A Thankless Job: A Translators Roundtable

2005-06

Most of us English speakers are too lazy, busy or stultified to read Goethe, Gogol, Kafka, and Mishima in their original languages. Many of us, however, have at some point cracked open a legendary work, translated from a foreign tongue, and finished it wondering: is that really all? What am I missing? Then, and perhaps only then, do we seek out the small-font name tucked below the cover art, huddled even smaller alongside the bar code on the back cover, or languishing with the Library of Congress classifications on the copyright page. We eye the name with disdain, speculating unpleasantly about his or her qualifications. O the unlucky translator, invisible in success, responsible for so much!

They’ve been indispensable since the dawn of literature, laboring over the masterpieces of others, coaxing them into approximation. Four gifted translators-into-English of four very different works gave generously of their time for this roundtable, mostly concerning their experiences with a recent book. May we introduce, with the respective works on which the roundtable is focusing:

Ms. Dorna Khazeni, who translated controversial novelist Michel Houellebecq’s 1991 essay “H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life” (Believer Books, 2005) from French; Mr. Benjamin Paloff, who translated then-teenaged Dorota Maslowska’s intense, unconventional debut novel Snow White and Russian Red (Black Cat, 2005) from Polish; Mr. Mark Polizzotti, who translated the gentle, erudite spy spoof Chopin’s Move (Dalkey Archive Press, 2004) by Jean Echenoz, past winner of the Prix Goncourt and Prix Médicis, from French; and Mr. Peter Wortsman, who translated a collection of 18-century Viennese innovator and bon vivant Peter Altenberg’s slice-of-life prose poems, titled Telegrams of the Soul, (Archipelago Books, 2005) from German.

This obliging foursome’s responses, submitted through e-mail, have in some cases been delicately trimmed, massaged and repurposed, but except where paraphrase or clarification are indicated by brackets, the language is entirely, gloriously, originally theirs.
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To begin with, what was your background in translation, and how did you come to translate this work?

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Paloff: I work comparatively in three Slavic literatures (Czech, Polish, and Russian), as well as with contemporary American literature, and translation is a natural feature of my work. I have been studying translation theory far longer than I have been facing the practical rigors of translation. My earliest translations were a hodgepodge of poems, essays, screenplays, and articles, some done for love, others as contract work in college.

The Maslowska project was spearheaded at Grove Press by Amy Hundley, a truly excellent editor, and I assume that she made the final decision about who would translate the novel. [Candidates for the job were] asked to translate three short passages. Working on the sample was as important for me as it was for Grove: this was my first chance to see if I could invent a hybrid language that would be readable in English and faithful to Maslowska’s Polish.

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Khazeni: I haven’t done a lot of translation, actually. But I had translated some short fiction from Farsi and from French and a lot of non-fiction. I also work as an interpreter.

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Wortsman: I had all but given up translation, having been burnt in the past by a publisher who essentially cheated me. It is such a thankless task. There was one review in particular of a past — and I might add, critically acclaimed — translation of mine, Posthumous Papers of a Living Author, by Robert Musil (originally published by Eridanos Books in 1987 and reissued by Penguin 20th-Century Classics), in which the reviewer noted everything from the rich complex style of Musil to the quality of the paper, the cover and even the cloth bookmark, but did not say a single word about the translation.

In this case, I happened to meet Jill Schoolman, the publisher, at a party. She knew my work and asked me to do something for her. I said, “No, I don’t translate anymore, but if I did, and I’m not saying I will, somebody really ought to do Peter Altenberg.”

Altenberg is a literary godfather to me. I am his “love god-child,” — not his bastard, since there is no anger or shame in my confession of a literary illegitimacy I discovered long after the fact.

I tried my best to resist translating, but the whole project poured out of my pores. I’ve never worked so quickly and don’t suppose I ever will again. It was all over and done with, including the process of [selecting the pieces], in a matter of months.

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What were the unique challenges of this job?

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Khazeni: I don’t think I was prepared for the stylistic challenges that Houellebecq’s writing presented. His sentences appear so deceptively simple, [but] upon closer inspection you realize they aren’t constructed in anything resembling a straightforward way. He often expresses a thought with great economy using syntax that’s unusual. There are lots of really short sentences — exclamations, almost — sometimes lacking a verb. But it all reads really fluidly and beautifully in French. It was so much harder than I’d anticipated to try to turn that language into English.

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Polizzotti: In the case of Echenoz, I feel particularly fortunate because his style seemed to “connect” with a style that felt natural to me. Plus, over twenty years of knowing each other and working together, I’ve noticed a certain effect of symbiosis: even in our correspondence I often find myself unwittingly “speaking Echenoz.” I think it also helps that we seem to share a number of likes in literature, movies, and music: we had a not dissimilar formation.

Stylistically, Echenoz differs from a number of the authors I’ve translated in that he tends to be much sparer in emotion and extremely economical in expression, which I value and admire. Although one can find bits and pieces of many precursors in his work, ranging from the New Novel to American pulp, the writer who seems to have the greatest stylistic affinity with him (or vice versa) is Flaubert. Not surprisingly, [Flaubert’s] Bouvard and Pecuchet, which I’m now translating for Dalkey, is Echenoz’s favorite book. Having translated Echenoz’s novels beforehand makes me feel a lot more comfortable with Flaubert than I might otherwise have.

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Wortsman: In this case, the translation was a labor of love. That having been said, I do try to feel my way into the soul of the author to find the apt term and tenor. For instance, does one translate the German “man” as “one” or “you” — as in “one says” or “you say?” That’s always a question. Then there are words and even notions that don’t exist in the English of our time. In the piece “Autobiography” (“Selbstbiographie”) I searched and failed to find the precise English for a “Liebig-Tiegel,” a kind of device that no longer seems to exist. Not even the librarian at the Austrian Cultural Institute had ever heard of it. So, by the logic of the sentence and context I came up with “reduction pot” — as in “The life of the soul and what the day may bring, reduced to two to three pages, cleansed of superfluities like a beef cow in a reduction pot.”

[With regard to] the particularity of Altenberg’s cadence, I would have to confess that I worked more by intuition than anything else. Being the son of Viennese-Jewish refugees and having heard this uniquely Viennese German spoken throughout my childhood, I heard the lines, rather than read them, and the act of translation was more of a filtration through the invisible channel linking heart and ear.

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Paloff: I did have some difficulty with the ending, though not just because the voice changes in the last few pages. By that point in the novel, it was fun to face the challenge of reproducing that shift. But that last section, with the exception of the last page, is no longer spoken by Nails, [the main character and the narrator until then], but by an anonymous young woman who provides a very glancing commentary on some of the novel’s themes. In Polish, it is very obvious that this new speaker is a woman: grammatical endings for verbs are gendered in the past tense, so there is no need to remark on the speaker’s gender. I got around this by beginning the passage, “Indeed, we’re girls talking about death…”

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Did you have any interaction with the author?

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Polizzotti: The obvious advantage of working with a living author is that you can query unclear wordings or points of fact, though the Internet has made this less necessary than it used to be. In some instances, Echenoz and I have even made a few minor changes to some of the books — small inconsistencies that the French copyeditor hadn’t noticed, things like that. In the case of [the earlier novel] Piano, we had to find a suitable singer/actress to replace the original’s Doris Day, after the US publisher decided to change it for legal reasons (in the English edition, her part is played by Peggy Lee). The title Chopin’s Move was also the product of some discussion back and forth, because Dalkey felt, rightly, that the literal title Lake (the French title is Lac) wouldn’t convey much to an American reader. The other advantage is that a living author uses contemporary language and settings, which require far less research and second-guessing than older works.

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Paloff: Maslowska and I have met, but I did not consult her directly on the translation. I have found in the past that, if I can get linguistic or cultural queries answered elsewhere, I have a much easier (and happier) time finding original solutions to the original problems posed by a literary text without having someone peering over my shoulder. Odd as it may sound, even though we may share the same ultimate goal — a good book — translator and author often do not have the same investment in the process of translation. There have been cases where I have found this to be otherwise — for example, in translating critical or theoretical literature — but generally I prefer to stand alone with the book.

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Wortsman: My affection for Altenberg is profound and sincere. I think of him as an old friend who just happens to be dead, but whose voice continues to echo in the texts. I am also convinced of the modernity of this voice. My intent was to take him out of the nostalgia ghetto of fin-de-siècle Vienna and present him as a voice which, though uttered in another time and place, speaks with an almost uncanny prescience to our own moment.

His creative method had a peculiar impact on my translation. It was as if Altenberg haunted me. In the past I have always labored profusely over every word, in my translation as in my own writing, but in this case it was as if the translation dictated itself and all I had to do was type it out. I am taking a touch of poetic license here, as there were passages I had to struggle with, but by and large it really was as if dear old Altenberg was whispering the words in my ear.

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To what degree does your sense of the original author’s intent shape your choices?

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Khazeni: When I’m translating, I attempt to be as faithful as possible to the text that I am working with, in terms of language, tone, voice, nuance, as well as syntax, rhythm and structure. At the same time, there’s a point at which you also work with your instincts of the language you are translating into. It’s not as black and white as working this one way all the time or this other way. I can’t say, “This is my system.” I approach the sentence and translate it as I read it, so I’m both reading it in the original language and translating into English. My translation is an extension of my reading. But it’s also a function of the fact that I read and write English. So these things dance around each other, my reading, my understanding and my translating. It is also a fact that there are things you come across that you’re not sure about, “Did he mean this or that?” you wonder. “If this three word phrase doesn’t make any sense in English, do I add a verb? Or not?” In my limited experience, the answer varies. I also tend to believe that there’s not one way of translating anything. I imagine that there can be more than one good translation of a work and that each will have different merits. Each will be a reading as well as a translation, though, other than in some inconceivably extreme case, the differences are of nuance and the original work is what comes across in each one.

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Polizzotti: As mentioned earlier, one great help in translating Echenoz is that I feel close to his sense of humor and tone, and our personal contacts over the years have helped further this. So in that sense, I suppose I can “hear” his voice more easily in the English, when I feel I’ve gotten it right. But any text, to a large degree, has its own internal logic and shape, and you don’t need to know the author personally to immerse yourself in this. By the same token, there are certain books I simply wouldn’t take on because the writer’s voice is opaque to me, or antipathetic. This is more an issue with fiction than with nonfiction. Not every translator is well suited to every book.

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What’s your greatest satisfaction in translation? The day-to-day engagement with a text? The finished product?

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Khazeni: It’s definitely not the finished product. You always worry that maybe you should keep tweaking it. I do, anyhow.

I really love the process. I like the reading of a text with that devotion and the inquisitive attention that translating requires. Pondering and weighing the words of it, the place of each sentence, the concert of all of them. It’s a very pleasurable way of being with a text. Sometimes too, I’ll read something that I think is really important, or that I know a friend would love to read, and then it’s a kind of sense of mission: I feel I have to translate whatever it is so others can read it.

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Polizzotti: The part I enjoy best is revision, after the basic draft is on paper and all major vocabulary issues have been resolved. In other words, the process of turning it from a mass of Translatorese into something that sounds, first like English, and then like English the original author might have written. I generally reread and revise each complete draft half a dozen times, sometimes more. And it’s never really finished, of course — you could revise forever.

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Wortsman: Altenberg brought me back to translation as a craft which I have resumed as a daily exercise, for an hour or so, a priming or loosening up prior to leaping into the chilly waters of composition. As a trilingual author — English, French and German — translation helps me align my tongue with my soul, to clear the throat and let the voice out.

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Paloff: I treat a translation the same as I do any other piece of writing, which means many drafts, many revisions, and development over time. When the language of a project fails to evolve, I become very skeptical of my work. The upside of this is that the project generally picks up nuance and flavor as it goes on. The downside is that the process never really ends, and I am never really satisfied with the outcome, even once it is published. If translation is truly something that “begins in failure,” as Robert Pinsky once said, then the best I can hope for is “good enough,” and I put a big burden on myself to make “good enough” really good. I learned a great deal about the Polish language from translating this book, and that continues to serve me well.

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Did you bring to the job of translation, or accumulate through the process, your own critical analysis of the book’s underlying “big picture” ideas or messages? How did your evolving sense of the work affect your translation at the word-to-word level?

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Polizzotti: Not so much in the translation. This has been relevant when I’ve written an introduction to the book, but even then that kind of analysis comes after the fact. The only “big picture” work that goes into the translation itself is a first reading straight through, so that I know where the book is going and what clues I might need to pick up on along the way. Otherwise, the work happens at a very local level, in trying to reproduce as well as possible the tone, voice, mood, information, rhythm, and “feel” of each sentence and each paragraph. That said, at the local level, one often has to interpret and analyze. It sometimes happens that the meaning of a sentence in French and the meaning of its literal translation into English are two different things, and one has to alter the wording a bit to preserve the author’s intention.

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Paloff: What makes [Snow White and Russian Red] a worthwhile book for me is that my understanding of its linguistic and rhetorical nuances changed a great deal the more I worked on it, the more I read (and wrote) it. This is what good literature does, I think: it changes as we read it, and it continues to change as we change. It is difficult for me to say whether my appreciation of the book evolved so much because I was working so closely with the language, or my work with the language evolved so much because my reading of it was developing.

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Khazeni: I don’t think the work’s underlying ideas or messages affect my word-to-word work. But I do think the more I know about a writer’s body of work, the easier it is for me to approach the translation. It informs the translation on a deeper level, perhaps. It’s not always possible and sometimes you just go at a piece cold, with no context, but in Houellebecq’s case, having read his novels, it was interesting to see him develop his intellectual thesis in this literary essay. Working on a sentence-level, I was always aware of him as the probing intellectual writer of, say, Elementary Particles, so it made me more acutely aware of the precision of his thinking and language.

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We’ll conclude with a round of specific questions. Mr. Polizzotti, if you had to identify a primary aspect of Chopin’s Move that you worked to bring across, what would it be?

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Polizzotti: Ultimately, to me, Echenoz’s books are all about the act of writing. The plot is somewhat secondary, like Hitchcock’s MacGuffin. A crucial part of this is the particular humor, which is perhaps the hardest part to preserve, and which involves a combination of timing, concision, reference, sound, and even whether or not the reader has kept certain earlier details in mind.

What I’m trying to recreate more than anything is the effect the original text had on the French reader. This could entail any number of small departures — anything from changing a cultural reference to making a small addition or deletion to clarify a point — but, paradoxical as this might seem, always with an eye toward preserving the integrity of the original. By clinging too faithfully to the sentence structure or cultural system of the original, you’re more likely to end up with gibberish, with something the reader finds incomprehensible. Where’s the advantage in that?

Up until Piano, most of Echenoz’s books would appear in the UK in a British translation, which to me sounded a bit unnatural, even as mine no doubt seemed to them. British and American English are moving farther and farther apart, it seems to me, and it is becoming increasingly difficult to have a translation truly “work” on both sides of the Atlantic. Even Piano, which was published in my translation in the UK, underwent some Anglicizing first (“chap” instead of “guy”; various turns of phrase that struck them as too American). Personally, I wouldn’t want to show that edition as an example of my work — the difference is subtle, but it makes the whole thing sound “off” to me. And not because it’s British English, but precisely because it’s a bastardization of the two. There are sentences in that version that I simply would never have written.

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Mr. Paloff, how vital to your translation was maintaining cultural fidelity?

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Paloff: The question of cultural fidelity in translation will rattle translators for all time. I think it’s something that depends very much on the text itself, and on the translator’s own intentions in bringing the work into the target language. There’s a point when translation becomes adaptation — look at all the versions of Latin poets that suddenly make reference to American pop culture — but we would be much poorer without these as well. Because Maslowska’s book is about intercultural conflict — those few who have written about the novel as a cautionary tale about drug use have given it a very superficial reading — it would not have worked to change the cultural references, though this was hardly necessary. McDonald’s is the same company everywhere. The mistake we sometimes make is when we think that McDonald’s means the same for a Pole as it does for an American, and this is simply not the case. There were a couple times when I needed to use a couple more words than Maslowska does. When she says Arka Gdynia, her readers know that it’s a soccer team, thus: Arka Gdynia Football Club.

The language of Snow White and Russian Red is nothing like what one learns in the classroom. For one thing, it is delightfully vulgar. For another, it creates a hybrid of high and low diction that moves at a rapid tempo and sometimes strains the limits of sense. Fortunately, I’ve spent enough time in Poland to know a lot of the things they don’t teach you in school. The rest I picked up from a variety of sources: plenty of reading in Polish, native speakers, dictionaries (including specialty dictionaries ranging from slang to technical language), and the Internet. The last of these was extraordinarily helpful; the Internet, as a ubiquitous presence in Europe and North America, is an increasingly necessary tool for the translator of contemporary literature. I picked up a lot from reading Polish chat-rooms and blogs, where people almost unconsciously translate their spoken language into text.

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Mr. Wortsman, how did you decide when to keep Peter Altenberg’s emphatic punctuation, and when to lighten a ?!? to a ? What influenced these decisions?

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Wortsman: This was one of the rare cases in which my wonderful publisher-editor, Jill Schoolman, interceded, gently suggesting a lightening of the opulent punctuation. In my original translation I was religiously faithful, but I came to agree with Jill that the contemporary American reader might be put off by this eccentric and ever so slightly hysterical use of punctuation. In Vienna they slather “schlag” (whipped cream) on every cake. This is dear PA’s indulgence. I have always envied the license in Spanish to start a sentence with upside-down punctuation, thereby to whisper from the start which way the sentence is going, so the profusion of question marks and exclamations points — like punctuational walking sticks and canes — did not bother me.

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Ms. Khazeni, where Houellebecq’s original quoted Lovecraft, you made the decision to insert Lovecraft’s original words instead of re-translating the translated-to-French Lovecraft Houellebecq worked from; what difficulties did you have tracking down the passages Houellebecq was excerpting, and what was your method? Did you perform a literal translation of the French excerpt, and then look for something similar in Lovecraft’s originals?

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Khazeni: I do believe Houellebecq’s only read HPL in translation. [As far as] “the decision to insert Lovecraft’s original words,” I don’t believe it could have been done any other way. It’s extremely dicey to attempt to retranslate back into the original language from a translation of someone’s original voice. Not a good idea, I’d say. I had qualms about the way we had to handle the situation — dropping the quotes and retranslating passages– but it seemed like the only solution. Mr. Houellebecq was satisfied with the final result, based on my conversations with him during his recent visit.

I really didn’t have a very scientific method. Early on, I figured out that many of the quotes came from Lovecraft’s letters. Often there’d be some clue as to when chronologically in Lovecraft’s life this or that quoted comment was made. If, for example, the sentence Houellebecq had written in French had something to do with [Lovecraft’s] impressions of New York, I’d figure out what year it was [Lovecraft] first visited New York and then I’d sift through all the letters around those dates looking for something that resembled the quotes. It was kind of crazy that it worked, this non-method. Each time I stumbled across the exact passage I’d feel so relieved and gratified. Then there were the times when I didn’t find the equivalent in Lovecraft’s letters (or fiction, as the case might be). [Lovecraft scholar] S. T. Joshi was so grand and generous to help us look for missing original quotes, but in the end, we were still left with a few mysteries.

I think I reached the conclusion that [since] in the introduction Houellebecq wrote to the Lovecraft book, ten years after its first publication, he refers to it as a sort of first novel, one might be led to assume that the Lovecraft of this essay is in part a character of Houellebecq’s creation.

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Thank you all for your contributions and for the enthusiasm of your responses. Thanks also to Chad Post at Dalkey Archive Press, Kara Mason at Archipelago, and “John” at Believer Books for putting me in touch with your talented translators.

 

 

2005-03-29

I’ve taken a survey of eight hundred poets, including Dave Brinks, and we agreed that the best times and places to be a poet was Vienna at the end of the 19th century, and New Orleans at present. In Vienna the cafes of the time teemed with the high flames of idealism and art burning inside any number of people, some of them moved by bohemian faith, and others just pretty. In Vienna, for instance, you could run into Peter Altenberg, the author of Telegrams of the Soul, who might say: “Religion is a kind of ‘ideal application’ of the persecution complex on human nerves!” Altenberg said that around 1899, and was praised for it by Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann, and Arthur Schnitzler, writers whom you might run into if you frequented the right cafes and burned withesprit-du-temps. In  those cafes you might also find people like Albert Einstein, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Karl Kraus, all of whom had something new in mind and were ready to explicate it in dazzling detail, especially if you were young, had auburn hair and deep black or violet eyes. Peter Altenberg adored nature, but rarely left Vienna for the real thing. He rhapsodized about the daughters of his acquintances with an inspired ease that today could easily be mistaken for pedophilia, but for physical company he prefered prostitutes for whom he bought flowers, and treated to layered cream pastries and hot chocolate. Inspired by Baudelaire, he wrote his poetry in prose paragraphs under the influence of morphine, cocaine, and alcohol, but the baroque wallpaper in his room may have been equally influential. The entities that came to life in the wallpaper dictated his frank and weird reflections. For instance: “Forest, lake, spring, winter, woman, art – all fade away, and there’s only one still thrilling thing left: your lovely walking stick!” Altenberg collected walking sticks and was known to wield one if provoked late at night in a dubious neighborhood. He was portly and had a sense of humor that may be untranslateable today, but it made the likes of Kafka and Mann roll on the floor. Fin-de-siècle Vienna bubbled with culture like an overripe Brie or a kirsche torte (chocolate cherry pie) left in the window of a pastry shop too long. Which is why everyone was amazed when the nazis jackbooted their way through such refinement. Lucky for him, Peter Altenberg was way dead by then, having exited his hefty frame in 1919.  Telegrams of the Soul: Selected Prose Pearls of Peter Altenberg is now in English, translated by Peter Wortsman, published by Archipelago Books. Anyone who wants to understand or participate in the current bohemian revival in New Orleans, should take a copy of this book to the Gold Mine on Thursdays and let him or herself be seen with it. Stay off the wallpaper!

 

These tales and essays, some only a few lines long, convey the fleeting intoxications of a fin-de-siecle idler. A dedicated admirer of the fair sex—especially, and no doubt disturbingly for many modern readers, as represented by 13-year-old charmers—Altenberg (1859-1919) passed his life in the coffee shops and brothels of Vienna.  The pieces he wrote about his experiences there were admired by, among others, Thomas Mann, Arthur Schnitzler and Franz Kafka.  A perennial enthusiast, the author cannot write four sentences running without resorting to the exclamation point.  Rapture is triggered by the mundane: a dock in the sun, artificial flowers, a turn of phrase.  His passion for women and young girls is exalted by attentive and unfailing compassion.  In one piece, learning of a working-class nymphet’s passion for silk swatches, he obtains a box of them from the manufacturer.  His ensuing description of the party she creates for her fellow urchins, presiding over their admiration of the rags like a queen, ends with the child’s peremptory dismissal of her benefactor.  Another series recounts the everyday life of the Ashanti inhabitants of an African village transported to serve as a tourist attraction in the Viennese zoo.  Altenberg developed close friendships with many of the Ashanti; his portraits of them are as sensitive as his renderings of family members, literary and professional acquaintances, and prostitutes.  While the prose here is often overblown, it proceeds from genuine excesses of feeling; the writer has been carried away, and in almost every case, he takes the reader with him.

Winning expressions of pleasure, at once lyrical, incisive and funny.

 

Unsuccessful at law, medicine, and the book trade, it was only by chance that Richard Englander discovered his skill at writing when he was in his 40s. The son of a wealthy Viennese businessman, Englander took the pen name of Peter Altenberg and found success as a newspaper writer of brief sketches and vignettes, which he called “prose pearls.”“Success” is probably too positive a word for Altenberg’s writing career. He lived in cheap hotels on donations from friends and admirers. A true Bohemian who was prone to wild dress and outrageous opinions, he favored the company of prostitutes between his visits to the local asylum, where the city’s alcoholics were treated. Altenberg listed the CafÈ Central, a favorite of Vienna’s artistic set of the 1890s, as his official address. He would write the short prose he favored either at the coffeehouse or while propped up in his bed.

Inspired not only by the prose poems of Baudelaire but by that Austrian invention the postcard and its condensed style of writing, Altenberg’s prose pearls are a very personal form of writing “They’re extracts! Extracts from life,” he said. In fact, his personal life was often the subject of his writings, but he mixed fact and fiction freely, blurring the lines between the real and the imaginary. At his best, he is like a favorite lush uncle, telling wondrous stories you can’t quite believe. Altenberg relates his supposed encounters with shop clerks, waiters, and hotel maids, and displays his family’s dirty laundry “their financial and sexual hi-jinks” for all to see. He is prone to discuss very childish things, like what kind of pen he favors when he writes, and he’ll share his reaction to newfangled inventions such as the elevator. And he does not hesitate to discourse on his ponderings, both trivial and not so, sometimes venturing into waters a tad too deep for him.

Altenberg bragged that he never rewrote anything, that all of his writings were spontaneous first drafts. Some of them read that way, unfortunately, as if his deadline were pressing and he needed to end the piece and get it to the printer. Several! others! look! like! forests! of! exclamation! points! But then there are those pieces that truly are “prose pearls,” small works of perfect beauty. The piece entitled “Schubert,” for instance, traces a line of thought from its point of inspiration to its final destination. Altenberg begins by speaking of the print hanging on the wall of his room, which shows Schubert playing the piano for three little girls; this reminds him of the composer’s longing for the daughter of one of his patrons. When the girl teased Schubert that he had never dedicated anything to her, he exclaimed: “What for? As it is, it ’s all for you! ” Altenberg ends the piece with this telling remark: “That’s why I often turn to page 37 in Niggli’s biography of Schubert. ”

 

Brazilian poet and dramatist João Cabral de Melo Neto, who died in 1999, left behind a wealth of work, much of it chronicled in Education By Stone. The Collection pulls mostly from 1950-1980, the period of his major work (once Cabral lost his sight in the early 1990’s, he quit writing altogether). Throughout his career, Cabral eschewed personal revelation, opting to concentrate on the solid objects of reality. His images are so material so tangible, they feel like the work of a master surrealist. In “The Dog Without Feathers,” for example, Cabral travels a terse, epigrammatic path through images of dogs biting seas, killed by rivers. One is gently lulled by the poem’s pace before realizing the sublime violence of observation:

The river fears the sea
As a dog fears a door that’s cracked open,
As a beggar fears
An apparently open church,

Cabral’s careful juxtaposition of objects here lends a devilish sense of foreboding. His work is filled with these types of images and truisms; he reminds the reader that there are subtleties both real and imagined in everyday things, that “the blood of a dog / is heavier / than the dog itself” and that “whatever lives / inflicts life / on silence.”

Cabral’s infliction of life on silence was a profound one. Although Education By Stone sadly excludes his later work, including poems from his last book before going blind, Sevilha Andando, it provides a cohesive English-language overview of one of Brazil’s most profound and influential poets.

 

A long-overdue bilingual edition of João Cabral de Melo Neto’s poetry has just been published by Archipelago Books, a young literary press based in New York. Winner of many international prizes, Cabral first became known to English-language readers via a group of translations edited by Elizabeth Bishop in the classic An Anthology of Twentieth-Century Brazilian Poetry (1972). This new volume, exquisitely crafted by Richard Zenith, is a fine heir to that tradition, continuing the efforts of the now out-of-print Selected Poetry, 1937-1990, edited by Djelal Kadir (1994).

Jo“o Cabral de Melo Neto, one of the most influential Brazilian poets of the twentieth century, was born in Recife in 1920 and died in Rio, where he had resided the last years of his life, in 1999. Despite having spent decades abroad as a diplomat, his poems remain firmly rooted in the arid landscapes of the northeastern backlands and the hard life of its inhabitants, a “hardness” also present in the precise assembly of his compositions.

In an unusual and masterly way, Cabral’s poetry thus blends two things that often appear unrelated: social concerns and formal innovation. Evincing an equally unlikely marriage of influences, Cabral’s deceptively simple, lapidary poetics invokes both the universe of literatura de cordel (popular northeastern ballads sung by itinerant musicians) and the lessons of high modernist architecture as exemplified by LeCorbusier, one of the poet’s long-time models. Instead of a poetics of “expression,” Cabral’s texts seem to enact both what Ezra Pound called “a direct presentation of the thing” and what Haroldo de Campos termed a “geometry of commitment,” where neither form nor content dominate, but rather fuse into an organic whole. In this hard-edged yet moving poetry, one acquires from the stone lessons in morals (“its cold resistance”), in poetics (“its concrete flesh”), and in economics (“its compact weight”), but never actively, for this reluctant instructor “is a stone from birth, penetrating the soul.”

In a conscious choice that excludes very early and very late work, Zenith gathers pieces from the 1950s through the 1980s (in his estimation, Cabral’s strongest period), paying particular attention to the landmark volume EducaÁ“o pela pedra (1966), which also lends its title to the selection. Education by Stone includes poems Zenith had previously published but in a revision that corrects slight inaccuracies and clarifies what seemed a hesitating line or stanza. Overall, the choice of poems is a generous, personal introduction to Cabral, and, where the previous edition had included only excerpts of longer poems, Zenith has gone for the full text, as is the case of the book-length poem The Dog without Feathers, an allegory of the Capibaribe River in Pernambuco. Other important poems collected here for the first time in English include Cabral’s “Antiode” and “The Engineer,” which can be read as his anti-lyrical and constructivist ars poetica.

The selection also features poems from the A Escola das facas (The School of Knives), translated here for the first time. Nota¨bly absent, however, is Cabral’s most popular long poem, Morte e vida severina (a section of which was translated by Bishop as The Death and Life of a Severino), a dramatic piece influenced by the vernacular that recounts the trials and tribulations of impoverished retirantes (migrant sugar-cane workers).

The collection, then, presents a slight preference for the lyrical poem, instead of Cabral’s more narrative/dramatic texts. Zenith’s excellent translations, however, do not overlyricize, and, in comparison to versions by other translators, seem intent on making Cabral’s Brazilian modernity speak the current North American poetic idiom. Also, in contrast to earlier versions, Zenith has opted for the colloquial, eschewing Latin cognates and closely following Cabral’s reticent style. The volume also includes an informative and well-written afterword, as well as discreet factual notes to selected poems. A very timely pub¨lication and a handsome edition, Education by Stone stands as a fitting posthumous homage not only to one of Brazil’s but to one of the world’s most original poets of the last century.

 

In the 1930s, too, Yom Sang-seop published what is considered one of the masterpieces of early modern Korean fiction, Three Generations, which recently appeared in a new translation by Yu Young-nan. Far from describing the atrocities of Japanese rule, Yom’s novel depicts a stultified society in which the old depart from Confucian values and the young cannot build a new world for themselves. Several characters engage in an almost halfhearted conspiracy against the colonial authorities and inevitably fail. A father who fails to honor his ancestors or set a proper example for his son is brought low by his misdeeds. Characters speak to one another with a bluntness that seems awkward when set against, for instance, the Japanese aesthetic of indirection. The structure of the novel is uneven, the prose unremarkable. Nevertheless, in its way, Three Generations successfully portrays a society throttled by the “modernization” that Japan inflicted upon the peninsula. This delayed development, as much as the more violent policies of the era, constituted the tragedy of the colonial experience.

 

If you’re reading a Hebrew novel in English, how do you know if it’s any good?

Some things are lost in translation, as the old saying goes. One imagines this to be especially true for literary fiction, but if you don’t read the original language, if you don’t have the two books sitting side by side as you read, how are you supposed to know what has been lost?

This is a problem even for the folks giving a new translation award. Rather than figure out for themselves the best translation of a work of fiction, beginning next month the judges of Britain’s prestigious Man Booker prize will dole out an extra 15,000 pounds to their yearly fiction winner. It will then be up to the author to decide which translator of his or her work gets the cash. No word on what to do if the winner isn’t a literary superstar who has been translated into several languages; nor, perhaps, have the Booker people considered what to do if the translations aren’t very good. After all, they’re not judging!

In his introduction to The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, released late last year, John le Carre offers up a hint on what to look for in a translation: simplicity. He points out that Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous stories, though great, were short on “fine turns of phrase” and “clever adjectives,” allowing them to translate “without loss into practically any language.”

There’s an irony in this. Those writers who are least interested in language – those writers, in other words, who are least interesting -are best to read in other languages. The prolific Israeli writer Aharon Appelfeld may be a case in point, except that he is anything but an uninteresting writer. In two recent memoirs, the Holocaust survivor emphasizes his suspicion of any “fluent stream of words.”“I prefer stuttering,” he writes in The Story of a Life, published in English last fall and translated from the Hebrew by Aloma Halter, “for in stuttering I hear the friction and the disquiet, the effort to purge impurities from the words, the desire to offer something from inside you. Smooth, fluent sentences leave me with a feeling of uncleanness, of order that hides emptiness.”

Not words you expect to hear from a writer, but they are born out by Appelfeld’s style, which is one of haunting simplicity. In A Table for One: Under the Light of Jerusalem(also translated by Halter), a beautiful coffee-table book of Appelfeld essays about cafe life in Jerusalem accompanied by paintings and drawings of the city by his son Meir, he tells of needing to avoid people while on the run during World War II. “This turned me into a mute creature,” he writes. “Any time that I was asked something, the words would be stuck in my mouth.”

Perhaps because of his unornamented style, Appelfeld’s writing feels particularly immediate. It doesn’t seem to be translated at all. Go to Amazon.com, meanwhile, or even the publisher Schocken’s Web site, and you won’t find Halter’s name. Do his literary benefactors wish to preserve the impression he’s writing in English?

This is not an issue, however, for a recent novel by Vietnamese dissident Duong Thu Huong. How do you know you’re reading a bad translation? When you keep stumbling over phrases like “tutelary genies” or nearly correct idioms like “two-edged sword” or mystifying bits of dialogue like “I just don’t remember, full stop.”No Man’s Land is a wonderful novel – the story of happily married Mien being claimed by her supposedly dead first husband is heartbreaking and thought-provoking – but is nevertheless ill-served by translators Nina McPherson and Phan Huy Duong. (Although this is the fifth Huong novel the pair has rendered into English, their names can be found only in fine print on the copyright page.)

It helps to articulate a rule of thumb here: When reading a good translation (or good writing, for that matter), your focus remains immersed in the story. A bad translation, on the other hand, calls attention to itself. “Danger had left front stage,” Huong writes, whatever that means.

Of course, translations must convey more than language; they must communicate a different culture. They must acknowledge that through language we announce our distinctive ways of understanding the world. This may be why the translation for My Father’s Rifle: A Childhood in Kurdistan, a new memoir by Hiner Saleem, seems so effortless. Catherine Temerson is translating from the French, a language that reflects a worldview not so different from our own (politics aside).

Saleem’s writing is clipped and vigorous, American even, in the fashion of Hemingway.

Vietnamese, by comparison, is a much more foreign tongue, forever distinguishing relationships and class rankings. In No Man’s Land, this leads to unfortunate exchanges where characters yell things like “Hey there, mother of my son!”

A good translation, then, must give us a sense of the foreign without being too literal. No language is more hierarchical than Korean, its verbs recognizing distinctions that are largely invisible in English. In Three Generations, the classic Korean novel by Yom Sang-seop just translated into English by Yu Young-nan, the young man Deok-gi uncomfortably runs into his father’s former mistress, a beautiful woman his own age named Gyeong-ae. How should he address her? As a woman, as a peer or as an elder who once had a relationship with his father? While such a dilemma would be instantly recognizable to Korean readers, Americans need some help.

“I leave tomorrow . . .” Deok-gi hesitated, not knowing how to end his sentence. He wasn’t inclined to use a formal ending, but it was difficult to justify a familiar one.

A Korean-speaking critic objected to parts of Yu’s translation for not adequately conveying the energy of the original dialogue. But that would be impossible!

Instead, Yu balances the foreignness of Korean with the constraints of English. For all that may be lost in the process, this is the great, imperfect pleasure of reading translations.

 

When people speak of “East Asian literature,” it’s not surprising that the conversation is limited to Japanese and Chinese writers. Almost none of Korea’s writers (with the exception of Yi Munyol) have been translated or widely distributed within the United States. But one hopes that Yom Sang-seop’sThree Generations (Archipelago Books, 2005) will bring Korean literature to a wider, English speaking audience.

Originally published as a serial in the early 1930s and as a book in 1948, Three Generationschronicles the life of Deok-gi, the youngest adult of the wealthy Jo clan. Beloved by his grandfather, the formidable patriarch of the clan, and estranged from Sang-hun, his father, college-aged Deok-gi navigates the strictures of the Korean social system, aided by his socialist friend, Byeong-hwa, the other focal point of the novel.

Immediately, Yom gets up the family conflicts: the grandfather dislikes Sang-hun for becoming a Christian minister, while Deok-gi finds his father hypocritical for fathering a child with a young girl, then abandoning them. But the inter-generational squabbling is not the whole of the novel; indeed, though the recipient of the grandfather’s inheritance drives the first half of the novel, the suspense picks up considerably in the second half when Byeong-hwa’s socialist activities cause trouble.

Yom’s sympathies lie squarely with the socialists. From the outset, the novel presents a convincing tension between those with wealth and those without. Not surprisingly, the characters lower on the socio-economic scale are Marxists, while the characters even lower than that are given very little voice. At one point, Deok-gi remarks that his two servants were “no different from some liberated black slaves in America.” By the novel’s end, the corrupting nature of wealth and property is not lost on Deok-gi, who comes to a socialist epiphany: “Someone who was poor, whose lot in life was hard labor, shouldn’t he at least receive an appropriate compensation for his pains?”

More tellingly, Byeong-hwa, the unrepentant socialist, is nothing less than honorable. Though threatened with imprisonment and torture, Byeong-hwa embodies brave and ideal characteristics: selflessness in the face of hunger, utter devotion to “the cause,” an unwavering willingness to help others—a stark contrast to Sang-hun’s nominal Christianity.

It’s tempting to interpret the author’s view of Korean Christians through Sang-hun–conniving, hypocritical, greedy–but despite the antagonism towards the father’s character, Yom’s understanding of the Korean Christians is more nuanced. At first, Sang-hun appears torn between his religion and his desire to honor his own father, motivations complicated by lingering feelings for his mistress. It comes as a disappointment, then, when, Sang-hun later abandons his moral complexity to move in with a concubine and set up a bawdy house. But, despite the glaringly obvious character flaws that Yom projects onto his most prominent Christian character, Yom acknowledges that, for better or worse, Christianity would be an integral part of Korean culture, as much as the Japanese influence had been in the past, and as much as the Socialist influence would be in the future.

While the males in the story get the main narrative attention, the conflicts and intrigues of the female characters within the household, particularly the grandfather›s young new wife and her stepdaughter-in-law, are just as fascinating, albeit less fleshed out. Interestingly enough, most of the older females are named and defined by their roles—“Deok-gi’s mother” or “the Suwon woman”—a telling illustration of the patriarchal culture on display. Indeed, from the males’ point-of-view, the females “behave like chickens after a fight,” especially after they’ve reached “a phase of life in which women tend to grow cranky anyway.” Gyeong-ae and Pil-sun, however, the two women with proper names who represent the new generation—both of them beautiful, forthright and, not coincidentally, the love interests of Byeong-hwa and Deok-gi—do not engage in the backstabbing and demure embarrassment that mark the other women in the novel.

The notion of a national hierarchy becomes a subtle but persistent undercurrent in the book. At the time Three Generations was written, the Japanese were still a colonial presence in Korea, and despite the antagonism, the Japanese are posited as superior: Deok-gi chooses to go to the more prestigious school in Kyoto, rather than a Korean one; other characters speak Japanese in order to impress.

Though the internalization of the colonial structure is present, it also appears externally. When Gyeong-ae and Sang-hun are taken into a police station after a bar fight, the Japanese policemen are outraged not at the fight, but at the fact that Gyeong-ae kissed a Korean, rather than the Japanese customers. It comes as no surprise, then, that the Japanese policemen treat their Korean captives harshly. And as much as the Japanese are revered and feared, the Chinese are reviled. The Chinese characters who speak in broken language, and insults frequently feature the Chinese as the butt of the joke.

Some of the repressive mores of the Korean culture itself are also highlighted. Characters jockey for honor in the eyes of the community and their families, even while their actions are at odds with their reputations. They live in fear of rumors and of what others think of them. This sense of propriety becomes a crushing force; that Yom Sang-seop manages to convey its importance is no mean feat. At first—especially to Westerners steeped in an individualist tradition—the character’s overwhelming need to appear honorable or respectable seems foreign, but the omniscient narrator’s ability to show one character’s fear of what›s happened to his reputation and another character’s malicious pleasure in seeing what’s happened deftly dramatizes the situation.

Yu Young-man’s translation juxtaposes English phraseology that’s sometimes at odds with curiously poetic Korean idioms: silent as someone “with a mouthful of stolen honey;” hungry as “ghosts who had starved for three lifetimes.” But the prose, for the most part, is clear and straightforward, echoing the linear plot and characters admirably. With its complex plot and huge cast of characters,Three Generations evokes not only Korean culture at a critical juncture in its history, but the strength and pleasures of its literature.

Viet Dinh graduated with his MFA from the University of Houston in 2003 and now lives in Denver. His stories can be found in the Threepenny Review, Zoetrope: All-Story, Fence, and the Michigan Quarterly Review, among others. He throws caution to the wind and oftentimes has to duck when it comes flying back at him.

 

Originally published in 1931 as a serial in “Chosun Ilbo,” and fluently translated from the original Korean, Three Generations is a classic work of Korean fiction following the tense dynamics of the Jo family in 1930s Japanese-occupied Seoul. Skillfully describing traditional Korean family structure, and vividly portraying the effects of Japanese rule, Three Generations presents a fierce battle between modern and traditional elements, as well as a chilling portrayal of the ruthlessness with which a colonial power imposed its will upon those under its control. Author Yom Sang-seop was one of the few Korean writers of the era who remained true to his ideals and did not write in Japanese or write pro-Japanese articles. A highly recommended and welcome contribution to modern Asian literature shelves.