Posts filed under 'role of the translator'

Life Cycles of the Text: On Eliot Weinberger’s The Life of Tu Fu & Eric Weiskott’s Cycle of Dreams

September 24, 2025  |  in Essays  |  by Mathew Weitman

Was I reading Tu Fu, Du Fu, or 杜甫 ? Or was I reading Weinberger? Have I really read Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky? Or only Pevear and Volokhonksy?

Reviews of translations tend to find themselves in familiar ruts; concern over perceived faithfulness, deftness or lack thereof, that is, if they recognize that it is a translation at all. Below, Mathew Weitman casts a scathing eye to recent criticism of Eliot Weinberger’s The Life of Tu Fu, praised by Forrest Gander as a “distinctive and refreshing” text, and broadens his discussion to include Eric Weiskott’s translation of and expansion upon the Middle English poem Piers Plowman in Cycle of Dreams. Weitman’s essay, through the works of Weinberger and Weiskott, disregards the justification of unconventional translations to explore instead what these works represent for translation, authorship, and humanity’s shared experiences across time and space.

For over forty years, Eliot Weinberger has piqued our foremost and laziest critics. His expertise remains inconveniently wedged between autodidactic and erudite, and his unique blend of formal innovation and wry humor never undercuts the seriousness of his disparate subjects of study. His translations of Octavio Paz, Bei Dao, and Jorge Luis Borges—to name a few—are forever colored by his well-known inquiry into the art of translation, 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei (a critical work that is itself colored by Weinberger’s self-reflexivity and ironic dogmatism). This is all to say that though Weinberger’s systematic destruction of readerly expectations—via genre, via tone, via form—should come to be expected, for the past few months I’ve enjoyed the bemused, uncurious, and outright lacking critical discourse around his newest book, The Life of Tu Fu.

In the small pool of Weinberger’s reviewers, two factions have formed in the shallow end. First, there are those who attempt to summarize the work. These blurbists are quick to tell you things you already know—things like (to paraphrase), “Though its title suggests this would be a biography of the Tang Dynasty poet Tu Fu, it is actually a book of poems.” And/or: “Weinberger’s newest collection of poems is not comprised of original poems—at least not in the romantic sense of ‘original.’ Instead, they are translations of various Tu Fu poems collaged together… Like a cento [or something].” These protracted synopses avoid critical engagement with the text almost as assiduously as the text avoids genre. READ MORE…

Honoring the Art of Translation: Ümit Hussein

September 28, 2020  |  in Essays  |  by Ümit Hussein

Our task is not restricted to giving readers access to literature . . . by doing so we also perform the role of cultural ambassadors.

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. 

In this third feature, we are delighted to present an original essay by Ümit Hussein, an award-winning translator (and past Asymptote Book Club contributor!), who translates from the Turkish to the English. Her translation of Burhan Sönmez’s Istanbul Istanbul won the EBRD prize in 2018 and her translation of Nermin Yıldırım’s Secret Dreams in Istanbul is forthcoming from Anthem Press. Born and raised in North London in an extended Turkish Cypriot family, Hussein sees her role as translator reaching beyond the linguistic, in order to act as a cultural ambassador and elucidate a different cultural context for English readers. Here, she explains her own response to the question of why translation is essential to promoting literature and bringing about change.  

When I was asked to write this article, my brief was to make it about any aspect of translation I thought was important. Unaccustomed to so much freedom, I set about wracking my brain. One of the first thoughts that crossed my mind was, why do we translate at all? Given that it is widely believed that a translation can never be equal to the original; that a good translator is one that is completely invisible; that the translation must read as though written in the target language; that we are branded with the label traduttore traditore; that it is so poorly paid; and that, harshest of all, a certain award-winning writer, who translated fiction before she became a novelist, said in an interview, “For me it’s a waste of time . . . I want to write, not waste time with translations.” (Fortunately for this author, her translator, whose translation won her the prize, does not share her views.) What, then, motivates us to lavish so much love, care, time, and energy on what is frequently treated as the poor relative of “real” writing? READ MORE…

The Anxiety of Translation: A Conversation between Ilan Stavans and Robert Croll

December 12, 2018  |  in Interviews  |  by Ilan Stavans and Robert Croll

From a translator’s viewpoint (at least, from this translator), the best author is a dead author. That absence is a form of freedom.

Translation, by definition, is about dislocation. By traveling from one culture to another, our rootedness is turned on its head. In this dialogue on translation and anxiety, Ilan Stavans, Lewis-Sebring Professor of Humanities, Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College, the publisher of Restless Books, and the host of NPR’s podcast “In Contrast,” and Robert Croll, translator of Ricardo Piglia’s three-volume The Diaries of Emilio Renzi (Restless Books, 2017–20), ponder the responsibility the translator has toward the original text, the discoveries of how unstable the target language is, and the realization that translation is an essentially destabilizing experience.

Robert Croll: For me, the act of translation always involves an underlying anxiety: my feeling of responsibility toward the original text, which is bound to the knowledge that my words will be taken to represent the author’s intentions, leads to a constant fear of being discovered as an impostor. But can experience in translation destabilize the way we read texts in their original languages?

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In Conversation: Emma Ramadan

September 19, 2018  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Mallory Truckenmiller

I had to insert myself literally as a character, and be creative as a translator.

Our latest Asymptote Book Club selection, Brice Matthieussent’s Revenge of the Translator, depicts a terrifying scenario for many authors. According to its translator, the main character is “an author’s worst nightmare”: a translator with their own ulterior motives.

In the latest installment of the Book Club interview series, Emma Ramadan (herself one of numerous characters in the multi-layered English translation of Matthieussent’s novel) speaks to Mallory Truckenmiller. Read on to find out more Ramadan’s unique experience translating Revenge of the Translator — a text that offers us a glimpse into “some of our darkest fantasies as translators.”

Follow up this conversation’s insights into the art of translation with our #30issues30days program, celebrating 7 years of Asymptote.

Mallory Truckenmiller (MT): One defining quality of Revenge of the Translator is its translation within a translation structure, with the translator actually entering the plot of the novel. As the English translator, your role adds yet another layer to the work. How did you approach this position? Did you find ways to insert yourself as a new voice or character within your translation?

Emma Ramadan (ER): Because the French novel Vengeance du traducteur is framed as a French translation of a (non-existent) English original titled Translator’s Revenge, creating my own English translation got a bit complicated. I couldn’t use Translator’s Revenge as the title of my translation, and at the end, when the narrator mentions a supposed “American translator” of Vengeance du traducteur currently undertaking the translation of the book into English in their city, that translator had to be me, that city had to be Providence. It had to come full circle and the reader of the English translation had to understand that this was an explicit reference to the book they were currently holding in their hands, a reference to my work, otherwise, the whole conceit falls apart. Which, in turn, adds extra layers: how faithful is this translation I’ve been reading? How much has this book I’m currently holding in my hands about a rogue translator been messed with in turn by its own translator? I had to insert myself literally as a character, and be creative as a translator, to do justice to Matthieussent’s multi-layered work and keep it from veering into total insanity.

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