Author: archipelago

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Translation: The Facts

Indo-European

A few facts about translation through the ages, from our intern Alison Silver:

 

The word “translation”

  • Derives from the Latin for “the carrying from one place to another.”

 

Classical:

  • 300-200 B.C.E. First major translation in Classical World was Septuagint (pre-Christian translation of Hebrew Bible/Jewish Scriptures into Koine Greek). Septuagint means seventy in Latin and is the name of the Bible because of the believed seventy translators who completed it.

Septuagint[ image courtesy of truthnet.org ]

  • Cicero said of his translation of Demosthenes that the translator must reproduce the original work in adherence to the conventions of Latin usage.

 

Early English

  • The first high quality English translations were from the great English poet, Geoffrey Chaucer, called “grant translateur” by contemporary French poet Eustache Deschamps.
  • Medieval literature centered on Chaucer’s tradition of free adaptation.
  •  The first major English translation was the Wyclif (Wycliffe) Bible c. 1382, and English prose translation began a century later with Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur, a free adaptation of Arthurian romances.
  • 1412 Archbishop Arundel wrote to the pope that Wycliffe was a “wretched and pestilent fellow of damnable memory, … the very herald and child of anti-Christ, who crowned his wickedness by translating the Scriptures into the mother tongue.”
  • Shortly after, a provincial council at Oxford issued a decree stating that “no one shall in future translate on his own authority any text of holy scriptures into the English tongue—nor shall any man read this kind of book, booklet or treatise, now recently composed in the time of the said John Wycliffe or later, or any that shall be composed in future, in whole or part, publicly or secretly, under penalty of the greater excommunication.”  This decree lasted until 1453 with the fall of Constantinople when scholars brought Greek texts to the West.

 

Renaissance

  • In Italy, Petrarch had collected Greek manuscripts to translate, and Marsilio Ficino undertook a Latin translation of Plato’s works. Along with Desiderius Erasmus’ Latin translation of the New Testament, these works introduced a new approach to translation that emphasized exactness, particularly in preserving the exact wording of religions and philosophical figures like Jesus, Plato, and Aristotle.
  • More freedom of poetic interpretation arose from The Pléiade (a group of Renaissance poets in France) and Tudor poets’ translations of works by Horace, Ovid, and Petrarch, after a growth in the middle class and the development of printing technology created the desire to translate original writing into contemporary language to entertain the public.
  • 1611 translation of the King James Bible, resulting from collaboration of almost 50 translators
  • 1612 Thomas Shelton completes the first part of an expanded version of Don Quixote, followed by Cervantes’ publishing of the second part.

Restoration and 18th and 19th Centuries

  • Translation was becoming an industry, in which writers were paid little but nonetheless made a living on translation projects, including collaborations with their contemporaries.
  • 1683-1686 John Dryden’s translation of Plutarch’s Lives
  • 1697 John Dryden’s translation of the Aeneid
  • 1715-1720 Alexander Pope’s translations of the Iliad
  • 1725-1726 Alexander Pope’s translation of the Odyssey
  • Standards for translation heightened in the 19th century regarding style and accuracy. Victorian efforts, like Thomas Carlyle’s translations of Goethe’s writings, Sir Richard Francis Burton’s Arabian Nights (1885-1888), and William Morris’ translation of Beowolf (1895) strived for literal translation in order to preserve the classic quality of the original text, even at the expense of modern-day comprehensibility.
  • 1813 Friedrich Schleiermacher wrote a treatise in German entitled “On the Different Methods of Translating,” in which he advocated that “Either the translator leaves the writer in peace as much as possible and moves the reader toward him; or he leaves the reader in peace as much as possible and moves the writer toward him.”

 

20th Century

Notable translations of the era include:

  • 1871 Benjamin Jowett’s translation of Plato alters convention by reproducing the work in plain, understandable terms and not the archaic language of the original.
  • 1922-1931 C.K. Scott Moncrieff’s translation of Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past
  • 1925-1933 Arthur Waley’s translation of Murasaki Shikibu’s Tale of Genji

 

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Rodin on the Artist in Nature

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Gustav Klimt, Bauernhaus mit Birken, 1900

To any artist, worthy of the name, all in nature is beautiful, because his eyes, fearlessly accepting all exterior truth, read there, as in an open book, all the inner truth.

– Auguste Rodin, French sculptor (1840-1917)

 

Check out Rainer Maria Rilke’s Auguste Rodin, translated from the German by Daniel Slager, with an exquisite introduction by William H. Gass and stunning photographs by Michael Eastman.

 

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Benjamin’s “The Task of the Translator” – Part II

Continuing our series on Walter Benjamin, Eric selects certain passages from “The Task of the Translator” and relates them to our work at Archipelago:

Translation is so far removed from being the sterile equation of two dead languages that of all literary forms it is the one charged with the special mission of watching over the maturing process of the original language and the birth pangs of its own.

 

Here, Benjamin emphasizes the dynamic quality of translation. Whereas the original text remains static over centuries, new translations continue to appear with generations, reviving the text, such as Scott Montcrieff’s original English translation (and subsequent revisions/edits) of Proust and Lydia Davis’s recent English translation.

 

Just as the manifestations of life are intimately connected with the phenomenon of life without being of importance to it, a translation issues from the original—not so much form its life as from its afterlife. For a translation comes later than the original, and since the important works of world literature never find their chosen translators at the time of their origin, their translation marks their stage of continued life.

 

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James Baldwin on Film Adaptations

decasia[scene from “Decasia” ; image courtesy of University of South Carolina Moving Image Research Collections/Icarus Films]

Now, obviously, the only way to translate the written word to the cinema involves doing considerable violence to the written word, to the extent, indeed, of forgetting the written word. A film is meant to be seen, and, ideally, the less a film talks, the better. The cinematic translation, nevertheless, however great and necessary the violence it is compelled to us on the original form, is obliged to remain faithful to the intention, and the vision, of the original form. The necessary violence of the translation involves making very subtle and difficult choices. The root motive of the choices made can be gauged by the effect of these choices: and the effect of these deliberate choices, deliberately made, must be considered as resulting in a willed and deliberate act—that is, the film which we are seeing is the film we are intended to see.

— James Baldwin, on the film adaptation of Billie Holiday’s autobiography, Lady Sings the Blues (from The Devil Finds Work)

 

Enlightening, given a continued flow of tepid films adapted from searing books.

 

What is the most successful — and not necessarily faithful! — film translation of an extraordinary book? Write your thoughts in the comment below.

 

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WHAT I’M READING I: Murder, Axolotls, and Soviet Blocs

 

An axolotl: one of the creatures in Caspar Henderson’s The Book of Barely Imagined Beings
[image courtesy of http://southerncrossreview.org ]

 

Every so often, we’d like to share some of our book recommendations around the office. For the first installment, Florence fills us in on a few of her recent reads:

 

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The Infatuations, Javier Marias

A murder mystery for lovers of Éric Rohmer. The plot is simple: a book editor at a publishing house becomes infatuated with a glamorous couple who she sees every morning at a café on her way to work. One day she sees in the newspaper a photograph of the husband, who has been brutally murdered, and becomes embroiled in a love triangle that involves his mourning widow and his eternal-bachelor best friend. These events veer close to pulp, but that’s the point: this is the ultimate highbrow/lowbrow novel. Marias breaks down moral questions to their basest level, a move that gives him the space for reflections on time’s passing, the fickle nature of memory, guilt, and death, thereby elevating an archetypal tale to the level of Greek tragedy.

 

The widow reflecting on death:

…. there is also an impulse toward death: ‘I want to be where he is, and the only place where we could coincide is the past, in that place of not being but of having been. He is past, whereas I am still present. If I were also past, at least I would be the same as him in that respect, which would be something, and I would be in no position to miss him or remember him. I would be on the same level as him or in the same dimension, in the same time, and we would not be left alone in this precarious world in which everything familiar is being taken away from us. Nothing more can be taken away from us if we are not here. Nothing more can die on us if we are already dead.’

 

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The Book of Barely Imagined Beings: A 21st Century Bestiary, Caspar Henderson

A wonderful compendium of animals that are all the stranger for being real. Henderson allows himself to roam from natural history to moral philosophy to personal reflection, employing the essay’s digression-friendly form with a dexterity reminiscent of Montaigne, Samuel Johnson, W. G. Sebald, and Borges, to whom the title nods.

 

We meet the axolotl, a baby-faced salamander whose ability to regenerate limbs has aided in stem cell research; and tardigrades, a stubby, eight-legged polyextremophile which has survived in outer space for ten days. We also get to know more familiar animals better, including the octopus, whose blood runs with copper, not iron, and the dolphin, whose feats of libido made me blush (did you know a dolphin orgy is called a “wuzzle”? Beats gang bang).

 

But what makes this book worth reading is that it is not merely a catalogue of fun facts. Henderson’s body of knowledge ranges from evolutionary biology to archaic manuscripts, anthropology, and modern literature, and his sense of wonderment at natural history not only extends to these realms, but also beautifully gets at what it means to be human. What are our brains for if not to aid our greedy eyes? By this measure, the fox handily beats the hedgehog.

 

Also see the author’s awesome blog, a series of notes and comments on the chapters in the book: hyperlinks for those who’d rather call them marginalia.

 

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Postwar, Tony Judt

I became determined to read this back in 2010 after Tony Judt’s devastating passing. Three years later, I have finally completed this task.

 

Despite the tome’s literal and metaphorical weightiness, its 800-plus pages do not sit heavily. Judt’s Renaissance Man-cultural touchstones and acerbic humor punctuate grim statistics and otherwise numbing political personalities: we are reminded of Mitterand’s backhanded compliment to Margaret Thatcher of “the eyes of Caligula and the mouth of Marilyn Monroe”, and Judt’s takedown of the individualism of the ‘60s and 70s, a philosophy that he sees as placing the one above the many at the expense of a greater social good, is punctuated by his dissing of its cinematic parallel: Rivette’s “Celine and Julie Go Boating” (which I, personally, love. I guess a millenial would?)

 

Every chapter is enlightening and elegantly written. Postwar begins with an account of the refugee crisis following the fall of the Third Reich: the 8 million displaced persons and “unrepatriable” individuals who, whether due to civil war or Soviet occupation, refused to or could not return home. Judt is especially good on the decline of the Soviet bloc—its monopolies, fudged ledgers, and above all, its doomed inflexibility, its inability to dispatch regionalized versions of Communism, as exemplified by the Tito-Stalin split. I was also impressed by his chapters on Belgian, Catalan, and Balkan regionalism which, to grossly oversimplify, show separatist movements emerging where unequal wealth accrues.

 

If the book has a thesis, it’s that a “Europe” exists at all, a claim that may seem hollow today, as EU-Turkey talks are delayed over protests in Taksim Square. “What binds Europeans together . . . is what it has become conventional to call – in disjunctive but revealing contrast with ‘the American way of life’ – the ‘European model of society’.” At its core is the Europeans’ “deliberate choice to work less, earn less – and live better lives.” In return for high taxes, they receive “free or nearly free medical services, early retirement and a prodigious range of social and public services.” And not far behind this agreement lurks WWII: its utter devastation of the land and economy, painstakingly detailed in this book, meant European governments were forced to start from scratch. It is not surprising that out of such horrors was borne a social contract guaranteeing its citizenry’s basic needs. As a young American who expects to find social security’s coffers empty when the time comes, I can admit to some envy of this grand bargain. And thanks to this truly magisterial, erudite, and eye-opening work, I have a better sense from whence it came.

 

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Announcement of upcoming events for Landscape with Yellow Birds

Archipelago Books is delighted to announce an exciting event series for

José Ángel Valente’s Landscape with Yellow Birds, with readings by the translator Thomas Christensen

Please join us for our upcoming events: 

A reading, lecture and Q&A

at George Washington University, Washington D.C.

September 25th at 2:15 pm

 

Landscape with Yellow Birds: a bilingual reading

at the Whittall Pavilion, Thomas Jefferson Building, Library of Congress, Washington D.C.

September 26th at 12:00 pm

A bilingual reading with Thomas Christensen

 at the Instituto Cervantes, New York

September 27th at 6:30 pm

Landscape with Yellow Birds: a reading

at Grolier Poetry Bookshop, Cambridge, MA

October 1st at 7:00 pm

We are grateful to SPAIN Arts & Culture, a program organized by the Embassy of Spain in Washington D.C.; the Spain-USA Foundation; the Instituto Cervantes; and Grolier Poetry Bookshop for making these events possible.

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Libretti & All: Auden the Translator

 

 

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A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.
— W.H. Auden, The Complete Works of W.H. Auden: Prose: Volume II. 1939-1948

 

In addition to his own verse, Auden translated a number of works into English, including the Mozart libretti The Magic Flute and Don Giovani. For Auden, opera libretti sat firmly with the European poetic tradition.

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INTERNATIONAL TRAVEL, Vol I: Bucharest & Its Bookstores

Untitled (Image courtesy of My Search For Sunshine Tumblr)

In honor of our forthcoming publication of Mircea Cărtărescu‘s Blinding, Archipelago’s Bronwen Durocher takes us on a tour of Bucharest–through its bookstores.

 

Bucharest is a city I’d love to see—and not just because I’d like to peek out from a massive roof of a Communist-era apartment block to imagine (like the young Mircea Cărtărescu) the decay of infrastructure and the proliferation of butterflies among the medieval ruins. The city has come a long way since Mircea’s childhood, in the two decades since the advent of democracy. Bookstores cropping up in the main arteries of the city, a burgeoning Romanian nightlife, al fresco restaurants in the historic district, and a wide range of museums (including the Museum of the Romanian Peasant and the open-air National Village Museum) attest to the kind of self-fashioning cultural renaissance Mircea imagined for his unconventional metropolis.

 

Of all the cultural offerings, I’m most interested in visiting Bucharest’s quirky English-language and world literature bookstores.  I begin with Anthony Frost bookstore, located just minutes from the Athenee Palace Hotel, (made famous by Olivia Manning’s The Balkan Trilogy about English ex-pats living in 1930s Bucharest).  The shop was started by a trio of Romanian Anglophiles in 2007 and stocks English-language titles about Romania and Bucharest alongside a wide variety of international fiction and nonfiction titles; comics and graphic novels; and art and photography books. (And Archipelago titles!)

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(Image courtesy of http://classiq.me/bookshops blog)

I’d also love to visit these lovely-looking shops:

 

Humanitas Bookshop (located on 120 Calea Victoriei), is on the bottom floor of the Hotel Cismigiu building, and stocks a mix of Romanian and international titles. Well-lit and filled with comfy chairs, Humanitas looks like a gorgeous little shop and boasts an outdoor cafe where the travel-weary drink coffee and peruse their recent purchases.

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(Image courtesy of TripAdvisor.com) 

 

Carturesti Bookshop, which has expanded to a few locations in Bucharest and beyond, is a cultural hotspot.  Part bookstore, part event space, part cafe, Carturesti sells books, tea, and customized stationery and hosts events, workshops, interviews, and intellectual discussions.  I’d love to stop by to get a sense of what’s happening in the community.

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(Image courtesy of Tripadvisor.com)

 

For more on Bucharest’s cultural offerings, including the National Village Museum, the Palace of the Parliament (formerly the Palace of the People), Bucharest’s Arc De’triumph, and the House of the Free Press (pictured below), visit Romanian tourism’s website.

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(Image courtesy of  the Ministry of Regional Development and Tourism and Eugen Mihai)

 Happy travels!

 

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Benjamin's "The Task of the Translator" – Part I

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Benjamin’s essay most relevant to our work here at Archipelago has to be “The Task of the Translator.” Originally written as an introduction to his translation of Baudelaire’s Tableaux Parisiens, the essay stands on its own as a translator’s manifesto. Over the next few weeks, I’ll highlight some particularly explorative statements, and I encourage anyone to leave a comment with their thoughts, rants, diatribes, etc. Discuss!

[A translation’s] essential quality is not statement or the imparting of information. Yet any translation which intends to perform a transmitting function cannot transmit anything but information–hence, something inessential. This is the hallmark of bad translations. But do we not generally regard as the essential substance of a literary work what it contains in addition to information–as even a poor translator will admit–the unfathomable, the mysterious, the “poetic,” something that a translator can reproduce only if he is also a poet? This, actually, is the cause of another characteristic of inferior translation, which consequently we may define as the inaccurate transmission of an inessential content. This will be true whenever a translation undertakes to serve the reader. However, if it were intended for the reader, the same would have to apply to the original. If the original does not exist for the reader’s sake, how could the translation be understood on the basis of this premise?

These two, bold statements twist together to form a thought difficult for me to fully understand. He seems, at first, to suggest that translation is a middle-ground between meaning and music. The next sentence, however, clarifies this further:

Translation is a mode.

And later:

As translation is a mode of its own, the task of the translator, too, may be regarded as distinct and clearly differentiated from the task of the poet.

Benjamin separates the action of the translator from the poet or novelist, giving translators their due independence as artistis in their own, distinct way.