Michelle Bailat-Jones

Writer, Translator, Reader

Posts from the ‘translation’ category

“And where can beauty find a place among us when it is so doggedly pursued?”

By

I am so excited to be able to announce the publication of my first book-length translation—Beauty on Earth by Charles Ferdinand Ramuz—which has just come out this month from the Australian publisher Onesuch Press. It has been a true pleasure working with Onesuch and I’m honored to have had their support. Also, this English-language edition comes with a forward from the American writer Valerie Trueblood, and I am so grateful for her insight into the novel.

Beauty on Earth was first published in 1927 and it is the story of a Cuban orphan, Juliette, who must come to live with her uncle Milliquet in a small village on the shores of Lake Geneva. He is a local café owner, greedy and inept, and he has a horrid wife; Juliette’s life in this village is doomed from the start. She is so different from these stuffy Swiss villagers, so beautiful, so exotic, that they literally do not know what to do with her. With her beauty.

Unfortunately, the quickest and most common response is an attempt to possess her. And as the story proceeds, a series of men try their hardest (in quite different ways) to do exactly this.

The book is populated with a range of wonderful characters—from Chauvy, the town drunk, to Rouge, the gruff but sweet fisherman; from Ravinet, the malicious Savoyard, to Maurice, the Mayor’s son. And my favorite—Emilie. I won’t tell you about her because I want you to read her for yourself. More than Juliette, I think of her as the novel’s emotional pinpoint. Each scene in which she features broke my heart (several times, as I translated and revised and revised and revised). And while Ramuz has been criticized for keeping his distance (and therefore the readers) from his supposed main-character Juliette, he shows with Emilie exactly how deep he is able to go into one of his creations.

So that distance from Juliette is done on purpose and is there for a reason. I leave it to you to speculate why.

I don’t want to write too much more about the book, for fear that I will unwittingly give away all of its hidden treasures, but I’ll leave you with an excerpt, from one of the story’s quiet moments, when the first difficulties have seemingly fallen away, just before everything falls apart:

As for the girl, she’d gone on fishing with us. She’d gone on having a place among us, when she got into the boat, leaving each morning with us to go raise the nets. She held onto the rudder; Rouge telling her, “Right…left…straight on…” she pulled one of the ropes, or the other, seated on the rear bench. In the beautiful weather that lasted all of the rest of that month and for much of the next, they set out together, the three of them, and this space where she found herself, it belongs to us. It seemed she was right where she should have been: look carefully, beneath the mountain, look carefully, among the stones and the sand, or on this water that is gray at first, then lemon yellow, then orange yellow; then it looks as though we are navigating through a field of clover, upsetting the stems with the oars. She was completely at home here, maybe, for awhile, because there was no one else here; which means that there was no one but her and us; her and us, and these things and us.

The book is available in the UK, the US and Australia. Please take a look at the Onesuch Press website, for even more information.

6 Comments

short scene from La Beauté Sur la Terre (Beauty on Earth)

By

This week I am finishing up what I hope will be the final revisions on this long Ramuz translation—and it is a pure joy to go through this text again, for the third or fourth time, word by word, reading most of it aloud, looking at the way the sentences work in a series, work against one another, and marveling at how quickly Ramuz wrote this book. A draft completed in only a few months, rewritten again over another few months.

But today I find myself pausing on a particular scene. This happens just after Juliette is settled into Rouge’s house, at the most idyllic point of the novel, when everything seems to be falling in place (and obviously just before everything begins to fall apart). It is a Sunday morning and the entire population of this lakeside village is out singing and walking and enjoying the sunshine. Juliette and Rouge and Décosterd have just finished their breakfast and are out walking along the shoreline, and Maurice (the mayor’s son) is spying on them from a hiding spot beneath some bushes up the hillside. What is also important about this scene is that Juliette has just changed out of her black mourning dress into a brightly colored Caribbean-style dress.

Lui, là-haut, regarde toujours. Il a vue que les montagnes en ce moment avaient été atteintes sur leur côté par le soleil qui descendait, en même temps que sa lumière était moins blanche ; il y avait comme du miel contre les parois de rocher. Plus bas, sur la pente des prés, c’était comme de la poudre d’or ; au-dessus des bois, une cendre chaude. Tout se faisait beau, tout se faisait plus beau encore, comme dans une rivalité. Toutes les choses qui se font belles, toujours plus belles, l’eau, la montagne, le ciel, ce qui est liquide, ce qui est solide, ce qui n’est ni solide, ni liquide, mais tout tient ensemble ; il y avait comme une entente, un continuel échange de l’une à l’autre chose, et entre toutes les choses qui sont. Et autour d’elle et à cause d’elle, comme il pense et se dit là-haut. Il y a une place pour la beauté…

[Up on the mountain, he was still watching. He had seen that at this moment the mountains were touched on their side by the sun dipping down, at the same time the light turned less white; there was a color like honey between the walls of rock. Lower down, on the slope of the fields, it was like powdered gold; above the woods, like warm cinders. Everything was making itself beautiful, everything was making itself more than beautiful, like a rivalry. All these things making themselves more beautiful, always more beautiful, the water, the mountain, the sky, all that is liquid, all that is solid, all that is neither solid nor liquid, but it all holds together; it was like an agreement, a continual exchange from one thing to another thing, and between everything that exists. And around her and because of her—what he is thinking and telling himself up there. There is a place for beauty… ]

Ramuz does so much with this idea of Juliette as a figure of nature. She is so much more than a person, she is more-than-human. In this scene she is adding to the natural setting, she is a part of it, but later she will both create the atmosphere and be destroyed by it. She is absolutely enmeshed with the natural setting and this is something Ramuz does particularly well – his characters are never separate from their surroundings, but fundamentally altered by the mountains, the sun, the snow, the fields and all the workings of the natural world. I do not know of another writer (off-hand) who does this in quite the same way.

2 Comments

Some writing, some reading

By

Some Writing

Between January and March this year, I had the very real pleasure (and subsequent immediate self-doubting anxiety) of seeing several short fiction pieces, and one translation, published around this beautiful lit-loving internet:

In January the exciting and new Sundog Lit published the first of my Elemental stories, “miner’s daughter.” These are very short pieces that I’ve been playing with as I work on a longer cycle; they are also auxiliary pieces to the novel I’m slowly writing about a woman who discovers a naturally-occurring nuclear fission reactor (and abandoned mine).

PANK just recently published a second one, called “Mining.”

In March then, Two Serious Ladies, which is an online journal that has published some of my favorite contemporary writers, included a short piece I first wrote over 10 years ago and have been re-writing ever since.  “Gongneung subway, 1.am”

Also, the always-beautiful Cerise Press included my translation of Ramuz’s “The Two Old Maids” in their spring issue. This journal does such wonderful work and this issue hosts a number of really beautiful translations as well as essays. Two of my favorites from this issue are Mary P. Noonan’s essay on Beckett and Jacqueline White’s on Mata Hari.

The Ann Arbor Review published a very tiny poem called “For September.” This poem is the perfect example of something I wish I could re-write now that it’s been published – an ongoing war with my inner poet.

Finally, at Necessary Fiction, I was very happy to be involved in a Round Table Discussion on Kate Zambreno’s Heroines with fellow writers/readers Helen McClory, Joanna Walsh and Christine Cody. This book has continued to stimulate some very interesting discussions around the web, and I highly recommend it.

Some Reading

My reading has been very much all over the place for the last few months—a mixture of contemporary titles, classic and contemporary Japanese novels, and back to Virginia Woolf’s Diaries. I’m also about halfway through Lyndall Gordon’s biography of Woolf and thoroughly immersed—Gordon filters all auto/biographical information about Woolf and her family and peers with lengthy discussions of Woolf’s fiction and other writings. It’s all extremely compelling.

I have discovered a handful of writers this winter worth looking further into. The first is Michelle Latiolais, whose story collection Widow was published by Bellevue Literary Press. She has a novel as well, which I will read soon. And I’m going to write a full post on Widow, but will say quickly here that it was an exceptional collection—the combination of emotional and cerebral that I absolutely love, with narratives just a bit inscrutable but which attain a high emotional resonance. She reminded me of Christine Schutt in many ways (and indeed, Schutt blurbed the book). The second is Mariko Nagai, whose collection Georgic I wrote about here.

I’ve also read two quite different francophone women writers, neither of whom has been translated into English but who were both incredibly well-published in their lifetimes and who walked along the periphery of the “nouveau roman.” The first is Hélène Bessette who was French, and the second is Clarisse Francillon, from Switzerland although she lived for most of her life in Paris. Imagine my delight at finding at small back room at the public library in Vevey that houses the Francillon collection—all of her own work plus the library she donated to the city when she died in 1976. Imagine my further delight when I learned I could check anything out and that it wasn’t restricted to use on site. I toddled home with a tall stack of her novels and am getting acquainted. Her novel Le Carnet à Lucarnes (The Skylight Notebook) is described in the Dictionnaire Littéraire des Femmes de Langue Française in this way:

L’héroine y incarne au féminin trois archétypes de l’imaginaire occidental: Hamlet, le tourmenté, Don Juan, l’insatisfait et Faust, l’orgueilleux.

[In this book, the heroine represents a feminine personification of three western archetypes : Hamlet, the tormented, Don Juan, the unfulfilled and Faust, the proud.]

3 Comments

Ramuz translation out: “The Two Old Maids”

By

I have mentioned before how much I love the international journal Cerise Press—consistently excellent content and a lovely design as well. But I’m extra delighted about their latest, the Spring 2013 issue, as it includes my translation of a 1906 short story by Ramuz. This particular story was originally published in the Journal de Genève in 1906, and as far as I can find was never anthologized elsewhere or re-published.

Ramuz is especially good at writing about old women, old maids in fact, and this story, aptly named “The Two Old Maids” is one that showcases that skill. The story is really only a very brief portrait—a single evening in the night of two older seamstress sisters living in a small town when they get a glimpse of a life that was denied to them.

My favorite part of the entire story is when Ramuz steps back and sets the scene – just before the women sit down at the window to look out into the garden (which is an action that will devastate them – this looking out – best not to look out):

And so the daylight departed slowly from the back of the room up to where they were sitting. The furniture entered into the shadow; it appeared to be drowning. The shadow began at the base and then rose like water, until eventually each piece was submerged.

Looking outside, the light was a surprise because it was still so bright yet already dark inside. The sky was yellow, then it became green. A gust of wind bent the branches on the trees.

A large garden extended in front of the ladies’ house. The garden belonged to Mr. Loup, the surveyor. The trees were all black too, making great masses in the sky. In between them, a bit of lighter colored grass stuck out. Then there was a movement in the air. Up above, the green had gone, turned to blue, darkened and a star began to shine at that moment, opened like an eye.

Oh, what softness was on everything! The evening lies down, lets itself go. A renunciation. And then noises come from further away, weaken and disappear. So good to breathe in this silence! Even if it makes lonely souls sad.

You can read the entire translation – and the rest of this excellent issue here. Enjoy!

Best European Fiction 2013 from Dalkey Archive

By

My last review of 2012 over at Necessary Fiction is an appropriate one as I take a look at the most recent edition of Dalkey Archive’s Best European Fiction project:

One of the defining elements of Dalkey Archive’s Best European Fiction project is the impossibility of gathering these assorted fictions under a single stylistic or thematic roof. And the most recent offering—the fourth of the series and the last edited by Aleksandar Hemon—is no different; the Best European Fiction 2013 is a mix of aesthetics and styles, a jumble of voices and settings and genres and perspectives, the stories as different from each other as are the 32 different countries and 28 different languages that this lengthy collection includes.

Anyone interested in translated literature, in voices that are almost never represented in traditional American publishing—at least not in such diversity or sheer number—will really enjoy this anthology. It’s a collection to take slowly—a story a week, a story a day. Whatever your pace. But these are unique little fictions and a glimpse at how contemporary literature is evolving on the European end of things.

You can read the entire review here.

Noelle Revaz – With the Animals

By

This week at The Rumpus I reviewed With the Animals by Noelle Revaz – this book was published this year as part of Dalkey Archive’s Swiss Literature Series:

Paul, the narrator and subject of Noëlle Revaz’s With the Animals, is a rustic Swiss farmer with strong opinions but a weak intellect; he is a man of formidable emotion but has a rather small heart, metaphorically speaking. The book asks its readers to sustain an intimate encounter with this difficult and often violent man, an intimate encounter because of the way the reader becomes so tightly locked inside Paul’s narrated vision—the story unfolds in his voice and through the representation of his thinking as Revaz has conceived it. Paul’s voice is exceedingly rustic, so much so that at first it seems the book might be set several decades before its initial French-language publication date of 2002. As the story continues, however, it becomes clear that while the story is contemporary, Paul is a living anachronism – out-of-date even by the standards of other neighboring farmers.

Not only is he wary of modern technology—he has trouble using an ordinary landline telephone, for example—and ultra-conservative in his vision of family and society, he is also attached to his farm and to his animals in such a way that he actually sits just outside the usual polarity of city and rural; he is nearly more animal than he is human. And this set-up leads to the central question of With the Animals– can Paul be humanized?

You can read the entire review here.

And, now, just a quick word, a more personal reaction to the book. In W. Donald Wilson’s short Translator’s Note, he comments that With the Animals isn’t written in any particular French dialect, that it was an invention of Revaz’s. Also, Revaz does not name the Swiss canton where Paul has his farm, but it isn’t hard to narrow down the options. First, it’s a French speaking canton: either Valais, Jura, Geneva, Fribourg, or Vaud. We can cross off the Valais as it’s a mountainous region and mostly Catholic, Fribourg is quite Catholic and so is the Jura (and most farming regions of the Jura are up on a high plateau – the beautiful but anarchist Franches Montagnes – that give a very particular farming and community culture). I mention this Catholicism as an excluding factor because I believe that in With the Animals Revaz is really working with a particular Swiss Protestant aesthetic, a bit of Calvinism gone mad, if you will, and so that leaves the cantons of Vaud and Geneva – basically any of the rural communities that dot the hillsides overlooking Lake Geneva.

So I believe, although cannot prove, that the book is set in the canton of Vaud – this is where Revaz currently lives, although I believe she is originally from the Valais. And this is where I live. I live in a small farming community in the canton of Vaud, and I rent a farmhouse from a local farmer. I read the book in French first and then read Wilson’s translation (which is excellent, as I mention in the review at The Rumpus). Much of Revaz’s French felt incredibly familiar to me – the rustic expressions, the cold awkwardness about matters of emotion and physical sensuality, this strange tenderness toward the animals. It’s all worked into the language of the book, and this language is the Swiss French that I’ve come to listen to most often. (Not to mention the one farmer – about Paul’s age – who comes into our local shops still covered in manure, still reeking of spoilt milk and speaks in a patois I cannot understand at all. I see this man at least once every few weeks and now he’s become Paul to me, a pure embodiment of the book.)

So because of all this, I can’t help but disagree with Wilson – Paul’s unique speech is absolutely drenched in this little corner of Switzerland and its rural culture, it’s tension between modernity and traditional Swiss Protestant ethics and aesthetics. And I think it’s a bit of a shame to play that down.

2 Comments

New Ramuz translation out – “Phimonette”

By

The Spring Issue of Metamorphoses—the journal of the five college faculty seminar on literary translation—includes my translation of Charles Ferdinand Ramuz’s short story, “Phimonette.” It took me several tries to find a home for this unique and sad little story. It is essentially the story of a life lived unhappily, and a sudden frenzied rush to do it again, this time happily, even if that happiness is imagined, even delusional. The title character, Phimonette, is an old woman who has suddenly shown up at a semi-secret dance party in a hay loft on the mountain where the young people of the village like to meet. Phimonette has lost her grip on reality and has imagined herself young again, this time with a fiancé, and so the young villagers tease and laugh at her, although they aren’t mean. However, as the day continues and the group descends from the hillside back into the village and we meet Phimonette’s sister, Angèle (also unmarried, also an old-maid and also very unhappy), it becomes clear that Phimonette’s delusion will have quite sad repercussions.

This kind of story involving two sisters – old maids – is one that Ramuz returns to again and again. It’s clear he was interested in solitude and the nature of sorrow created from loneliness. In “Phimonette” he pushes this idea to the extreme and shows that this lifelong unhappiness has finally caused a rupture. Phimonette is incapable of living with her unhappiness any longer and so she exchanges it for something equally dangerous – insanity. (I can’t help finding the French kinder here – “la folie” seems so much softer than “insanity.”)

Editions Slatkine in Geneva have been slowly producing The Complete Works of CF Ramuz, fully annotated and commented; there will be 30 volumes in total when they finish the series in 2013, including five volumes dedicated to his short stories. It is an enormous undertaking, but the result is spectacular. I have three of the short story volumes (Nouvelles et Morceaux) and it’s from these annotated texts that I’ve based my translations. These annotated volumes are also a wonderful source of information about each piece.

For “Phimonette,” for example, we learn that the story was originally titled, “Mariette” but that Ramuz changed the protagonist’s name for his second draft. The story was written in about one week in September of 1907, and there are five different drafts. It was rejected by a literary journal in Lausanne in October 1907 and was not published in Ramuz’s lifetime. Fun to think that it found a home in another country and language just over a hundred years later!

Here is a link to Metamorphoses.

 

 

1 Comment

C.F. Ramuz – If the Sun Were Never to Return (story)

By

The current (Fall/Winter 2011) issue of Hayden’s Ferry Review includes my translation of “If the Sun Were Never to Return,” a beautiful story by C.F. Ramuz. This happens to be one of my very favorite Ramuz pieces, for the reasons I mention in my translator’s note, and so I’m obviously thrilled that Hayden’s Ferry has published it, but I’m even more thrilled that it was selected as one of the online sample pieces from the issue. Ramuz deserves as wide an audience as possible, and now everyone can read this story.

“If the Sun were Never to Return” is actually two stories in one. The first is the story of a village that wakes to total blackness. The villagers slowly realize that the sun is not coming back and that this encroaching darkness means they are all going to die. But the real story starts halfway through, and it’s about having lost in love, about revenge. It is one of Ramuz’s most violent stories, even if no real violence actually occurs.

The village is still sleeping and this reassures him for a moment. Maybe he’s actually woken up at the wrong time, or he’s having a bad dream. But all of a sudden his muscles tighten below his Adam’s apple, pushing it upward; he breathes with difficulty. The need to shut his door comes upon him, he closes it, and he stands behind the door, not knowing what to do, waiting.

Five o’clock rings, and we can see it isn’t yet light out.

Yet this is May. The five bells ring out, and it seems like the sound they make has doubled, even tripled in strength. They ring and echo and echo for a long time, as if they are hitting sheets of metal. It’s impossible for us not to hear them. And Larpin moves his head forward. He rests his forehead against the door panel, he listens, the clock rings again, each new ring quieting in its turn, then a door opens, then a second door, then a long voice calls out in the dark.

He recognizes the voice of a neighbor, and she’s calling her husband, “Julien! Julien!” We hear Julien answer her, “This is the devil’s work.” A third voice comes in from the opposite side, “What’s going on?” And now, from all around, the voices cross and question each other.

Aside from what I write in my translator’s note, one of the other reasons that this story is one of my favorites is because it was the genesis for his incredible novel with the same title. The short story and the novel actually have very little in common – the characters are different, most of the story is different, but the psychology is all there. The fear of living in darkness.

Finally, just a funny note. Living in Switzerland, just a few kilometers from where Ramuz spent most of his life and the fact that I’m obsessed with his work means that I see reminders of him just about everywhere. A few weeks ago, a truck passed me while I walked with the dog and my daughter on a country road. The name on the truck read “Milliquet” which is the name of the café owner in La Beauté sur la Terre. In this Hayden’s Ferry Review short story, Ramuz mentions a man named Larpin, the old man who is up walking around because he doesn’t sleep anymore. Well, my doctor’s name is Larpin and every time I drive past his office (which is just in the village, so I go past at least three times a week) I’m reminded of the scene of Larpin checking his watch and standing at the doorway, staring out on the dark night.

1 Comment

giving up the crazy

By

When I first started writing about books and reading back in 2006, I fell into a rhythm almost immediately, writing three times a week and keeping up with several reading projects at the same time. Not to mention the hours I spent reading and commenting on other literary blogs and, in general, being engaged in the online literary community. For any of you who visit this space regularly, you might have noticed that things became very quiet late last spring.

The obvious reason for my blogging slowdown has to do with a certain wonderful little girl who has just turned two. Parenthood has put the crunch into timecrunch for me and I’m still adjusting to the shock. I should also mention that Switzerland, for all its lovely scenery, good food and fun people, isn’t as social as many of its neighbors. Many women in Switzerland stop working when they have their children, and most only continue part-time. Child care structures are rare and hard to get into. We waited a year and a half to get 1.3 days at our local daycare and made do with a part-time nanny so that I could work 2.5 days a week. Since August, I’ve had three full days of child care and this has felt like a luxury. (A luxury that won’t last very long – our nanny is moving on in January and our daycare cannot pick up that extra day. Did you all hear that yelp of frustration?)

However, I know I’m not the only parent in the world with this kind of problem, and the details of juggling parenthood and profession isn’t what I wanted to write about, even if it’s related.

I read an article last week over at Salon called “How to say ‘Balls of Gold’ in French?” (I’m not linking to it because they don’t need to see my personal rant here about childcare and literary passions, but if you’re interested in issues of translation, I’d highly recommend it). The article basically reminded me what a futile struggle I’ve been engaged in for the last few years as I pursue both a fiction writing career and literary translation work.

Everyone knows that making it (whether financially or critically) as a writer of literary fiction is extremely hard, maybe even sometimes impossible. OK, I accept that. Fiction writing is for the extra hours. But somehow I missed the memo on realistic literary pursuits and so went ahead and added literary translation to the mix of “extra hours” work, as if this could somehow become the day job to keep my writing afloat. Ha! In the Salon article, translator David Bellos says, “You can’t really live as a literary or book translator in the English-speaking world as a full-time job and also sleep.”

And he’s talking about people who actually get book contracts—not aspiring translators (ahem, that’s me) who have only published a few short story translations and spend half their time querying publishers with samples we’ve completed in our free time, in the hopes of getting a ridiculously low-paid book contract. Before having my daughter, I had enough time to keep up with both paid work and my unpaid literary passions. Being a freelance commercial translator and editor (and teaching the occasional scientific writing class) meant that I could contribute to my household income as well as have two or three hours a day to write fiction and translate any number of writers I hoped to see make their way into the English-speaking world.

But since then – goodness, I’ve been running on a lot of hope and not much reality. I suspect I’m not alone in this tendency, but I’ve spent the first two years of my daughter’s life thinking I could keep up the same level of activity as I had before she was born. I never told my commercial clients that I was working half-time (because they would have found another translator), and so there were many weeks that I crammed 5 days of work into 2.5 days. On the days that I didn’t have childcare, I literally raced to my desk anytime she went down for a nap, and then worked most evenings after she was in bed and every morning before she would wake up. I even took a Dictaphone on walks—I would find a very quiet country road near the farm, let the dog roam, prop my Ramuz or whoever up onto the stroller, and dictate a translation while my daughter watched the trees and listened to the story. This may seem romantic, but it’s also a little crazy.

And amid all of this, I finished a novel and took on more reviewing work than I’ve ever done before. I’m sure you can see where this is headed—somehow all these different candles reached the end of their wicks this summer and I’ve been cutting back on superfluous activities ever since, this blog included.

But the realization I came to after reading the Salon article was that I’ve been engaged in a double impossibility for the last few years—it’s sad for me to admit, but there is simply very very very little chance that I’ll ever make it as both a literary fiction writer AND a literary fiction translator. And all the more so because I’m dividing my increasingly restricted time between the two. And each requires infinite dedication, infinite patience, an extremely thick skin, and a willingness to continue even though very little money will ever get made.

So, obviously, I need to make a choice. And really, when I think about it, there is no choice. When I get to the end of my day, if I haven’t written any fiction, I get a little panicked. Even if it’s only 500 words, even if it gets deleted the next day, writing fiction is the only professional accomplishment that means anything to me. And publishing is notoriously hard; no one is going to go waltzing into my hard drive and pick up the stories and books I’ve got sitting there. The work required to get published is nearly equal to the work involved in actually creating the story and getting the words onto paper.

Now, I’m not even going to start discussing the insecurities involved in sitting on two, soon to be three, novel manuscripts that no one seems interested in publishing. Suffice it to say that I’m perfectly aware of the fact that to give up literary translation in favor of writing fiction means I’m giving up something I love to focus on something that may never work either. This reality has occasioned many a sleepless night.

In a perfect world (or my version of a perfect world), literary translation would be a valued profession and there would be hundreds of publishers around the world jumping at the chance to make literature available in as many languages as possible. Even with the recent noticeable upswing in interest in translated literature in the US, I don’t see it becoming easier to make a living as a full-time literary translator. So I am ducking out—for now. Maybe, hopefully, someday I’ll try again.

Now, before this post devolves entirely into a pity party for me (too late, yes, I know). I will point you toward an essay written over the summer by Alison Anderson, one of the most accomplished French-English translators working today (and a really lovely person to boot). Anderson presents a sound analysis of the problem underlying the difficulty/impossibility of literary translation as stable career. Her essay is both thoughtful and invigorating.

I can only hope that because this issue is getting raised (by Anderson, by Salon, by the report that Anderson references in her essay), thus proving that the literary world is at least paying attention, maybe something will change in the future.

 

4 Comments

thoughts on reviewing translations

By

A few weeks ago over at Necessary Fiction, I reviewed Seven Years, a novel by a Swiss novelist writing in German. In that review I tackle the content of the book, and only make a few passing comments about the style. I actually wanted to say more about the writing but couldn’t find my way into that discussion within the review, so I settled for leaving it out. This kind of compromise always leaves me a little unsettled, especially because Seven Years is a translation and I feel strongly about not overlooking that fact when considering a book.

Recently, Words Without Borders has published a series of essays on how to review translations. The latest is by Scott Esposito, the editor of The Quarterly Conversation, and it’s a good one. Esposito provides some thoughtful framework-style guidelines for looking at a translation and finding a way to evaluate it. There are about nine essays now for the whole series, and they are well worth a read for anyone interested in reading or reviewing literature in translation.

Now, where I come to this in relation to my Seven Years review is that I sorely wanted to be able to say something about the translation. And in my idealist little heart I figured that I would find a way…I am a translator, right? I am also a huge fan of literature in translation, right? I live in Switzerland, right?  (Okay, Seven Years is set in Germany, actually, so never mind). But in the end, because I don’t read German, I simply did not feel comfortable approaching that aspect of the text.

The writing in the English version of Seven Years is unadorned and straightforward. The most interesting thing about it is that much of the dialogue comes indirectly, and even when it is direct, it isn’t set off from the rest of the text. So there are moments when you have to read a line twice to make sure who is speaking. Other than that, though, there isn’t much that stood out from Seven Years to raise my translator antennae…but maybe this is only because I don’t read German. Perhaps if I read German, I would have been able to see patterns in the translated English that could only come about because they were being created on top of German scaffolding. I see this with translations from the French and from Japanese, because certain phrasings and structures necessarily occur as the English grapples with the original.

You see my dilemma here. In my heart of hearts, I’d like to believe that someone unfamiliar with the original language can engage with aspects of the translation as suggested by these WWB articles, but I’m skeptical. And I get the sense that this great discussion on reviewing translation isn’t addressing this question head-on. (Except this piece by Jonathan Blitzer.) Is it possible to review fairly and thoroughly, emphasis on thoroughly, without knowledge of the original language? I want to think so, but I don’t think so. Examples? Anyone?

In the end, all I can say about Seven Years is that it is a translation, that an original text exists in German and that what I read was Michael Hofmann’s version of Peter Stamm. How that differs from someone else’s version of Peter Stamm I cannot say. And that frustrates me. I’d like to find a way through this problem.

11 Comments