Translated books hold a unique place in the world of literature—and as world literature. They are capable of introducing readers to cultures foreign to them, and of dissolving the boundaries separating great writers around the world from the many readers, and writers, who would appreciate them. As David Damrosch explains in “What Is World Literature,” “To do better justice to our texts… we need to attend closely to what we are doing when we import them and introduce them into new contexts. Today we are making more and more translations from and among an unprecedented range of literary worlds; done well, these multiple translations can give us a unique purchase on the global scope of the world’s cultures, past and present” (14).
However, “good” translations require careful consideration in order to simultaneously further the ideals of world literature and create new versions of masterful pieces of writing without feeding into complex and problematic cultural hierarchies. And, if it is the (not easily attainable) goal of translators to create a version of a story that productively engages members of a target culture, thus serving the ends of world literature, it is the responsibility of those who review translations to demonstrate how translators do so and promote the visibility of good translations to a wider audience.
But how, exactly, can one assess the work a translation does in English, and how does it fit into world literature on the whole? What makes a translation “good,” and who determines what that means? Why is it important to review and appraise translations in our Anglocentric culture? In this essay, I explore the work that reviewers of translations do in the American context, from reviews in mainstream publications to those written for independent specialized outlets. I discuss what the work of reviewing a translation entails; what the purpose of the translation review is and what it can achieve in different contexts; and how the practice of reviewing translations can be improved.
Why Review Translations (Well)?
Translated books in the Anglophone context are often overlooked in the publishing and bookselling worlds. Unsurprisingly, one of the reasons why translation reviews matter is their impact on the recognition and sale of translated books. Much like any other book review, a positive read of a translated book, particularly by another accomplished writer, and/ or in a well-known publication can galvanize the success of the translation. Reviews of translations are particularly pivotal given that translated books comprise a niche section of the market. As Stiliana Milkova writes, “Only about 3% of books published in the United States are works in translation. And this miniscule number shrinks further when we realize that the majority of these translations are technical texts or reprints of classics; only 0.7% are in fact first-time translations of literary fiction and/ or poetry. These numerical values testify to a culture in which literary works in translation do not possess intrinsic worth or appreciate over time” (166). Demonstrating that translations are of general interest and are worthy of review, therefore, is an endeavor that requires genuine and continuous effort.
What I call “mainstream reviews” of translated books are important to the recognition of translated literature. There is not an exact binary of “mainstream” versus “non-mainstream” review; however, for the purposes of this essay, I define mainstream reviews as those published in widely-circulated, mainstream (non-specialized) publications, online or print, with which many readers are familiar, such as the New Yorker, New York Times, Washington Post, etc. These reviews tend to prioritize their wide readership and exhibit certain trends concerning translated literature that reflect the need to market to an expansive consumer base. However, precisely because mainstream reviews are so important, it is crucial to acknowledge that they are often flawed, and that they often do not represent translated literature in a nuanced way, or with an eye toward the very visibility they are best situated to encourage.
Most importantly, mainstream reviews often do not highlight translation as a salient feature of a translated book. Rather, they often attempt to review a translated book as if it were written in English. This may seem intuitive—in order to make translated literature fit in with all other literature, why not review translations like any other book written in English, focusing on whether or not it is enjoyable? However, separating a book from its cultural context is generally unhelpful. The purpose of a review is to allow a reader to engage more deeply with a particular text in some way, and to deconstruct, to an extent, how a piece of writing achieves its ends. Pretending that a book derives from the same background as its reader does not, in fact, endear the reader to the text, but provides them with an incomplete notion of it.
If it seems like a stretch to say that mainstream reviews intentionally obfuscate the fact that translated books are translated, and that this matters to the reader’s experience, there are many flagrant examples to illustrate this trend. First and foremost, there are reviews which do not mention that the text is translated at all. A striking example is Merve Emre’s review in Public Books titled “B-Sides: Natalia Ginzburg’s ‘The Dry Heart’.” It is crucial to discussing the book that Ginzburg was Italian, and that it was originally written in Italian, given the post-World War II critiques of Fascism implicit in her writing—and perhaps even more importantly given the specificity of her language, which is analyzed at length in the review without ever mentioning that said language is not Ginzsburg’s original writing but the translator’s. And more, Emre argues that the narrator’s killing her husband is an act of liberation from the oppressive domestic reality where she has been trapped, invisible and unheard. In effect, however, Emre kills the translator of the book, Frances Frenaye, trapping her within a regime of invisibility and silencing her original voice. How can one analyze an author’s distinctive voice without any acknowledgement that their voice has been fundamentally altered in the version of the text the reader encounters?
This is just one example among many mainstream reviews that overlook the fact that a piece of writing is translated. Some mainstream reviews do note that a work is translated, but still seem to avoid discussing this fact and gloss it over in a dismissive manner. In a typical mainstream review, the translator is named, and the quality of their translation briefly assessed. However, this is usually done (if at all) with a parenthetical aside, “translated by…” or with a single descriptive adverb, to say that the text was, for example, “beautifully,” “elegantly,” or worse, “fluently,” translated, which says nothing about how translation is an element of the text, nor gives the reader any greater insight.1
Furthermore, in searching for relevant mainstream reviews of translations, I was frustrated more than once by not just the priorities central to those reviews but the lack of reviews, in general. Why was I not able to find a review in a mainstream publication of a new(er) translation of Kafka’s The Trial by Breon Mitchell, but for a mention of said translation in an article titled “The Impossibility of translating Franz Kafka”?2 Why, in my preliminary searches, did I find mostly articles from the New York Times grouping multiple translations together—for example, articles titled “77 New Books in Translation,” “Four New Books in Translation Test the Bounds of Reality,” and “New Novels in Translation (To Read on an Island, Perhaps?)”?
The reviews themselves point to a trend whereby the fact of the book being “world literature” and congratulating the reader on their worldliness take precedence over the content of the books being discussed in mainstream reviews, which becomes secondary.3 This means that complex issues of the transference of language and stories across cultures in translation, and the particularities of certain translators, translations, and translation strategies, are further relegated to being a tertiary concern. Clicking on “77 New Books in Translation” reveals an animated heading that reads, “Globetrotting.” Additionally, these examples illustrate the ways in which translations have to be packaged to fit the mainstream aesthetic simply because they are translations, and would otherwise be considered unpalatable.
The aforementioned “New Novels in Translation (To Read on an Island, Perhaps?)” is an especially applicable demonstration of this point, given the political complexities of the books that the article actually reviews versus how they are marketed. While the attention-grabbing, tongue-in-cheek title suggests beach reads, the only basis for the parenthetical question is the fact that the books discussed in the review physically take place on islands, or were written by islander authors. Even to this, there is an exception: As the subheading exclaims, “New international fiction from Guadeloupe, the Canary Islands, Tahiti and Basque Country.” The Basque Country is crucially not an island, but happens to be (presumably) unfamiliar enough to the potential readership as to be lumped together with actual islands. It becomes clear, then, that the article’s title represents books deriving from niche or marginalized authors and communities as exotic in order to pique the interest of Anglophone readers.
These books are grouped together because they are translated and need to be marketed and represent non-Anglophone “others”—if this grouping seems arbitrary, it is because it is. The title is a marketing ploy, and while it might be an effective one, it nonetheless illustrates the pervasive idea that translations are unapproachable, and the subsequent attempts to make them so. Additionally, books in translation simply aren’t the focus of mainstream reviews often, unless the author or translator has won a notable award—the Nobel Prize for example, or the Booker Prize—or else was already famous (e.g., translations by Jhumpa Lahiri, who retains her status as a well-known author when she acts as a translator, and whose translations are therefore afforded greater attention). Translations might also receive some degree of recognition in the mainstream if the translation constitutes some sort of notable “scandal,” or if the translation is specifically positioned to as “against the grain”—for example, a “modern” translation, or an otherwise “avant-garde” translation (see Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey, which I discuss later).
This is broadly due to the established hierarchy that American culture has created between English literature made for English-language readers and all other literature, that positions original English work as the most culturally valuable. Essentially, our culture is attached to the notion of the singular genius of English-language storytelling such that it does not accommodate with any real recognition any other forms of literature. The mainstream review, therefore, is not expansive in its selection of global literature (when it does recognize it at all) even though there are many authors and translators producing many worthwhile pieces of literature worldwide. Thus derives, in mainstream translation reviews, the frequent erasure of the labor of the translator, and the implicit suggestion that the translator does not matter to the work, and to literature in general. Reviews with these omissions not only devalue the translator’s work, but change the way English-language readers interact with a text and its author in profound and problematic ways, because the reader has no sense of the cultural context of the author and the work, may miss important historical details embedded within the text, and is not encouraged to consider the multicultural resonances of the writing.
The translator, the author, and the reader are all done a disservice through the translator’s invisibility in these reviews, which in many cases fail to illustrate the complexity of the books and authors to which they make reference—or even to accurately represent them. As translator Nathan Dize put it in an interview, “a fundamental aspect of a review of a translation is a genuine attempt to engage with the labor, aesthetics, and intentions of the translator(s) involved in bringing the book into another language.”4 It is important that reviews of translated work do so, both because translators deserve to have their labor recognized—but perhaps even more importantly because “bringing a book into another language” is a cross-cultural endeavor central to why books are translated, how they are received, and how we interact with cultures other than our own.
Translations, Retranslations, and Cultural Ownership
The issue of translation’s visibility in reviews extends even further, then, than notions of recognizing translators and their labor as important, to the awareness of how translators and readers interact with cross-cultural narratives. This is to say, if a review fails to adequately discuss the translated text as a cultural object, the original author within their cultural context, and the translator as being intimately involved in the relation of this work to a target audience, then the reader who is not familiar with the source language or culture is given no true insight into the text. This is especially crucial in the case of the reviews I focus on in this essay—those examining work translated into English—because of how the myth of Anglo-American cultural dominance is continually perpetuated, and how translation into English interacts with problematic established cultural hierarchies.
As an example of how Anglo-American dominance versus nuanced representation become complicated in a translation review (when not handled with the appropriate care and centralization of translation dynamics), here is the first paragraph of a review of Clarice Lispector’s The Besieged City, translated by Johnny Lorenz (more on him later), written by Mike Broida and published in The Paris Review:5
In 1949, Clarice Lispector found herself in a bit of a funk, despite the effusive acclaim surrounding her first novel, Near to the Wild Heart, six years earlier. After the difficulty she’d faced getting her second novel, The Chandelier, published in 1946, her attempt to find a publisher for her third novel, The Besieged City, was proving no easier. The publisher of The Chandelier had rejected it, and so had many of Rio de Janeiro’s prestigious publishing houses. How was it that an author who had revolutionized Portuguese writing several years earlier, whose debut novel was praised as “the greatest novel a woman has ever written in the Portuguese language” suddenly couldn’t get her name in print? The Besieged City’s translation into English would be even more arduous—it is only arriving now, in 2019, seventy years after its initial publication and forty-two years after its author’s death.
Putting aside for the moment that to describe Clarice Lispector— renowned, controversial, groundbreaking, inspirational, and masterful Brazilian writer— as being “in a bit of a funk,” is at least minorly infantilizing, Broida also paints a hierarchical picture of the Brazilian and English publishing worlds, with English publishing at the epicenter of literature. The idea that getting The Besieged City published in English was “more arduous” than publishing her original work makes several assumptions, the first of which is that Lispector was equally as invested in people reading her work in English as she was in her original work being published; it’s possible that she was, but Broida offers no defense for that idea. And to suggest this despite the fact that Lispector primarily wrote for a Brazilian audience and from her own cultural perspective and not for an English audience surreptitiously positions an English literature publication as the end goal for all writers, which is in no way the case in general, and especially for Lispector.
Translators and those who are familiar with the particular place translated literature occupies in the world take care to note how language dominance functions, and how to avoid the perpetuation of Anglo-American literary dominance. In other words, the translation world recognizes that, as Venuti explains in “How to Read a Translation,” “the current predicament of English translation doesn’t favor sharp distinctions between the literary and the political, the aesthetic and the sociological. English is the most translated language worldwide, but relatively little translated into, particularly given the size and profitability of the American and British publishing industries.” This points to problematic industry standards that favor English as a dominant language, and reinforce western colonialist narratives surrounding language ideology.
In an interview with Barbara Halla, who was until very recently the Criticism Editor at Asymptote, (a magazine which specializes in world literature in translation), Halla noted that she chooses reviews that are sensitive to these issues as well, saying, “You shouldn’t try to impose too much of a western, Anglo-American perspective on the books that you’re reviewing, and should instead try to come to them on their own terms. This is why I like reviews by, if not translators, academics, who may have lived in a particular place, know the [source] language. They’re able to see the cultural context that a work is coming from. That’s the most important element for me—having someone who can de-center certain perspectives, and come to the work on its own terms.”6
These seem not to be concerns that Broida was able to integrate into his review of Clarice Lispector, as he glosses over both the complicated dynamics unfolding within the translation of her work and Lispector’s own cultural context. As Halla noted, this is a key difference between the ways that translators write reviews of translation, and the ways that non-translators do. Translation discourse is of particular importance to the argument this review makes about Lispector’s cultural context. Therefore, failing to address translation does a particular violence to the source text and author, given that Lispector’s cultural context informed so much of her work itself, and her unique perspectives are not only relevant to her writing, but defined it. A Jewish immigrant to Brazil from Ukraine, Lispector confronted problems of identity, religion, self-fashioning, national origin and identity, gender, and language itself. As an article from Jewish Women’s Archive explains, “[Lispector’s] fiction was neither ethnic nor naturalistically bound…The outstanding Brazilian and Latin American female writer of her generation, Clarice Lispector wrote lyrically inspirational works, employing an original use of language and revealing an intense search for understanding the enigmas of existence, the problems of self and subjectivity as well as identity difference, and the condition of psychological and spiritual exile” (Vieira).
This quote both provides more context for The Besieged City than Broida does in his review, and elucidates the reasons that the cultural context of translated work demands more careful consideration than Broida seems to afford The Besieged City in his review. While Broida does quote Lispector, discuss her identity in several places in his review, and note multiple times that the work is translated, his omission of the translator’s name and a fruitful discussion of the politics surrounding translating Lispector are apparent. He does not name the translator of The Besieged City, Johnny Lorenz, opting instead to write, “The Besieged City’s debut translation into English is the newest entry in the decade-long project of New Directions to translate or retranslate all of Lispector’s work, led by Lispector’s biographer, Benjamin Moser.” The focus on Moser, an award-winning author, entirely erases Lorenz himself— who, by the way, is a translator, doctor of English, the child of Brazilian immigrants, a Fulbright recipient for study in Brazil… the list goes on. This is not even to mention the fact that the review does not assess the quality of Lopez’ translation, or speak much to Lispector’s particular way of writing and intentional play with language.
A review of a translated book must mention the ways in which the writing has changed on its journey from one culture to another, and is far more worthwhile to the reader if it assesses the ways in which— and the degree to which—the translator has captured the essence of the original text by interpreting it. In fact, a translation “ought to be read differently,” Venuti proposes in “How to Read a Translation” (a title which could very accurately be extended to “How to Read a Translation and Write a Worthwhile Review of It”) and elaborates further:
A translation ought to be read differently from an original composition precisely because it is not an original, because not only a foreign work, but a foreign culture is involved. My aim has been to describe ways of reading translations which increase rather than diminish the pleasures that only reading can offer. These pleasures involve primarily the linguistic, literary, and cultural dimensions of translations. But they might also include the devilish thrill that comes from resistance, from challenging the institutionalized power of cultural brokers like publishers, from staging a personal protest against the grossly unequal patterns of cultural exchange in which readers are unwittingly implicated. Read translations, although with an eye out for the translator’s work, with the awareness that the most a translation can give you is an insightful and eloquent interpretation of a foreign text, at once limited and enabled by the need to address the receiving culture (Venuti).
Translations can give a reader an “insightful interpretation” of a foreign text, but don’t give a reader a totalizing view of the source culture. Readers should not think that they do, nor should they think that the text they are reading derives from their own culture, hence the need for the reader to know that a text is translated, and for a reviewer to talk about the translator, their credentials, how they approached a work, and therefore how they are able to transmit the aspects of the original that they are able to capture.
I have found that mainstream reviews often fail to consider writing as a living thing. In other words, the best reviews encourage more thinking, more writing, more and better translations; reviews of translated books written by translators tend to encourage advances, re-translations, and new interpretations of the texts they discuss. All too often, mainstream reviews encourage binary views of translations that reduce them to “good” or “bad”—and “goodness” is often assessed through the degree to which the translation does not announce itself. While reviews written by translators not only acknowledge the translator, but, when they criticize, do so in productive ways that encourage improvement, reviews not written by translators seem to focus on whether the book is easy to read in English. If so, they encourage reading the book; if not, they discourage it.
Consider a New York Times review of Lydia Davis’ translation of Gustave Flaubet’s Madame Bovary, which contains this line pertaining to the translation: “Given the pressure Flaubert applied to each sentence, there is no greater test of a translator’s art than Madame Bovary. Faithful to the style of the original, but not to the point of slavishness, Davis’s effort is transparent—the reader never senses her presence. For Madame Bovary, hers is the level of mastery required” (Harrison). While the line acknowledges a truism about Flaubert’s laborious style, and contains an (uncommon) acknowledgment of the translator’s skill that specifically references the reasons the translator’s work is particularly commendable, it is worth noting several allusions that this sentence makes, consciously or unconsciously.
The first of these allusions is the word “faithful,” a fraught and recognizable word in translation discourse deriving from the idea of Les Belles Infideles, an idea coined by Giles Ménage and described by Mark Polizzotti in Sympathy for the Traitor as “a venerably sexist French adage likening translations to women, in that they can be comely or faithful but never both”(49). The idea of a “faithful” translation is a pervasive one, but, as Polizzotti explains, “no one has been able to define, once and for all, exactly what fidelity means in the context of translation” (49), which, along with its sexist associations, is the reason that translation scholars have found the word “faithful” to be a double-edged sword. The fact that Lydia Davis is a female translator, and that female translators rarely get their due in general, heightens the implications of the word “faithful” in this context, regardless of whether the reviewer, Kathryn Harrison, intended this association—certainly, I don’t believe that she was attempting to be polemical or sexist—but the association prevails nonetheless.7
The second (possibly accidental) allusion in the sentence above is the idea of a good translation being “transparent,” and of the reader “never sens[ing] her presence.” The translator Norman Shapiro is quoted as saying,“I see translation as the attempt to produce a text so transparent that it does not seem to be translated. A good translation is like a pane of glass. You only notice that it’s there when there are little imperfections—scratches, bubbles. Ideally, there shouldn’t be any. It should never call attention to itself” (Kratz, 19:27). This exact quote is used as an epigraph for the first chapter of Lawrence Venuti’s The Translator’s Invisibility, wherein Venuti proceeds to examine the problematic paradigm Shapiro creates.
The Translator’s Invisibility identifies at length the issues evoked by the comparison of translation to a pane of glass, and the translator’s reduction to transparency. But to summarize its main points and my thoughts on its applications in discussing reviews: translations are not meant to be an invisible pane of glass placed over an original work, because this 1) devalues the labor of the translator, leading to fewer translations, translations of lower caliber, and a lack of recognition that causes translators to be chronically underpaid and underrepresented, and 2) diminishes reader engagement with world literature as such (as translations are forced to assimilate to American cultural values and consumer sensibilities, or else risk being deemed flawed) and valorizes translation at requires the least amount of mental effort on the part of the reader. Thus, while Harrison’s review is not bad— it does not obscure the idea that Madame Bovary is translated, and does point to Davis’ mastery of the text—it does so in a way (typical of mainstream reviews) that limits important discussion of the text and posits an oversimplified version of what translation is and does. Like Broida’s review of Lispector, it kills the momentum of the writing itself, this time by judging Davis’ “mastery” with a finality that does not encourage other translations and views the writing as somewhat dead; or at least immovable.
In comparison, in Lydia Davis’ own discussion of her work on Madame Bovary, “Some Notes on Translation and on Madame Bovary,” Davis analyzes her own translation, and of course is able to incorporate her perspective as a translator to greater effect. Davis, for one thing, observes that many translations of Madame Bovary exist, and to defend her own version, she puts it into its cultural context and provides examples as to how her text differs from other available translations. In doing so, she also provides the reader with several ruminations on the endeavor of re-translation and advocates for its continued practice. She explains that she’s been met with skepticism and confusion when she tells people she translated Madame Bovary despite numerous existing translations. Later, she provides her own rationale:
But in the case of a book that appeared more than one hundred and fifty years ago, like Madame Bovary, and that is an important landmark in the history of the novel, there is room for plenty of different English versions. For one thing, the first editions of the original text may have been faulty, and over the years one or more corrected editions have been published, so that the earliest English translations no longer match the most accurate original. The earliest translators (as was the case with the Muirs rendering Kafka) may have felt they needed to inflict subtle or not so subtle alterations on the style and even the content of the original so as to make it more acceptable to the Anglophone audience; with the passing of time, we come to deem this something of a betrayal and ask for a more faithful version. Earlier versions may simply not be as good in other respects as they could be—let another translator have a try.
In this way, Davis not only defends her own undertaking of translating Madame Bovary, but acknowledges the text—original and translation—as a living, dynamic thing.
Walter Benjamin’s “The Translator’s Task”8 reminds us that translations themselves are fluid, and re-translations should be encouraged, as they are often able to improve upon previous editions and suggest new ways of approaching a text. Halla also noted, “Translation is a future-oriented gesture. Criticism, too. It helps to think of translation as a review of the book, in a way, an interpretation in and of itself because obviously every translator will have a different interpretation, and language itself changes.” By underscoring this aspect of translation, Davis is able to provide examples of the ways in which her translation is doing something new (and, in her view, better) with the text, while still promoting engagement with the text in the future—even future translations. As translator Anita Raja notes in “Translation As a Practice of Acceptance,” “ the totality of the original text is not reproduced by a single translation, but by a series of translations: those that preceded the translation and those that will follow.” Thus, translations exist within not only cross-cultural contexts but in the contexts of all versions of the work that have come before them, and texts that have not yet been produced. Addressing these contexts grounds the reader in an ongoing literary history, which is crucial to engaging with world literature, and arguably any text.
Translation-conscious reviews are able to better speak to the importance of translated literature and represent translations in more informative, nuanced, and productive ways for readers. Many mainstream reviews seem to favor translations that are “domesticating” by virtue of the fact that they have a singular novelty deemed of interest to the American and English-speaking public—scandal, fame, or an attempt to go against the grain of existing translations. Mainstream reviews also retroactively domesticate by mentioning the translator only in passing and by “aestheticizing” the translator’s intellectual and creative labor (applying to it labels such as “elegant,” “fluent,” and “beautiful”). While mainstream reviews can be useful, the choices above seem to be influenced by an assumption that the reader will not want to venture reading outside of one’s own culture. I would argue that typically (good) readers of translations in fact do want to be challenged—that good readers in general want to be challenged.
Possibly because of our short attention spans and the need for aggressive marketing in order to sell translated literature, it seems that reviewers often attempt to give their readers short, digestible summaries concluding with definitive suggestions to read or not to read. Reviews that discuss how to read a text, explaining what has gone into a translated work’s creation, are able to achieve far greater ends for the reader. When one reads reviews that are sensitive to matters of translation, it becomes clear that they are able to accomplish just as much as mainstream reviews in terms of concerns of audience, genre, and readability, but have other advantages, too. Observing the differences between these reviews and mainstream reviews shows the problems arising from removing the translator from discourse surrounding a text, as well as the depth of review and analysis possible when one does engage with a translated work as such.
Read Part 2 of The Translation Review: Why it Matters and How to Do it Right.
Peter Fray-Witzer is a writer and translator from the Boston area. A recent graduate from Oberlin College, where he studied Comparative Literature, he now serves as an Americorps member at 826 Boston, where he is a High School Writers’ Room Program Specialist.
Works Cited
Benjamin, Walter. “The Translator’s Task.” The Translation Studies Reader, 3rd ed., Routledge, London & New York, pp. 74–83.
Boum Make, Jennifer. “Translation as Testimony: On Makenzy Orcel’s ‘The Immortals,’ Translated from French by Nathan Dize.” Reading in Translation, 2 Feb. 2021.
Broida, Mike. “The Siege of Clarice Lispector.” The Paris Review, 24 Apr. 2019.
Chamberlain, Lori. “Gender and the Metaphorics of Translation.” Signs, vol. 13, no. 3, 1988, pp. 454–72.
Cogan, Gaëlle. “A Genre beyond Gender: Anne Garréta’s Sphinx.” The Kenyon Review.
Damrosch, David. “What Is World Literature?.” World Literature Today, vol. 77, no. 1, 2003, pp. 9–14.
Davis, Lydia. “Some Notes on Translation and on Madame Bovary.” The Paris Review, 16 Sept. 2022.
Dize, Nathan. Personal communication, March 28, 2024.
Dize, Nathan. “Haitian Sacred Arts as Public Education: Antoine Innocent’s ‘Mimola, or the Story of a Casket,’ Translated from French and Haitian Creole by Susan Kalter.” Reading in Translation, 12 Aug. 2019.
Emre, Merve. “B-Sides: Natalia Ginzburg’s ‘The Dry Heart.’” Public Books, 22 Mar. 2023.
Halla, Barbara. Personal communication March 13 2024.
Harrison, Kathryn. “Desperate Housewife.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 30 Sept. 2010.
Kratz, D. (1986) “An Interview with Norman Shapiro,” Translation Review 19:27–28
Mason, Wyatt. “The First Woman to Translate the ‘Odyssey’ into English.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 2 Nov. 2017.
Milkova, Stiliana. 2016. “The Translator’s Visibility or the Ferrante-Goldstein Phenomenon.” Allegoria 73: 166-173.
Polizzotti, Mark. Sympathy for the Traitor: A Translation Manifesto. MIT Press, 2019.
Raja, Anita. “Translation as a Practice of Acceptance.” Translated by Rebecca Falkoff and Stiliana Milkova, Asymptote, 2016.
Tepper, Anderson. “New Novels in Translation (to Read on an Island, Perhaps?).” The New York Times, 15 Sept. 2022.
Venuti, Lawrence. “How to Read a Translation” Ed. Walch, Louis. Words Without Borders, 7 Aug. 2023.
Venuti, Lawrence. The Translator’s Invisibility. Taylor & Francis, 2018.
Vieira, Nelson H. “Clarice Lispector.” Jewish Women’s Archive.
- See a review in the New Yorker by Garth Greenwell that reviews two translations of Pajtim Statovci’s novels, but of translation says one single time, in parentheses, “(Both novels were translated, from the Finnish, by David Hackston).” See also a review from the New York Times titled “Four New Books in Translation Test the Bounds of Reality” which describes each translation once, in a single sentence or phrase as I note above, for example ““a lively translation by Chris Andrews.”
↩︎ - Nor did I find a review of the new translation of Albert Camus’ The Plague, aside from writing done by the translator herself. One would think, given the context of the global pandemic, that a new translation of The Plague would be of significant interest, but it has been largely overlooked. In 2021, Reading in Translation published a review by Andrew Martino.
↩︎ - This article from the online literary magazine n+1 further addresses how reading world literature has evolved to be a status symbol of the educated and worldly, and the problematic nature of such trends.
↩︎ - Dize, Nathan. Personal communication, March 28, 2024.
↩︎ - While I criticize Broida for his approach to this review, I do not want to devalue him as a writer or scholar, nor do I think he’s singularly to blame for the faults I find with this review. Mike Broida is an accomplished writer, and himself received a Fulbright for study in Brazil. He has written on Brazilian cultural differences, Portuguese writing, etc. He simply misses the mark here, and is not able to inhabit a translation-focused perspective. His writing is not overtly or purposefully disrespectful toward Lispector—the issues I find here simply point to problems within the industry of mainstream reviews with particular clarity, and I believe this review functions as a relevant example of traits of mainstream review that have become popularized but need improvement.
↩︎ - Halla, Barbara. Personal communication March 13, 2024.
↩︎ - Lori Chamberlain, in “Gender and the Metaphorics of Translation,” speaks further on the idea of the beautiful and unfaithful, and how it contributes to the devalorization of female translators. Furthermore, she makes a well-stated and compelling argument about the ways in which the translator’s invisibility (or transparency, as I refer to it in the next paragraph) devalues the work of female translators. Her essay further explores the ideas of production and reproduction, and how the classification and vilification of “reproductive” work like translation derives from sexist hierarchies, particularly within academia. Her argument about “examin[ing] what is at stake for gender in the representation of translation: the struggle for authority and the politics of originality informing this struggle” (455) is intrinsically tied to the visibility I argue for in this essay—it cannot be overlooked that the fight for the translator’s visibility has been primarily championed by female translators (such as, most recently, Jennifer Croft) because of the specific marginalization associated with femininity and translation, and how they have historically been linked.
↩︎ - Benjamin is very open to interpretation on this front. This is a conclusion I’ve drawn from this essay on a whole, but see specifically his discussion of the “afterlife” of a text (76). ↩︎