting intersect here in different ways. To name a few examples: Ricardo Piglia pointed out, from the apocryphal quotation that appears in the author’s note of Domingo Sarmiento’s Facundo–—on ne tue point les idées—the staged desecration of European or American culture, positing an “aesthetics of stealing.”[i] Borges points out a lateral and decentralized, even impertinent and irreverent use of European culture in Argentine literature; his writing contains much cutting, copying, and transcribing. Leónidas Lamborghini, in his Reescrituras, brings together copy and variation through a procedure that distorts and denaturalizes the original statement of the work.[ii] Finally, I’m remembering all of the events last year surrounding Pablo Katchadijian’s El Aleph engordado—the lawsuit that Borges’ widow filed for supposed “plagiarism,” and the defense made by the artistic community on behalf of the work, alleging that his practice was in line with certain practices of 20th century art, from Duchamp forward, including Borges himself.[iii]

How do you locate your own practice within this trajectory?

Leticia Obeid: I am part of that tradition by affinity, but also in an inevitable way, because I believe that the feeling of being a copy of a distant original model is a specific kind of symptom of being from a culture born as a colony—this feeling that we are a copy of a distant, original model. Without a doubt, this quality exists in all of Argentine cultural production—it is more or less central, more or less evident in each case. In my work, the copy has a pop quality, I would dare to say, now that we’re looking for genealogies: the parody and the homage unite in a single act. I feel a love and a hate for those very expressions that I have learned by heart, those songs, those texts and images that at some point invaded a space in my mind. In some cases the copy is a response to that invasion; it’s a charade, and it’s reverential as well.

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Ask a Translator with Daniel Hahn

August 31, 2016  |  in Ask a Translator, Interviews  |  by Daniel Hahn

In normal circumstances, then, it’s not my job to make the book better.

We’re bringing you the latest meditations on translation from acclaimed author, editor and translator Daniel Hahn. In “Ask a Translator,” he answers burning questions from readers about the gritty details of his chosen career. Today Daniel responds to Asymptote reader Tony Liang from Beijing, China.

Do you think the translator should be allowed to edit the text he translates?

It is not my job to change a text I’m translating. Indeed, my aim at its most essential is exactly the opposite: to focus all the ingenuity I have on figuring out specifically how to change nothing, how to give my publisher precisely the book we started with—not abridged or corrected or improved, but my best attempt at keeping it just the same, the language changed but nothing else. To rewrite the text in entirely new words while seeking to have as little of my own collateral effect on it as I possibly can. Leaving aside the fact that that’s impossible (because even as it keeps things the same, the process of translation is also changing everything), that’s the intention, that’s what we like to pretend is happening. Maintaining structural, narrative, tonal integrity, if you like, and faking it with all the rest.

In normal circumstances, then, it’s not my job to make the book better. It’s not my job to make the book more palatable to a reader. It’s not my job to fact-check a book and correct its mistakes and inconsistencies. My job is to write the same book. That’s the general idea.

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Urban Protest in Brazil: the City and the Politics of Luiz Ruffato

August 25, 2016  |  in Interviews  |  by Kathleen McCaul Moura

What annoys me sometimes in literature is when you try to show me a world which is only a violent, terrible world. I know this already.

‘Our political history is a succession of dictatorships.’

                                                                                            —Luiz Ruffato                                                        

The fiction of Luiz Ruffato tackles the grave injustices found in Brazilian society: the deep chasm between rich and poor, the endemic corruption, the cheapness of life in the sprawling poverty-stricken peripheries of the major cities. He is the kind of outspoken writer that tumultuous Brazil needs right now. The country is in crisis following recession, a massive corruption scandal and the impeachment process of its President Dilma Rousseff.

It is the poor who will suffer most from this debacle. After just a week in power the administration of acting President Michel Temer began scaling back social policies that the left-wing Workers’ Party had put in place over many years. The Guardian reports that ‘moves are under way to soften the definition of slavery, roll back the demarcation of indigenous land, trim house-building programs’[1].’

Ruffato gave presage to all this in his 2013 speech to Frankfurt Book Fair, presenting Brazil not as an up-and-coming economic success story, but a country in which the shackles of slavery had not been shaken off, describing the abject state of the majority of the population as ‘invisible…deprived of the basic rights of citizenship: housing, transportation, leisure, education, and healthcare…a disposable piece of the machinery driving the economy.’

Ruffato is in a position to talk of these matters. The son of an illiterate washerwoman and a popcorn seller, he slept rough for a month in a bus station when he first moved to Sao Paulo, making his subsequent literary success all the more remarkable. His most famous novel, There Were Many Horses, published in English in 2013, has been hailed as a defining novel in the history of Brazilian literature, winning both the Brazilian APCA Award for best novel and the Brazilian National Library’s Machado de Assis Award. In 2016 Ruffato won the International Herman Hesse Prize for Literature in Translation.

Set in São Paulo, a metropolis of over 20 million people, There Were Many Horses roams across the cityscape and its underbelly, investigating the lives of the homeless, the broken, the lonely, the corrupt and the evil. It is an important book for its political and social statements but also a rare example of a novel which engages completely with the concept of the developing world megacity: in characters, imagery, and structure. A series of 69 vignettes which happen over the course of a night in São Paulo, it began as an experiment, an attempt to capture the sprawling city in a way which Ruffato felt traditional novels had not done. Ruffato argues that the book’s experimental form mirrors the splintered infrastructure of São Paulo and the fragmented lives of Paulistas more effectively.

This interview was conducted in two parts. The first meeting happened in Sao Paulo, at the home of Ruffato. The author lives in an old-fashioned apartment block on the quiet crest of one of the city’s steep hills, in the upper middle-class neighbourhood of Perdizes. The narrow marble corridor that leads to his apartment, filled with potted plants and hanging ferns. Inside, the apartment is neat, with few ornaments. Opposite to a shelf of novels and books on art, a sofa sits by a window looking out across the city. The streaming lines of cars, the expanse of blue sky, the poor peripheral sprawl that goes on and on, blurring into the horizon: all of this made a fitting setting to talk about São Paulo itself, the genesis of There Were Many Horses, the challenges of writing about Brazil and developing world cities. 

The second part of the interview happened over the internet, after the recent suspension of the President Dilma Rousseff. This time, the author focused on politics and on uncertain future of Brazil. The bold red typeface in which he answered questions was perhaps an indication of the fear he feels for the dangerous position Brazil finds itself in today.

Kathleen McCaul (KM): Tell me how you came to write There Were Many Horses?

Luiz Ruffato (LR): There Were Many Horses, started first of all, like a stylistic exercise. I was thinking the following; for me, to write about São Paulo, or any other megacity, is almost impossible. The idea of a novel is closed, it’s a closed structure, and with a closed structure, you need to make choices, you need to make edits. I thought that these edits were precarious. I was wondering in what way I could get the city in the way that we (Paulistas) get it. I stayed thinking about these questions. The two basic units/concepts of a novel is time and space and I was thinking how does time and space work in a megacity? It’s not the same in a small city—space and time are different there. And space and time in São Paulo and London are different, for example. These two questions were the first things I was thinking and then I started to think how to put these things into São Paulo, how to create a novel, thinking about time and space, set in São Paulo. READ MORE…

Translator Profile: Lydia Davis

August 24, 2016  |  in Interviews, Translator's Profile  |  by Allegra Rosenbaum and Lydia Davis

I began to see that I enjoyed [translation] and also that it was a form of writing I could do without the problem of having to be "inspired."

Lydia Davis is the author of one novel and seven story collections, the most recent of which is Can’t and Won’t (2014). Her Collected Stories was published in 2009. She is also the translator, from the French, of Swann’s Way (2003) and Madame Bovary (2010) and has been appointed, this year, the French-American Foundation’s inaugural Laureate in Translation. A bi-lingual edition of her translations from the Dutch, of the very short stories of A.L. Snijders, first presented in our Fall 2011 issue, will be published in Amsterdam by AFdH in September.

Who are you and what do you translate?

I’m Lydia Davis, both fiction writer and translator. I’ve been both for as long as I can remember, and they complement each other nicely. I spent decades translating from French and then, about ten years ago, started widening my scope of languages—first with Spanish, then with Dutch and German. I’ve also—just for the challenge—translated one story from the Portuguese and a few from the two principal Norwegian languages.

I should add, since you asked what I translate, not from which languages, that my most recent major translations from French were Proust’s Swann’s Way and Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. After those two projects, which occupied several years each, I vowed to translate only very short stories. I have mainly stuck to that vow. READ MORE…

Translator’s Profile: Jeffrey Green

August 11, 2016  |  in Interviews, Translator's Profile  |  by Jeffrey Green and Lee Yew Leong

Our editor-in-chief talks with Jeffrey Green, the translator of Nir Baram's Good People

First of all, congratulations on the very fine translation, which I can recommend to Asymptote‘s readers without the slightest reservation. I was quite impressed by the deftness of your rendering; I found the book ‘unputdownable,’ riveted as I was by your skillful reconstruction in English of Nir Baram’s adman, and the meteoric ascent of his career in 1930s Germany. In fact, other than the odd German word or two every page, the writing didn’t seem to bear any trace of translation, for me at least, as I found it working perfectly well in English, both in terms of the story’s sitcom-like pacing and the sharp, precise English. I’m curious to know how much was lost in translation?

I’m grateful for your compliments, and I’m also very grateful to the editors at Text Publishing in Australia, who went over the manuscript with meticulous care and fine literary judgment. I always had the feeling that they were working with me (and Nir), not against me, with the aim of producing the most readable book possible. I’m glad you think that we succeeded.

With regard to this translation, I benefited from Nir’s input. Translators into English are fortunate, in that the authors they translate usually known the language, so they can correct misunderstandings, notice sentences that one has skipped, etc. Of course, this has a downside as well, because some writers (even Nir on occasion) think they know English better than their translator. Also, the writer always has the feeling that something has been lost, his voice, in the transition into another language. It must be somewhat distressing to hear one’s voice differently from the way one imagined it. On the other hand, sometimes writers discover things about their work when they see it in translation. But they have to accept loss of control inherent in the process of translation.

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In Conversation with Gazmend Kapllani

August 10, 2016  |  in Interviews  |  by Gigi Papoulias

The desire to speak other languages invaded my mind. I, too, wanted to look strange, mysterious and attractive...

Gazmend Kapllani is an Albanian-born author, journalist, and scholar. He lived in Athens for over twenty years. He received his PhD in political science and history from Panteion University in Athens, with a dissertation on the image of Albanians in the Greek press and of Greeks in the Albanian press. In addition, he was a columnist for Greece’s leading daily newspapers. Kapllani has written his first three novels in Greek, which is not his native language. His work centers on themes of migration, borders, totalitarianism, and how Balkan history has shaped public and private narratives.

Kapllani’s first novel A Short Border Handbook (Livanis, 2006) has become a best-seller and has been translated into Danish, English, French, Polish and Italian. His second novel, My Name is Europe (Livanis, 2010), has been published into French. The Last Page (Livanis, 2012) his most recent novel, has been translated into French and was short-listed for The Cezam Prix Litteraire Inter CE 2016. Since 2012 he has been living in the US, where he was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, Visiting Scholar at Brown University and Writer in Residence at Wellesley College. Kapllani currently lives in Boston and teaches Creative Writing and European History at Emerson College.  

Gigi Papoulias has a chance to sit down and talk to Kapllani on his work, language, and borders.

Gigi Papoulias (GP): You seem to have a passion for languages. You are fluent in five languages. Were you born into a multilingual family?

Gazmend Kapllani (GK): Actually I was born in a shack. My father’s family was persecuted by the communist regime and was driven out of their house in the countryside and punished—sent to live in a shack on the outskirts of my hometown Lushnje. They were considered “enemies of the regime” because they were wealthy landowners. Stalin did the same with the so-called “kulaks” in the Soviet Union.

I grew up surrounded by a large group of monolingual relatives whose discussions always led to the glory days of their aristocratic past. I grew up surrounded by joyful uncles and aunts—all of them impressively good looking. I’m amazed today that in my memories that miserable place comes as a place of joy and love. I remember the flowers that were planted all around. My grandmother was an extraordinary woman—she had lost three brothers in the war against the Nazis in Albania—she did everything possible to make life in the shack seem normal. What has remained with me is the extraordinary love that I was given in that shack. I also learned what resilience and human dignity mean. But I refused the rest: living with the glory of the past. I understood though that when people are denied a present and a future they take refuge in the past.

READ MORE…

Ask a Translator with Daniel Hahn

August 3, 2016  |  in Ask a Translator, Interviews  |  by Daniel Hahn

Translation, like any kind of writing, depends on instinct, you mustn’t forget that. But remember, too, that even instinct can be trained.

We’ve been hungry for more since Daniel Hahn made an appearance at the Asymptote Literary Salon in London two weeks ago. This week, we’re back with translation advice from the author, translator, and editor answering the following question from Singapore-based Asymptote reader Michelle Loh.

What can a translator do to improve?

I’m writing this answer from a mid-week lull at the British Centre for Literary Translation summer school. It’s an intensive, six-day residential course for literary translators and would-be literary translators, which I’ve taken part in annually since more or less the start of my own career. (Alarmed to discover, upon quick calculation, that this is my tenth… Hmm…) The BCLT summer school is mainly structured around language-specific workshop groups, but this year I’m leading one of a pair of unusual “multilingual” workshops; the nine participants in my group for the week are all excellent literary translators into English, but from a wide and wonderful range of source languages. (Between them, my lot speak Polish, Italian, French, Spanish, Latvian, Hungarian, German, Armenian, Russian, Portuguese, Dutch, and probably one or two others I’ve forgotten.) So how do you examine the translation process all together if you can never look at a single common source? To put it another way, what the hell was I supposed to do all week? READ MORE…

In Conversation with Lulu Norman and Ros Schwartz

July 28, 2016  |  in Interviews, Translator's Profile  |  by Lulu Norman and Ros Schwartz

Our editor-in-chief talks with the co-translators of Tahar Ben Jelloun's About My Mother

Lee Yew Leong: First of all, how would you classify this new book from Tahar Ben Jelloun? The story opens with an autobiographical narrator (Ben Jelloun himself) talking about his ailing mother, but then changes mode with italicized passages, where we get stories about his mother’s past recreated from her perspective.

Ros Schwartz: Do we have to classify it? I think there’s a problem with trying to categorize books by non-Western writers which often don’t follow a linear narrative arc according to traditional European classifications. I appreciate that doing so makes life easier for publishers—and is essential when entering books for prizes and applying for subsidies—and for booksellers, but my experience of translating Francophone writers such as Ben Jelloun and Dominique Eddé (Lebanese author who writes in French) is that their books defy categorisation. So while this book is strongly autobiographical, recounting the demise of Ben Jelloun’s mother, it also has a strong fictional element where he imagines what might be going on in his mother’s Alzheimer’s-raddled mind.

Lulu Norman: Yes and also into the past, when he imagines her life as a girl and what it must have been like for her in the Fez of the 1940s; there’s a more obviously ‘fictional’ feel in those passages. The narrator, who is called Tahar, pieces together the story of her life, constructing a narrative out of what he knows and what he imagines. Ben Jelloun calls the book a novel, in order I suppose to give himself the fullest leeway and perhaps avoid any ruction in life, since everyone’s memory is so subjective.

LYL: Could you share with our readers what went on behind the scenes of this project? How both of you got attached to this translation, for example? How did English PEN play a part in the materialization of the book, and how long did you take to complete the manuscript?

RS: This project is very dear to my heart. I’ve wanted to translate Ben Jelloun ever since I read L’enfant de sable in 1985. A couple of years ago I’d just finished translating Escape by Dominique Manotti for Gary Pulsifer at Arcadia and he mentioned that he’d just acquired Sur ma mère. Gary, this one’s for me, please. It’s funny because as a translator you can get typecast. Gary had me down as doing crime fiction. Anyway, he immediately said yes, and wrote to Tahar to make sure he was OK with my doing the translation. In the meantime, there was a radical change of management and direction at Arcadia, and the project was dropped. I was devastated and wrote to Anne-Solange Noble, rights director at Gallimard, to ask if I could seek another publisher. I took the book to Lynn Gaspard at Saqi who snapped it up. Sadly Gary passed away before the book was published, which is why we have dedicated our translation to him. READ MORE…

Hannah LeClair in Conversation with Poet Denis Hirson

July 27, 2016  |  in Interviews  |  by Hannah LeClair

"What happens in the shadows is unseen, mysterious. And shadows are what one is very conscious of in the heat of South Africa."

Denis Hirson is a South African poet living in Paris. He is the author of six books, exploring the memory of South Africa under Apartheid. Hirson is a translator of Breyten Breytenbach and the editor of two anthologies of South African poetry: The Lava of This Land: South African Poetry 1960-1996, (Northwestern Press, US; Actes sud, France, 1997), and its recently published companion, In the Heat of Shadows: South African Poetry 1996-2013 (Deep South, 2014). Hannah LeClair’s conversation with Denis begins with a discussion of his role as the editor of these anthologies, and delves into the many facets of his work, from his early translations of Breytenbach, to his readings and performances in concert with long-time collaborators Sonia Emanuel and saxophonist Steve Potts, to his own writing, which frequently crosses the border between poetry and prose.

Hannah LeClair: In the Heat of Shadows is a companion to The Lava of This Land, the first anthology of South African poetry you edited. And it first appeared in French, under the title Pas de blessure, pas d’histoire, in the wake of a festival organized by the Biennale international des poètes en Val de Marne in 2013. Can you talk about your work on this project? What was it like to bring together a multi-lingual collection of poets in this context?

Denis Hirson: It was in irresistible invitation. I was asked to help choose the poets who were going to come and participate in the Festival—I should add that this took place in the context of a larger event which the French term “une saison”— a season of cultural exchange with other countries— in this case, South Africa. The first part of the Saison took place in 2012, with South Africa hosting French cultural events, and the second part of the exchange took place in France, in 2013. Pas de blessure, pas d’histoire was an anthology produced as a result of the festival, and included the work of the fourteen South African poets initially invited to participate, along with fourteen others. It was strange to put together this anthology in French before bringing it out in English; I did that a year later, changing the content slightly. I should add that the publisher was Deep South in Grahamstown, South Africa – the press run by my friend Robert Berold, who was one of the poets invited to Paris at that time.

READ MORE…

An Interview with Eleanor McDowall of Radio Atlas

July 21, 2016  |  in Interviews  |  by David Maclean

Finding a way to understand the language without destroying the poetry of its delivery seems key to me.

Radio Atlas is an exciting new project gathering together subtitled audio from around the world – introducing listeners to a whole slew of inventive, genre-bending documentaries, drama and sound art made in languages that they may not necessarily speak.

Eleanor McDowall is an established radio documentary maker and producer with Falling Tree Productions, an independent production company based in London. She has helped to pioneer “animated radio” productions at home in the United Kingdom, and produces BBC Radio 4’s much-lauded series,‘Short Cuts’, with the British comedian, Josie Long.

***

David Maclean: Can you give me a brief history of Radio Atlas, i.e. how it came together and its origins?

Eleanor McDowall: Radio Atlas emerged out of a desire I had for a platform that didn’t exist—an easy, accessible way of engaging with interesting audio in languages I didn’t speak. I’d had a lot of experience listening to documentaries with big wads of paper on my knee, flicking through a translation as the audio played out, and desperately hoping that I hadn’t lost my place. A few years ago I saw an early event by the wonderful In The Dark where they played a Norwegian audio documentary in a cinema with subtitles and I was struck by how natural the experience was. This was the first time that I got away from feeling I was ‘reading’ a documentary and felt like I was really ‘hearing’ it. Radio Atlas is an attempt to make the most sympathetic subtitling experience I can for the audio—so hopefully you stop thinking about the text and start listening.

READ MORE…

Live Today! Ask A Translator: The Best Tips

July 20, 2016  |  in Ask a Translator, News  |  by Daniel Hahn

"...my aim is to take one superb piece of writing, and make another superb piece of writing that can stand in for it with a new set of readers."

Since we launched our ‘Ask A Translator’ column last December, award-winning writer, editor and translator Daniel Hahn has been on hand to remedy the translation woes of Asymptote readers around the globe. Given the overwhelming love that our readers show for the column and Daniel (seriously, you guys are the best), we can’t wait to welcome Asymptote fans to our very first literary salon today at Waterstones Piccadilly, London on July 20th. The event will be hosted by our Editor-at-Large, Megan Bradshaw and will see Daniel fielding questions from the audience and our readers via Twitter. You can find out more about the event and reserve your place here, or if you can’t attend the event, tweet us your translation question with #AskATranslator.

In anticipation of the event, we’ve put together a shortlist of the six most important lessons for aspiring translators:

  1. Don’t be starstruck by authors (and don’t be afraid to stand your ground)

“Imagine approaching pretty much any writer and saying, “Look, here’s the plan, we’re going to change lots of things in your book—no, I really mean lots of things, like all the words—then we’re going to publish it all over the world in your name, but you won’t get to see what it actually says… Sound OK?” They’d be within their rights to feel more than a little uneasy about it.

[…]

But just as I don’t always understand what they’re doing, they don’t always understand what I’m doing either. And their English is sometimes not quite as good as they think it is. (Or at least I hope it’s typically less good than mine, otherwise I might as well pack the whole thing in.) While I want them to be reassured, I’m the person who signs things off for the publisher, and I have to be happy with the English text—my name’s on it, too, and if something sounds funny that will end up being my fault.”

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