Place: Scotland

Honoring the Art of Translation: Carolina Orloff

There is so much of us in the language we inherit, the language we’re nursed in. Our mother tongue defines us, whether we like it or not.

As National Translation Month draws to a close, so does our four-part special feature on the subject—a series of first-hand, original essays by key players in the translation process: an author, a platform, a translator, a publisher. And since translating also means shifting coordinates, we made sure to hit four different corners of the world. Over the course of the past few days, we’ve brought you a Romanian poet, a Chinese online literary hub, and a Turkish translator, all at the very top of their game. Today, we wrap it up by traveling from Buenos Aires to Edinburgh with Carolina Orloff, co-founder and publishing director of the award-winning Charco Press (we figured the trip was worth postponing our usual “Translation Tuesday” column, back next week).

In this thoughtful, moving piece, Carolina masterfully intertwines personal experience with theory. She dives into the challenges of living between languages (she’s a longtime Argentinian expat in the UK), explaining how that has influenced her own views of translation and, more broadly, Charco’s publishing philosophy. From missing dulce de leche to musing about Benjamin, she covers almost as much ground here as she’s done throughout her life as a bona fide globetrotter.

Those who have insinuated that Menard devoted his life to writing a contemporary Quixote besmirch his illustrious memory. Pierre Menard did not want to compose another Quixote, which surely is easy enough—he wanted to compose the Quixote.

‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,’ Jorge Luis Borges

When I think about translation, I’m seized by a host of thoughts and emotions—some varying, some constant. It goes beyond the years I’ve spent studying and writing theory, or the fact that I’ve been living between languages (‘entre lenguas,’ to quote the extraordinary Sylvia Molloy) for more than half my life now: there is something within my matrix, my emotional framework, that is made of languages, of gestures from different cultures, different geographies. As is the case with many compatriots, I’m a second-generation Argentinian (most of the country’s indigenous population was wiped out by a nefarious ‘whitening’ campaign during the late 1800s); like many in my generation, I have also emigrated from that southern land. All my grandparents were foreigners, and I use this word with the utmost care and precision. My parents fed off that simultaneously strange and normalised state of living in Buenos Aires while immersed in the echoes of Russian, English, Yiddish, Polish, and Andalusian Spanish. They soaked up these acquired traditions and dressed them up in new meaning—a meaning that they could call their own and that could be freer, albeit loaded with so many other foreign codes. In sum, they were constantly translating.

I recall a conversation I had with a fellow student once, when I was at the University of York. His porteño accent was much stronger than mine. I was twenty years old and had been living in English for three. When I asked him when he’d last been to Argentina, he said nonchalantly that he had actually never ‘crossed the pond.’ His mother was from Buenos Aires and yes, he had been born there, but when he was just one or two years old, they had left for Sweden in search of political asylum. They had never returned. It was an epiphanic moment for me. And now that I am a mother, an Argentinian mother living in Scotland with a daughter born in Edinburgh, I can’t help but re-signify it. There is so much of us in the language we inherit, the language we’re nursed in. Our mother tongue defines us, whether we like it or not, and I feel that there is no satisfactory way of translating that identity; it can only be transmitted. READ MORE…

What’s New with the Crew? A Monthly Update

From World Poetry Day to PEN competitions, we've had a busy month!

One quick piece of housekeeping news before our regular update! First, thanks to 98 wonderful backers, we’ve raised $13,547 so far toward our project to showcase new work created in response to Trump’s #MuslimBan. (Read the interviews given by our editor-in-chief at The Chicago Review of Books and at the Ploughshares Blog.) With only 7 days left to contribute to our fundraiser, we’ve unveiled a secret perk just for blog readers like you: for $100 apiece, you get first dibs on autographed books from writers like Junot Díaz and Yann Martel, who also stand with us against the travel ban! Fancy your own autographed copy of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao while also supporting frontline efforts to reverse Trump’s travel ban (20% of all proceeds of this fundraiser will go to the ACLU and Refugees Welcome)? Want to help keep Asymptote around beyond 2017? Wait no more: Throw in your support for our fundraiser today!

1491238761

* * *

Educational Arm Assistant Anna Aresi conducted and translated interviews with Scottish poet Kathleen Jamie and Italian translator Giorgia Sensi as part of Mosaici‘s feature for World Poetry Day, which can be read alongside Sensi’s translations of five poems by Jamie.
 
Editor-at-Large for Romania and Moldova Chris Tanasescu (MARGENTO) has published an article entitled “Community as Commoning, (Dis)Placing, and (Trans)versing: from Participatory and ‘Strike Art’ to the Postdigital”  ​in the latest issue of Dacoromania Litteraria.  One of his performances from the CROWD Omnibus tour in 2016, featuring 100 writers from 37 European countries, has recently been released by Forum Stadtpark in Austria.

READ MORE…

Intuition and Analysis: Interviewing Guest Artist Andrea Popyordanova

Sometimes the texts that impress me the most are the most difficult to work on.

Illustrator Andrea Popyordanova is Asymptote’s guest artist for the July 2016 issue. Her beautiful collages reimagined scenes from thirteen texts in our Fiction, Nonfiction, Drama, Writers on Writers, and Multilingual Writing Feature sections. Guest Artist Liaison Berny Tan interviewed her about contributing to Asymptote and how she develops her unique imagery.

Berny Tan (BT): The illustrations you created for Asymptote have this wonderful effortlessness about them, even when they’re composed of so many elements within a single frame. Could you take us through your process of conceiving and executing each piece?

Andrea Popyordanova (AP): I usually look at the most powerful descriptions in each text. I trust my intuition—if I vividly remember a particular expression or moment in a text, I visualize that. I start by composing the image in color, and then lay down the details that complete the whole. It’s all very quick, all about recreating a feeling or a striking image in my head. There isn’t really a process; it’s more of trying things until there is an image that works.

medea_538


BT: You have a great way of visually setting a scene that feels almost like a memory of the narrative itself. In your editorial work, what are the challenges of balancing image and text, especially when you have to capture the text in a static image?

AP: I try to be slightly more analytical. I focus on the point of the text, and emphasize or extend it with my piece. An illustration in a magazine functions as a highlight of what the illustrator thinks is important in the text. I also try to figure out what’s appropriate for the readers of the article, and to match the style of my work to the publication.

READ MORE…

The Lives of the Translators: the Whence and the How

"Kafka’s fluent homelessness began to look more and more prescient to the Muirs as the years passed..."

Translation, like marriage, is the art of making things work; so it should be no surprise that some of the best translations in literary history were made by married couples.

Frequently this is a matter of convenience, or at least begins that way. One partner is fluent in one language; one is a better writer; one has more time. Talents assert themselves and sacrifices are made, until eventually the two sides work things out enough for the garbage to get taken out and the dog fed. The book gets done, in other words, which is another way of saying that the labor that produced it disappears behind a finish so perfect that it confuses pets and makes guests wish their own lives were so spotless.

For Willa and Edwin Muir, the Scottish couple whose translations of Franz Kafka, Hermann Broch and many others introduced English-language readers to some of the greatest German modernists, translation was a gift and a curse. On the one hand, it offered them money and a sense of accomplishment; on the other, it encroached on the writing that both of them, at different points in their lives, considered a true calling. But no matter how they thought about it, translation remained a means of survival for the couple: a lifeboat in which they bobbed, happily or at odds, through some of the most treacherous waters of the 20th century.

READ MORE…

Dispatch from Scotland’s International Poetry Festival

Editor-at-large Jasmine Heydari tackles Welsh poetry, language and war, and a Haggis breakfast in her dispatch from StAnza

Earlier this spring I attended StAnza, one of Scotland’s major international poetry festivals. After an early flight from Stockholm to Edinburgh, I boarded a bus taking me to the east coast of Scotland. The bus made its way through twisty and narrow roads, overlooking green hills on one side, while the other faced long, golden sand dunes and black rocks coated in seaweed. Two hours later, I arrived at the city of St. Andrews, or as the Scots say it, Saunt Aundraes, the home of the festival.

READ MORE…