Posts filed under 'Translation challenges'

The “Untranslatable” Osvaldo Lamborghini’s English-Language Debut

March 8, 2021  |  in Reviews  |  by Paul Holzman

Lamborghini is all wild and free in his work, and Sequiera corrals it, grounds it.

Two Stories by Osvaldo Lamborghini, translated from the Spanish by Jessica Sequeira, Sublunary Editions, 2021

The subject of Osvaldo Lamborghini’s impact on Argentine Literature summons a polarity of responses. The late Leopoldo Marechal, commenting on Lamborghini’s seminal El Fiord, said: “It’s perfect. A sphere. Shame it’s a sphere of shit.” On the contrary, César Aira, Lamborghini’s mentor/curator of sorts, extrapolates his singularity—claiming his work to be unparalleled. Academics of the greatest rigor and other heavyweights of the contemporary Latin American literati—such as Tamara Kamenszain and Roberto Bolaño—have unfettered their comments on the writing of Lamborghini as well: the former finding the need to unabatedly analyze, theorize, and deconstruct the dialectic around Lamborghini’s work, and the latter encouraging the reader to enter with caution. With so much contention surrounding his oeuvre, taking on the task of translating any of Lamborghini’s work is a mighty—even ominous—task. It therefore comes to no surprise that a print translation into the English has taken a relatively long time to reach our hands, but it has arrived: Two Stories by Osvaldo Lamborghini, by the intrepid hand of translator Jessica Sequeira.

The written word, for Lamborghini, permeates the conscious with a concise and potent mechanism, boggling the minds of readers with an intelligently savage use of syntax, punctuation, and orthography. I first encountered his antics in El Fiord, his first publication. After quickly scrapping my thesaurus and dictionary, I stumbled between aversion and infatuation, rummaging through a labyrinth of blogs and academic databases for explanations and makeshift guides to the text. After a few years of indulging in the somewhat toxic relationship of attempting to translate El Fiord into English, my notes revealed that a great many elements of his writing transcend conventional translation approaches and decisions, culminating in ever more possibilities for the text. Thus, translation is an important tool for engaging the multifarious nature of Lamborghini’s work, and Two Stories demonstrates that the act of translation proves to be a helpful light while shadowboxing what some call the “untranslatable” Osvaldo Lamborghini.

It is not only Lamborghini’s quirky punctuation and witty syntax that deems his work untranslatable; the challenge lies within his deep plunge into Argentine history, politics, literature, popular culture, and identity at large. Two Stories is no exception. Each story is meticulously laced with gaucho and contemporary slang—not to mention the author’s own neologisms. Jessica Sequiera is to be commended, then, for a translation that does not break or loosen the tensions Lamborghini creates with the aforementioned layers embedded in his work, setting the state for the Anglophone community to consider how Lamborghini has set himself apart, breaking from the established literary scene. READ MORE…

Shunning Stereotypes: Emma Ramadan on Translating Meryem Alaoui’s Straight From the Horse’s Mouth

October 22, 2020  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Allison Braden

It’s about Morocco, but not the cliched version . . . It’s a wild Morocco that is both more devastating and more fun than anyone might expect.

In her recent review of our fabulous September Book Club selection, Editor-at-Large Allison Braden praised the book’s candor, humor, and heart, as well as its fresh take on Moroccan culture. Below, she revisits these and other topics in conversation with award-winning translator and former Asymptote member Emma Ramadan. Straight From The Horse’s Mouth, they agree, defies our preconceptions of Morocco, its women, and the makings of great literature in translation.

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 USD15 per book; once you’re a member, you can join the online discussion on our Facebook page!

Allison Braden: I want to start by asking how you found this book. What attracted you to the story?

Emma Ramadan: Other Press came to me and asked if I wanted to translate the book, and I read it through and loved it. What I really like about it, and what I have tried to look for in other translation projects I’ve pitched, is that it’s by a Moroccan writer and it’s about Morocco, but not the cliched version of Morocco that can get neatly packaged to American readers. This happens with a lot of countries where there aren’t that many English translations already in existence: there’s an expectation that they will read a certain way, or that they will educate us about a certain aspect of that country or culture, as if that were the only thing those literatures were supposed to do. I like that this book doesn’t really provide the view of Morocco that English-language readers might have in mind, or that publishers might want to sell to them. It’s a wild Morocco that is both more devastating and more fun than anyone might expect. I love Jmiaa’s story, and I love her voice, and I love that she’s allowed to have a painful existence as a sex worker but also a radical transformation into a famous movie star. It’s a really fun book, and we don’t get a lot of those from certain countries.

AB: I noticed on Twitter that you said you often wish for more fun and funny books in translation. I’m curious about why you think there aren’t as many of those.

ER: I have a lot of thoughts about this, but I’ll sum them up by saying that I think there’s a certain pressure when you’re pitching a translation, or when publishers are acquiring a translation, for it to be a big, important, prize-worthy book; it’s very expensive to do translations, and there’s this idea that they don’t sell very well, so to make sure you’re getting your money’s worth, there needs to be some important hook or payoff in the form of big reviews or awards. These more fun, funny, light books that have a lot to say—that definitely have their readers and an importance of their own—may not seem as appealing or worthy in that way, but I would really disagree. Sometimes you just want to translate a book because it’s really good, and good doesn’t necessarily mean heavy and political and invested with all this cultural capital about what it means to live in a specific place. Sometimes it can just be a great book. And that should be, and is, enough.

AB: You’ve also translated some very serious Moroccan literature—I’m thinking of Ahmed Bouanani’s The Shutters. Did translating that inform your translation of Straight From the Horse’s Mouth, even though it’s such a different tone and genre?

ER: It did inform my translation insomuch as I got to know Morocco very well through that project, living there as I was working on it. So then, in translating this other book that’s very much set there, I was able to say, “Okay, they’re going to this town, I know what that town looks like.” It was deeply informative in that way, even if it’s a very different kind of book. There are other comparisons to be made, too: Bouanani uses some language that resists being translated, and in Straight From the Horse’s Mouth, Meryem Alaoui uses Arabic words in her French text that I left in Arabic, so both authors are writing from a culture that uses multiple languages. The challenge for me there was letting all those voices come through and not forcing them into some kind of neat English. READ MORE…

Sustaining Diversity: Translating the Literatures of Smaller European Nations

June 26, 2017  |  in Essays  |  by Rajendra Chitnis

A new study investigates whether the growth in translations from literatures of smaller European countries is matched by an increase in diversity.

Smaller European literatures don’t necessarily come from geographically or numerically small nations, but they are generally clustered in what for, say, English, French, or German readers, are European peripheries like the Balkans, the Baltic, Central and Eastern Europe, the Low Countries, the Mediterranean and Scandinavia. They are written in less widely spoken languages, come from less familiar traditions and depend on translation to reach an international audience. A project called ‘Translating the Literatures of Small European Nations’, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, aimed to understand both the challenges and opportunities that exist for these literatures as they try to break into the cultural mainstream in the UK, and in June 2017 we finally published a report on our findings.

Our project brought together four academics from the UK who promote very different smaller literatures―not only through their teaching and research, but also through various kinds of public engagement and publisher collaboration: I work on Czech and Slovak at Bristol, Rhian Atkin on Portuguese at Cardiff, Jakob Stougaard-Nielsen on Scandinavian and Zoran Milutinović on South Slav at UCL. We sensed that we work quite similarly, in parallel or even in competition, without much opportunity to discuss how our smaller literatures perceive and promote themselves internationally and how they are received by readers. We suspected that this parallel, competitive experience applied more generally to other professional advocates of smaller European literatures, whether translators, publishers, literary agents or state and third-sector promoters.

READ MORE…