Not Lost

A New York Times piece on a Christopher Hampton's play 'The Philanthropist' ends with a wonderful reminder of how important translation is for literature and the arts:

I think translation is very underappreciated and under-rewarded. I feel quite strongly that translation is performing an incredibly valuable service for us all. As often as not, when you read a translated novel, you have to search to find the name of the translator. Of course the translator is the person who is directly mediating the language to you and giving you access to all these worlds that you otherwise wouldn’t be able to enter.

And of course, the first comment on the story says in a contemptuously backhanded agreement:

poetry is, of course, what is “lost in translation,” and good translators (like every good artist) knows that their work will inevitably fail to convey the full beauty and truth of the original (in the case of the artist, the original being the kernel of an idea for a work that is alway better than whatever gets made). but where would we be without wonderful translators like hampton, who give us worlds that would otherwise remain completely inaccessible? translation is an art — an interpretive art (like acting, directing, dancing, singing, playing an instrument) but an art nonetheless. here’s to translators!

Though the article was posted two weeks ago, I couldn't help but add my disgruntled .02:

Though another commenter quips Frost's famous derision of translating poetry, that it is what is lost in translation, I think this view is often misunderstood. I think he means is that great translation requires a great artist, a poet, to re-form the poetry in the new language. Those who think that translations are always and inescapably inferior and derivative tend to be rather limited in their view of what a translation can achieve. It's no surprise to anyone that there are losses in the translation of literature - sounds, rhymes, meters that simply have no equivalent in the target language. But most people who have not thought overmuch about the practice don't realize there are equal gains - in sound, rhyme, meter, and even, sometimes, in allusion and elsewhere.

This history of this inferior and derivative idea of translation actually comes from translating religious texts - that the original was sacred and divine and that any transference of it was necessarily inferior. We recognize now the crippling absurdity of that idea - especially since it came to bear when the Christian Bible was already in Latin, having been translated already.

Many of the greatest poets in recent history, Pablo Neruda for one, believed that translation could actually improve upon the original. And I think he was right - a great line from his most famous book, Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, reads: "El amor es tan corto, el olvido es tan largo." It is much tighter in English: "Love is so short, forgetting is so long." The anaphora is clearer, the symmetry of phrasing emphasized by the loss of the articles, unnecessary in English.

The myopic view that a translation is necessarily inferior to an original work is what prevents translators from being recognized as artists, necessary for the success of global literature. It is what prevents translators from being fairly compensated for their work, and what prevents acknowledgment that without them we would have a very limited and sad reading world indeed.

Translator, Trader?

There is a fantastic new review of an essay on translating literature over at The Complete Review today. Not only am I constantly impressed by the number of foreign-language books reviewed (either in translation or untranslated) over there, but the insight with which he addresses not only the merits of the work but the translation as well. This review deals with a new translation of That Mad Ache by Françoise Sagan, translated by Douglas R. Hofstadter.

What is especially interesting is that the book on has two covers - a front and back. The front is for the text, the back, when turned upside down, is the cover of the long essay on translation by Hofstadter included with the text. I haven't read it, but having read the review I think it's safe to say that I will likely disagree with his discussion of translation in major parts, I would not translate Bonjour tristesse as Howdy, Blues, and don't feel the need to elucidate texts as a translator - that is the job of the critic, teacher or student. In any case, having not read it I was still struck by the magnitude of giving the translator not only so much page space in the book, but his own cover. And, according to The Complete Review, listing him on the front not as a translator but co-author.

Which immediately made me think of Russel Valentino's excellent post at Words Without Borders a week or so ago. He discusses the debate over the National Translation Award's new eligibility requirements that the translator of a literary work be listed on the cover. This, he seems to say, and I agree, needlessly punishes translators who have little to no control over what a publisher may decide. Not only that, it is, he says, a misguided attempt at educating a reading public about the necessity and pervasiveness of translation. I agree with his conclusion that this kind of education should be happening in universities and schools - where it is most effective and appropriate.

The issue from the publisher's side is that translation is scary to the reading public, and being aware that a book is translated will make readers choose not to read the book. As Valentino says, this is merely heresay, with no real data to back up this claim. You can also posit readers like me, who have several 'favorite' translators and regularly search for books translated by them not only because of their skill in the art of translation, but because of their execellent tastes in literature. If Margaret Sayers Peden translates a book, chances are I'm going to like it, because I share her taste in literature. In any case, there is no current way to determine what effect the prominent display of a translator's name on the cover of a book has on its sales.

Which makes it more interesting then that Hofstadter is credited as being a co-author. His approach to translation, on the freer side of the spectrum, certainly allows for the possibility of crediting in this manner. The idea, frankly, turns me off. It would be one thing if he worked with the original author on the translation, which doesn't appear to be the case here. But even then, I would be skeptical of a claim of co-authorship. There is an analogy here in music, perhaps. A contemporary conductor re-interpreting a Mozart symphony does not then claim to have co-composed it. Conducting itself is an art of interpretation, of translating written notes to sound, and is respected as such. Great conductors are acknowledged as masters of an art form that is seperate from the act of composing (though of course one does not preclude the other, just as being a translator does not preclude one from also writing). Even in arranging music for new combinations of instruments one does not claim authorship of the original music. It is an adaption, seperate from but indebted to the genius of the original author.

Looser translation tactics should also be seen in this light. And so while it is imperative that translation become more acceptable to engage academically, as Valentino suggests, and that translators are given credit and respect for the practice of their art, there are limits to how much ownership one can claim of the original text.

I'm delighted that the translator's afterward in this book is so substantial - I think this is something that publishers, should they choose to, could add to the reading and understanding of a text. But I'm wary of the heavy-handed claims being made. A sure way to lose respect for the art of translating is to infringe into the art of authoring without warrent.

Poetry as a Political Indicator

There are times when, in the often overwhelming inundation of information that I chose to subject myself to daily, threads almost miraculously make themselves clear to me. (I won't contemplate the wealth of connections that I'm sure slide by in the deluge). Last week I discovered the Poetry Foundation's wonderful podcasts, and have been listening in chronological order to the Poetry Magazine podcast. When I finally reached the discussion from October 2008 on the November 2008 issue I was not only interested in the conversation about Bolaño's poetry, but about Robert Archambeau's discussion on poetry and politics. Actually, it seemed as though he had a book forthcoming on the subject, though I haven't been able to find out anything about it.

Archambeau talks about something that most U.S. writers will smile knowingly about: poets who claim to speak truth to power, when power isn't listening. I think, though, the problem isn't really that the power isn't listing, it's that people aren't listing. In many wealthy industrialized nations, people are more or less capable of speaking for themselves, and so don't turn to literature to represent communities. The exception to this, of course, are subaltern communities (for example racial and religious minorities, gay and lesbian communities, and until very recently, women). But for the most part in wealthy industrialized nations the common recourse for writers who want to 'speak truth to power' is relying on language that can't be exploited, that stands outside of the logic of the marketplace as resistance to capital. This, of course, doesn't usually create direct connections or solutions to real problems, but offers instead an alternative sense of valuation - that there is more to life than subsistence. The problem is that when poetry offers abstractions in the face of real problems, it removes itself from directly addressing these problems. The more esoteric and apart from worldly issues it becomes, the fewer people rely on it to speak for their concerns, and the more removed it has to become in order to fulfill its sense of purpose. (These are my thoughts, though drawn from Archambeau's discussion).

So, does poetry accomplish anything? Archambeau says that in some circumstances, it does - especially in subjugated cultures and societies. Literature thrives, he says, in situations where vast percentages of populations are disenfranchised, because it offers an alternative means of expressing something that isn't being represented. In this way (and I hear a note of Neruda here) poetry speaks for an otherwise unrepresented community, it is a "voice for the voiceless." Not a community of poetry readers, but an identity group. They read poetry not for it's pure aesthetic enrichment of their lives, or for a search for morality, truth, beauty and the sublime, but because it is perhaps the only place in which their voices are heard, and in which their values are expressed. Archambeau even quotes a colleague as saying that "When you look at a country in which poetry is highly valued outside of a literary community, it's generally a sign of underdevelopment."

With these thoughts about poetry as a means of identity politics for disenfranchised communities whirling in my mind, I came across today an article in the online magazine Guernica in which Joel Peckham writes:

A nation does need its poets and poetry. However much people claim to dislike it, poetry—those articulated symbols and metaphors, those stories that resonate with a community and are therefore essential to human aspiration—responds to the basic need of individuals to reach beyond their small existence and connect with something meaningful. At its worst, poetry simply records the longings of an isolated individual but, at its best, when one poem or poet tunes into the longings of a people, poetry provides us with an articulated affirmation of our purpose as a culture—and indeed, culture cannot exist without it. This relates to why rhetoric is such an important part of the political sphere. A political speech attempts to give a vision in keeping with a nation’s core values while also trying to expand, adapt, and reaffirm those values for successive generations.
(Emphasis mine).
Guernica, April 2009

There is something here that strikes exactly at the heart of it: great, powerful and political poetry is for communities. And not communities of poetry readers and writers, but a larger sense of community, one not restricted by geography or language. Poetry can't convert (usually), but it can speak, it can galvanize and it can be the spark of ignition for communities to take shape and become heard around.

Poetry has power only when looking outside the individual, or the specialized literary community, to address and take part in the world around it. And it is not only powerful, but necessary.

Cuban Science Fiction

Thanks to Three Percent a few weeks ago I learned about the World SF News Blog. I am a sometimes guilty, but constant, reader of science fiction in English and only recently began exploring the rich world of science fiction in translation, and in Spanish (my other reading language). Today, on the World SF News Blog they posted a link to a list of Cuban science fiction writers which includes detailed biographical information, bibliographies and links to texts and interviews. A great resource I look forward to more fully exploring!

Interdisciplinarity

In an insightful and suggestive NYTimes.com article yesterday, Columbia professor of religion Mark Taylor discusses the structure of higher education in the United States, and its future. Despite it's rather anxiety-inducing title, "The End of the University As We Know It," the article is not as doom-saying as all that. Rather, he carefully isolates the major recurring problems of academia, which those of us involved in it know all too well, and considers solutions to these problems.

Among his major complaints, and rightfully so, is the debillitating specialization and inability to foster innovation that the current system necessitates:

And as departments fragment, research and publication become more and more about less and less. Each academic becomes the trustee not of a branch of the sciences, but of limited knowledge that all too often is irrelevant for genuinely important problems. ... The emphasis on narrow scholarship also encourages an educational system that has become a process of cloning.

All other problems aside, the siloing of academia has made it less and less relevant and by extension made the sometimes very important work that happens in both practical and theoretical fields within university communities arcane and inaccessible. This problem connects, in my mind, to that of jargon, which Edward Said wrote about brilliantly in Representations of the Intellectual. When the work that academics do cannot be understood as relating to the world outside the ivory tower, it becomes relegated to navel-gazing and self-indulgent diatribe. In just the same way, when departments and the faculty and students within them turn away from the connections implicit in their work they become diminishingly important. It is these connections that justifies more obviously the humanities, but the sciences as well.

This is to say, also, that all fields of study are equally rich with connections. That poetry (as I firmly believe) is as relevant as chemistry for addressing the world's multiplying and complex problems.

There can be no adequate understanding of the most important issues we face when disciplines are cloistered from one another and operate on their own premises.

It would be far more effective to bring together people working on questions of religion, politics, history, economics, anthropology, sociology, literature, art, religion and philosophy to engage in comparative analysis of common problems. As the curriculum is restructured, fields of inquiry and methods of investigation will be transformed.

I think that there have been surges in this direction in academia. Comparative Literature departments, to some degree, address the necessity for looking outside single national literary traditions to form complete pictures. New Historicism in literary criticism requires the situating of a text and its author in a socio-historical, political and economic context for the fullest understanding. I'm drawing examples from my own discipline, but I'm sure there are many others.

It's no surprise to me that the author of this article is a professor of religion. One of the monumental and formative moments of my undergraduate academic experience was a spirited discussion in a study of religion class (which became a second major for me, in part because of this) in which we examined the place of the study of religion in academia. Was it even possible to study religion without equal parts anthropology, history, economics, politics and literature? Was it reasonable to expect to be able to study any of these independant of the others? As a class, we came to the conclusion that it would make more sense to have a Cultural Studies field in which one could focus, like a wide-angle camera, on a particular aspect without excluding the others. Our professor agreed.

The problem is that these steps are too small. Even the collapse of autonomous and disconnected departments is not enough. It is also the problem of national in the place of international. Taylor addresses this through the increased use of technology and resources, allowing universities around the world to simultaneously share resources and faculty, but this leaves 2/3 of the world behind. In order for academia and scholarship to truly transform, it needs to break free of the elitism that is endemic in the institutions. The elitism isn't mearly in the absurd over-specialization, or in the equaliy pretentious use of jargon, but in the basic assumptions of what higher education can accomplish, and what its intent is in the world. A dissolution of boundaries between disciplines is a good first step in a larger examination of the role of the intellectual in public life.

Critics of these ideas say that it is the ability to specialize so minutely that allows great ideas to develop, and while I don't doubt that for some that's true, I think for the most part it rewards elitism and arcane scholarship. There must be not only room, but encouragement, for both. Critics of these ideas say that these kinds of changes would take away from the scholarship that is possbile, for who is making the decisions once professors aren't guarenteed a life-time position? God forbid it be the administrators! The answer, of course, is more innovation: boards - perhaps much like editorial boards, for example, that determine areas of inquiry and whether to discontinue unsuccesful focuses. There

I, unlike Taylor, have no solutions. His are radical, and will be rejected but shouldn't be. Even the suggestion of aboloshing tenure, though this made me flinch with aprehension. He's right, though, aboloshing tenure to be replaced with long-term contracts would allow for more innovation in universities, and make it possible for younger professors to find footing. There's a risk here that by aboloshing tenure universities would merely increase the exploitation of adjunct and graduate student teachers (another institutionalized problem addressed in the article), without creating opportunities and a system of rewards that would encourage the change Talyor is hoping for.

This is perhaps why change occurs so slowly in institutions as old as the university. The risks run high, and the people in power have a lot at stake. There are no shareholders to call for radical restructuring, only students whose futures are at the whim of the system they are a part of. There are too many people who have too much to gain by maintaining the status quo, and no one in the position to push for immediate and comprehensive change. It is a system dependant on evolution. But I don't find this discouraging.

I've already seen the inklings of this broadening of perspective in academia. Literary translation, perhaps the best example of looking outside the singluar specialized field, has begun to find a place in academia in the UK and the US. Interdisciplinary studies programs are popping up, still new, unfunded and untested, but there. The possibilites for real change are out there - but only if the existing power structures can evolve towards it.

The Husk

Reading over at Harriet a post by Martin Earl I came across the following three statements, that, taken together, seemed to me somewhat contradictory.

It also could have been the denaturing process of translation itself, which gives us, at best, the husk of poems. But it was the husk I needed, not the grace notes. I needed a new conceptual platform.

Young North American poets of the early 21st century must come to understand that the English language has become the global language, and this global idiom comes in two basic forms: hegemonic and co-opted; that is, English has become a language which embodies both power and the struggle against power, both the standardization and the defense of the particular.

It is our duty now, since English has become the language of globalization, to continually recycle all of its registers, to shift and shuffle them, to be at once plain spoken and baroque, as need be, to keep the language exercised, lean and honest.

I was glad to see the discussion in the comments turn toward translation, because I was dismayed by the first statement above, especially in light of the conclusion - our responsibility now as speakers of a language of globalization, war and consumerism.

It seems to me that in large part the assumption that nothing of value can move between languages is a result of linguistic monopoly, and an archaic one at that, coming from a previous language of empire and religion, Latin. Replaced by the religion of consumerism and the empire of free market, English supplants Latin but the premise is the same. Translation threatens the supremacy of the language of state, and therefore is classified as at best inferior and at worst traitorous. He mentions in a comment that he's studied the 'art of translation' - and I do believe it is an art, at least when translating literary works - and so it is even stranger to me that he would reduce it to failed derivative reproduction.

While I accept that there are necessary sacrifices made during the translation process, there are also gains. These gains are not only in the sound, syntax, image and structure of the poem (as they can be, at times) but in the expansion of our horizons as readers and writers, and importantly the de-centering of our native language as the only legitimate producer of culture and art.

Translation, I think, is an inherently subversive act that can throw into sharp relief the bloated egotism of our linguistic assumptions. To use his term, it is through translation that we can perhaps un-co-opt poetic expression.

Zebra Poetry Film Festival

I've always been intrigued by the possibilities of combining, or exploring the overlap between, film and poetry. This may be because I work in poetry while my husband, brother and several of my closest friends work in film. I won't pretend it's not a selfish interest. It's also always seemed rich in possibility because both rely heavily on universal communication through the image, and film allows for a multidimensional and multitemporal exploration of single or multiplied and shifting images.

So I was thrilled, in a frenzy of surfing, to come across the Zebra Poetry Film Award and corresponding festival. Though the site is moderately difficult to navigate and my German is severely lacking, with 600 entries from across the world in 2006, it's clear that I'm not the only one who believes this is a fertile ground for creation. The site does, after a bit of searching, have information about the upcoming 2009 event from June 27 - July 5, and the videos of past year's winners. I looked a bit for a dvd of the films, or some of them, because I would certainly buy it if not only to support the festival, but also to enrich my understanding of this borderland art, but in vain.

In any case, this certainly bumped German up on my list of languages to improve.