Another Reason for Translation

A interesting review of Edith Grossman's new book "Why Translation Matters" in The New York Times.

Here's the summation: In the end, Grossman warmly (after all) and gratefully rehearses the twofold answer to the question of her title: translation matters because it is an expression and an extension of our humanity, the secret metaphor of all literary communication; and because the creation of any literary translation is (or at least must be) an original writing, not a pathetic shadow or tracing of the inaccessible “original” but the creation, indeed, of a second — and as we have seen, a third and a ninth — but always a new work, in another language.

Grossman is a fabulous translator and I'm looking forward to reading her take on why her work matters.

Precious Translation from The Poetry Translation Centre

Last month, Poetry Magazine published a lengthy discussion on translation. Two poets and people I admire—Ilya Kaminsky and Adam Kirsch—took somewhat opposing sides in the debate. Kirsch took the more pessimistic stance, claiming the now standard impossibility of translation and that “when you translate the “accidents of life” into the rather featureless dialect of international poetry” there is a risk “of losing the very truth the poem wants to tell us.” Kaminsky, who just co-edited (with Susan Harris) a book of translated poetry from around the world called The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry, took the side of translation. While his arguments were more nuanced, he suggested that while there may be good and bad translations of specific poems, translation can yield something akin to the poetic ‘truth’ and sometimes yield a better poem. Most of us who read poetry in translation partake of both points of view (as do probably these two poets, but what a boring conversation that would make!).

In my case, I can only read Rilke, Zagajewski, Milosz, Akhmatova, Cavafy in translation. Even the Hebrew poets I love including Natan Zach, Yehuda Amichai, Dahlia Ravikovitch come to me only, really, in their English translations. But in all cases, I recognize the trade-off. The original music and meter, form and even content, is often sacrificed. Translators must make choices. As I mentioned in an earlier post, Hamutal Bar-Yosef, an Israeli poet, and her English language translator decided to avoid translating any of Bar-Yosef’s more difficult poems (i.e., ones that had difficult form or abstract metaphor) because they felt it would be impossible to do adequate translations. You have only to compare different translations of the same poems to see how it can sometimes work and sometimes not. Hopefully though what is retained (and dare I say added by the translator) replicates, even enhances, what the originating poem intended.

I’m reiterating some of this debate because I came across a very interesting translation project called the “Poetry Translation Centre.” It is a small UK-based outfit that translated only living African, Asian or Latin American poets who have already established a reputation in their own languages and only through collaboration with the poet. Their process is in three steps:

1. They look at the original poem: even if most of us can’t understand a word, it’s always important to hear its music, and to look at how the poet has placed it on the page.
2. The language expert produces a literal translation that’s as close to the original as possible.
3. There’s the long and detailed negotiation that ends with the translated poem.

It is a lengthy process and obviously requires lots of resources though the Centre seems open to the idea of exchanging poems via mail and e-mail. So far, they’ve translated poets from Sudan, Portugal, Tajikistan, Somalia, Kurdistan, India, Argentina, Afghanistan, Turkey, Oman, and many others, including poets from Palestine and one from Israel. On their website, there are podcasts that include readings in both the original language and the translated, and one can purchase chapbooks of the translations.

I am doing a bit of informal translating myself from Hebrew to English of work by Israeli poets Tal Nitzan-Keren and Khaviva Padia. These translations are extremely time consuming and, so far, terrible. They illustrate how far I still have to go in learning this difficult language, and, how difficult the translation project is.

Check out The Poetry Translation Centre website and some of the poets. You can see the poems in their original languages, the literal translations, as well as the finished translated poems. Here is one of the finished poems by Sudanese poet Al-Saddiq Al-Raddi translated from Arabic:

Dream

Poetry - may you be a green body.
May you be a language
in which I wander
with my wings and my self.
Be the inspiration of my tongue,
so that I may pasture
the tribes of my voice - though they are silent.

Sleepless
and alone, I see
you will not be
a green body.
You were neither
a good master, to be bought,
nor the muse.
My longed for delirium, my memory.

More Introverted Than We Knew!

The online site Three Percent, launched in 2007 with a focus on international literature and affiliated with the small press publisher Open Letter, maintains a database of books published (or distributed) in the US that are translations from other languages. If you remember I blogged a bit about Open Letter and Three Percent earlier this month…anyway.

The site named itself after the oft-cited statistic that 3% of books published in the US are in translation (which as we all agree is a pretty small number). If their database is as comprehensive as they say, well, 3% should be something US readership can only aspire to. Book industry tracker Bowker states that in 2008, 47,514 new (i.e., not reprints) works of fiction and another 10,538 works of poetry were published in the US. Three Percent notes only 280 newly-translated works of fiction and 82 newly-translated works of poetry published OR distributed in the US for the same year. This leads to the abysmal translation statistics of .59% and .78%, respectively. Less than 1%! Bowker hasn’t released 2009 stats, but Three Percent’s database only lists 283 works of fiction and another 65 works of poetry in translation for 2009, so, unless publishing experienced a tsunami-size drop in numbers, it’s hard to see how the stats changed much.

Perhaps I’m not comparing equally weighed apples to apples, but it does seem a really small number. I mean 65 poetry books for an entire year—that’s just a little over one a week!

And, not surprisingly, most translations are from Europe with France, Italy, Spain, and Germany dominating. I was kind of surprised to see so few translations from Russian, but then again, I’m hard pressed to think of a recent translation of new work (Valzhyna Mort is Belarussian!) I know, I know, does Turkey belong with the Middle East?

In case you were wondering the most prolific publishers of translation (at least in 2009) according to Three Percent are as follows (the numbers and percentages are of the total, fiction and poetry, translations for 2009):

Dalkey Archive   19   5.46%
New Directions   13   3.74%
American University at Cairo   11   3.16%
Europa Editions   11   3.16%
HarperCollins   10   2.87%
Green Integer   9   2.59%
Penguin   9   2.59%
Bitter Lemon   8   2.30%
Open Letter   8   2.30%
White Pine   8   2.30%
Archipelago   7   2.01%
Knopf   7   2.01%
Northwestern University Press   7   2.01%
Pushkin Press   7   2.01%
Aflame Books   6   1.72%
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt   6   1.72%

I really feel most of these publishers are doing a service. God knows US readers just don’t have a big appetite for ‘foreign’ literature. And big-house publishing is, for the most part, profit driven (are there still profits in publishing anything but Sarah Palin and Dan Brown?). I guess we should be thankful that the big publishing houses do manage to squeeze out a few translations given the miniscule chance that any will be bestsellers let alone profitable (OK, brand names like Orhan Pamuk and Roberto Bolano excluded). Not surprisingly, the biggest publishers of translated fiction and poetry are non-profit and small presses, which don't have to answer to shareholders.

Anyway, as an addendum to my 2010 reading list, I’m going to add some recent poetry translations. I need to do a bit of research, but at least a couple by poets who are still among us, put out by one of these small presses, and, definitely a couple by poets of whom I’ve never heard.

Open Letters--Small Publishing of Big Translations

Speaking of translation...in today's New York Times Arts section, there was a long lovely article on a small, year-old press called Open Letter Books that does nothing BUT translation. The press, affiliated with the University of Rochester in New York, publishes 10-12 books a year and has an online literary website called Three Percent. Get it, 3%? Because translations account for only about 3% of the US book market.

Open Letter's list includes authors from all over the world--South Africa, Chile, Spain, Germany, Poland, Lithuania, France, Iceland...no region seems excluded and though there are no Middle Eastern or Asian writers, I'm sure we'll see representation as the publishing house evolves. Right? The concentration so far has also been largely fiction and essays, though they said to expect some poetry soon. I'm looking forward to that as well.

Anyway, for $100 you can receive all 10 of a year's publications, which seems a pretty good deal though given how much is already begging to be read on my shelves, I'm not sure I want to add to my pile without a thorough perusal. Their books DO have beautiful covers, so perhaps just looking at them might be worth the investment.

Check it out and kudos to what seems a really fascinating press.

More Translation Please

In my last post, I was complaining a bit about the narrowness of translations of not only novels but also poetry into English. So, rather than complain, I thought I would highlight a couple of translation awards. Perhaps an idea for a late Christmas present or something to bring in the New Year?

First, there is the Popescu Prize for Poetry in Translation, which is a biennial prize awarded by the UK’s Poetry Society. You can think of the UK Poetry Society as analogous to the US Poetry Foundation. On their website, the UK Poetry Society call the Popescu a “prize for poetry translation” and, further down, a “prize for European poetry translation” featuring “poetry translated from another European language into English”. This year the Popescu went to Professor Randall Couch for his translation of Gabriela Mistral’s Madwomen. Of course Mistral is Chilean. The prize really is an honor for both the author and translator, though I’m not sure the Chileans enjoy having works by one of their own classified as ‘European.’

Of as much interest is the shortlist for the prize. I’m particularly intrigued by two authors I’ve never heard of: Elena Shvarts and Oktay Rifat. Without these translations, perhaps I never would have.

Of course there’s also the annual PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, which is conferred every spring in New York. The award recognizes book-length translations of poetry from any language into English published during the current calendar year, and is judged by a single translator of poetry.

Two PEN award winners I have particularly loved are Peter Cole’s translation of Aharon Shabtai’s J'Accuse; and Chana Bloch and Chana Kronfeld’s translation Open Closed Open by Yehuda Amichai. They could not be more oppositional in terms of tone--Shabtai is politically on the faaaaar left while Amichai was, I'd say, more middle left. There are no right wing Israeli poets, or rather, there are no well published right wing Israeli poets.

Anyway, I know that translation, perhaps more so in poetry than in novels, is almost impossible. A better word might be transliteration, representing words in one language into another. Moreover, a good translation depends as much on the talent of the translator as on the talent of the originating writer. But that doesn’t mean we ignore them. And it doesn’t mean that all is lost in the translated work. Rather, I believe that the act of reaching out, of trying to grasp another’s experience, another’s words, even if slightly garbled, broadens our own experience. How can we forego that?

Where are the Translations?

I’ve been browsing bookstores in New York, which has become an even greater pleasure since living in Israel, where there are no English language bookstores and the English language section of most Israeli bookstores is taken up by bestsellers and books on Jewish/Israeli themes. One point struck me—the volume of poetry books that are translations from other languages. Of course this includes such classics and required reading by authors like Beowolf, Chaucer, Dante, Homer, as well as what might be called translation candy (so good no one can resist and that seems to find its way into everyone’s stocking at some point) from Rilke, Rumi, Neruda, etc.

But taking up a lot of shelf space were fairly recent translations of Durs Grunbein, Adam Zagajewski, Jorge Luis Borges, Mahmoud Darwish, C.P. Cavafy. Not that any of these poets are likely to displace the Steven Kings and Dan Browns of the poetry world. Yes, you know who I mean—Mary Oliver, Wendell Berry, and Billy Collins. Although I think all three of these poets have great merit. And what would my father give me every three years if not Billy Collin’s latest book of poems?

So I spent a few minutes congratulating readers of poetry for their broader interest. Certainly Horace Engdahl, the permanent secretary of the Nobel prize jury, couldn't have mean poetry readers when he said last year, "The US is too isolated, too insular. They don't translate enough and don't really participate in the big dialogue of literature." Engdahl went on, "That ignorance is restraining." Well, maybe, maybe not. Because after my few minutes of satisfaction, I couldn’t help but note the lack of contemporary translation. Yes, there was another translation of Rilke, another of Darwish, but what of the thousands of poets writing around the world right now, today?

Of course I know the difficulty of translation, especially when most local poets in their respective countries have yet to garner a large enough body of work (not to mention local audience) to have translators outside their borders take note. Still. To that point, I want to shout out about a couple of blogs that highlight translations and works (in English) being produced outside US borders. Two I like are ShadowKnifePen, which always has interesting news and anecdotes of South American poets, and Absinthe Minded, which focuses on European poetry.

If you know of any, please dash off an e-mail to me. I’d love to take a look.

The Amazing Dahlia Ravikovitch

I want to celebrate a recently released translation of Israeli poet Dahlia Ravikovitch, translated by the duo of Chana Bloch and Chana Kronfeld, called Hovering at Low Altitude, The Collected Poetry of Dahlia Ravikovitch. Both have been translating Hebrew poetry into English for decades (check out their wonderful translations of Yehuda Amichai). Ravikovitch is considered in Israel to be one of the leading women poets of the past one hundred years, actually one of the leading Hebrew language poets period. I’ve read Ravikovitch’s work in translation before (The Window, published in 1989, and also translated by Chana Bloch is a shorter book but contains many of her best poems), but this latest release is much more comprehensive.

Dahlia Ravikovitch, similar to many poets writing in Hebrew in the 60s and 70s, adopted colloquial speech in her poems and wrote entirely in open verse. However, unlike some of her contemporaries (e.g., Natan Zach, Yehuda Amichai), who often wrote of the crisis of Israel, Ravikovitch's early writing was personal, dealing with depression, self-loathing, womanhood, motherhood, love and the lack of it. She was perhaps the first female poet that spoke of 'the body' and its objectification, albeit usually in cloaked terms (e.g., the poem "Clockwork Doll"). With that said, she was not a confessional poet, and many of her poems are personae, written in second or third voice, or directed at situations outside her own. She also wrote movingly about Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians, often from the perspective of a woman. In reviews and analyses, Ravikovitch is often discussed as being a political poet, but it wasn’t until after Israel’s 1982 invasion into Lebanon, the last fourth of her life, that that the Palestinian and Middle East conflict became a central themes of her work. After the massacre of Palestinian refugees at Sabra and Shatila, carried out by the Christian Lebanese phalanges unleashed in the camps by the Israeli army, she wrote:

Over the sewage ponds of Sabra and Shatila
there you passed a considerable number of people on
from the land of the living to the land of the dead
night after night
first shots
then hangings
and then slaughter with knives
. . . and our sweet soldiers
they have asked nothing for themselves
they wanted so badly
to go home in peace.

This poem, whose title translates as 'You Can't Kill a Baby Twice' appears in her 1995 collection Col Ha-Shirim Ad Co ('All the Poems So Far'). As this excerpt illustrates, Ravikovitch’s work conveyed not only her compassion for the plight of the ‘other’ but her understanding of how the conflict affected Israel and Israelis. Her work in all cases, political or not, rode close to the vein. Her friends referred to her as 'a woman with no skin and bare nerves.' She died in 2005, reportedly of suicide.

I love her work and, for those searching for another Israeli voice (yes, we all know Amichai) Ravikovitch is a place to start.