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We've been following the literary furore over Elena Ferrante's unmasking as translator Anita Raja and share in the outrage about NYRB's stripping of a writer's chosen anonymity. By sheer coincidence, Anita Raja, who contributes an essay on translation to the upcoming issue, slated for release on October 17, was included in the ten names selected to be featured in all our publicity materials (including the postcards we sent to print last Friday, before the news broke). Lest it be construed as opportunistic, we want to assure you that our mission will never deviate from catalyzing the transmission of great works of literature. While we continue to put the finishing touches on what looks to be a magnificent Fall issue, please enjoy this edition of Fortnightly Airmail.
Your Itinerary Today:
- TAKE OFF: Announcing the 2017 Close Approximations Translation Contest
- TRAVEL LOG: Daniel Hahn tackles the question, 'Does a translator's name belong on the cover of a book?'
- POSTCARD ONE: Part Two of our interview with editor Penny Hueston
- PASSAGES: Revisiting Ada Aharoni's A Day of Honey, A Day of Onions
- REARVIEW: A few recent standouts from the Asymptote blog
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We are positively thrilled to announce our now annual Close Approximations Translation Contest! This competition, now in its third edition, will be judged by two of the finest translators into English today: David Bellos, translator of Georges Perec and author of Is That a Fish in Your Ear?, and Sawako Nakayasu, winner of the 2016 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. A total of $3,000 in honoraria will be awarded to two winners and four runners-up, plus publication in our Spring 2017 issue and possibly The Guardian via our Translation Tuesday showcase. The deadline to participate is February 1st, 2017, but don't wait till last minute. Read about the second edition's winners and check out our contest guidelines now!
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Once again, acclaimed literary translator and friend of Asymptote Daniel Hahn is here to answer your most pressing questions about the tricks of the trade. The following question comes from Singapore's Michelle Loh:
Why aren’t translators’ names on most book covers? Are you for or against this practice of keeping translators’ names hidden?
Some people believe that readers are scared of translations. They assume—whether rightly or wrongly—that a reader is more likely to pick up a book whose front jacket reads
Title of Great Novel!
by
Name-Of-Awesome-Novelist
than a book whose front jacket reads
Title of Great Novel!
by
Name-Of-Awesome-Novelist, but actually not really because I’m afraid it’s been translated by Unrecognisable-Translator-Person so it’s probably quite obscure and kind of foreign and anyway you know what translations are like (LOL!) and tbqh you can’t even really be sure of what you’re getting…
(I paraphrase, slightly.)
Their argument, then, is that translations are hard enough to sell as it is without your having to remind people that the book is a translation before they’ve even picked it up. There are plenty of publishers I like very much who make this argument, and I do understand. I do think it underestimates our readers, but where most publishers are concerned I really don’t see this as a lack of respect for the translator’s work.
(Sure, there are countries where the circumstances are quite different: plenty of places in, say, southern Europe, where translators’ names are routinely left off covers, despite the fact that nobody there would argue that readers aren’t open to translations per se; so yes, there, unlike here, it really might indeed be simply a matter of the translators themselves being undervalued.)
But the wording in your question—“keeping translators’ names hidden”—and my last paragraph—“translators’ names are routinely left off covers”—both suggest an active omission, and hence an assumption that the inclusion of the translator’s name on the cover was the obvious default. That there was originally some glorious proto-jacket that did include translators’ names but at some point the publishers craftily, stingily and deliberately removed them. Rather than not deciding to include them in the first place, which isn’t, I think, the same thing.
Now, I happen to disagree with those assumptions some publishers make about reader prejudice. But there is another argument for which I have every sympathy. Jackets are there to sell products, and arguably should include only those things that will help to persuade people to pick up and buy a book, and should not be cluttered with anything else. That an optimal front cover includes the author and the title and whatever image and design work will best to sell it and a celebrity quote if you can get one… but that’s it. Nothing extraneous, no extra information, or assorted other credits, however well earned. After all, the front jacket will only rarely include the name of the publisher, it won’t have the barcode or the ISBN or the name of the designer, all of which serve a function and so need to be somewhere, but they don’t need to be there. There’ll be a blurb, which will go on the back if it’s the paperback or on the flaps if it’s a hardback, but this, too, isn’t the first hit that will persuade readers to pick it up. The jacket is there to sell a book, not to list credits or massage egos.
And individual translators’ names, on the whole, do not sell books. It’s perfectly possible to think most readers won’t be scared of a translation without necessarily believing a translator’s name is actively an asset at the point of retail, and that’s what I think should be preeminent among criteria for what we put on the front. Frankly if a publisher could get an endorsement quote from her saying “What a masterpiece! I wish I’d written this!”, I’d much rather they stuck J.K. Rowling’s name on my book than insisting on mine. We might even sell a few copies.
Yes, there are a small number of translators whose names are indeed an asset, and it would be a shame if marketing departments in publishing houses didn’t see that; if you’ve got a book in the U.K. translated by Anthea Bell or Margaret Jull Costa, say, do put their name on the jacket because they’ll often be more familiar to readers than the original author, and deservedly so. (This often applies, too, with the retranslation of a classic where what you’re buying is specifically the new translation by Translator X rather than merely an interchangeable access to the original.) But that’s not the case for most of us. Believe me, I wish individual translators’ names did help to sell a book—“OMG, the new Daniel Hahn is out tomorrow!” But no, we aren’t there yet.
This is not to say—of course—that I feel translators’ names, or the fact that a book is translated at all, should be “hidden”, to use your word. I think we need proper credit—names on the title page in a reasonable font, sometimes on the back cover, a biography (if it’s a hardback, possibly on the back flap along with the author’s?). I fight for these things in my contracts, and I make my contribution to a translated book pretty visible at every opportunity. But while I’ve always been grateful for a cover credit, I don’t think I’ve ever insisted on one. I trust designers and marketing professionals to know what they’re doing, and I don’t think my name is ever going to help them persuade a reader pick up my book out of the hundreds of others on display, and that’s what the jacket needs to do.
Yes, credit is important—we’re professionals and our translations are our own creations—but it would be a shame to clutter a gorgeous, striking design with more words, my name, the publishers’ name, the designer’s name, the blurb, and other (also legitimately important) bits and pieces, wouldn’t it?
Many of my fellow translators would disagree with me. But as professionals we all have our different red lines, and as campaigners we all pick our battles. Yes, I'll fight hard for a visible, respectful, professional credit and acknowledgment of my ownership of my work. I'll fight for proper pay, and copyright protection, and many other points of symbolism and principle as well as substance that matter to my job. But I'm not going to let my ego—pretty substantial though it is by translators' standards—get in the way of publishers doing theirs.
Daniel Hahn's recent translation of José Eduardo Agualusa's A General Theory of Oblivion was shortlisted for the 2016 Man Booker International Prize. Find more of Daniel's past columns over at our blog.
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Recently, our new Blog Editor Madeline Jones spoke with Penny Hueston, Senior Editor at Melbourne-based Text Publishing, about Hueston's work translating the inimitable style of Marie Darrieussecq, the ways her own editing and translation processes relate, and the exciting projects she has planned. We highlighted an excerpt from Darrieussecq's Men in a recent installment of Translation Tuesdays, curated by Asymptote for The Guardian Books Network. Part One of this interview ran in the last Fortnightly Airmail.
Darrieussecq said in an interview in 2005, "When someone reads one of my books, I want them to feel as if they have looked through a new window it wouldn't have occurred to them to open before, or even known was there. I don't just want to show people a good time or make them laugh. To do this I need new sentences, as new as possible. I need to explode clichés, to see how they work from the inside.” You’ve certainly done justice to this goal of hers in the English version—the language is always fresh and stimulating. Was it challenging to work from French without expressions, idioms, or clichés, which have established meanings and oftentimes “easy” translations into other languages? How did you determine what would be analogously unfamiliar yet meaningful in English?
It is true that reading Darrieussecq may sometimes not seem easy: she certainly does reveal “new” uses of language, “new” perspectives on common perceptions, surprising, shocking sometimes, both on the line, at a linguistic level, as well as at the level of ideas. That is precisely the mark of her genius: she shows us both the importance of clichés (as, literally, keys to our world), as well as their limitations, and tries to find other words and ways of exploring the ideas and feelings behind these clichés.
Right from the title and epigraph of this novel, Darrieussecq, who admires Duras’s own linguistic brilliance, is playing with language and notions of romantic love: the French title of Men plays on a quote by Marguerite Duras: Il faut beaucoup aimer les hommes. Beaucoup, beaucoup. Beaucoup les aimer pour les aimer. Sans cela, ce n’est pas possible, on ne peut pas les supporter. We have to love men a lot. A lot, a lot. Love them a lot in order to love them. Otherwise it’s impossible; we couldn’t bear them. Just as in so much of Darrieussecq’s writing, the word-play and irony is wonderfully implicit.
The language and the creation of the character are as one: inventive, poetic and witty, every word counts. Darrieussecq is forever stripping back language to its essence, often minus syntactical elements, like subjects or verbs—just as Solange in Africa, a superficial French vedette who lands in this heart of darkness, is stripped back to almost nothing, once all her prejudices and the stereotypes she has lived by have been twisted, exposed and subverted. The visceral nature of her new world means that the characters and objects often fuse, subject and object become one, which is also part of the nature of Solange’s obsession with her man and with this strange place that is Africa.
At the same time, the sharpness of Darrieussecq’s imagery and language is precisely what reveals the superficiality of the film world she is depicting. Humour is also a great tool for this purpose. There is a brilliantly comic scene in which the egotistical French actor playing the steamboat driver in Heart of Darkness, and terrified of catching African diseases, insists that all the water for the rain machine used in filming the storm scene be bottled Évian water.
Solange is as if possessed, by the illness, the fever, of romantic obsession. Darrieussecq reveals what happens to a woman who is objectified by a man, or who allows herself to be reduced to a passive object: Solange feels as if she is disintegrating. One of the words Darrieussecq uses in many of her books is “atomize” or “pulverize”, for this state of disintegration into time and space. She often uses metaphors about outer space and the Earth and the Moon appear in capitals as if we are to see the characters and ourselves as particles operating in an immense void.
Darrieussecq is herself a translator, from Latin and from English (most recently James Joyce and Virginia Woolf), so I was fortunate to be able to ask her the occasional question. But in general, in translating tricky idioms or jokes, I try to stay as close to the original tone, imagery and meaning and, if possible, retain or find equivalent internal rhymes, alliterations and rhythms.
In All the Way, Darrieussecq often uses words and expressions that connect with her Basque origins. Like Elena Ferrante in her Neapolitan novels, she uses dialect to express the obscene or the sexual layers of expression and is primarily concerned with the play of language(s) and their interpretation, how language shapes us. In All the Way the fault-lines between language and sex are a source of comic confusion for the adolescent Solange as she negotiates her sexual initiation. In the same way, the older Solange in Men is forever falling into the trap of making linguistic and cultural assumptions and misinterpreting so much. Translating Darrieussecq’s double-entendres and jokes, or finding equivalent nursery rhymes or teenage slang is like working out a complicated puzzle. But “a good match, that’s the truth about translation”, as David Bellos says in his Is That a Fish in Your Ear. Above all, I want to avoid making a translation that is simply correct, but without the texture and echoes of the original language.
Since both of the main characters – Solange and her love interest, Kouhouesso – are foreigners in Los Angeles, and Solange is a foreigner still while they’re filming in Cameroon, there are frequent mentions in the novel of certain things “happening in French,” or what it means when the two of them speak in English rather than in French. How did you decide to translate these moments into English (or use the French or Camfranglais) the way you did?
In the beginning of the novel, in L.A., Solange is the typical French woman: “As for her, everyone knew she was French. She could work on her accent and play an American, but most of the time they wanted her to play a French woman: the shrill bitch, the elegant ice queen, the romantic victim…people often joked that, even from a satellite, you could tell she was French. Was it her figure? The angle of her jawline? Or the tic of starting sentences with a little sceptical pout? Apparently, languages shape faces. Her speech therapist in Los Angeles, with whom she practised accents, thought it was an issue of muscular tension.” But she can’t pick him: “At first she thought he was American. His intonation, the way he moved.” Just to confuse her, he turns out to be Canadian, born in Cameroon.
They discover that they both speak both French and English, and their rapport shifts depending on which language they are speaking:
“He hardly ever responded in French. Where he came from, they spoke English and French and numerous (three hundred!) other languages. Nous n’avions pas précisé une heure: the sentence was a bit odd, but mostly it was his accent that was odd. An accent like the comedian Michel Leeb’s. For a second, she thought he was making fun of her. That he was overdoing it. In her village, in Clèves, in the eighties, there was always someone imitating Michel Leeb imitating black people. If he had said in English, just as firmly, we didn’t say what time, she might have been intimidated. But she wanted to smile now…”
After they have sex for the first time, Solange muses: “It happened in English. Perhaps it would not have registered with such force in French. Well, how would she know?” When Solange gets angry with him, she speaks in French. There was, of course, no question of leaving this in French, but I chose to leave hints of the original in the text, just as Darriuessecq sprinkles her text with English.
With the locals in Africa, Kouhouesso speaks Camaroonian pidgin, Camfranglais. I located a Camfranglais dictionary—it was difficult but fun finding equivalent rhythms in English.
How would you compare translating Darrieussecq to other writers you’ve translated, such as the Nobel Prize-winner Patrick Modiano?
Translating Max, a prize-winning young-adult novel by a French writer, Sarah-Cohen-Scali was in some ways easier than translating Darrieuesscq’s novels. The prose is simpler, both in vocabulary and syntax, and there is none of the complex linguistic and metaphorical work to decipher. But Max is a child-narrator with a distinctive voice, shrill and monomanaical, as befitting a bigoted boy raised under the Lebensborn program, whom we follow from a foetus to the age of nine, completely indoctrinated by Nazi ideology until he meets a Jewish boy and the scales fall from his eyes. It was a challenge to enter into this persona and then capture and sustain the rhythms and idiomatic speech of a little punk whom we both deride and pity. I think it’s important not to fall into the trap of smoothing over the English translation when the original is sometimes awkward or unwieldy.
In translating Little Jewel by Patrick Modiano it was again a challenge to capture his pitch-perfect, deceptively simple style, often described as la petite musique. This is the only one of Modiano’s novels narrated by a female voice, but it is similar to his other novels in that the tone is haunting, yearning, hallucinatory, sometimes panic-stricken. The weight of the past, of guilt and the unknown evokes a resonance of secrets that may never be revealed. Whereas in translating the precision of tone in Men, I kept in mind Darrieussecq’s sense of an exploratory dismantling of language and of a world in order to reveal things afresh.
One of the problems I had to think my way through as I translated Little Jewel was how to deal with the way Modiano effortlessly changes tenses. His world is the past—from the perspective of the narrator and also, occasionally, of the author. While it might have been easier to smooth over Modiano’s tenses in English, this would have betrayed an effect of temporal dislocation by an author who creates a world where memories, real or invented, are more real than anything else. Moving between these different realms of the past is precisely what creates the genius of the Modiano style of flou, haziness, fragmentation, uncertainty. There are a few places in Little Jewel where I worried about the reader’s potential perceptions of these shifts in tense, but I chose to adhere to the original French and let the reader be brought up short, wondering whether the narrator is the author, and whether we are in the past or the present, a present that is taken up in the workings of memory itself.
I found it comparatively straightforward to translate Darrieussecq playing with tenses and time because it was more in terms of Solange’s deranged sense of time expanding and collapsing as she enters the state of obsessive waiting for her lover.
Are you working on any new translations at the moment?
I’m finishing a translation of Marie Darrieussecq’s latest book, Being Here (Être ici est une splendeur), an unconventional biography of the German expressionist painter Paula Modersohn-Becker. The book was published to coincide with a wonderful retrospective exhibition of her work at the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris in May this year, for which Darrieussecq was one of the curators and she also wrote much of the accompanying catalogue text. In her characteristically elliptical, probing prose, Darrieussecq ignores the surface details of an ordinary biographical outline, focusing instead on the pressures Paula faced as a female painter at the turn of the twentieth century; on her original style and choice of subjects (she was the first to paint herself not only naked but pregnant); her friendship with the writer Rainer Maria Rilke; her fraught marriage; her ambivalence about combining her passion for her artistic career with motherhood; and her tragic death at thirty-one, soon after giving birth. Darrieussecq was inspired to write Being Here after seeing paintings by Paula Modersohn-Becker, of “real women” and “real babies”, depicted naked and in all the languorous physicality of pregnancy and breastfeeding.
And I’m looking forward to translating Marie Darrieussecq’s next novel (a few years off) in which, she has told me, Solange makes an appearance!
For more translator profiles, navigate over to our blog for conversations with Lydia Davis, Adam Morris, and Jeffrey Green.
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A Day of Honey, A Day of Onions, a play written and translated from the Hebrew by Ada Aharoni, published in our Winter 2016 issue, focuses on the love story of Esther and Rafi, set in Egypt just before the second exodus of the mid-twentieth century. As Jews, the two face many challenges: loss of wealth, loss of family members, lost loved ones, anti-semitism, ignorance, a tenuous socio-economic status, and so much more. It is so refreshing, in the midst of all the suffering and depressing headlines in today's world, to read a play like Aharoni's—ending, as it does, on a somewhat hopeful note.
—Allegra Rosenbaum, former Blog Editor
(Editor's Note: in this scene, ESTHER and RAFI, who have just met, stand watching the HAVERIM, a group of friends from the Maccabi Club, in a festive gathering at the pyramids. ESTHER is a sephardic Jew born and raised in Egypt, while RAFI is rumored to have been through one of the Nazi concentration camps.)
RAFI: What do you want to accomplish?
ESTHER: Oh! So many things!
RAFI: Like what, for instance?
ESTHER: I’ll just give you three of them: 1. I want to have a country of my own—Israel. 2. I want to be a successful writer. 3. I want to prove that girls are just as good as boys . . . and so many other things . . .
RAFI: Wow! Quite a program for a lifetime!
ESTHER: And what’s yours, may I ask?
RAFI: You may, but I can’t tell you.
ESTHER: Why not? It’s unfair, I told you mine!
RAFI: I can’t, because I have nothing to tell. No program whatsoever. I want nothing—except to be left alone.
ESTHER (hurt): If so, I’ll oblige . . . (SHE starts walking away.)
RAFI (taking hold of her arm to retain her): Please stay. I like talking to you, you remind me of someone . . . I’ll try to explain myself: One day you’ll be dead, you say. I don’t have to wait for that day, I feel already dead. I was killed there, in Hitler’s camps; what you see here is just a ghost—not really me.
(After an awkward pause.)
ESTHER: Hi Ghost!
(RAFI stares at her.)
ESTHER: Oh, I’m sorry, I really am, I shouldn’t be joking about this. Please forgive me.
RAFI: It’s not for you to be sorry, you had nothing to do with it . . . (After a short pause.) I didn’t think someone like you had thoughts about death.
ESTHER: Why not? Do you have the exclusive copyright?
RAFI stares at her again, and then walks away.
ESTHER (following him, quite upset, muttering to herself): Big-mouthed Esther! Now I’ve really hurt his feelings . . . But I didn’t mean to. I shouldn’t have been so flippant—not on the subject of the Holocaust.
(The HAVERIM enter, joyfully dancing the hora again. SHE goes to RAFI who is standing apart.)
ESTHER: Would you like to join them?
RAFI: No. I can’t dance these dances.
ESTHER: I could teach you . . .
RAFI: You could, but I don’t want you to.
ESTHER (hurt): Suit yourself.
SHE joins the group. They have stopped dancing. A tango is heard—sung by Yaffa Yarkoni.
YAFFA: “Artsenu ha ktantonet, artsenu ha yafonet, artsi sheli, sheli . . . My small country, my lovely country, my country, mine, mine . . .”
(The friends look at each other, not knowing if THEY should dance the tango. DANIEL approaches CLARA and bows.)
CLARA (non-plussed): Dance a “bourgeois” tango? You know we’ve never done that before!
DANIEL (comically): Don’t worry. It’s a kosher tango. Don’t you hear the Hebrew words? “Our tiny land—our beautiful land—my land—my land . . .” Come on, my Clara—let’s dance.
CLARA (laughing): Well—in that case.
(SHE makes a mock curtsy and dances with him spiritedly—prompting the others to do likewise. They all form couples and dance merrily. ESTHER stands there watching, as RAFI approaches her.)
RAFI: I’ll dance this one with you, if you like.
ESTHER: Yes . . . I like.
(RAFI takes her in his arms and leads her gracefully through the movements—until the music ends, THEY breathlessly sit down, and the lights fade out on the group.)
ESTHER: You dance so well!
RAFI: Even a ghost can have a sense of rhythm.
Immerse yourself in the rest of A Day of Honey, A Day of Onions, and take the time to explore the rest of our Archive, easily navigable by issue or country. You can also select a preferred source language using the drop-down menu at the top of our home page.
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Have you been keeping up with the Asymptote blog lately? If not, here are a few gems you’ll want to check out! The exciting new feature, “Around the World with Asymptote,” brought dispatches from staffers on literary scenes around the world, from Australia, Nepal and the U.S., to Pakistan, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, and Argentina. Claire Pershan of our Educational Arm spoke with Laila Familiar, who adapts contemporary Arabic fiction for use in her classes, while Hong Kong Editor-at-Large Charlie Ng interviewed this year's Lammy winner Nicholas Wong. U.K. Editor-at-Large M. René Bradshaw reviewed the bilingual London production of Nicolai Khalezin's Burning Doors, "a wielding and warped montage of vignettes based on the testimonies of artists targeted by Putin." Finally, our ever-popular "Translation Tuesdays" presented excerpts from irresistible new works by Emanuele Trevi and Carlos Fonseca. For more fascinating posts, updated every weekday, become a daily reader of the Asymptote blog!
That brings us to the end of yet another edition of Fortnightly Airmail. We hope you stay in touch with us by following our Facebook and Twitter feeds! If you like what we do, be sure to spread the word and consider becoming a sustaining member, for as little as $5 a month, to help us bring you more of what you love. Every little goes a long way!
Yours in every language and corner of the world,
Your friends at Asymptote
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