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Category Archives: On Translation

April 12, 2019
On Translation

Ms. Difficult: Translating Emily Dickinson

By Ana Luísa Amaral

Emily Dickinson, ca. 1848. Photo: public domain, courtesy of Yale University Manuscripts and Archives Digital Images Database, via Wikimedia Commons.

When she was translating Rilke into Russian, the poet Marina Tsvetaeva wrote in a letter to Boris Pasternak:

And today I want Rilke to speak—through me. In the vernacular, this is known as translation. (How much better the Germans put it—nachdichten!—following the poet’s path, paving anew the entire road which he paved. For let nach be—(to follow after), but—dichten!, is that which is always anew. Nachdichten—to pave anew over instantaneously vanishing traces. But translation has another meaning. To translate not just into (the Russian language, for example), but across (a river). I translate Rilke into the Russian tongue, as he will someday translate me to the other world.

To speak through another always sets us down in a place of no return, a place of exile, translation’s natural habitat. However, precisely because it is a place of exile, translation allows for the confluence of several voices. And suddenly, sometimes, the almost-miracle occurs, as Rilke writes in the fifth of his Duino Elegies:

In this troublesome nowhere, suddenly,
the unsayable point here the pure too-little
is changed incomprehensibly—, altered
into that empty too-much.

Translating poetry requires both a deep knowledge of the original language and of the poem’s historical, cultural, and literary context; more than anything, though, it requires a still deeper knowledge of the language into which it’s being translated, the translator’s own language. Added to this must be a love of that language, the language of the person receiving and then transforming the poem into a new poem—creating a new path. Read More
August 10, 2018
On Translation

Translation, in Sickness and in Health

By Lara Vergnaud

Ramon Casas, Decadent Woman, 1899.

Translation is a curious craft. You must capture the voice of an author writing in one language and bear it into another, yet leave faint trace that the transfer ever took place. (The translator extraordinaire Charlotte Mandell calls this transformation “Something Else but Still the Same.”) Though spared the anguish of writer’s block, the translator nonetheless has to confront the white page and fill it. The fear: being so immersed in the source text, adhering so closely to the source language, that the resulting prose is affected and awkward—or worse, unreadable. Yet immersion is inevitable. In fact, it’s required.

Like the ghostwriter, the translator must slip on a second skin. Sometimes this transition is gentle, unobtrusive, without violence. But sometimes the settling in is abrupt, loud, and even disagreeable. For me, “plunge deep” tactics that go beyond the mechanics of translation help: coaxing out references to reconstruct the author’s cultural touchstones (books, film, music); reading passages aloud, first in the original and then in translation, until hoarseness sets in; animating the author’s story through my senses, using my nose, my ears, my eyes, and my fingers; devouring every clue to imprint the range of the author’s voice (humor, anger, grief, detachment) on my translation. Read More
July 25, 2017
On Translation

Straightening out Ulysses

By Bernard Hœpffner

A translator’s notes.

Samuel Frederick Brocas, The Ha’Penny Bridge, Dublin, 1818.

The indefatigable Bernard Hœpffner, who translated many English masterpieces into French—among them Huckleberry Finn, The Anatomy of Melancholy, and John Keene’s Counternarratives—drowned off the northern coast of Wales this past May. Many obituaries in the French press highlighted Hœpffner’s involvement in an eight-person retranslation of James Joyce’s Ulysses. In homage to an extraordinary figure, The Paris Review Daily presents a translated selection from his Ulysses “logbook.” —Jeffrey Zuckerman, translator

Summer 2000 – Phone call from Jacques Aubert, asking if I might be interested in retranslating James Joyce’s Ulysses. Immediate disappointment upon learning this would be a team effort. Each episode having been written in a different style, he asks me which one I like best, and, without any hesitation, I name Ithaca, in the question-and-answer style of the Catholic catechism.

October 30, 2000 – First meeting at Éditions Gallimard with several staff members, Stephen Joyce and his wife, Jacques Aubert (the general editor), and nine of the other preliminary translators. I am the sole professional translator. Antoine Gallimard appears briefly. Stephen Joyce promises not to interfere in the translation. Homage is paid to the “complete French translation of M. Auguste Morel, with the help of M. Stuart Gilbert, fully revised by M. Valery Larbaud and the author” (1929), which we decide to stow out of sight, at the expense of using the edition’s critical apparatus.

We agree, as our guiding principle, on the credo in Stephen Hero: “He put his lines together not word by word but letter by letter.” We also decide not to Gallicize everything, as Larbaud had done with the preceding translation.

Contract terms are discussed. The new translation will be published on June 16, 2004, the one hundredth anniversary of Bloomsday, with no notes. Read More
March 15, 2017
On Translation

The Swedish Gangster’s Wife’s Bag

By Saskia Vogel

On translating Karolina Ramqvist’s novel The White City.

Vintage Louis Vuitton ad.

It started with an editorial query about a bag.

In Karolina Ramqvist’s novel The White City, a woman, Karin, has been left without resources after living a luxe life with her gangster husband, John, who is dead. Karin’s Swedish, middle-class family never approved of her decision to become a criminal’s housewife, so she can’t go to them for help. The “gangster family” that was supposed to have her back has turned on her. She has no one but her nursing infant, and she’s reluctant about motherhood. In the middle of a frozen Stockholm winter, Karin is being left out in the cold, figuratively and literally: the authorities are about to seize her grand suburban home. The reader meets her there, where signs of filth and decay abound. There’s no heating, no Internet. Desperate for cash, she’s selling off her luxury handbags. The doorbell rings; a prospective buyer who has seen Karin’s ad has come to have a look: Read More
September 30, 2015
On Translation

That Old Goat!

By Damion Searls

Robert Walser’s scrupulous art of translation.

Robert Walser

Today is International Translation Day, an occasion of particular piety among the few who observe it. Translation, that glorious service to culture and human understanding!

There are failures, too, though. Some are of the sort that plague most any endeavor in this vale of tears: inadequacy, incompetence, ineptitude. A New Yorker cartoon, beloved in translator circles, shows someone approaching a horror-stricken writer and saying, “Do you not be happy with me as the translator of the book of you?” Read More
September 16, 2015
On Translation

Back to School with the Übermensch

By Damion Searls

Nietzsche on education, inequality, and translation.

Nietzsche as a pupil at Schulpforta, 1861.

When I went off to college, it wasn’t, as far as I could tell, the result of any decision. The assumption—the fact—was simply there, in my family or high school or race and class or wherever it was, that there was more to come after twelfth grade. I didn’t appreciate the privilege nearly enough, but I also felt no need to justify to myself or anyone else how I planned to spend the next four years. There must still be such eighteen or nineteen year olds out there, never expected to explain themselves, but it is harder to imagine them. Nowadays, education is fraught and embattled and debated and doubted down to the core.

I feel like I’ve read the same essay half a dozen times recently—here are two good examples—an essay insisting that the true value of education is not calculable in monetary terms. Education is moral, philosophical: a process of creating and becoming better people. You can make the argument that a liberal-arts education is “valuable” in the narrow sense, since it is, but even if that argument wins some battles—and it rarely does—it will lose the war. Once you concede that economic striving takes priority over artistic or humanistic goals, then arts funding and English degrees and even pure science are never going to withstand the juggernaut of business and technology. You have to fight under a higher standard.

I agree with this line of thought and am happy enough to see the point made half a dozen times over. I’ve read it recently in Friedrich Nietzsche, too, whose little-known 1872 lectures On the Future of Our Educational Institutions are appearing this fall in my new translation under the snappier title Anti-Education. Even in Nietzsche’s day, the state and the masses were apparently clamoring for

as much knowledge and education as possible—leading to the greatest possible production and demand—leading to the greatest happiness: that’s the formula. Here we have Utility as the goal and purpose of education, or more precisely Gain: the highest possible income … Culture is tolerated only insofar as it serves the cause of earning money.

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