Michelle Bailat-Jones

Writer, Translator, Reader

Posts tagged ‘translation’

Pastoral by Charles Ferdinand Ramuz

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My translation of “Pastoral,” a short story by C.F. Ramuz was published in the Winter issue of The Kenyon Review. This is a lovely little story about a young shepherd girl and teenage boy. Ramuz’s particular eye for village life is so clever, so sharp. Here is a short excerpt:

The magpies are carried away like pieces of half-burned paper in a fireplace. They are standing a little below the forest. A pine tree forest. The forest cracks, the forest leans. They watch it tip backward all of a sudden, showing the red of its trunks, and then it leans forward again. It disappears beneath its foliage. The forest is red, the forest is black; it takes turns shifting from red to black. There is an explosion, a crack, and then they stop watching because they’ve thrown their two hands forward against the ground (turning their backs to the forest). The goats stop grazing, astonished at this grass that keeps moving, which seems to escape them like water running up an incline.

Click here to buy the issue.

a review of the new Madame Bovary translation

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I’ve recently come across three excellent articles, all about matters close to my own heart. I’ll mention the first one today and get to the two others either tomorrow or Monday.

The first is Julian Barnes’ Writer’s Writer and Writer’s Writer’s Writer from last week’s London Review of Books. This is not only a thorough and excellent review of Lydia Davis’ much-celebrated and much-discussed new translation of Madame Bovary, it is also a careful discussion of what literary translation is all about and what kind of choices translators must make.

With careful and good-natured severity (the best kind), he explains many of Davis’ choices and compares them to other, previous English versions of Madame Bovary. These comparisons are wonderful for a details enthusiast like me, as each reveals how the various translators interpreted or compromised the original.

I haven’t read Madame Bovary in translation, and I didn’t really plan to until reading this article, but as a translator I am now extremely interested in the choices that its previous translators have made. One choice that Davis made came as a surprise to me – she wanted to mirror Flaubert’s grammar and sentence structure as much as possible. This is a curious choice. Often a French sentence is a little turned around compared to an English sentence, not in terms of subject/verb or the big important parts of the sentence, but in terms of the little clauses and the commas. This is part of the musicality of French, and something that English doesn’t necessarily have.

As Barnes suggests, and I would agree, to keep Flaubert’s grammar in English is a risky decision. It keeps the translation accurate in one sense, but opens up a separate claim to inaccuracy. If a sentence reads awkwardly once it has been transformed into another language, this is a deep betrayal of a writer like Flaubert whose prose is anything but awkward. Which obviously makes Flaubert a most difficult writer to translate.

Barnes’ final critique of Davis is that she isn’t a great fan of Madame Bovary and he wonders whether it is possible to create a truly masterful translation when you are “out of sympathy” with the work. This is an excellent question. I would tend to say no. If you cannot find the beauty of the work in the whole, and not just on a sentence per sentence basis, I suspect your readers won’t either. But Barnes is ultimately fair with Davis, however, calling her translation “more than acceptable.”

For those of you who have read Davis’ translation, or any others, I’d be curious to hear your thoughts.

Sten Nadolny – The Discovery of Slowness

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From The Discovery of Slowness:

It was an evening sky of infinite duration, shadows becoming gigantically long, and when swaths of mist rose, they turned at once into reddish clouds, changing colors up to the northern horizon.

John looked out on the ice, studied its forms, and tried to understand what they meant. It was true, then, that with its own power the sea could surpass itself. Here was the proof. Here he discovered the meaning of his dreams.

I loved this book.

Sir John Franklin was a real person and Nadolny follows his fascinating life with great care from what I can only assume came out of a formidable amount of research. The novel does so much more, however, than recount the facts of Franklin’s life. It investigates an aesthetics of thought.

On the surface the book is about Franklin’s passion for the ocean, for exploring and discovery. But Nadolny only uses this “fact” of Franklin’s life to engage with the more complex notions of intellect, empathy and honor (to oneself and to others). I was most interested in this idea of slow, deliberate thinking and how Franklin was aware of the way his mind worked. His “character” develops along with the movement of the story and the great events he lives through, but more interestingly, his perception and understanding of his capacity for reflection is subject to a more subtle, but ultimately more profound, revelation.

This book was originally published in German in 1983 and translated into English by Ralph Freedman in 1987.

bookish news

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The Quarterly Conversation and Open Letters Monthly have teamed up this summer for a group read of Murasaki Shikibu’s The Tale of Genji. The idea is to read about 70-90 pages a week and they have selected the more recent Royall Tyler translation. I’ve decided to join in and ordered my copy of the translation last week. My only experience with Genji is the original and Seidensticker, so this will be a treat. For other language nerds like me, there exists a very cool website in Japanese of the original Genji Monogatari, with the classical Japanese, the modern Japanese and a Romaji transliteration in three interactive panes. So. Much. Fun.

And I just learned (a month late) that Amazon has decided to launch a translation imprint called AmazonCrossing. Using their ever-so-detailed sales and reviews data, they plan to pick up books which are likely to become big sellers and have them translated. On the whole I think this is fantastic news…more books from around the world making their way into English. The first book they’ve picked is from France, The King of Kahel by Tierno Monénembo. I’ll be very curious to see what other books get on to their list.

Arnost Lustig – Lovely Green Eyes

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Back in early April I put together a list of books for a culture clash project but I’ve been very slow getting the project off the ground and just read the first of these titles over the weekend. However, my first book was definitely worth the wait – Arnost Lustig’s Lovely Green Eyes (translated from Czech by Ewald Osers).

I don’t think I could have started this project with a more perfect (and unfortunately, by that I mean tragic) example of cultural conflict. Lustig’s novel is set during the last few months of WWII, at a military brothel in Poland, and describes the experiences of a 15-year-old Jewish girl who manages to exchange death at Auschwitz for life as a prostitute.

For a number of very obvious reasons, this was not an easy novel. The task Lustig set himself, if indeed that is how he conceived it, seems to have been to create a stunningly, achingly beautiful narrative out of a subject more suited for nightmare. The physical landscape of the novel is fashioned from a meticulous collection of horrific and specific detail – ash from the gas chambers at Auschwitz floating through a wintery sky, the scrapings and rustlings of rats in the brothel, a constant inventory of eye color and hair color, the visible signs and symptoms of malnutrition and chronic dysentery, the sounds of physical violence.

That landscape is bleak and cold and horrible, as it is meant to be. But Lustig takes great care to integrate an abundance of humanity to his narrative. Skinny, as she is called at the brothel, alternately condemns and forgives herself for choosing to become a prostitute to escape death. She wonders continually at her desire to survive – Is this a sin? Would it have been better to die?

Aside from Skinny, Lustig’s humanity comes from the faces and stories of the other prostitutes, from the Madam, even from the soldiers which arrive by truckload for the girls each day. One of the more fascinating expressions of Lustig’s vision comes from the juxtaposition of two officers who come for Skinny – Wehrmacht Captain Henschel and Obersturmführer Stefan Sarazin from the Waffen-SS. Both of these men are her enemies, both would kill her on the spot if they suspected her true ethnicity. They are each a part of the vast and frightening Nazi machine, yet Lustig renders each so carefully, gives each a unique and complicated identity, they become one of the many faces of the war. Sarazin, in particular, presents an intricate portrait of Nazi psychosis.

Through Skinny’s encounters with these two officers, Lovely Green Eyes goes courageously deep into the psychology of what it meant to believe in the war from the German perspective and what it meant to understand that belief and know you were on the wrong side of it.

Of all the books on the Holocaust that I’ve read, this has to be one of the very best, along with George Semprun’s L’Ecriture ou la Vie, which I felt treated the subject in a similar way – how do we live with the memory of a tragedy of this scale, on both a personal and more collective, or national, level?

Lustig has three other novels, all of which have been translated. His first novel, A Prayer For Katerina Horowitzowa, was published in 1974 and nominated for a National Book Award.