Interviews

Waywords & Meansigns—Composing with the Explosion of Language

May 11, 2015  |  in Interviews  |  by Rebecca Hanssens-Reed

How do you "understand" James Joyce to translate him? Rebecca Hanssens-Reed in conversation with Mariana Lanari, musical translator of the "Wake"

Mariana Lanari hosts performative readings of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake in Amsterdam, and recently recorded two chapters for an audio-musical version of Finnegans Wake, unabridged, called Waywords and Meansigns. Featuring established—as well as up-and-coming—artists from around the world, Waywords and Meansigns strives for a version of Joyce’s work that is stimulating and accessible to even the most casual of readers and listeners. The project officially launched a week ago, on Monday, May 4th: the 76th anniversary of Finnegans Wake.

Finnegans Wake contains over sixty languages. In spite of this, it has, in turn been translated into several other languages from its original English (though a number of translators of the text have given up, gone mad, or mysteriously disappeared, as was the case for a Japanese translator). This raises some interesting questions when considering its “translation” into an audio-musical language. What is lost, gained, or changed when we transfer a multilingual text to a musical, non-linguistic platform? Finnegans Wake reconstructs notions of language, and that process is echoed in converting such a text audio-musically. What we are left with is something resembling a full spectrum of meaning-making (in the loosest sense of the term).

Mariana, alongside composer Sjoerd Leijten, scored the first and last chapters of the text to music. Mariana and I talked about the novel and her involvement in Waywords and Meansigns, including the sensation of foreign-ness, how Finnegans Wake changed her life, and the odd comfort of settling into a vulnerable place of not-knowing or understanding. READ MORE…

Interview with Cristina Burneo

May 6, 2015  |  in Interviews  |  by Sarah Foster

An interview in Spanish and English about literary Ecuador and the bilingual poet Alfredo Gangotena

Scroll down to read the interview in Spanish. 

How did you become interested in translation?

When I was sixteen or seventeen years old, I was in my last year of high school, and our German teacher—a man named Herbert Wöhlers, who was my German teacher for six years, and one of the most amazing teachers I had (now he lives in Heidelberg)—had us read and translate a Rilke poem. I found myself reading, interpreting, deciphering, re-writing, and I was fascinated, it made me happy. Especially because it was poetry, already my favorite kind of writing. I haven’t translated Rilke again, and I’ve almost never translated from German since, but it doesn’t matter. That drive to translate had been built into my writing and my reading.

You’ve done a lot of work with the poetry of Alfredo Gangotena, who lived in France and wrote in French. Did those things complicate his relationship with Ecuadorian society? Do you think that translations of his work into Spanish have been important for that reason?

Yes, of course, writing in French and then coming to the Andes poses a problem. What sense does it make for an afrancesado poet to come back to Quito and keep writing in French? It felt like a slap in the face to the “well-to-do” members of the Ecuadorian cultural circles. Benjamín Carrión referred indirectly to the afrancesados as decadent, prisoners of complacency. He even suggested that francophiles and effeminates were dangerously close to each other.

Gangotena was out of place in that sense. When he died, a close friend of the poet, Riofrío, announced that his work would be translated… but the emerging translation project only came into being in the hands of other poet translators, Gonzalo Escudero and Filoteo Samaniego, in 1956, twelve years after Gangotena’s death.

It’s very important that we have wanted to keep translating Gangotena. Without translation there’s no revision, or culture, or the option of doubting the official versions of history and literature. Today, I wonder how it is that standard image of the hard, masculine, and committed intellectual excludes other figures, like that of Alfredo Gangotena. For that reason, translating his poetry also requires us to question our own ideas about Ecuadorian culture, ideas that require us to perform our nationality and our intellectual lives in the prescribed way. Gangotena, to a great extent, resisted that obligation.

READ MORE…

In Conversation: George Henson, Translator

May 4, 2015  |  in Interviews  |  by Rosie Clarke

Rosie Clarke chats with George Henson, translator of Sergio Pitol's "The Art of Flight"

George Henson is a senior lecturer at UT Dallas, where he specializes in literary translation, translation theory, Spanish language, 20th century Latin American poetry and narrative, and queer literature. His translations of short stories by Mexican author Elena Poniatowska have appeared in Nimrod, Translation Review, The Literary Review, and Puerto del Sol. His translation of Carlos Pintado’s short story “Joy Eslava” was published by Zafra Lit, and his translations of poems by Francisco Morán have appeared in Sojourn and The Havana Reader.

His translation of Sergio Pitol’s The Art of Flight, the first of Pitol’s “Trilogy of Memory,” was published last month by Deep Vellum. Recipient of the Cervantes Prize in 2005, Pitol is considered by many to be Mexico’s greatest living author, but this is his first appearance in English translation. I spoke with George via email about why this could be, and discussed his translation practice and the challenges of working with a multigeneric work like Pitol’s. READ MORE…

An Interview With Epigram Books

April 15, 2015  |  in Interviews  |  by Pooja Makhijani

Children's literature takes on translation, too

Epigram Books is a Singaporean independent publisher best known for the middle-grade series The Diary of Amos Lee, translations of Singapore’s Cultural Medallion winners, and new editions of out-of-print classic Singaporean novels. Epigram Books also publishes children’s picture books, plays, graphic novels and cookbooks. 

Nearly fifteen percent of Epigram Books’ list is works in translation and its list of picture books, the Stories from Around The World series, features contemporary titles handpicked by Publisher and CEO Edmund Wee. Most recently, Epigram Books translated The Little Kangaroo by Guido van Genechten (from Dutch) and Hurry Up, Slow Down by Isabel Minhós Martins and illustrated by Bernardo Carvalho (from Portuguese) to English.

I spoke to Wee in Epigram Books’ Toa Payoh office.

How did Epigram Books’ Stories from Around the World series start?

Epigram Books wanted to introduce English-language books that were not books from the U.S. or the U.K. to Singaporean readers. 

Once I started looking at books published in other languages, I discovered so many good ones! Obviously, I couldn’t bring them all to this market, so I selected a few, found translators in Singapore, and released our first titles. READ MORE…

Contributing a Voice: Interviewing Guest Artist Shuxian Lee

April 6, 2015  |  in Interviews  |  by Berny Tan

“I believe in at least making work about what I have felt or experienced or strongly believe in. Only then do I feel the urge to make art at all.”

Antwerp-based illustrator Shuxian Lee is Asymptote’s guest artist for the January issue. Her joyous, Escher-esque cover image is perfect for our 4th anniversary, while her beautiful, evocative, and often poignant illustrations accompany a total of seventeen texts. I interview her about her process and inspirations, and find out more about her graphic novels.

Berny Tan: I find your illustrations incredibly rich in both texture and colour. Could you take us through your process of conceiving and executing each piece?

Shuxian Lee: I’m quite a visual person—when I read something or feel something, I get these viewpoints in my head that are sometimes quite filmic and are related to a certain mood. Sometimes, when I come across certain expressions, I’m reminded of certain artworks or patterns that inspire me. I love to draw references to paintings because painters (mostly 19th- and 20th-century ones) are some of my biggest inspirations and first loves!

Once I get this image in my head, then I’ll sketch thumbnails of some of the ideas—though to be honest, I’m quite lazy about this part because I usually already have the finished composition in my head. Next, I look for reference images for colour, gesture or to get the perspectives right, then I start sketching. I usually make my own reference images too, and I rely a lot on my partner (or myself) as a model for my characters.

If the sketch works, I get started with the inking, then I scan it and colour it in Photoshop. I love organic textures of paint and dirt and brush marks, so I try to integrate that during the digital colouring too. In general, I work with non-digital mediums, but it’s nice to discover ways to replicate the non-digital look on Photoshop. I actually only started using Photoshop to colour a few years ago, so I’m still figuring out lots of things.

READ MORE…

Hunger and the Artist: Interviewing Windham Campbell Prizewinner Helon Habila

April 1, 2015  |  in Interviews  |  by Nicole Idar

An interview with Nigerian author Helon Habila, winner of a 2015 Windham Campbell Prize in Fiction

The Windham Campbell Prize, launched just two years ago, has quickly become one of the most sought-after literary awards in the world, offering recipients the financial freedom to write with a $150,000 no-strings-attached grant. This year, Nigeria-born Helon Habila, author of the novels Waiting for an Angel (Norton, 2002), Measuring Time (Norton, 2007), and Oil on Water (Norton, 2010), received a Windham Campbell Prize in the Fiction category. Established by Donald Windham and Sandy M. Campbell, who were artists themselves, the prize recognizes writers writing in English from anywhere in the world.

Nicole Idar: The Windham Campbell Prize was inspired by Donald Windham’s own experiences as a young writer struggling to support himself, and in your own work you’ve written about young writers faced with this very struggle—Diaz, the narrator and aspiring journalist in “The Hotel Malogo,” for example. When you were first starting out as a writer, you worked as an editor for several years in Lagos. How has this struggle to balance art with financial security shaped you as a writer?

Helon Habila: Hunger, both metaphorical and literal, is always good for the artist. It sharpens your focus and drives you on. There’s a beautiful essay by Ben Okri on this subject, published in the British Council’s New Writing anthology a long time ago. It is based on his own experiences as a struggling writer in London. He describes how hunger would literally wake you up at night and drive you to the writing desk. But of course the best work on this subject for me is Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London. Yet, when the hunger becomes too much, it becomes a burden, not a helper. You might, for instance, find yourself writing about food for no discernible reason. I wrote my first book mostly hungry, with no computer, and by candle light because our electricity wasn’t working. This was in Lagos. I had to go to work at 7 am, and get home at around 7 pm, rest for a few hours and start writing by candle light till around 3 am. Then rest and go to work at 7 am. It was tough, but it shaped me in so many ways. I am glad that book worked out, it went on to win the Caine Prize and got me my first book deal with Penguin and Norton. It would have been devastating if it didn’t. READ MORE…

An Interview with the “Turnip Princess” Translator, Maria Tatar

March 23, 2015  |  in Interviews  |  by Patty Nash

Beyond Brothers Grimm, beyond Hans Christian Andersen: "There's nothing like this collection in English."

The following is an interview with translator Maria Tatar, of Franz Xaver Von Schönwerth’s The Turnip Princess and Other Newly Discovered Tales, available here—and if you’d like a taste, check out our recent Translation Tuesday, featuring the short story “The Enchanted Fiddle!”

Could you talk about the Turnip Princess and what sort of fairy tales they are?

Schönwerth collected his stories from farmhands, domestic servants, artisans —people who worked for a living and were experts in the art of gossip, improvisation, talk, and storytelling. His official work took him into royal quarters, but he was deeply committed to capturing tales told by adults in workrooms and around the hearth. Unlike the Grimms, who were equal-opportunity collectors, begging and borrowing from all social classes, Schönwerth wanted tales untainted by literary influences—hence the rough-hewn quality of many of his stories.   He did not smooth out rough edges, add psychological motivation, or make stylistic “improvements.” The Turnip Princess lets us listen in to storytelling sessions from times past. And suddenly, once you’ve read a a dozen or so of these tales, you begin to see how they were put together and animated for audiences.

How did you prepare to translate this sort of writing?

I suppose I could say that I have been preparing for this work all my life. I was trilingual for a brief period as a child, speaking Hungarian, German, and English—never confusing them according to my parents, and thank goodness for that. My graduate work in German Studies took a literary turn, and I did not begin research on folklore and fairy tales in earnest until I started reading fairy tales to my children in the 1980s. Translating the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen for my annotated editions of their work was in some ways actually not the best training ground for Schönwerth. The Grimms and Andersen strive for a carefully constructed folksy tone; Schönwerth by contrast just puts on the page what he hears. I often had to resist the temptation to smooth out the rough edges and create a reader-friendly story. READ MORE…

Publisher Profile: Ariadne Press

March 19, 2015  |  in Interviews  |  by Eva Richter

Karl Johns and Jorun Johns of Ariadne Press on Austrian literature in translation

Ariadne Press has been publishing translated Austrian literature since 1988 from Riverside, California. Their 260 titles range from exciting new fiction to autobiographies, pioneering critical work, and plays, on diverse subjects from Nazism to science fiction to music and humor. I spoke with editor Karl Johns and founding editor Jorun Johns on the phone about Ariadne, Austria’s modern literary masters, and the intersection of Vienna and California.

***

Eva Richter: How did Ariadne Press start?

Karl Johns: That’s interesting, how everything starts. The International Arthur Schnitzler Research Association was founded in 1962 to celebrate the 100th birthday of Arthur Schnitzler. When all the German-language refugees came to the United States, California was actually the second most popular goal after New York, in spite of the fact that the Midwest and Chicago already had German speakers and German newspapers and all that. So there were a lot of people in California and Los Angeles. Many of these people survived as psychoanalysts. They were the ones who were most prosperous, maybe. Some of them were the admirers of Arthur Schnitzler, and that’s how that was started, and that led to the journal, which became more and more general, not just Arthur Schnitzler but all of Austrian literature, and it was called Modern Austrian Literature. My mother, Jorun Johns, was one of the editors of that. It sort of grew, and it became the standard place for people to publish articles about modern Austrian authors.

The logical thing was that these people needed to publish books for their academic credentials. And it’s always difficult to find a publisher! So my mother founded Ariadne together with two colleagues, Donald Daviau at UC Riverside and Richard Lawson at San Diego State University. The first book they published was the memoir of Leon Askin, who had begun as an actor in Vienna and emigrated. Since then, Ariadne has put out 260 titles, and we have a number in the pipeline, including Shaking the Empire: Shaking Patriarchy, an anthology of feminist writings from Eastern European languages. All our books are translated into English, with one exception, and the idea is to make Austrian literature, authors, and studies of them available to the English-speaking audience. The Library of Congress does not distinguish Austria from Germany, but it really is a separate tradition.

READ MORE…

The Orbital Library: Interviewing Ken Liu

March 5, 2015  |  in Interviews  |  by Matthew Spencer

“All writers are writing science fiction in a certain sense in so far as they explore concepts of alienation and modernity.”

Ken Liu is a Chinese-born American writer whose body of translations and original fiction is helping shed light on the current boom of science fiction and fantasy writing in China to English-speaking audiences. A lawyer and programmer by profession, he made his publishing debut with “The Paper Menagerie,” a short story about a mail-order bride and her son coping with cultural alienation through the care of sentient origami animals. The story swept the science fiction and fantasy establishment, garnering the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Awards in a stroke. Many more stories and translations were to follow.

Liu first came to my attention through his translation of The Three-Body Problem, the first book in a trilogy by the bestselling author Cixin Liu, popularly regarded as the key figure in China’s science fiction community.

The novel is made up of two interwoven narratives, one set in near-future China (no concrete dates are given) and the other during the height of the Cultural Revolution. Ye Wenjie is an astrophysicist and engineer whose father is brutally murdered during an uprising of the Red Guards. Branded a reactionary because of her family ties, she is sent to  a rural labor camp. Her troubles are compounded when the authorities learn of her interest in the nascent environmental movement.

READ MORE…

Life in Grinding Years: Latvia in Transition and Translation

March 3, 2015  |  in Essays, Interviews  |  by Inara Cedrins

A conversation with Amanda Aizpuriete, Latvian poet and translator

Amanda Aizpuriete is a mystical poet. In conversation this past fall, she told me she writes “about places I haven’t been, lives I haven’t lived.” We met in Jurmala, a place whose name literally means “seashore” and which comprises a string of resort towns halfway between Riga and Kaugari, where Aizpuriete has lived all her life. Her mother was entitled to military housing there. Her children went to the same school she attended as a child. “I have lived through the most dramatic changes,” Aizpuriete says, who was born in 1956 and has published collections of poetry while Latvia was under Soviet control to the present.

“There was only one publisher at the start, and an ‘inside’ review was of the greatest importance.” She explained this meant a critique and recommendation of a prospective book by a well-known writer.

Aizpuriete studied philology and philosophy at the Latvian State University from 1974-1979, as well as at the M. Gorky Literature Institute’s Translation Seminary in Moscow from 1980-1984. Through this time, she met translators from Ukraine and Azerbaijan and discovered what she describes as “great writings,” just opening up to publishing in the mid-eighties when Gorbachev entered power. First to translate this work into Latvian, she interviewed Josef Brodsky a couple of years after he’d won the Nobel Prize, and translated his play Demokratija into Latvian with his collaboration. “This was a beautiful episode, done through relationships,” Aizpuriete says. As poetry editor for the magazine Avots (Wellspring) in the mid-eighties, Aizpuriete was able to see the debut of banned Latvians, those it was not possible to publish earlier. READ MORE…

Proust Questionnaire: Tim Wilkinson

February 24, 2015  |  in Proust Questionnaires  |  by Asymptote

...a "Lydia Davis" questionnaire for Hungarian-language translator Tim Wilkinson

Tim Wilkinson (b. 1947) grew up in Sheffield, S. Yorks., but has lived most his adult life in London. He is the primary English translator of Hungarian writer Imre Kertész (titles including Fatelessness, Fiasco, Kaddish for an Unborn Child, Liquidation, Detective Story, The Pathseeker and Dossier K) and, more recently, Miklós Szentkuthy (Marginalia on Casanova, Towards the One and Only Metaphor), among others, as well as shorter works by a wide range of other contemporary Hungarian-­language authors. Fatelessness was awarded the PEN Club/Book of the Month Translation Prize for 2005.

Q: How did you learn your foreign language, and how did you begin working as a literary translator?

A: I learned Hungarian “on the hoof,” mainly by moving to Budapest around Easter 1970 and marrying the girl with whom I had by then fallen in love, having made several trips there since 1964. I might add that I sort of picked up German in much the same way (minus the love complications), by taking up a job in Switzerland, 20 years later. Contact with speakers of a language is, for me, the important feature, just as it is with small children… The strictly “literary” translation work only really came about ten years ago, after I had been translating a fairly wide range of non-fiction (mostly with a pronounced historical flavor) as an add-on to my main job (which was in an altogether different field and had little or nothing to do with translation). READ MORE…

In Conversation: Portuguese translator Alison Entrekin

February 18, 2015  |  in Interviews  |  by Eric M. B. Becker

Do you use a special filter to replace whatever has been lost, or do you leave the photograph unadulterated?

Eric Becker: Before we get into more details about Brazilian literature itself—how is it you came to literary translation, and why Brazil?

AE: As is probably the case with most literary translators, I didn’t just wake up one morning and think “I want to be a literary translator.” Rather, it came to me slowly. I had originally studied Creative Writing at university in Australia, and wanted to be a writer. But fresh out of university, I married a Brazilian and moved to Brazil. I did what many foreigners do when they first arrive here: I taught English. But it wasn’t really what I wanted to be doing. I realized I had a flair for language and did a course in translation, with the sole intent of becoming a literary translator, even though I had read barely any Brazilian literature before that. I just had a hunch that the creative writing and translation skills could be a useful pairing.

EB: You’ve been translating now for about a decade and a half. What is it you’ve learned or what has changed in your practice during that time?

AE: Well, apart from settling into a way of working that works for me, I’ve developed countless theories about the differences between Portuguese and English, between Brazilian literature and English literatures. In fact, with every new book I translate, I either further one of my pet theories a little or more, or develop a completely new one.

For example, I am endlessly fascinated by how certain literary aesthetics can be received so differently from one culture to the next. The very grammar of the Portuguese language, and the culture in which it is embedded, have given rise to such different perceptions of what constitutes “good style.” Sentences that are witty in Portuguese can come across as pedantic or convoluted in English.

READ MORE…

Publisher Profile: Restless Books

February 10, 2015  |  in Interviews, Publisher Profile  |  by Frances Riddle

"Restless was conceived in a moment when decisive transformations were taking place."

Restless Books is a digital-first publishing initiative spearheaded by Ilan Stavans, the Lewis-Sebring Professor in Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College. Stavans is also a writer and cofounder of the Great Books Summer Program at Amherst, Stanford, and Oxford. We spoke via Skype about his books, which “reflect the restlessness of our multiform lives.”

Frances Riddle: How was Restless Books born?

Ilan Stavans: Restless was conceived in a moment when decisive transformations were taking place. Booksellers were shrinking in size; big publishers were limiting the number of books coming from different countries, from different languages. Restless came out of a response to the limited exposure an American reader has to international fiction. We aim to translate great work from a variety of languages. That was and is our mission—to compensate for the commercial way of thinking the big publishers have in New York City. We are a mid-sized publisher, but our goal is to help internationalize the landscape of American literature as much as possible. The Press aims to publish fiction, non-fiction, and poetry dealing with restlessness as a condition.

FR: Was this focus on movement—restlessness—inspired by your own immigrant experience? READ MORE…

Publisher Profile: A Midsummer Night’s Press

December 11, 2014  |  in Interviews  |  by Frances Riddle

An interview with Lawrence Schimel, head of independent poetry press A Midsummer Night's Press

A Midsummer Night’s Press started publishing poetry in 1991. Since then, the press has expanded to include three imprints. Fabula Rasa publishes works that draw inspiration from mythology and folklore. Body Language publishes writing related to gender and sexual identity. Sapphic Classics, in collaboration with Sinister Wisdom journal, rereleases works of lesbian poetry.

This fall, A Midsummer Night’s Press has launched a new imprint, Periscope, which focuses on poetry in translation. Lawrence Schimel, the press’s founder, answered my questions by e-mail before jetting off to the Guadalajara Book Fair. Read on for information on how to receive free international shipping on Periscope’s debut titles. READ MORE…