Translation

Yu Hua at Elliott Bay Book Co

~ bythefirelight

Yu Hua was at Elliott Bay Book Co on March 1st. He is promoting his new book Brothers and is on a tour of the states. Since it is rare to have access to an author like him, especially since he doesn’t speak English, it was a treat to see him. He is a funny man even with an interpreter and has a good sense of the dark. He made a few comments that are of special interest.

  1. He picks his translators himself. Although he doesn’t speak English he looks for someone who knows the literature of the target language. He isn’t as interested in the Chinese scholars who only know about Chinese literature. He is more interested in having the readers be able to read the book, than a pure translation.
  2. Since he went to school during the Cultural Revolution his education was hindered. Therefore, when he began to write he only knew about 4000 characters. The lack of characters led to a sparse writing style. He said from a bad thing came a good thing.
  3. Like a good cook who  is made better by eating many different types of food; a writer who samples good writing will become better.
  4. He has been lucky to live in a land where changes that have taken place over the last 40 years in China, took 400 years to occur in Europe.
  5. His father was a surgeon whose surgery was in the same building as their house and the morgue was next to the bathroom. Occasionally, he would sleep in the morgue because it was cool. He can remember seeing his father covered in blood from surgeries. These memories informed his early works with violence. He also told a little joke wondering what made the trees near the house grow so well, the bathroom or the morgue.
  6. When Mao died he said the sound of 1000 people sobbing sounded ridiculous, not sad. He couldn’t keep from laughing. So he put his head down on the stool in front of him. He was shaking from the laughter so much that the teachers thought he was crying the hardest.

Cipher Journal

~ bythefirelight

Cipher Journal is a journal dedicated to translation. The magazine is a bit of a mishmash but there are some interesting items in translation from India and China.The links page is definately worth a look.

The website, though, leaves a little to be desired. Who puts the primary navigation at the bottom of the page anymore?

Arabic Translation – A History

~ bythefirelight

The Complete Review has a link to a review in the National of a new history of translation and Arabic, Prison-house of Language. The author raises some interesting issues about translation and power, but what caught my eye was this paragraph.

The translation of Arab literature into western languages yokes it to western sensibilities and conventions. As Kilito muses, “Who can read an Arab poet or novelist today without establishing a relationship between him and his European peers? We Arabs have invented a special way of reading: we read an Arabic text while thinking about the possibility of transferring it into a European language.” That long thread of Arab language and culture unravels under the heat of the European gaze. “Woe to the writers for whom we find no European counterparts: we simply turn away from them, leaving them in a dark, abandoned isthmus, a passage without mirrors to reflect their shadow or save them from loss and deathlike abandon.”

I have had the feeling at times when I read a story that was originally writen in Arabic, that it is so different in style and approach from the common ways of writing stories in the US and Europe that I’m not sure what to make of it. Is it good? Os it considered good there and I just don’t understand? Hassouna Moshbahi’s The Tortoise in Sardines and Oranges is a perfect example. Using the refrains “that was my first adventure” and “they beat me” the story mixes day dreams, boyish adventures and descriptions of everyday life in Tunisa. There is no ephinanic moment, no Frytag’s triangle, so what is going on? At such moments I think of the reverse, too, when Nagib Mahfouz talks about looking for models for his fiction. In each case, the cultural associations on each side make it difficult to know what the tradition is.

El País Reviews Bolaño and Bolanomania Again

~ bythefirelight ~ 1 Comment

El País has another article about Bolanomania in the United States. (You can see a previous post I did on the subject here). It talks about some of the reviews he has received, how most talk about his biography as much or more than the books and notes the controversy over his heroin usage. The article also notes that one’s reputation after death is based on luck. The author notes that the translation into English has created a different Bolaño, a Bolaño that Americans read from within their own cultural framework. Nothing surprising there. He goes on to compare Bolaño to Kerouac and suggests Americans are placing reading Kerouac and the Beat’s vitalism into Bolaños vitalism and from this reading they are culturally locating Bolaño.

Probably the North American reader recognizes a diction en these novels that es not dissimilar and lets the reader make the book their own, with local flavor and its riches. In English the books are not only very literary and miticulous, pasionate and brillant; they are, over all, vitalist.

The grand tradition of North American vitalist prose, in effect, has been the setting where the various styles of fiction characteristically Yankee were defined. The greatest stylist of this style is Jack Kerouac, and his On the Road, written in 1951 and rejected by 19 publishers before its publication in 1957, is a a modern classic. Even though the Beat Generation ended up being devoured by its own reputation, its works are more serious than the image of its authors, simplified to the point of being taken granted, and converted into merchandise. The brilliance of that vibrant, radiant, fluid, and unpredictable prose echoes like a spell in the pages of Bolaño.

Probablemente el lector norteamericano reconoce en estas novelas una dicción que no le es ajena, y que le permite hacer suya, con apetito local, su riqueza. En inglés no son sólo muy literarias y minuciosas, apasionadas y brillantes; son, sobre todo, vitalistas.

La gran tradición de la prosa norteamericana vitalista, en efecto, ha sido el escenario donde se definen los varios estilos de la ficción característicamente yanqui. El mayor estilista de este estilo es Jack Kerouac, y su On the road, escrita en 1951 y rechazada por 19 editoriales antes de su publicación en 1957, un clásico moderno. Aunque la generación Beat terminó devorada por su biografía popular, sus obras son más serias que la imagen de sus autores, simplificados al punto de darse por leídos, convertidos en mercancía residual. El brillo de esa prosa vivaz, irradiante, fluida, imprevisible, resuena como un conjuro en las páginas de Bolaño.

The Fifty Minute Mermaid – in the TLS

~ bythefirelight

The TLS has a review of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill’s book The Fifty Minute Mermaid, which sounds at the same time funny, magical, and yet subversive. It is published in a side by side edition in English and Gaelic and sounds fun.

after she had stumbled across the greatest discovery of all –  something even more profound than sex – / by which I mean mascara

My family history is Irish and I have always wanted to learn Gaelic and as a teenager thought I actually would. Perhaps, still, along with Arabic I still can. Until then, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill’s will have to suffice.

Translation as Nationalism

~ bythefirelight

Eurozine has an article called re-transnationalization of literary criticism. It is not a new article (although the danish translation is), but it is interesting especially in the American context. The article laments the passing of an age when major newspapers in Europe would publish reviews of books that had just been published in a different countries and in a different languages. The golden age of this nationalism free reviewing was the 50s. Now, some 50 years later the major papers only review translations of books written in other languages. Considering how few fiction titles are translated into English, less than 3% this year according to Three Percent, it seems like not just a lost age, but an age that never existed. It also seems the perfect reflection of the differences between the United States and Europe: one a large geographically isolated country for much of its history; the other, a group of states whose histories and geography are intertwined even if at times some states have not wanted to believe it.

Beginnings In Chinese Novels

~ bythefirelight

Paper republic has a great post about the beginnings of Chinese novels. According to Howard Goldblat, a thirty year translator of Chinese novels, the Chinese don’t try to open a novel with a catchy first line, instead, they often refer to place. Golblat suggest that since place and history are so important to Chinese culture, references to place are so much more important than they are in western writing. Nothing is a 100% as Golblat points out, but it is an interesting insight. Well worth a read.