Say Ayotzinapa

November 18, 2014  |  in Essays, Translations  |  by Sophie Hughes and Valeria Luiselli

A special feature in 20 languages: presenting David Huerta’s “Ayotzinapa” with an introduction by Faces in the Crowd-author Valeria Luiselli

David Huerta wrote “Ayotzinapa” on November 2, 2014, “in anger, outrage, and horror.” It has already formed an installation at the Oaxaca Museum of Contemporary Art, been printed by Juan Nicanor Pascoe’s letterpress, and been read and excerpted in protest banners from Berlin to Xalapa. When I read it two weeks ago, I realised there was a very practical way for Asymptote, as a journal of international literature, to communicate Mexico’s rallying cry for change and justice in multiple languages. Juana Adcock’s English translation was the first in a chain that now stretches from Mexico to Scotland, China, Romania, Israel, Indonesia, Brazil, Greece, and beyond. Asymptote’s global “Ayotzinapa” has become a poetic event, an audible coming-together, which is one constructive way of responsibly renewing the word Ayotzinapa, as Valeria Luiselli suggests we must do in her introduction to the poem. All of the translations begin with the same, untouched word, Ayotzinapa; like David, all of our translators took pains to get across—rephrasing the Greek poet C. P. Cavafy—what these Ayotzinapas mean.

Below you can read and listen to David Huerta’s original Spanish-language poem. You can also use the drop-down menu like a map to read translations of his poem in 20 languages. Listen, too, to our translators’ audio recordings, and particularly to their pronunciation of the unchanged title, “Ayotzinapa.” Above all, this global translation is about resisting the state of speechlessness that is easy to fall into when what you are witnessing is beyond imagination; about learning how to say Ayotzinapa; about stopping the word Ayotzinapa from being a strange, unrelated Mexican sound. #WeAreAllAyotzinapa #WritersWithAyotzinapa — Sophie Hughes, Editor-at-large, Mexico

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The Tiff: What Makes a Bad Translation?

November 17, 2014  |  in Essays  |  by Susan Bernofsky and Suzanne Jill Levine

A sound-off between two translation heavyweights Susan Bernofsky and Suzanne Jill Levine

Susan Bernofsky, Translationista + director of literary translation at Columbia University

Translating well is pretty difficult, so it stands to reason that a certain number of the translations you find out in the world are going to stink. And lousy translations can be of as many different types as Tolstoy’s unhappy families—or at least it might seem so at first blush. But when it really comes down to it, most translations that fail to live up to their potential sin in one of two fundamental ways. In the first case, the translator just doesn’t know what he’s doing. This can mean that he fails to master the original language he’s translating from to the point of being able to understand everything the author is up to, whether it’s stylistically, tonally or even on the basic level of plot (of stories, of sentences). Let’s face it: if you don’t know a language well enough to unpack a syntactically knotty sentence or recognize slang expressions and figures of speech, it’s pretty hopeless. If you read in a translation from the English about someone refusing to donate the posterior of a rodent when it’s really just a rat’s ass he’s not giving, well, that’s a nifty example of lost in translation. Or maybe the translator knows the language pretty well, but the writer has set the work in a milieu where the translator doesn’t know his way around enough to decipher the signposts that show whether a bit of dialogue is to be read as sarcastic or heartfelt, aggressive or shy. Or he’s never eaten that particular sort of food and doesn’t know how to find the words for it. Or he’s lazy and hasn’t bothered to study the work he’s translating carefully enough to really see how it ticks. Or or or. That’s the first set of things that can go wrong. These are all eminently fixable. The translator can do research, or ask for help, or get a work ethic, or plot to spend time in a place that will provide him with the cultural literacy he lacks. This mediocre translator might still be on his way to becoming a good one. The second category of ills is more dire. These are problems that arise when the translator just isn’t a good writer in English. And that’s a hard one to remedy. Why should translators be any less prone to Tin Ear than writers of other sorts? We’ve all encountered sentences that sound like something large and heavy being dragged downstairs. Occasionally a writer does this on purpose, for effect, but usually not. And the dirty secret of translation is that the very activity of translating tends to turn elegant writers into awkward ones. It’s because when you’re translating (especially if you’re fairly new to the activity), you’re likely to spend too much time hanging out in the part of your brain that learns foreign languages, makes rational decisions and does math. Look, I’m not a neuroscientist. But remember all those exercises your creative writing teachers used to throw at you? (Here’s six words, make a sestina right now, go!) They were mostly designed to trick you into switching off the rational part of your brain long enough for you to be able to write something. Good writing is most likely to come into being not by force of will but by relaxing into a sort of loose focus that lets the wiser part of your brain (the part where flashes of insight strike) take control. And it’s really hard to make simultaneous use of the writerly and rational parts of your brain, as brilliant translation requires. This is my private explanation for why so many translations fall short of delightfulness. Ideally, a translation of a literary work should be a work of literature in its own right, displaying a sense of style, tone, rhythm, voice and language succulent enough to make you want to read it all over again. And if the translator can’t really write well, that’s not going to happen. Still, there’s a bit of hope left. Like other sorts of writers, translators can get better at what they do by reading a lot of well-written books and thinking and talking about what they read. I’m not convinced that taste and a sense of style can be taught, but I’m pretty sure they can be learned. READ MORE…

On Manoel de Barros (1916-2014)

November 14, 2014  |  in News, Translations  |  by Idra Novey

“A tree was growing in his voice / And his face was an open field”

Manoel de Barros began writing poetry at the age of thirteen. For the next eighty years, until his death on November 13, 2014, at ninety-eight, he wrote of the wetlands like no other Brazilian poet before him or since. He invented a language to speak not for his own experience of the wetlands but for how the birds experienced it. He wrote of the world as seen by the ants and of the music heard at the bottom of the river and of a humbleness before nature that was not of a poet who visited for a weekend or a month to escape urban life but of a poet who was born into a lush green place and felt himself to be such a part of it that he never lived anywhere else.

Translating his poems dramatically changed my thinking about the relationship between nature and language. For Manoel de Barros, nature and language were one and the same. He sought words that were the birds and therefore “belonged to no language.” As we lose species after species to human destruction, Manoel de Barros speaks for what we are losing with a swiftness that it is nearly unfathomable. – Idra Novey

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Weekly News Roundup, 14th November 2014: Finish Your Books, Discover New Things

November 14, 2014  |  in News  |  by Patty Nash

This week's literary highlights from across the world

If you’re reading this, chances are you’re Internet-savvy (or at least Internet-literate, which is an appealing almost-rhyme—so you’re a poet, too). And those who use the Internet know what “clickbait” is, or think they do—but it may be time to rethink what that coinage actually means. (Speaking of regrettable words: Time Magazine has a poll asking readers what words/phrases they’d like to ban from the English language—and the word “feminist” is in the list. Seriously?!). While the Internet allows us to look back and cringe at photos, messages, and comments of yesteryear and today, prolific authors are rarely asked to do the same. Here are six authors (including Philip Roth, Asymptote friend Lydia Davis, and Junot Díaz) on some of their earliest work.

Famed French OULIPO member Georges Perec may no longer be living, but a recently discovered manuscript lets readers uncover more of his infuriatingly clever work: A Portrait of a Man was found inside a closet and hits the English-language market this week, thanks to a translation by none other than David Bellos. Yet more literature resurfaces: from famed American writer John Steinbeck, a story read by Orson Welles on radio never reached print—until now. And fans of tragic Welsh poet Dylan Thomas (including yours truly), rejoice: nineteen new poems of his have been uncovered. Now you might understand his tragedy! Finally, Holocaust survivor and Polish memoirist Mary Berg’s archival scrapbooks and journals have surfaced, shedding new light on a lifetime marked by trauma.

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October Issue Highlight: from “Against the Current,” by Tedi López Mills

November 13, 2014  |  in Essays, Translations  |  by Patty Nash

Another in-depth look at our most recent issue

When Asymptote’s October issue came out nearly a month ago, I (that is to say, your trusty blog editor Patty Nash, with my co-editor Eva Richter) promised that the favorites we had picked were merely the tip of the iceberg. That there were more where those came from, which is to say that they weren’t favorites at all, per se, because the word “favorite” implies absoluteness. And in an issue as large and diverse as ours, sticking to one or two final picks feels like an unnecessary burden: as blog editors, we do make the rules, after all. READ MORE…

New in Translation: November 2014

November 12, 2014  |  in Reviews  |  by Eva Richter, Sohini Basak, and Tim Ellison

Wolfgang Koeppen’s Youth, Vietnamese poetry by Nguyen Phan Que Mai, and Melania G. Mazzucco’s Limbo

The strength of Wolfgang Koeppen’s Youth (Jugend), an autobiographical account of the German author’s formation, lies in the small stuff: its sentence constructions, its often-startling words. These sentences can go on endlessly, such as the evocation of its setting that starts the book. After a first, short sentence—“My mother was afraid of snakes”—Koeppen goes on to describe the area of Rosental in one elaborate sentence that continues for the next three pages. This sentence twists and grows, covering furniture, landmarks, food, even the history of the young narrator’s family, until the speaker plunges into a fantastic rant against the place:

[…] while all around the streets smelled complacently of the anatomy of clinics, the sweat of patients, the horror of the dying, the fear of the examinee and the guilty innocents at the mercy of the prison-warders […] of the vanity of professors, the dead hearts of officials, the frowst of the laws, and then the poverty of the Lange Reihe and the indurated humiliation of the gray school, how I hated the city and wished it consigned to the snakes (5).

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Marcel Schwob’s “Mimes” – Mime XVIII

November 11, 2014  |  in Translations  |  by Katie Assef and Sam Gordon

Sam Gordon and Katie Assef with two very different translations of one of Schwob’s most captivating pieces.

Read all previous posts in Asymptote’s “Mimes” translation project here.

Mime XVIII. Hermes the Psychagôgos
(trans. Sam Gordon)

I conduct the dead, whether they be shut up in sculpted stone sarcophagi or contained in the bellies of metal or clay urns, bedecked or gilded, or painted in blue, or eviscerated and without brains, or wrapped in strips of linen, and with my herald’s staff I guide their step as I usher them on.

We continue along a rapid way men cannot see. Courtesans press against virgins and murderers against philosophers, and mothers against those who refused to give birth, and priests against perjurers. For they are seeking forgiveness for their crimes, whether they imagined them in their heads, or committed them with their hands. And having not been free in life, bound as they were by laws and customs, or by their own memory, they fear isolation and lend one another support. She who slept naked amongst men in flagstoned chambers consoles a young girl who died before her wedding, and who dreams determinedly of love. One who used to kill at the roadside—face sullied with ash and soot—places a hand on the brow of a thinker who wanted to renew the world, who foretold death. The woman who loved her children and suffered by them hides her head in the breast of a Hetaira who was willfully sterile. The man draped in a long robe who had convinced himself to believe in his god, forcing himself down on bended knee, weeps on the shoulder of the cynic who had broken the oaths of the flesh and mind before the eyes of the citizens. In this way, they help each other throughout their journey, walking beneath the yoke of memory.

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A Winter’s Night in Sydney: Poetry Plurilingual

November 10, 2014  |  in Dispatches, Translations  |  by Stephanie Guest

Reporting from the front lines of poetry, translation, and performance

I walked through Sydney’s back streets and upstairs to the crowded room where “Poetry Plurilingual” was about to begin. We sat on mismatched armchairs and wooden benches and squeezed up against each other. The night started with a series of readings of poems in foreign languages, followed by English-language translations. The focus of these readings was on the “original,” foreign, text. But the night took a sharp turn when two readers—Jack Breukelaar and Toby Fitch—boldly shifted the audience’s attention to the process and text of translation.

Jack introduced the audience to the work of Japanese writer and manga artist Kiriko Nananan, showing us a “1994 cool female authors” edition of Garo, an avant-garde manga periodical that began in the sixties, that he bought for a dollar at a discount bookshop. The book was visually striking—Jack didn’t know the work’s significance when he bought it—“but was drawn to [the] cover image by Nananan, reminiscent of Schiele or Baudelaire.” More of Nananan’s work has been translated into French than into English, and Jack had not found any previous English translation of his chosen poem:   READ MORE…

Weekly News Roundup, 7th November 2014: Slangin’ Words, Who Knew?

November 7, 2014  |  in News  |  by Patty Nash

This week's literary highlights from across the world

Hey dudes, what’s happenin’? If you aren’t used to that tenor of slang employed here at the roundup, it’s because we haven’t included that level of vernacular in our lexicon just yet—here’s an enlightening piece on the phenomena of language-to-slang. The ethics of our slang—YOLO, DGAF, et al—have infiltrated our young writers, as evidenced in this short story featured in n+1: “YOLO Ethics.” And while some slang never catches on at all (“fetch,” anyone?), the same can’t be said for languages. How do you revive a language that is effectively dead? (It’s always a good idea to learn a new language, since we are at our most genius when we are in the process of language acquisition).  READ MORE…

Who Is Long Muzzle? Interviewing Guest Artist Monika Grubizna

November 6, 2014  |  in Interviews  |  by Berny Tan and Monika Grubizna

Asymptote guest artist Monika Grubizna on Naive art, the legacy of Polish poster design, and the importance of humor in her work.

Asymptote’s guest artist for the current fall issue is Monika Grubizna (a.k.a. Long Muzzle). An independent graphic artist and illustrator, Monika created a striking cover image, as well as thirteen brand new illustrations for our Fiction, Nonfiction, and Drama sections. I interviewed her about this experience, her influences, and her practice.

Berny Tan: First question: Why “Long Muzzle”?

Monika Grubizna: I’ve always been obsessed with animals. Ever since I can remember, the main motifs of my drawings have been dogs. I enjoyed drawing bad wolves with open muzzles showing big, sharp teeth. And then I got a dog. The moniker “Long Muzzle” came to be because of my dog, whose snout is really, really long. Plus it sounds funny—at least in Polish.

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Diversifying Translation

November 5, 2014  |  in Essays  |  by Daniel Goulden

"But since any piece of literature could fit under its umbrella, 'World Literature' is not so much a genre as perspective."

In 1827, the seminal German humanist Johann Wolfgang von Goethe—noting that literature was being shared across national borders of Europe and beyond—wrote the now-famous line: “the era of World Literature is at hand, everyone must do what they can to hasten its approach.”

We consider this quote the start of a global literary consciousness that shifted the conception of literature from a reflection of national character to a global phenomenon reflecting the (purportedly universal) human spirit. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Three Contemporary Russian Poets

November 4, 2014  |  in Translations  |  by Kat Shapiro

Work by Evgeny Nikitin, Andrey Tavrov, and Sergei Shestakov—translated by Kat Shapiro

I. Evgeny Nikitin

The candle flame is trembling and in sway

As, catching fire, a moth melts in to kiss her.

My friend stopped writing—he is like a whisper,

A beast that runs his hunter’s way.

Winter is closing in, drawing its shutters.

The timid gas with little azure tongue

Spurts from the burner, lightly stutters,

The dying moth forgotten before long.

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Interviewing Juliet Winters Carpenter

November 3, 2014  |  in Interviews  |  by Elisa Taber

Asymptote blog’s spotlight on Japanese translation continues with this conversation with acclaimed translator Juliet Winters Carpenter!

Juliet Winters Carpenter is an award-winning translator of Japanese poetry and prose noted for promoting contemporary Japanese authors (including Minae Mizumura, Noboru Tsujihara, and Ryōtarō Shiba) to English readers by rendering their distinctive prose into precise yet colloquial English. Pushkin Press reissued her translation of Machi Tawara’s Salad Anniversary in a beautiful edition last month. Carpenter describes the wry self-awareness that comes across in Tawara’s poetry with a sense of kinship, suggesting that a degree of self-cognizance, in addition to close reading and writing skills, is required from a translator.

Elisa Taber: Kenneth Rexroth famously commented on Japanese poetry and translation, “It is (…) more essentially poetic. Many, especially Japanese, editors and translators have been embarrassed by this intensity and concentration and have labored to explain each poem until it has been explained away.” You seem to encapsulate, rather than expound, the meaning of each verse, by translating the tanka form in three lines rather than the customary five. Were you wary of over-explaining Tawara’s work?

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Weekly News Roundup, 31st October 2014: Western Vampire Flicks, Big Kirkus Bucks

October 31, 2014  |  in News  |  by Patty Nash

This week's literary highlights from across the world

Happy Halloween to our All-Hallow’s-Eve-observing readers. Do you have a literary costume? You could dress up as tumultuous Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, who celebrated his 100th birthday this week (from the grave). Or you could simply celebrate by reading R.L. Stine (of Goosebumps fame)’s recently live-tweeted short story, “What’s in my Sandwich?” (Good question). Or ponder the following question, as answered by Ayana Mathis and Francine Prose: what’s the most terrifying book you’ve ever read?  READ MORE…