Posts filed under 'rhythm in translation'

A Pointed Atemporality: Mui Poopoksakul on Translating Saneh Sangsuk’s Venom

June 22, 2023  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Barbara Halla

He's very aware of the rhythm and musicality of this text . . . he said it should take something like an hour and thirty-seven minutes to read.

In our May Book Club selection, a young boy struggles with a snake in the fictional village of Praeknamdang, in a tense battle between beauty and cruelty. In poetic language that is nostalgic for the world it describes without romanticizing it, Saneh Sangsuk creates a complex and captivating world. In this fable-like story there are no simple morals, in keeping with Sangsuk’s resistance to efforts to depict a sanitized view of Thailand and to the idea that the purpose of literature is to create a path to social change. In this interview with translator Mui Poopoksakul, we discuss the role of nature in the text, translating meticulous prose, and the politics of literary criticism.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD20 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title.   

Barbara Halla (BH): How did you get into translation, especially given your law background?

Mui Poopoksakul (MP): I actually studied comparative literature as an undergrad, and then in my early twenties, like a lot of people who study the humanities, I felt a little bit like, “Oh, I need to get a ‘real job.’” I went to law school, and I worked at a law firm for about five years, and I liked that job just fine, but it just wasn’t what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. 

So, I started thinking, What should I be doing? What do I want to do with myself? I had always wanted to do something in the literary field but didn’t quite have the courage, and I realized that not a lot of Thai literature been translated. I thought, If I can just get one book out, that would be really amazing. So, I went back to grad school. I did an MA in Cultural Translation at the American University of Paris, and The Sad Part Was was my thesis from that program. Because I had done it as my thesis, I felt like I was translating it for something. I wasn’t just producing a sample that might go nowhere.

The whole field was all new to me, so I didn’t know how anything worked. I didn’t even know how many pages a translation sample should be. But then I ended up not having to worry about that because I did the book as my thesis.

BH: You mentioned even just one book, but did you have any authors in mind? Was Saneh Sangsuk one of those authors in your ideal roster?

MP: I wouldn’t say I had a roster, but I did have one author in mind and that was Prabda Yoon, and that really helped me get started, because I wasn’t getting into the field thinking, “I want to translate.” My thought was, “I want to translate this book.” I think that helped me a lot, having a more concrete goal. 

READ MORE…

Reading Palestine in French: In Conversation with Kareem James Abu-Zeid

May 11, 2023  |  in Interviews  |  by Tuğrul Mende

The translation on its own should be so powerful or important that it serves as its own aesthetic justification.

Born in Haifa in 1944, Olivia Elias is a poet of the Palestinian diaspora  writing in French. During her childhood, she lived as a refugee in Beirut, but later moved to Montreal and then to Paris in the early 1980s. While she started to publish her poetry quite late in comparison to other poets, she has authored several collections since 2013. Her poetry is characterized as precise and rhythmic, and the Palestinian cause is a recurring theme throughout her work. Elias’ poem “Flame of Fire” opens:

I was born
In this
Eruptive time
When my country’s
Name was changed

Though Olivia Elias began writing poetry at a later stage in her life, she quickly gained maturity in the craft. With her third collection, Chaos, Crossing she reached an artistic peak, which has been brought into English in Kareem James Abu-Zeid’s translation. While the collection contains previously published poems, it also features  poems which haven’t yet been published in French before. In this interview, Kareem James Abu-Zeid discusses his introduction to Elias’ work, the influences and intricacies of Elias’ poetry, and the process of bringing Chaos, Crossing into English for the first time.

Tuğrul Mende (TM): You studied French literature in the past. Can you tell me what drew you to the subject and what drew you to translate Olivia Elias?

Kareem James Abu-Zeid (KJAZ): It’s funny, because I did study French literature and poetry—French was my major as an undergraduate—but that wasn‘t how I discovered Olivia‘s poetry. She was introduced to me by another Palestinian poet, Najwan Darwish, in May 2020, and I immediately wanted to translate her work.

I wasn’t reading a lot of French poetry at the time, and I was mainly translating Arabic. All of the literary projects I had done up to that point were in Arabic. I do a lot of academic and professional translations from French and from German, but I hadn’t done many literary texts. Up until 2003, when I graduated from college, I was reading a lot of French poetry, but then I began translating Arabic and French literature dropped away a little bit in my translation life. So this project somehow felt like it connected those disparate parts of my life.

TM: What do you do differently when translating from those various languages?

KJAZ:  I don’t consciously do anything differently. There are different things that happen and different challenges that arise with different languages, of course. For me, it always starts with understanding the source text, whatever its language. Then, hopefully, you develop a more empathetic connection to the source text, you really connect with it on a deeper level. The goal is to have the translation work as poetry in English.

There are different challenges with each language, and certainly with Arabic. When translating from Arabic to English, for example, the way the two languages work is so different that anything resembling a word-for-word translation is pretty much impossible. You’re forced to get very creative in terms of syntax, rhythm, etc.

With this project in particular, what I noticed is that I felt (for a little while) that I was going to be able to produce a translation that looked, at least on the surface, more like a mirror of the original French. I got lulled into a false sense of security, because the two languages are so close to one another in so many ways. But later on, I realized that the English wasn’t quite ”clicking” in the way I wanted, and that I couldn’t always mimic the French syntax or rhythms, or go with English cognates for French words—I had to step back a bit and really allow myself to recreate the texts as English-language poetry. I learned that there are unique difficulties when the languages are so close to each other as well. There were several times when I thought I had something good in English, and I was pleased, because in many ways it looked very close to the French. But then, when I managed to forget about the source text and just consider the English on its own, I realized that something was definitely sounding a bit “off” in my translation. READ MORE…

Sa’di’s Golestan: Rezvani’s New Translation Withstands a Foregone Conclusion

May 4, 2020  |  in Essays  |  by Siavash Saadlou

He is an exemplar of the intuitive translator—a translator whose wealth of experience allows him to sift through countless lexical choices . . .

In comparing various translations of the same text, one considers several factors—amongst them: accuracy, consistency, and the ease in which the secondary text reads in its newfound state. New translations of classic texts are further expected to provide knowledge and profundity that other extant translations missed. The writings of Persian poet Sa’di are intimately known and cherished in his original language, but its multiple iterations in English have each developed separate and, at times, misleading voices. In this following essay, writer and translator Siavash Saadlou discusses Mahmoud Rezvani’s new translation of Sa’di’s timeless Golestan, and how Rezvani’s insight into the book and his aptitude for translation have allowed his work to rise above its predecessors.

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Yet Sa’di loved the race of men,—
No churl, immured in cave or den
In bower and hall, he wants them all,
Nor can dispense
With Persia for his audience;
They must give ear,
Grow red with joy and white with fear;
But he has no companion;
Come ten, or come a million,
Good Sa’di dwells alone.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

Mahmoud Rezvani’s new translation of Sa’di’s Golestan—a thirteenth-century literary lighthouse best known for its creative composition, moralistic maxims, and lush language—challenges the notion suggesting that fidelity and beauty are mutually exclusive in literary translation. When Rezvani, now in his mid-sixties, proposed the idea for the first time, the literati in Iran thought it “preposterous” and “impossible.” Their deeply held cynicism was derived in part from Golestan’s ornate Persian, mixed with bombastic Arabic and Qur’anic allusions, that render its prose and poetry extraordinarily labyrinthine. It also stemmed from Sa’di’s shrewd use of ambiguities and amphibologies as well as heteronyms and homographs throughout the work; and Sa’di’s rhymed prose (Saj’)—which can be divided into three categories: parallel, symmetrical, and lopsided—made the task ahead all the more formidable. Choosing le mot juste was yet another major hurdle to overcome. Sa’di was, after all, a writer best known for his impeccable, inimitable turn of phrase. His command over both Persian and Arabic was beyond compare; in fact, Sa’di was as recognized for his mastery of language as Hafiz was for his consummate ambiguity. The difficulty, therefore, lay in translating Sa’di’s wide palette of vocabularies as well as the supremely intriguing juxtaposition of images and ideas. Then there was the musicality which, though often ignored in Western translations, is the lifeblood of classical Persian literature. It is understandable, then, that it took Rezvani years to pluck up the courage to even consider translating Golestan and ten years to complete the endeavor. READ MORE…

Beautiful Passages: An Interview with Booker-Longlisted Translator Michele Hutchison

March 11, 2020  |  in Interviews  |  by Sarah Timmer Harvey

The thing I get complimented on the most is the rhythm and flow of my translations, never their accuracy!

Michele Hutchison recently quipped on Twitter that she posts annual reminders on social media about the correct spelling of her name because “no one ever gets it right.” Yet, for the talented Dutch to English translator, 2020 is already shaping up to be the year that this all changes. In recent weeks, Hutchison was awarded the prestigious Vondel Prize for her “sure-footed, propulsive” translation of Sander Kollaard’s Stage Four, and her translation of Marieke Lucas Rijneveld’s explosive debut novel, The Discomfort of Evening, was longlisted for the 2020 International Booker Prize. Amsterdam-based Hutchison has translated over thirty-five books, co-written a book on the benefits of Dutch-style parenting, and is an active and generous member of the European literary translation community. Several years ago, Michele also read and thoughtfully critiqued my own translations of Marieke Lucas Rijneveld’s poetry. Following the announcement of the International Booker longlist, I was eager to reignite our conversation on Rijneveld’s work, and learn more about her prize-winning translation of Kollaard’s extraordinary novel.

—Sarah Timmer Harvey, March 2020

Sarah Timmer Harvey (STH): Congratulations on winning the Vondel Prize for your translation of Stage Four. What does winning the prize mean to you?

Michele Hutchison (MH): Thanks! If you look at the translators who have won in the past, it sets me in very good company and it’s a great honour. I found it very hard to believe I’d actually won the prize because I’ve always felt insecure about my translations, and I fixate on the flaws; it’s impossible to get everything right. But I suppose every translator struggles with producing an imperfect product. Mind you, I’ve noticed that the leading male translators in my field have less trouble with that, and feel they deserve prizes for all their hard work, so perhaps it’s a female thing?

I co-wrote a non-fiction book (The Happiest Kids in the World) and I actually found that less stressful. I was able to let go of some of my perfectionism because I wasn’t about to mess up someone else’s book like with a translation. What I also think about prizes is that the choice of the winner depends on the mood of the jury on the day. It’s not like the best book always wins, or that there is even objectively a “best” book or translation. To be honest, my money was on the runner-up, David Doherty. I guess my writerly touch was probably what clinched it in the end, if anything! READ MORE…