Read Part 1 of “The Translation Review: Why it Matters and How to Do it Right”
A book review can benefit significantly from discussing translation. Reviews that do engage with the translator’s approach provide the reader with a more profound analysis of cultural context and themes while maintaining some of the positive aspects of mainstream reviews, such as prioritizing readability and analyzing how certain audiences will react to certain texts. Jennifer Boum Make’s review in Reading in Translation of Nathan Dize’s translation of Makenzy Orcel’s The Immortals exemplifies this ability. This is how Boum Make contextualizes the translation:
The choice to translate such a critical text shedding light on rarely told stories responds to, at least, a twofold imperative: first, to place the novel into a new context and readership, opening a window into the lives of sex workers before and in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake; and then, second, to make debut novels and writers known to a broader audience. Dize’s translation develops a pedagogical approach that seeks to make the story accessible and legible to a wide audience beyond academic circles. While The Immortals is published by a university press, the prospect of an inclusive readership calls for translation choices that allow readers to actively engage in the story being told by having the possibility to become first-hand listeners without having their attention momentarily summoned by indefatigable footnotes.
It is easy to see here several parallels with productive aspects of mainstream reviews. The reviewer takes time to speculate about potential readership, what readers will be expecting, and who will most likely enjoy the text. This approach shares many similarities with mainstream reviews, especially in its expectation that foreign texts can be accessible, readable, and enjoyable to a wide audience.
However, the difference lies in the fact that Boum Make directly invokes Dize and his particular strategies as they relate to the reader’s experience, showcasing a greater depth of reading on the part of the reviewer (and not relegating his name to a parenthetical note). This invocation of the translator in fact also provides more useful information for the reader of the review, who is also either a former or potential reader of the translation, and therefore can benefit from an analysis of how they might expect to interact with the text. When reading mainstream reviews, it is almost easy to believe the translator is not being fully effaced. But reviews like Boum Make’s reveal what becomes possible when translators are truly considered part of the creation of a piece of writing.
This difference can also be seen in Nathan Dize’s own review of Susan Kalter’s translation of Antoine Innocent’s Mimola, or the Story of a Casket (also published in Reading In Translation; original text in French and Haitian Creole). This review analyzes not only the original text and Kalter’s translation, but how her translation allows for the work to be read from a pedagogical perspective. The title of the review, in fact, is “Haitian Sacred Arts as Public Education.” Throughout the review, Dize argues for this particular reading of Innocent’s text, and advocates for the ways in which Kalter has brought those specific interpretations to life in her translation. Even in a section in which Dize critiques the limitations of the paratextual materials Kalter includes along with the book, he retains a focus on the objectives of the book and the translation. He concludes the section with the idea “the paratextual materials, as well as the thoughtfully translated novel and annotated source text, will assist in the teaching of Innocent’s novel, which has been overdue for some time.” Dize’s focus on education and the concepts surrounding Vodou made visible to a wider audience through this text and its translation help to ground the review, suggesting possible audiences for it and readings of it.
Like Boum Make, Dize showcases extensive research and understanding of what the source text and the translation accomplish, which enriches his analysis. In what could be viewed as the thesis of his review, Dize writes, “When Innocent first published Mimola, he dedicated the book to his friends Vendenesse Éstapha Ducasse, Duraciné Vaval, and Massillon Coicou, who all believed, like the author, that theater, literature, the arts, and cultural translation could help bridge the urban/rural divide in Haiti and serve as a mode of public education. Susan Kalter’s translation of Mimola continues in the same vein of the arts as education by providing modern readers with a robust critical edition of this routinely overlooked 1906 text.” Dize then concludes that “Susan Kalter’s translation succeeds in framing Antoine Innocent’s early twentieth-century novel for twenty-first century readers, in presenting a polyphonic Haitian text to an audience in need of more Haitian stories, sacred and profane.” The reviewer puts the source text and the translation into relevant cultural context that might allow readers to interact more profoundly with the text—and he does so in a way that necessitates the discussion of the translation itself.
In viewing the book, the reading of it, and the act of translation as inseparable, Dize allows for the translator to be more visible. He even succeeds at making the translator a possible inroad to the text, citing her translator’s note and discussing how her afterward and the supplemental materials she curates bolster the reader’s ability to interpret the text:
Kalter’s afterword presents a deft summary of the novel and helps to reframe Innocent’s work more than a century after its initial publication. The historical contexts section, however ambitious, is lacking in a few respects. For instance, there are passages in the novel where characters express anti-Levantine and Islamophobic sentiments, which I believe deserve further consideration in Kalter’s paratext…Additionally, the historical context(s) section relies heavily on David Nicholls’ thesis on race and politics in Haiti from his 1979 text “From Dessalines to Duvalier: Race, Colour and National Independence in Haiti,” which has been thoroughly revised by scholars in the field. The limitations of these materials do not, however, detract from the narrative force of the novel and Kalter’s careful translation.
A critique of Boum Make’s and Dize’s review essays might be that, if we see the job of the reviewer as disseminating a translated work to as wide an audience as possible, reviews in specialized journals or magazines cannot possibly do this. Not only do they not have the backing of a big name, reviews by translators sometimes advocate for specific audiences and specific uses of their source texts and certainly invoke translation to a greater degree—which risks being seen as unpalatable.
Discussions of particular translational strategies not only evoke and provoke respect for the complexity both translator and author have achieved, but also help readers understand the source culture and what was/is important to the author. That is to say, a wide readership means little if the author’s true message is not being conveyed to that readership in an informed way mindful of the context the book was written in and the transformation(s) it has undergone between source and target culture.
Well-Known Authors and Translators In and Out of the Mainstream
Despite the fact that it is important to review lesser-known authors and books in order to diversify world literature, I acknowledge that, in order to actually improve mainstream reviews, it is also important to consider how the strategies I advocate for apply to books that are more popular, or more traditionally “marketable.” Therefore, I compare how mainstream reviews versus non-mainstream reviews deal with well-known authors, texts, and translators. To this end, I first examine reviews of Emma Ramadan’s translations of French author Anne Garétta (focusing on the novel Sphinx) and then a review of Emily Wilson’s recent translation of Homer’s the Odyssey.
To understand Emma Ramadan’s translation of Anne Garréta’s Sphinx, it is useful to know more about the text itself. Garréta wrote Sphinx as a member of the Oulipo,1 a famous French experimental writing collective, following their typical fashion of imposing constraints on their own writing (such as, for example, a story that does not include the letter “e”). Sphinx is a genderless love story: The narrator, known to the audience only as je, or I in English, and their love interest, whose name is only written as A***, are described without using any gendered pronouns. As one might imagine, translating such a text—made possible by specific grammatical rules in French—into English, is a monumental undertaking. And Ramadan’s skill, persistence, labor, and ingenuity in translating the novel cannot be understated.
Given this fact, and Garréta’s own fame, Ramadan’s translation of Sphinx has been reviewed several times since its publication in 2015, though somewhat surprisingly not by the New Yorker or New York Times.2 In 2015 Words Without Borders published a review by Jane Yong Kim, and in 2016 the Kenyon Review published “A Genre beyond Gender: Anne Garréta’s Sphinx,” by Gaëlle Cogan. Since these reviews both came out in publications that tend to prioritize world literature, one might expect that they would be quite similar in their attention to the translator’s role. Yet, they approach Sphinx in different ways. This is largely attributable to the fact that Kim is not a translator, and Cogan is, which makes all the difference.
Kim’s review affords more visibility to the translator than the typical mainstream review. Crucially, Kim quotes Ramadan’s translator’s note, which in general is an excellent way for reviewers to lend legitimacy to the translator and incorporate their voice. This quote is used to illustrate how Ramadan managed to render Garréta’s intentional play with gender and language, the genderlessness of the love story. Translation is mentioned only cursorily in the rest of the review, but ultimately Kim does no injustice to Ramadan’s translation. Because Words Without Borders is a specifically world-literature-focused magazine, the reviews it publishes are able to trust their audience to engage with world literature as such.
Cogan’s review achieves even more in terms of the translator’s visibility and analysis of the text because she is able to bring her unique perspective as a translator to bear on the review. Rather than simply mentioning Ramadan’s role, Cogan contextualizes it, and overtly recognizes it as well as the ways in which translation affects the text. Before quoting Ramadan herself (which, as I mentioned, is always a good sign, as it amplifies the voice of the translator), Cogan notes that “Translator Emma Ramadan works carefully to transpose Garréta’s text into a language harboring a different set of gender markings” (par. 9). The deliberate choice of the verb “work” acknowledges the translator’s contribution. Furthermore, Cogan takes a complex view of Ramadan’s translation that does not shy away from criticism, but does so respectfully.
Cogan mentions a few minor mistranslations that could be improved upon, and also analyzes Ramadan’s “handling of racial allusions,” as well as Garréta’s own “at best clumsy” dealings with race. This is a productive criticism of both Garréta and Ramadan that enriches the audience’s understanding of both the original text and the challenge of translating it, while giving insight into Ramadan’s process. In fact, Cogan seems to argue that Ramadan has, through her translation, provided us with a useful new cultural object. This approach allows readers to see translation as a transformative and productive endeavor, an outlook that is both crucial to understanding why a text has been translated (which a review should address) and is usually addressed only by translators themselves.
Translator Wyatt Mason’s review of Emily Wilson’s translation of the Odyssey, which appeared in the New York Times, is one of the few mainstream reviews I found which was written by a translator. It is lengthy, visible, given the popularity of the New York Times, and also somewhat unusual in what it accomplishes and how it does so. It is a mixed bag of features to be encouraged in mainstream reviews—namely that translation is made central to the review’s argument—and features that are more problematic. Mason’s review, part critical analysis and part interview, focuses far more on Emily Wilson herself, and the particular translational tasks than the typical review of a translated book does, mainstream or otherwise. The reason is apparent, and announced in the title, “The First Woman to Translate the ‘Odyssey’ Into English’; so, this review does ultimately fall into the mainstream pattern of translation becoming relevant because of some market-ably attention-grabbing aspect.
How this review simultaneously fits into and subverts the typical (and problematic) paradigms of mainstream review is complicated. On the one hand, it takes care to analyze in detail Emily Wilson’s translation, gives her literal voice within the review by including quotes from Mason’s interview with her, and tackles the challenge of explaining the Odyssey’s historical context, relating the difficulty of translating it to said context. It also suggests the ways in which a female translator’s perspective enriches the text and changes our understanding of it for the better, while at least to some degree addressing the sexism inherent in the scholarly world and how it applies to translation as well (which I would consider necessary in such a review).
On the other hand, the review still sensationalizes Wilson and her translation in a manner both typical of mainstream reviews and entirely avoidable. To name a few examples: Why is Emily Wilson’s name not in the title of the review, and only in the subheading? Surely, if one of the great accomplishments of this review is giving Wilson the due credit she has been denied as an academic throughout her life (as the article itself discusses), one of the most straightforward ways of acknowledging her and affording her publicity is the transparency of making her name central to the review.
Additionally, I cannot pretend to be thrilled by the description of Wilson that introduces the review: “the British classicist Emily Wilson, a woman of 45 prone to energetic explanations and un-self-conscious laughter, was leading me through a line of Ancient Greek. ‘Polytropos,’ Wilson said, in her deep, buoyant voice…” While I am generally in support of contextualization, as well as transparency surrounding a translator, references to their personhood and personality—attempts to humanize translators, who, as Mason likely understands, are far too often relegated to the shadows—I question how necessary some of these details are, and how many of them would have been used to describe a male translator.3 I immediately balk at a description of such an accomplished writer, translator, and academic, that includes so many of the pitfalls associated with men writing fictional women. It is frustrating to see a review take many steps in the right direction in terms of recognizing the (female) translator, but still be shortsighted in many regards.
There are strengths to Mason’s review, however—it does address the discipline of literary translation and defend its continued importance with a degree of finesse made possible by Mason’s perspective as a translator. Also, because the review is an interview, it does succeed at least partially in publicizing Wilson’s own voice and letting her speak to her experience as a translator and within academia—I propose the translator’s voice being integrated into reviews as one of the ways in which mainstream reviews should be improved. Another way Mason succeeds at bringing translation to the forefront of his review, and which should be a feature of all good translation reviews, is considering why it is important to translate, and specifically why it is important to translate the work at hand. Mason carefully explains the import of retranslations, with Wilson’s translation as an example. He even defines retranslation as a crucial part of comprehending and studying world literature: “That there could still be big questions about a nearly-three-millenniums-old poem that most everyone has heard of….has everything to do with how Wilson is seeking to redefine the job of modern literary scholarship.”
Mason, therefore fulfills the absolutely necessary function of examining what translation is doing for the world and how it furthers engagement with a text, and directly elucidates how Wilson’s translation contributes to literary scholarship on a whole. Indeed, examining how world literature is studied and how a particular translation expands that notion is the purpose of a translation review. He explains at length in his article why translation is important, citing the earliest debates about translation and in fact sketching out the entire history of translation in order to defend his (and Wilson’s) point that translation is the interpretation of texts, and the interpretation of texts is what the study of literature is about; without it, scholarship crumbles. And while I don’t believe that every translation review has to do this, I believe that every translation review has to have at its center this idea of, as Mason puts it, “what a translation is doing—and what it should do.”
What Mason does, then, in this tour-de-force of a review, is establish a standard for what translation review is as a practice. One can understand when reading this review why translation reviews exist: to ask questions about the state of literary scholarship; to posit how specific translations do or do not succeed at enriching it; to encourage a way to approach the translation, given these ideas; to help us understand why a translator made the choices that they did; and to, therefore, form a complete understanding of how the text in front of us has come to be there, why we are reading it, and what it is doing.
Bridging the Gap: How to Improve the Translation Review in the Mainstream
Mainstream reviews certainly accomplish many goals, such as visibility for the work they focus on (even if the pool of this work is quite limited). It is not wrong to advertise world literature as such, to cater to an audience who is less familiar with reading translations, or to use eye-catching titles or graphics. Without reviews that imagine an average reader, that recognize the importance of reader experience, and that employ certain marketing tactics to draw in a wider audience, translated books would seldom be sold. On the other hand, as it stands now, mainstream reviews generally do not provide the kinds of insights that reviews by other translators do, and in fact contribute significantly to the translator’s effacement even while mentioning the translator and their work. This seeming acknowledgment is a particularly insidious feature of many mainstream reviews, because they have the appearance of considering the text in the context of translation and world literature while doing little to lend the translator visibility or discuss elements of the text in translation.
Ultimately, the pattern emerges that when reviews of translated work are written by non-translators, or writers who have not at least spent considerable time learning about the source text and culture, those reviews often do not adequately accommodate cross-cultural perspectives, or delve into some of the most interesting features of a particular work of literature. When I asked Halla about what mainstream reviews accomplish as compared to those written by translators in independent publications, she expressed that only those who engage with translation can ask the kinds of questions that allow us to understand world literature—and how to approach a book in general. Of the importance of cultural context to reviews, and thus to a book’s “future,” she said:
There are schools of thought that say a book should stand on its own. But a book also has to speak to a particular moment—it has to speak to something in our lives. That’s something that a good critique can really reveal: Where does it fail? Where, and how, does it speak to, if not the present, then the future or the past? What kind of philosophical project does it have?…. 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.
So, how must reviews change in order to afford translated literature more cultural and popular recognition—and to ask the right kinds of questions about world literature? Firstly, large publications must begin to open up to world literature as worthwhile and readable, hire people with translation and world literature backgrounds into their permanent staff, and generally trust readers to interact positively with translated literature. Ideally, the cultural shift towards the acceptance of translated literature without erasing it as such and the elevation of translation discourse within the hierarchy of literary discourse would involve more translation reviews written by translators and published in mainstream venues, in addition to those in Asymptote, Hopscotch, Reading in Translation, and Words Without Borders. And these reviews would not have to be modified in order to fit the aesthetic of the mainstream—the mainstream would instead adapt to them.
But while encouraging large publications to consider translators’ perspectives is certainly one aspect of more accurately and thoughtfully representing translated literature in popular discourse, it is equally important to note that authors can be trained to review translations in positive, comprehensive, and productive ways. This is a concept that I have discussed with both Halla and professor and translator Stiliana Milkova, who both expressed that one problem mainstream publications encounter with integrating translational perspectives is that the pool of translators reviewing work is smaller than that of creative writers authoring reviews. Relatedly, attaching a well-known author’s name to a review can grant it visibility and authority that it would otherwise not have, which is especially crucial in reviews of translations that receive less exposure and are more difficult to market to begin with. So there is also considerable merit to creative writers reviewing translations, as long as they do it by thoroughly considering translational perspectives and incorporating them into the arguments of their reviews.
Nathan Dize also suggested that style guides and the expectations of mainstream reviews have a huge impact on what reviews are able to achieve: “On a practical level, I think that style guides impact translation reviews. If the reviewer does not have the space to account for the five Ws of the book, its plot as well as the author and their background, and the translator, the latter is likely to get the ax. Longform reviews tend to be a space where translators can filter in, but this is almost always up to the reviewer and their agenda.” This theory rings especially true to me given the comparative interrogation of translation as a major issue within Mason’s “longform” review. It also suggests that mainstream publications might benefit from adjusting their style guides concerning reviews of translated work, in order to accommodate the unique challenges that reviewing translated literature poses.
A final way that Dize suggests the landscape surrounding world literature could change is through more thoughtful marketing tactics when it comes to translated books. He posits that consumers are likely to buy that which is marketed to them, and, “If Barnes and Noble or Amazon were to have a translated literature table or a translated literature page, consumers would likely buy them.” He also notes that indie bookstores and presses, as well as independent magazines “do this very intentionally for moments like Women in Translation month.” This is certainly an idea that mainstream publications could further employ, to the advantage of consumers and with the result of boosting the status of world literature in popular discourse. I would argue that among the suggestions made herein regarding how to improve the recognition of translated literature and translators, adding a translated literature page on bookselling websites is one of the easiest to effect, and also one of the most promising.
The main reason that book reviews exist is to provide readers (or potential readers) with a perspective through which they can appreciate what a particular piece of literature does—and understand how to approach the text. Therefore it stands to reason that translated books deserve and require reviews that take into account the labor of the translator, what is lost and gained through translation, and the cultural context from which the book derives. Translators and translation must be recognized in order to represent world literature as worthwhile, especially in the face of institutionalized cultural dominance that attempts to downplay the achievements of non-American, non-Anglophone authors.
If translations (into English) are meant to reproduce the essence a foreign text for the English reader, and reviews are meant to facilitate the reader’s engagement with the essence of a text, then it is impossible to adequately review a translated work without discussing the journey the text has taken to arrive in the reader’s hands. This is why it is imperative that reviewers consider the discussion of translation and translators to be intrinsically tied to how the text can and should be interpreted.
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.
- She was also the first female member of Oulipo, and the first person to be admitted who was born after the group was founded. ↩︎
- The New Yorker and New York Times have both mentioned Emma Ramadan’s writing and translation multiple times, but do not have feature articles about her, nor her translation of Sphinx. I say this is surprising because even the sensationalism of a female translator translating the first female member of Oulipo seems not to have been sufficient for the translation to have been afforded mainstream recognition. If anything, I think this shows just how high the bar is for translations to reach the public eye. ↩︎
- Of course, I can’t fully unpack the degree to which I find this inappropriate, sexist, and disappointing. Why mention her age or her “energetic”-ness, as though to oppose an implicit assumption about 45-year-old women not being energetic? Why “un-self-conscious laughter”? What does that mean, but to suggest that women are (should be?) naturally self-conscious and to try to paint Wilson as some sort of “not-like-other-girls” model minority? Can we imagine Lawrence Venuti being described this way? (Perhaps: “A man of 71, Venuti hardly looks to be older than 40 as he sits with a book in his lap, his bald head gleaming jubilantly in the late afternoon sunlight…”)
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Works Cited in Part 1 and Part 2
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.
This insightful analysis highlights the value of translation reviews that engage deeply with a translator’s approach. By emphasizing the translator’s role, reviews like Boum Make’s and Dize’s foster a richer, culturally aware reading experience and broaden audience understanding.