Posts filed under 'multilinguism'

The 2023 PEN/Heim Grantees Talk Translation: Part II

May 29, 2023  |  in Essays  |  by Joaquín Gavilano, Stine An, and Stoyan Tchaprazov

I still remember the joy and hope in learning new words and how that does expand, if not the world, a word.

In this three-part series, Asymptote has asked the 2023 PEN/Heim grantees to talk about their work in progress; their responses, brimming with excitement, conviction, and connection, are a testament to how much translators put themselves into their labor. Through the varied approaches and languages, they share the important commonality of surety: that the work they’ve been entrusted with has an immense potential to illuminate our reality, enlarge our world, and enrich our experiences of literature.

Here, Stine An grows the vocabulary of her world; Stoyan Tchaprazov wrestles with a complex, multilingual diction; and Joaquín Gavilano translates his way back home.   

Stine An on Yoo Heekyung:

I was initially drawn to Yoo Heekyung’s work because of both his poetic lineage and breadth of contributions as a cultural worker. Having studied poetry with Kim Hyesoon, Yoo is most known for his poetry; however, he also writes plays and essays and frequently collaborates with other poets and artists on video content, podcasts, and events. Additionally, he runs wit n cynical, a one-of-a-kind poetry bookstore and project space in Seoul. I started translating his poems back in 2019 for a literary translation workshop with Sawako Nakayasu during my final year of MFA studies at Brown University; there, she not only inspired me to explore literary translation as a meaningful way to connect with my Korean heritage as a poet, but also as an exciting and potentially life-changing activity. I take invitations to change my life seriously. I started writing poetry because I wanted to change my life, and it’s for the same reason that I continue my work as a translator. The possibility to change my life. How exciting is that? What does it mean to grow the vocabulary of your world?

Sawako introduced me to the poet and translator Don Mee Choi, who in turn introduced me to Yoo’s work. One of the earliest pieces of feedback I received from Don Mee and other early readers for my translations was that I had nailed the tone for Yoo’s work, so I took that as a sign to continue. During my ALTA translation mentorship with Joyelle McSweeney, she invited me to reflect on my relationship to tone, and I realized that tone was something I deeply cared about in my own work—both as a poet and a stand-up comedian. So, I’ve been prioritizing tone, mood, and voice when translating Yoo’s poems. For inspiration, I’ve been revisiting Joachim Neugroschel’s translations of Franz Kafka’s short stories and aphorisms; I remember being utterly bewildered and enchanted by Kafka’s words through those translations—the humor, grief and wonder.

READ MORE…

Translating Multilingualism: An Interview with Ros Schwartz

July 21, 2022  |  in Interviews  |  by Sheela Mahadevan

Translation is the deepest form of reading.

Ros Schwartz is an award-winning British translator who has translated over one hundred works of French fiction and non-fiction into English, with a strong emphasis on authors including Dominique Eddé, Aziz Chouaki, and Tahar Ben Jelloun. Her most recent translations are Swiss-Cameroonian author Max Lobe’s A Long Way from Douala (Hope Road, 2021) and Does Snow Turn a Person White Inside (HopeRoad, 2022), and she is part of the team re-translating the works of Georges Simenon for Penguin Classics. Ros was made a Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2009.

Earlier this year, I had the honour of interviewing Ros Schwartz to find out about her approaches to literary translation, and in particular, about the art and complexities of translating multilingualism. Owing to histories of colonisation and migration, literatures are increasingly hybrid and multilingual. A work composed in “French” may bear explicit or implicit traces, tones, and vocabularies of other languages, and processes of translation may be embedded within the source text itself. Such linguistic entanglements in source texts challenge the very boundaries of languages and pose distinct challenges for the literary translator. In this interview, Ros Schwartz shares her own experiences about translating multilingualism in creative and innovative ways.

Sheela Mahadevan (SM): Ros, you come from a multilingual background, and you have translated several multilingual works which depict experiences of exile and migration. You also have a Jewish ancestry and have translated a work which relates to this theme, entitled Traduire comme Transhumer (Translation as Transhumance) by Mireille Gansel (Les Fugitives (UK) and The Feminist Press (USA), 2017). How does your own background and experience of migration and multilingualism intersect with your career as a translator, and how does Gansel’s work influence your thinking about translation?

Ros Schwartz (RS): My background has some similarities with that of Mireille Gansel. I too am Jewish—second generation—and my grandparents spoke only Yiddish, so although different from Gansel’s experience, I share that multilingual background common to families descended from exiles. Gansel interweaves her memoir with reflections on the art of translation, constantly interrogating and refining her practice. Her ethos chimes with mine and her approach to translation helped me better articulate my own; by translating the book and being inhabited by it for many months, I was able to engage with Gansel’s ideas in a way beyond that of a casual reader.

SM: You have translated numerous multilingual literatures into English, including the Lebanese Francophone novel Cerf-volant (Kite) by Dominique Eddé (Seagull Books, 2003). The novel depicts multilingual experiences; sometimes the characters speak in French, sometimes they speak in Arabic, and sometimes they translate between the two. The work is also about multilingual writing and casts light on the ways in which another language can haunt the primary literary language. Could you tell us more about your experience of translating this hybrid work? To what extent is it necessary to collaborate with native speakers of the additional language or the author in the translation process?

RS: I worked very closely with the author. We went over the translation together literally line by line, in person, closeted in her Paris apartment. I had her read passages out loud to help me capture the intonations and rhythms. I would never have attempted a translation like this had I not been able to collaborate with the author.

The novel has a different sensibility, and its non-linear narrative took me out of my comfort zone. The reader is plunged straight in and the narrative is a mosaic, which the reader gradually has to piece together. Eddé’s writing functions like an Impressionist painting, with deft brushstrokes that evoke characters, places, and atmospheres. It has disconcerting metaphors: “. . . une bouche à mi-chemin du cœur et de l’oiseau.” Literally: “a mouth half-way between a heart and a bird.” You don’t question it in French, partly because of the music of the language. For the English, I made it slightly more explicit: “a mouth that was shaped like a heart or a bird.” READ MORE…

Only I Could Come Up With That: Thuận on Chinatown

May 18, 2022  |  in Interviews  |  by Phuong Anh

My characters and stories are often considered too complicated, following neither moral nor cultural standards.

In the finest of fictions, many worlds converge. All the maps the writer has walked through, all the sights seen and tasted, all that was heard and spoken. The work of lauded Vietnamese author Thuận exists in this potent amalgam of experience, bringing the poetry of hidden meanings to the surface with her singular perspective. In her Anglophone debut, Chinatown, translated by Nguyễn An Lý and soon to be published by Tilted Axis, Thuận paints a thinking portrait from the Paris metro to the streets of Chợ Lớn, a love story of trespasses and reimagined borders—fictions residing in fictions, life nestled in life. In this following interview, the author speaks to Phương Anh about Chinatown’s unique structure, how her work in French translation has informed her writing, and the complex political relationships informing her narratives.

Phương Anh (PA): Based on your previous interviews, it seems that rhythm is very important to you. When I was reading your writing, I was easily swept away by its cadence—could you speak to your process and style?

Thuận (T): I wanted this book to have one single rhythm, cut into three steady parts with two short breaks entitled “I’m Yellow”; I did this to both challenge and encourage the reader’s patience. I think my novels’ rhythms should attack the reader, confront them, suck them in. And when I’m feeling out the rhythm, I like to think of myself as trying to compose a piece of music.

Also, I wanted to find words that are concise and clear, with no hidden meanings, few adjectives, and generally without many embellishments. I use short sentences, one following another, utilizing space so the words may gain more strength. And then I would repeat—like small waves that come in every now and again, disappearing into the rock and sand. That’s how I approached writing Chinatown. The cadence, for the most part, is created by repetition—of a word group, a sentence, or even a whole passage. It could also be an action, a saying, a name.

PA: I feel that you really have a meticulous and, one could say, impersonal approach towards writing. For instance, in an interview with BBC Vietnam, you said that you don’t write to confess. What did you mean by that exactly?

T: I didn’t want the novel to become a memoir, but rather a direct experience of consciousness, taken from the disordered and persistent thoughts of the main character. For many people, writing is about opening up about oneself. At twenty-six, after ten years being away from home, I began to write. But not for the purpose of talking about my life. My first thought was to serve a desire, a fantasy, a need to escape from myself, from my life.

Here, the need to write informs the responsibility of writing. In other words, a writer becomes professional only when they can express, defend, and prove their attitude towards reality. For me, writing is difficult. Writing long is even more difficult. With novels, the number of pages itself is already a challenge. Not to mention the structure, style, rhythm, characters. . . I think of writing a novel as a dangerous adventure—the most dangerous thing being not knowing where it’s going to go.

PA: Besides being an author, you are also a translator, and a ruthless one at that. When editing the French translation of Thư gửi Mina, you cut out almost one fourth of the text, feeling that there was too much excess. Could you tell me why you decided to do so?

T: Thư gửi Mina is a novel with thirteen chapters, composed of letters written to Mina—a girl from the main character’s time in Soviet Russia. When writing that particular novel, I tried to write longer, sort of drifting from one story to another. In Vietnamese, I guess the result wasn’t too bad. But when I was editing the French translation, the language of Descartes helped me to realize that there were too many words—that it was an overkill. After editing out around twenty thousand words in the French edition, I took out the Vietnamese one again and revised it. Hopefully, Thư gửi Mina will be re-published with a different spirit: short and succinct, strong and direct, following the economical literary art that I’m pursuing.

PA: You also said that translation helped you to see your work more clearly, which I find quite refreshing in a way, because people tend to focus on what is “lost in translation”.

T: Whenever I have doubts about a sentence I’ve just written, I double-check it by translating it into French and immediately, anything illogical or superfluous will come out. If translation takes one thing from us, it makes up for it in other ways. READ MORE…

Multilingualism in Adagio: On Switzerland and Its Languages

May 9, 2022  |  in Essays  |  by Katy Derbyshire and Zorka Ciklaminy

They are—there is no other way to put it—blank spots on the literary map of Switzerland.

Switzerland’s multilingualism has long been an inextricable part of its national identity, but how is this amalgam really implemented in everyday life—and how is it reflected in the country’s literature? Ahead of the Swiss Special Feature in our Summer 2022 issue (by the way, translators of this country’s literature are invited to submit work—and stand to receive an honorarium of USD80 if their work is accepted—by June 1), Swiss translator Zorka Ciklaminy sheds a light on the reality of living within this complex intersection of speaking, living, reading, and writing. The Berlin-based writer and translator Katy Derbyshire translated the following piece from the original German. 

The Swiss Language Landscape

Switzerland is a country coloured by multilingualism; German, French, Italian and Rhaeto-Romansh all have equal standing as official national languages. Yet, this presumed quadrilingualism does not unilaterally apply to all those living in Switzerland, since it is not the case that the entire population speaks all four languages; the country instead consists largely of monolingual regions, with little dialogue between them. Along the language boundaries, and in the multilingual cantons (Bern, Fribourg, Graubünden and Wallis), however, many people are bi- or multilingual, and in areas such as German-speaking Switzerland, we see a varying bilingual phenomenon: High German may be the official language, but in everyday life people speak Swiss German—a collective term for various Alemannic dialects.

How is this multilingualism lived on an individual and societal level, and used in everyday communication? As one might suspect, the answer is not entirely clear or logical at first glance. Though the country’s everyday multilingualism does not differ essentially from that of its neighbouring countries. It must be emphasized that dialogue between the linguistic communities is actively promoted by the Swiss government, with a language law stipulating, among other things, that Italian and Rhaeto-Romansh—underrepresented languages compared to German and French—are to be maintained and promoted as national languages. However, it is obvious that when we speak of a multilingual Switzerland in this age of globalization, and of English as a rising lingua franca, our focus cannot possibly remain solely on the official national languages—which would not reflect Switzerland’s linguistic diversity, excluding a large part of the country’s residents. Instead, one should be attentive to what are still frequently referred to in Switzerland using the rather infelicitous term “fifth national languages”.

In a country of immigrants, like Switzerland, migration-led linguistic diversity plays an emphatic role in formation of new language communities. After the end of the Second World War, the 1950s and 1960s saw the arrival of political refugees from Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Tibet, along with a larger group of labour migrants—known as Saisoniers—from Italy. During the 1980s and 1990s, migrants came mainly from southern and south-eastern Europe (Spain, Portugal, the former Yugoslavia and Turkey) and Sri Lanka. Following the 1999 Treaty on the Free Movement of Persons between Switzerland and the EU, further immigration occurred from central and eastern European states. This development prompted numerous languages to spread in Switzerland over the decades, forming a linguistic potpourri. In more specific terms, this migratory multilingualism means that these migration languages combined are spoken by more people in Switzerland than Italian and Rhaeto-Romansh together. For many years, the fact that this has led to new literatures in Switzerland was neglected or even ignored. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: June 2021

June 14, 2021  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by David Boyd, Eva Wissting, and Julia Sherwood

The best and latest from Mexico, Sweden, and Poland!

This month, our selections of excellent works from around the world are manifold with mystery: some historical, some psychological, and some linguistic. From Poland, philosopher Remigiusz Ryziński attempts to figure out the sexual politics behind Michel Foucault’s hasty departure from Warsaw. The newest autobiographical novel from Linda Boström Knausgård contends with the author’s own experiences with electroshock therapy, and its impact on her memories. Lastly, in an essay collection by Mariana Oliver explores the act of moving between the various territories of cities and languages, between familiarity and curiosity. Read on to find out more!

foucault

Foucault in Warsaw by Remigiusz Ryziński, translated from the Polish by Sean Gasper Bye, Open Letter, 2021

Review by Julia Sherwood, Editor-at-Large for Slovakia

“Michel Foucault came to Poland in October 1958. He took a position as the first director of the newly founded Center for French Culture at the University of Warsaw. It was in Warsaw that he finished his doctoral thesis, later published as History of Madness. Yet in mid-1959, he was forced to leave Poland. The reason was a certain boy, Jurek. No one ever figured out who this boy really was.” With the mystery laid out, Remigiusz Ryziński opens his exploration of this little-known episode in the life of the philosopher as a young man, and his attempt to find out what led to Foucault’s expulsion from Warsaw.

Foucault in Warsaw is the first non-academic book by Remigiusz Ryziński—a Polish philosopher and cultural critic who studied at the Sorbonne—and another addition to Sean Gasper Bye’s impressive portfolio of translations. Combining the techniques of literary reportage with the analytical tools of Foucault’s archaeology of knowledge, Ryziński has unearthed secret police dossiers and trawled through hundreds of pages of reports filed by undercover cops and snitches: “Stories typed or handwritten, full of dates and places, names and connections, meetings, relationships, breakups, love, and suffering. Reading them felt like flipping through someone’s family photo album.” He immersed himself in the press and newsreels from the period, incorporating details, such as the price of everyday goods and statistical information, to conjure up the flavours, textures, and colours of Warsaw—the city that is as much a hero of this book as the philosopher himself, along with “the boys whose company Foucault enjoyed most.”

For those familiar with recent works of Polish literature, Ryziński’s reconstruction of the life of the gay community in Warsaw in the late 1950s will bring to mind Lubiewo, Michał Witkowski’s groundbreaking 2004 novel depicting gay life on Poland’s Baltic coast, before and after the end of communism. While Witkowski’s book presents fictionalised versions of real stories and characters, Ryziński has tracked down the actual people who knew Foucault during his time in Warsaw (including some who were romantically linked to him) or were active on the gay scene at the time. He retraced the places Foucault did—or was likely to—frequent, recreating a detailed topography of Warsaw’s cruising spots: an assortment of cafés and bars from the seedy to the sophisticated, steam baths both ornate and functional, public squares and monuments ideally suited for pulling soldiers, and public toilets such as the French-style urinals known as “mushrooms,” to the bathrooms at the Palace of Culture, considered “the height of luxury.” READ MORE…

Asymptote at the Movies: In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones

May 12, 2021  |  in Asymptote at the Movies  |  by Allison Braden, Suhasini Patni, and Xiao Yue Shan

Capturing "the porousness between Hindi and English," Arundhati Roy's film is a triumph of voice.

Of her 1989 film, In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones, Arundhati Roy writes: “I loved the quirky, spontaneous performances. I loved the fact that there were no ‘beautiful’ people in it. I loved the egalitarian friendships between the boys and girls. I loved the corny clothes, the absurd glasses, the ridiculous hairdos, the uncertainty, the joy and the sadness of it . . . It was from another time . . . I ache for the innocence of it.” Indeed, the film is potent with the tender touches of youthful idealism, fearlessly authentic to its characterisations of young architecture students in 1970s India, and an early emblem of Roy’s intrepid criticisms against the evils of her time. In this edition of Asymptote at the Movies, Editor-at-Large for India Suhasini Patni speaks with Blog Editors Allison Braden and Xiao Yue Shan about the complex role Hinglish plays in the film, the depictions of class and social mobility, and how art can arise from the myriad places in which various languages meet.

Suhasini Patni (SP): Before Arundhati Roy became famous for her Booker Prize-winning novel and Pradip Krishen became an important environmentalist, they worked on the film In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones, which was screened late at night on Doordarshan in 1989, then largely forgotten by the Indian audience. However, it later went on to win two National Awards (both of which were returned to protest the government’s growing intolerance) and became a cult classic.

To the best of my knowledge, this is the first Hinglish film ever made in India. Critics found it difficult to categorize the language of the film; some called it an English language film—which does disservice to the mouthfuls of Hindi and Punjabi that form an integral part of the dialogue—and some called it a trilingual film, which doesn’t showcase the Indianness of the English spoken. English that is remolded to include mispronunciations and Hindi slang (“Kya maal hai. Hello sweetheart lovely,” says a catcaller to Radha).

Screen Shot 2021-05-11 at 12.46.42 AM

Discerning commentators found it difficult to admit an entire film existed in this “nonsense” language. Even the title itself is gibberish: In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones. The students in the film let us know what “those ones” are, but at the time of its release, the title was allegedly seen as inaccessible and alienating, and Roy was asked not to use it. But it’s exactly this mismatched, nonsensical language which makes for an endearing experience—a film ahead of its time, as people say.

The dialogue captures the porousness between Hindi and English. Code-switching in bilingualism is not new, but Hinglish, as Roy has written it, really grasps the way social mobility operates in a cosmopolitan city like Delhi. For the upwardly mobile, Hinglish is a language of survival. For those who cannot speak the hegemonic, pure, Sanskrit-ised Hindi, Hinglish helps to adapt to life in the capital. And in any case, North Indians have always spoken Hindustani, a Hindi that generously accommodates Urdu and other languages and dialects. Hinglish is arguably a “modern” version of Hindustani.

I’m interested in knowing what you think about the film, especially considering you’re not native Hindi speakers.

Allison Braden (AB): What a charming film! I agree that the movie’s collegial atmosphere and the students’ easy rapport depends largely on the code-switching; omitting the Hindi and Punjabi in favor of English only would have done away with one of the story’s most authentic elements. For viewers who don’t speak Hindi, some of the linguistic diversity naturally gets lost behind the subtitles, which appeared for the English, Hindi, and Punjabi dialogue in the version I watched, but the languages’ relationship to class remains evident. Arundhati Roy’s character, Radha, clearly struggles with the social mobility issue you bring up, which she articulates toward the end of the movie. She specifically mentions how her position as a student at the National School of Architecture requires her to speak a language that ninety percent of the country can’t understand. Social mobility is also explicitly referred to in the eponymous Annie’s initial thesis project—a plan to line India’s extensive train tracks with fruit trees and encourage the country’s flood of rural to urban migration to reverse course. Despite his enthusiasm for the idea—he even writes to the prime minister about it—his classmates respond dismissively. I was struck by the moment when his partner rebukes him after interpreting the plan as a suggestion that she return to her village. He explains that he’s speaking about a general issue, not her individual situation, but the exchange was such an effective illustration of how those larger issues affect so many individual lives.

Xiao Yue Shan (XYS): Far from being objectionable, for those of us who find language to be an object of fascination, the varying, generous, and emancipated dialogue of the film is one of its overarching attractions—endearing, as you say, Suhasini. Though, of course, I can imagine how difficult the melange may have been to navigate sans subtitles. READ MORE…