Posts filed under 'neologisms'

Forceful in Fury, Forceful in Beauty: An Interview with Alex Braslavsky on Translating Zuzanna Ginczanka

June 7, 2023  |  in Interviews  |  by Piotr Florczyk

She is incredibly important to the Polish tradition and, at the same time, I believe she is a world’s poet.

Zuzanna Ginczanka is a name that poetry readers will soon become very familiar with—if she hasn’t enraptured you already. In thrilling, Dionysian verses of musical, mythic, and magical beauty, the young Polish poet astounded her contemporaries during her brief lifetime, and is now being introduced to a new generation of readers with the same powerful lyricism and sensual joy. We were delighted to feature some of Ginczanka’s poems in our Spring 2020 issue through the electric translations of Alex Braslavsky—who has since published a bilingual edition of Ginczanka’s selected poems, On Centaurs & Other Poems, with World Poetry Press.

In the following interview, Piotr Florczyk talks to Braslavsky about how translations can encourage active engagement with the source language; the sensoriums, pyrotechnics, and complex metaphoric mechanisms at work amidst Ginczanka’s words; and what makes this poet a necessary inclusion within the Polish—and the global—canon.

Piotr Florczyk (PF): If I’m not mistaken, On Centaurs & Other Poems is your first book-length translation. Could you talk a little bit about how you got started as a translator and, secondly, how you came to this project?

Alex Braslavsky (AB): As an undergraduate, I took a poetry workshop in which we read Tomas Tranströmer and Wisława Szymborska’s work in translation, and I remember being really struck by the intimacy I felt in Clare Cavanagh’s English versions of Szymborska—that was when I fell in love with Polish poetry. When I went on to pursue my master’s in the United Kingdom, I had the opportunity to start learning Polish. I also started attending Oxford Comparative Criticism and Translation seminars run by Kasia Szymańska.

I shared my interest in poetry with Kasia, and she informed me that a full volume of Zuzanna Ginczanka’s poetry had just been released in Poland in the fall of 2019. I had never heard of the author, but I am really indebted to Kasia, because I remember that on the first day she and I sat down to read Ginczanka’s poems, I recognized it as some of the most sophisticated poetry I’d ever laid eyes on, and I also realized that my sensibilities could mesh with Ginczanka’s; I had the urge to translate her work.

PF: Your book is the first of at least two volumes of Ginczanka translations to be released this year. How do you account for this sudden and growing interest in her work?

AB: There has been a lot of push in Poland for Ginczanka to get her due recognition. Over the past decade, she has entered the canon of Polish poetry. Although she was long overlooked by Polish poets and scholars, she is now included in the prominent textbook, the Nasiłowska History of Polish Literature. Several monographs have also been written about her work over the last decade, and in 2020, Izolda Kiec’s biography of Ginczanka, Nie upilnuje mnie nic (Nobody Will Police Me), was published—then adapted into a play. Artists like Krystyna Piotrowska have also exhibited artwork paying homage to her. There is a pressing urge on the part of many to make sure Ginczanka’s life and work is thrown into high relief on the international literary stage. Mine is one of, I believe, four different translations of Ginczanka’s work to be released this year, all by female translators, and it is a special moment because her work is so brilliant. She deserves this array of renderings to her name.

PF: Although born in modern-day Ukraine to a Russian-speaking Jewish family, Ginczanka chose to write in Polish. Can you speak to what might have influenced her decision to do so?

AB: Although Ginczanka was a Nansen passport holder (never being granted Polish citizenship because she was Jewish), she felt throughout her life that she was Polish and was closely connected to the Polish poetic tradition. Her parents left her with her grandmother in Poland when she was still an infant, and she was raised in Równe, Poland (now Rivne, Ukraine). She went to Polish school, attending the prestigious Tadeusz Kościuszko State Gymnasium from the age of ten, and though she spoke Russian at home, she elected Polish as the language of her pen. READ MORE…

Pleasantly Odd Prose: An Interview with Translator from the Albanian, John Hodgson

March 29, 2021  |  in Interviews  |  by Sophia Stewart

When Albania was isolated under communism, Kadare tried to help his readers travel in their imagination.

Throughout Ismail Kadare’s autobiographical novel The Doll, recently published in English by Counterpoint Press, the narrator voices a dilemma that most writers know well: the insufficiency of language. “It was hard to explain because there were no words for it,” he says at one point. “Either I didn’t know them, or they weren’t yet invented.” And later: “No language could describe what I felt in my heart. I needed a different one. The one I had would not obey me.”

So much of the literary translator’s work lies in courting the obedience of language. Translation makes intelligible the previously unintelligible, imagines new words to convey preexistent meaning. John Hodgson knows this well: The Doll is the sixth book of Kadare’s that Hodgson has translated. Considering his outsized role in bringing Kadare’s work to English-language readers, he cuts a modest, unassuming figure. One of the few Albanian-English literary translators working today, Hodgson has translated Kadare’s novels The Three-Arched Bridge, The Traitor’s Niche, and A Girl in Exile, among others. In comparison to the Albanian writer’s previous novels, Hodgson describes The Doll as “a gentle, reflexive, and humorous book” and found “the experience of translating it was correspondingly relaxed.”

Hodgson and I recently discussed his work as an Albanian-English interpreter and literary translator, as well as the inimitable pleasures of “a Kadare sentence.”

—Sophia Stewart, Assistant Interviews Editor

Sophia Stewart (SS): You were born in England and studied English at Cambridge and Newcastle. What initially drew you to the Albanian language, and what led you to pursue Albanian translation professionally?

John Hodgson (JH): In the 1980s, I taught English in several now vanished Eastern European countries: the German Democratic Republic, the Soviet Union, and Yugoslavia. The British Council sent me to the University of Prishtina in Kosovo. I knew nothing about Kosovo when I arrived, but I was enthralled by the life there. Now, during lockdown, I’ve written a short book in Albanian about this time, which I recall with great affection. Soon afterwards I was head-hunted by the United States Government to translate Marxist-Leninist propaganda.

SS: Seeing as you were born in England, and therefore speak British English, do you actively avoid Briticisms in your translations? While there is no such thing as “standard English,” do you attempt to make your English translations as universally intelligible—that is, “unmarked” by dialectical indicators—as possible?

JH: When I worked for the United States government, my computer would bleep whenever I used a Briticism, and this taught me, for instance, not to write the word “whilst.” English is very rich and capacious, so it is possible to write in an “unmarked” style without lapsing into bland UN-speak. Albanian also has a lot of variation, particularly between the north and south, and Kadare writes in a non-regional literary Albanian that is quite a recent flowering, and which he himself has done a lot to shape and infuse with expressive power. Recently he has been consciously reviving old words and creating neologisms. A Kadare sentence in Albanian is quite unlike any other writer’s. I was pleased when a reviewer described the prose of one of my translations as “pleasantly odd.” I thought I had perhaps captured something of this. Dialectical indicators in the original language pose more intractable problems than a translator’s own idiom. So does slang. Kadare hardly ever uses slang, and presents none of the difficulties of, for example, the soldiers’ Bosnian in Faruk Šehić’s Under Pressure.

SS: The author-translator relationship can vary so much depending on the particular project or pairing. Having translated so much of Kadare’s work over the course of more than two decades, what does your working relationship with Kadare look like?

JH: Kadare has had dozens of translators and he can’t spend all his time dealing with us. I have been grateful for the confidence he has shown in me. Generally, after I have completed the first draft of each book in English, the editor and I put together questions for Kadare, which he has always answered conscientiously. He doesn’t use the internet, and I like to respect his privacy. READ MORE…

Honoring the Art of Translation: Radu Vancu

September 23, 2020  |  in Essays  |  by Radu Vancu

It is [the poet’s] task . . . to build an enormous, resonating device which would reverberate with beauty from all times, all spaces, all cultures.

Though Asymptote has made it a point to celebrate literary translation no matter the time of year, we’re still pretty thrilled that there’s a whole month dedicated to the cause. As we draw towards the end of National Translation Month, Asymptote is taking the opportunity to bring together essential components that complete the cycle of literature as it travels from one language to the next, with the intention of recognizing the meticulous, purposeful, and intimate labour invested into a text during this peregrination—from conception to publication. We have asked four valued members of the literary community, spanning the globe, to bring us their take on translation and its gifts. 

With this first feature, we are honoured to introduce an original text by Radu Vancu, a brilliant Romanian writer and translator (and past Asymptote contributor!) who traverses the international literary arena with a virtuoso expertise and a seemingly time-defiant profusion. In the following essay, he discusses his ongoing project to translate the works of Ezra Pound into Romanian, and thus brings to the forefront the great modernist’s defiance of limits. This poetry, which spans time, language, and cultures, is a testament to the sublime nature of translation, and its endless capacity for encapsulation.

Ezra Pound quickly understood that, in the case of poetry, regeneration is actually reinvention—or, more synthetically and apparently more paradoxically, inventing is actually reinventing. Poetry can live only through the graft of all that is alive throughout all ages, all cultures, all languages. Therefore, Pound came to understand that poetry does not mean only regenerated language, as he originally believed; it is instead a translingual, transnational, and even transcultural body, built (or “excerned,” to use his own word) by the addition of all the “living parts” still active in the geological layers of poetic language.

He says this in more contracted and memorable form in a 1930 Credo: “I believe that a light from Eleusis persisted throughout the middle ages and set beauty in the song of Provence and Italy.” J.J. Wilhelm also observes, in Ezra Pound: The Tragic Years, that this proposition is in full consonance with a small text by Pound, Religio, from 1910—forming thus, in my opinion, an approximate backbone of Pound’s poetics, otherwise so branched and polymorphous.

The poet must coagulate in their work this migrant light which iridesces simultaneously the Eleusine texts, the Provençal ballads, the Italian sonnets, in addition to the ancient Chinese, Greek, and Latin poetry, and so on. It is their task, therefore, to not only regenerate the poetic language—this enormous burden is still too simple—but to build an enormous, resonating device which would reverberate with beauty from all times, all spaces, all cultures. This is why it is hard to capture in translation the beauty of an Ezra Pound poem: because some poems substantiate the ancient Greek beauty, harsh and dangerous (“seek ever to stand in the hard Sophoclean light / And take your wounds from it gladly,” a poem says); some others take the form of Medieval villanelles, ballads, or shapes invented by Pound himself (the villonaud, for example), coalescing in another kind of beauty—seductive, chanting, feminine, sweet; some others reinvent a traditional Chinese aesthetic in the English language of the twentieth century; and so on. What is remarkable and astounding is that you, a twenty-first-century reader of English, can resonate with all these varying types of beauty. Pound’s genius is precisely that he succeeded in making new and alive the beauty of all great poetic languages, including the old or “dead” ones.

His achievement is that he can adapt his resonating apparatus to all the diachronic wavelengths of beauty. The construction of the poem—his physis—also varies according to the oscillation of this wavelength; when “making new” the ancient Greek epigrams, the poem has two or three lines, quite rarely more, and the Idealtypus of the beauty targeted is that of an intense and sarcastic, sometimes quasi-licentious lapidarity. In other instances, when he pretends to be translating from the ancient Chinese, the poems become long, winding, archaic in lexis, but the intricacies of the lines are in actuality an ekphrasis of the Chinese ideograms. In the Cantos, this mechanism builds an enormous vortex-poem, or, more preferably, a poem whose vortex is that of History itself—infinitely commingling fragments of poems, fragments of languages, fragments of historical, economic, biological, political information, and so on. And the beauty of these demented, illegible, and hypnotic Cantos is the very demented, illegible, and hypnotic beauty of our times. READ MORE…