Exophonic translators question not only the equation language and culture, but also the motives driving the translation of a certain work of literature in a certain language. The motives rest in the translator’s “language biography,” a complex and fascinating intersection of personal experiences, bodily encounters and relationships with languages and texts, as well as subjective perception of languages and cultures. In other words, with exophonic translators, the focus is not on the translated text, but on the translators themselves. This shift of focus from text to translator has led to the creation of a new sub field of Translation Studies, called Translator Studies, investigating the lived experiences of individual translators, or their Spracherleben.
Viola Ardone’s international bestseller “The Children’s Train,” translated in English by Clarissa Botsford, offers a touching glimpse into post-war Italy’s “happiness trains” (i treni della felicità). Part of a relief effort organized by the Italian Communist Party, these trains sent 70,000 impoverished children from southern Italy to live temporarily with families in the north. Through a blend of historical detail and imaginative storytelling, Ardone tells the tale of one child, Amerigo Speranza, and how his experience with the children’s train shapes his life.
Alessandro Barrico’s “Silk” is a story about the tension between Self and Other. Baricco’s main character Hervé Joncour travels repeatedly to Japan from his small, French town of LaVilleDieu in the 1860, to buy masses of silkworm eggs to replenish those at home struck by a silkworm-killing blight. Leaving his wife Hélène at home, he becomes secretly enamored with a young Japanese girl, whom he distinguishes for her eyes that “did not have an oriental slant” (19), a feature that immediately calls into question her otherness while nonetheless asserting her foreignness.
“Silk” reads differently in each of its two English translations. The style of writing and the quality of the prose is where the two translations diverge. Goldstein has prioritized the “sparseness” of Baricco’s prose in a very literal sense. Her translation is minimal in its embellishments and its interpretation, rendering the novel into English in its most accurate, albeit plain, form. Waldman, on the other hand, has evidently prioritized the text’s beauty and lyricism.
Published in Italy in 1996, “Silk” (Seta) was an immediate bestseller. It was translated in English in 1997 by Guido Waldman – a respected translator and editor whose titles include Ludovico Ariosto’s “Orlando Furioso” and Giovanni Bocaccio’s “The Decameron.” Retranslated by none other than Ann Goldstein in 2006, “Silk” accompanied the film adaptation, an international co-production that didn’t receive much acclaim. Despite the film’s lackluster fate, the retranslation in English of a contemporary literary work by a living author less than 10 years after its first translation, is a notable event.
Above all, “Silk” is a novel that dwells in silences and negative spaces, an examination of unfulfilled desire and all that remains unspoken. Joncour’s fixation on the young concubine that captured his imagination remains unrealized, buried beneath clandestine love notes and quick glances. Joncour himself remains evasive throughout the novel, his identity as slippery and difficult to grasp as a swath of silk (back home in France he becomes “the Japanese,” not only a reference to his travels, but also a hint at the other hidden inside the self). It is in these empty spaces that this story of desire and identity begins to unfurl, as lush and heady as a children’s fable.
The publication of “The Collected Poems,” with excellent translations and critical apparatus by Roberta Antognini and Peter Robinson, represents, alongside Norton’s 2018 edition of “The Novel of Ferrara” translated by Jamie McKendrick, the culmination of Bassani’s work now available to the English-speaking public.
“Black Box Named Like to Me” challenges the limits of syntax and image to hold the full scope of the imaginary in its grasp, touching on questions of motherhood, the future, memory, and the acquisition of language. The page is a zone for play, here, both in my translation and the original Spanish; words and ideas undergo radical transformation to best serve the purpose of the poems, shapeshifting at will.
How could a Russian speaker who has never been to Azerbaijan, who is not a specialist on the country or even the region, become the English language voice of Azerbaijan’s most important writer? The answer, of course, lies in a single, fraught word: colonialism.
It is Izidora Angel’s translation that brings Leah’s inner world to life. A Bulgarian American food writer, travel journalist, and translator, Angel renders Leah’s fantasies with the sort of precision and richness that only a writer of her caliber could accomplish.
It is the idea of comfort within pain that propels this novel forward. The motherless protagonist, now re-birthed in translation, emerges as an individual specially equipped to help those who need it most, and finds in her abilities a reason to keep going.
An impressive feat of Izidora Angel’s translation from Bulgarian lies in its ability to communicate the sense and culture of a foreign place while still providing a universal, relatable message. The presence of Bulgarian culture is strong—yet it does not prevent access or hang readers up on the foreignizing details.
This post features a cluster of reviews of Nataliya Deleva’s novel “Four Minutes,” translated from Bulgarian by Izidora Angel. This post also reflects on the principles and practices guiding a new college course on the art and craft of the translation review essay.
Banine came into the world in Baku, Azerbaijan, in 1905. She grew up taking lessons in French, German, English, and Russian, participating in feasts marking the end of Ramadan, playing the piano, traveling between the city and the countryside with relatives, talking to poplars, talking to rivers. Daydreaming.
The novel is a vivid recapturing of Italian life in the 1980s, but more than that it engages, and beautifully captures, the universal mystery of each person’s origins – in a specific place and time, in a social caste, and, most of all, from a set of parents – and evokes the loneliness of that insoluble mystery.