In this section we publish short essays on the art and craft of literary translation, on translation theory, on reading literature in translation, or reports from events on literary translation. Our goal is to introduce new ideas or reflect on old ones, to create a dialogue around issues in literary translation, and to keep you informed about happenings in the world of literary translation.
Skinless Light and Time That Breathes: On Translating the Poetry of Gabrielle Althen
By Oscar Duffield
The work of French poet Gabrielle Althen (pseudonym of Colette Astier) is a simmering broth of intensity, strangeness and wild overgrowth verging on surrealism. These qualities are paradoxically nurtured rather than inhibited by her preference for miniscule, aphoristic snippets of text ‘sculpted’ (her phrase) out of the blank space that envelops them.
She chooses her words carefully, and knots or weaves them together into miniature scenes, often abstract and containing at most what she calls “embryonic” narratives.In a not-yet-published poem that she was kind enough to share with me she writes “It must be one of my days of intensity hunting”: I think this hunt permeates all of her work.
There Can Never Be Too Many Cooks: On Banana Yoshimoto’s “Kitchen” in English and in Italian Translation
By Harrison Betz
For six years, I have had a tradition: right around the beginning of December, when the Florida heat finally cools off, I slip my copy of Banana Yoshimoto’s Kitchen off the shelf and allow it to rekindle a warmth within my being. Translated in English by Megan Backus, the light, intricate, and mouth-watering prose of the novella has delighted me endlessly.
There comes a time, however, when even the most faithful of regulars may go off in search of new flavors. This year, after a bout of summertime craving, Kitchen tasted quite different, prepared alla italiana by Giorgio Amitrano. The classic I had come to know and love was still there, but in every other bite, there was something unexpected. In fact, I became quite certain that sentences had been added to the Italian text, words I had never recalled reading in the English.
Translator, Reader: “The Philosophy of Translation” by Damion Searls
By Brian O’Keeffe
“The philosophical account of translation in this book is of what it means to read like a translator” (5) writes Damion Searls. Some might object that philosophy isn’t particularly good at describing reading (or writing, for that matter) and argue that one should prefer literary theory, but Searls enlists philosophers to describe what translators do (they read). Philosophy, moreover, usefully displaces translation ‘theory’ which too often, in his view, involves telling translators what they should or shouldn’t do.
In his “The History of ‘Translation’” chapter, Searls objects to how Schleiermacher’s “On the Different Methods of Translating” has been reduced to the following line: “Either the translator leaves the writer alone as much as possible and moves the reader toward the writer, or he leaves the reader alone as much as possible and moves the writer toward the reader” (Schleiermacher quoted in Schulte and Biguenet, 42). It’s too easy to concretize an either / or dichotomy and deem one option good, the other bad.
One Man, Three Voices: A Case for an English Retranslation of Mohamed Choukri’s “Al-Khubz al-Hafi”
By Hanna Alwine
Al-Khubz al-Hafi follows Mohamed from an early childhood in the rural, mountainous Rif region of Morocco, to an adolescence stretched between Oran and Tetouan, to an autonomous life in Tangiers where he begins his journey to literacy at twenty years old. The book forces the reader to engage with the painful reality of young Mohamed’s life—his brother’s murder, his abusive father, the quotidian violence that slips its way into his sexual fantasies. Choukri grapples with themes of grief and belonging, violence and tenderness, family and country.
The book exists under three titles—the Arabic source text Al-Khubz al-Hafi, the English translation For Bread Alone, and the French translation Le pain nu. Written by Choukri in Arabic, his autobiography was simultaneously translated into English and published by Paul Bowles in 1973. Seven years later, it was translated into French by Tahar Ben Jelloun. The Arabic text wasn’t published until 1982 when it was promptly banned in Morocco until 2000 for its explicit depictions of sex, drug and alcohol use, and its biting critique of the father and familial structures. Nonetheless, the book circulated covertly, becoming a defining piece of Moroccan national literature.
Edith Bruck and What Women Writers Can Tell us about the Holocaust
By Jeanne Bonner
In the past 30 years or so, many women survivors have published accounts of their experiences — Italian authors and others — and various books in the genre have been translated into English. In addition to Bruck’s Letter to My Mother, other books originally in Italian include Giuliana Tedeschi’s There Is A Place on Earth, published in English in 1992, and Liana Millu’s nonfiction book Smoke Over Birkenau, which came out in English in 1998. The tales these women have to tell, which include hidden pregnancies and sexual predation, are ones we need to hear. But women’s accounts of surviving the Holocaust remain largely unknown.
To some extent, the reason why the stories of women survivors are less known is accidental; many women survivors didn’t write or speak out about their experiences until decades later. And within survivor circles, any effort to compare suffering has been understandably discouraged.
Mansplaining Mona: Against a Seamless Translation
By Daniela Jimenez Ochoa
The fact that fluent translation is more accessible to the 46% of Americans who can read above the sixth-grade level has created a literary economy where domestication is favored. To the bilingual reader, Morris’ translation is not seamless–though perhaps no translation can ever really be–but it adds a second, intermediary narrator that chimes in to “mansplain” what the reader already knows from the text itself. Therefore, his Mona is more redundant and self-explanatory; a version of the Spanish text that steps down to the American reader, not to be trusted with complex characters and materials. I propose that the translator mansplains Mona, or, in the words of Antoine Berman, that his translation deforms the textual body of this novel through extensive clarification.
The Bourgeois Shudder: Fantasy, Politics, Race
By Lawrence Venuti
Dino Buzzati’s Italian texts pose unique challenges to a translator, partly because they were written some time ago (1930s-1970s), but also because the fantastic is perhaps the most subversive of narrative discourses, resistant to understanding, or indeed any form of interpretive control. It establishes an unreal world that disrupts dominant notions of what is real, making them seem variously unfamiliar, questionable, irrational – i.e., unreal in turn.
Can this unsettling effect, I wonder, be recreated in a translation of Buzzati’s stories today, many decades after they were first published in Italian? I would be establishing a different sort of equivalence to his writing, not just to his words and phrases, but to his use of the fantastic and its overall social impact. Would I need to adapt the stories freely, making them relevant to the cultural and political debates that divide our own tumultuous moment?
Does my translation have an accent? Exophonic Translation and the Experience of Language
By Elena Borelli and Cecilia Rossi
In mid-July 2024, we met to talk about literary translation and directionality. We discussed questions which are integral to what we do, as we both are “exophonic translators” working from our “mother tongue” or “first language” into our “second language” or, more accurately, “main language,” English. Our conversation revolved around the nature of directionality in literary translation, in which the choice of the language in which one translates reflects both one’s personal experience of language(s) and a decision inherent in the act of creative writing. Choosing a language in which to write literature challenges the existing norms based on a binary distinction between one’s “first” and “second” language. In this essay, we report the essence of our conversation, recounting our experience in the third person, to indicate our respective contributions to this exchange.
The Translation Review: Why it Matters and How to do it Right
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? This essay explores the work that reviewers of translations do in the American context, from reviews in mainstream publications to those written for independent specialized outlets. The essay discusses 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.
A Pervasive Method: On John Taylor’s Approach in Translating Franca Mancinelli’s “All the Eyes that I Have Opened”
Translated from Italian by John Taylor
Taylor’s translation appears to be a systematic operation—in other words—oriented by his acknowledgment of a philosophically (as well as poetically) coherent nucleus in All the Eyes that I Have Opened, a collection that constitutes one of the most interesting releases of recent contemporary Italian poetry.
The repeated adoption of a translation approach (which admits, in its very constructions, the disarticulation of referential uniqueness), is thus carried out in line with what the Italian poetic voice is itself asserting. To wit: the compromise of one’s own subjectivity as a unified space, as a function of an ontological process that coincides, as the days go by, with what has been lost.
Bringing “The Art of Joy” to English Readers
Goliarda Sapienza, born on May 10, 1924, would have been 100 years old last month, but remains ever young, spirited, and determined to win the hearts of her readers. A plaque on the façade of a building at 20 Via Pistone in Catania, where Goliarda lived on the second floor, reads: “Questa casa, la strada, i vicoli, Catania, la terra di Sicilia hanno nutrito il genio narrativo di Goliarda Sapienza” (This house, the street, the passageways, Catania, the land of Sicily nurtured the narrative genius of Goliarda Sapienza.)
I owe L’arte della gioia primarily to Jonathan Galassi at Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Though the translation was actually commissioned by Alexis Kirschbaum at Penguin UK, Galassi had been interested in it for some time, thanks to a scout who warmly promoted it to him.
Translation and Its Present Contexts: On Translating Eudora Welty into Hebrew
A year ago, I was relatively new to the United States – living in Durham, North Carolina – when I found a copy of The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty in my neighborhood’s Little Free Library. I did not know Welty, but I took the book with me. I thought reading it could be a good way to get oriented. After reading some of it, I closed the book, but something in that story, “Where is the Voice Coming From?,” asked me to translate it. I didn’t understand why. It is a somewhat problematic story, I thought. I felt uneasy.
Bibikhin’s Task of the Translator: Introducing “On the Problems of Determining the Essence of Translation“
By Margarita Marinova and Anna Alsufieva
Vladimir Veniaminovich Bibikhin (1938-2004) was a Russian philosopher, translator, and philologist. Although the order of these descriptors can vary, what they all have in common is the careful attention to the “word as an event” (after Bakhtin) in their attempt to uncover the ontological foundations of language. This complex issue was the focus of Bibikhin’s thought in general.
During the 1970s and 1980s, he established himself as a prominent translator of the most complex philosophical, theological, and literary texts, and as a widely respected humanitarian scholar of a rare and extensive erudition. Bibikhin’s article we have chosen to present for the first time in English here, “On the Problem of Determining the Essence of Translation,” was written in 1973, but to understand its significance one must go further back in time, to the 1920s and ‘30s.
On the Problem of Determining the Essence of Translation
By Vladimir Bibikhin. Translated from Russian by Margarita Marinova
To the extent to which translation is a new re-play, a re-shaping of the given material according to the universal language rules, it is, in principle, just as independent as the original. It is simply that same original, only re-cast in a new form, and continuing to live in that new form. The original appears to be original only outwardly, in a temporal sense. In essence, that is, in its relation to the possibilities of human speech, it is not more original than the translation.
The original is lost, imprisoned in its private form. Translatability rescues it from those constraints. It reveals the fundamental, even if only potential opportunity of the original to exist in any form. Translatability shows that while the original may have been written in Japanese or Abkhazian, it was also first written in the universal human language. But, having liberated the original from its individual form, the translator now must breathe into it a new life in his native speech, recognizing and affirming in the process the universality of his own native tongue.
Against Camouflage: Jozefina Komporaly on Translating from Hungarian Melinda Mátyus’ “MyLifeandMyLife”
Melinda Mátyus’ novel in verse MyLifeandMyLife is one of the most original pieces of experimental fiction published in Hungarian in recent years. The book’s protagonist is desperately in love with a mysterious male figure, and this emotional dependency not only leads her to give up her agency but also gradually paves the way to her suffocation and ultimate demise. Melinda Mátyus writes in bold and deeply touching ways about contemporary women and her protagonists examine womanhood in a variety of manifestations and configurations.
This is the first translation of Mátyus’ work in a foreign language and it comes in a bilingual edition, with the original Hungarian following Jozefina Komporaly’s English translation. We are grateful to Ugly Duckling Presse for allowing us to publish here Komporaly’s translator’s note in which she discusses Mátyus’ unique sense of grammar and syntax, and her own approach to translating it.
The Afterlives of Natalia Ginzburg’s “The Road to the City”
Natalia Ginzburg wrote The Road to the City (La strada che va in città) in the fall of 1941, during a time of persecution, hardship, and deprivation. The previous year her husband Leone Ginzburg, a prominent intellectual and anti-fascist activist, had been confined to internal exile in the remote village of Pizzoli in the Abruzzo region. Natalia and their children had left their home in Turin and joined him in October 1940, forging a family and professional life in exile, despite the difficult conditions of their everyday reality.
The Road to the City came out in 1942, under the pseudonym “Alessandra Tornimparte,” which Ginzburg used to evade Mussolini’s antiracial law restricting Jews from publishing. This novella was her first longer work, and it already contained the salient features of her poetics: stylistic economy and understatement, simplicity of diction, psychology constructed through details and actions, and a topographic imagination with the road and the city as its organizing figures.
Toward a Speculative Poetics of Translation: Janine Beichman’s Translation from Japanese of Ishigaki Rin’s “This Overflowing Light”
By James Garza
Over a career spanning decades, Ishigaki Rin (1920-2004) forged a poetry of keen moral discernment and wry self-discovery. On the one hand, her work was democratic in its language and outlook, premised on the possibility of liberation from the strictures of poverty and repressive social institutions. But it was also grounded in the absurdities of the everyday and the domestic, with a propensity for sharp turns into darkness. While this picture is not wrong, Janine Beichman argues in This Overflowing Light: Selected Poems (Isobar Press, 2022), it needs an update to recover several vital aspects of her poetics. In the volume’s artful and engaging introduction, Beichman calls our attention to several correspondences with contemporary poetics: first, there is the speculative orientation of Ishigaki’s work, capable of uncanny leaps in spatial and temporal perspective. Then there is its under-explored connection to eco-critical thought. And finally there is its playful but intense awareness of the agentive role of fantasy and imagination in constructing ‘real life.’
Always Against: On Translating the Punk Rock Lyrics of Egor Letov
During the second half of the 1980s, the liberalizing reforms of perestroika ushered in a renaissance period for the Soviet Union’s nascent rock scene. Bands that had gotten their start in underground apartment concerts could court mainstream success at rock clubs in the western Russian centers of Leningrad, Moscow, and Sverdlovsk under the watchful eye of state security. If the music of the degenerate West could not be eradicated, they reasoned, the KGB could curtail its harmful influence by supervising concerts, ensuring that politically dubious or stylistically unorthodox groups remained in the margins.
Yet in the western Siberian cities of Omsk, Novosibirsk, and Tiumen’, where no such officially sanctioned venues existed, young rockers captivated by Western punk bypassed the censors by remaining underground and creating music openly critical of the Soviet system. The most well-known figure in this emerging punk counterculture was Igor Fёdorovich (“Egor”) Letov (1964-2008), who in 1984 founded the band Grazhdanskaia oborona (Civil Defense)
Julia Kornberg’s “Atomizado Berlín”: Creating a New Reader Across Translation
By Nora Méndez
In this essay, I investigate how Julia Kornberg writes a novel that challenges and subverts this ‘lazy’ reader with stylistic, formal, and thematic innovations, and think about how a translation of her text, though difficult or precisely because of that, has the ability to support and communicate across another language her careful mediation of the demands of the global literary market. In what follows I pay specific attention to how Kornberg utilizes the novel’s topic-choice, ambiguity of context, and inclusion of words in English, French, and other languages, to challenge the reader that the global literary market caters to reclaim their agency and individuality as able and active readers.
Stumbling Through the “Foreign”: A Look at Poupeh Missaghi’s Poetics of Translation
By Anna Learn
Poupeh Missaghi wants you, the reader, to stumble.
In her genre-twisting 2020 novel trans(re)lating house one, the writer and translator declares, “I want you to be disrupted when you arrive here, feel some discomfort, feel out of place” (35). Although trans(re)lating house one is presented to us in English, Missaghi insists that Persian is the true language of its characters and city. The book was ‘translated’ from Persian to English, then, before it was ever written. For this reason, throughout her novel, Missaghi seeks to “acknowledge the Otherness of both the territory and the language to you, make them visible, and celebrate them” (35).
Erasing the Dividing Line: On Christian Bancroft’s “Queering Modernist Translation”
“Translation is having a queer moment,” Christian Bancroft writes in the introduction to his monograph, Queering Modernist Translation (Routledge, 2020). The moment has been a long time coming: both fields, translation and queer studies, were thriving by the turn of the 21st century, but only over the past ten years have special issues and edited essay collections begun to emerge with some frequency to consider their intersection, and the resulting “expansive ways of imagining the relationships among languages as they relate to the identities, cultures, and societies that produce them” (1). The uninitiated may wonder, what can queer theory offer translation, as a study and practice, aside from ways of uncovering or confronting the gender biases and heteronormativity in and between languages? Much more than that, I can enthusiastically report.
Reading Elena Ferrante in Bulgaria(n)
Last year I read Elena Ferrante’s new novel The Lying Life of Adults (La vita bugiarda degli adulti) in Bulgarian, in Ivo Yonkov’s translation. It was September 2020, it had just been released by Ferrante’s Bulgarian publisher, Colibri, and I was in Bulgaria myself. I went to Helikon, the largest bookshop in my home town Burgas, and asked for Ferrante’s new novel. The saleswoman quickly showed it to me on the shelf and recommended, since I was interested in Ferrante, that I also buy Nora Roberts’s (or was it Danielle Steel’s?) latest novel. I didn’t argue with her – I just picked up The Lying Life of Adults, paid for it and left. I refrained from telling her that Ferrante’s book was not a romance novel and the bookstore should reconsider its classification. I didn’t tell her that I was a Ferrante expert, that my book Elena Ferrante as World Literature was coming out in a few months, that it was the first scholarly monograph on Ferrante written in English, and by a Bulgarian at that.
Always to Seek: On Reading Russian Literature in Translation
It all began with youthful audacity. When someone asked me one day, “What are you reading?,” the answer was War and Peace. There was a pause, a faint flicker of confusion in the face hovering above my own, and then a slower, more tentative second question: “Why . . . are you reading that?”
I, at seventeen, sitting propped up against my locker in the hallway, didn’t really have an answer. The plain grey hardcover teetering against my knees looked as thick and heavy as a brick (he said), and why would anyone want to read some novel about the . . . Russians . . . during the – what was it, again? The Napoleonic Wars? What was the point?
I shrugged with adolescent nonchalance. “I don’t know. It’s interesting.”
Neither Here and There: The Misery and Splendor of (Reverse) Translation*
Translation is a gnarly business. Even more so when you’re doing it the wrong way around.
In Bulgarian, which I translate from, translating into a language that’s not your native tongue is colloquially known as obraten prevod, which literally means “reverse translation.” As an adjective, obraten carries the negative connotation of something abnormal or backward, something that goes against the grain, or something that simply isn’t right.
A Materialist Approach to Translation
The translator’s sin is that of breaching the mythology which surrounds the individual authorial voice. The literary world erases the translator in order to preserve the liberal ideal of individual genius. And yet this erasure is not a distinctive problem of translation, but rather an expression of the worker’s alienation from the product of their labor. It is in fact the narrative of authorship which is unusual, in that literature is one of the few commodities which, rather than being conceptually distanced from the workers who produce it, is viewed as an extension of that worker’s self. By arguing that translation is art, translation theory abandons the possibility of fighting alienation writ large, and instead pursues for translators the unusual forms of acknowledgement which writers receive.