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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.

 

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Ezra Pound & Canto I

 

If you’re going to engage with English poetry, a mentor once told me, sooner or later, you’re going to have to deal with Pound. She was referring, of course, to his controversial–and often, downright bigoted–remarks both on the page and beyond. But frankly, few modern English poets have influenced as many writers as Pound. That his work continues to resonate with successive generations poses a particular  challenge in the narrative history of American verse.

 

Pound recognized the need for international literature to enliven the language, incorporating untranslated text from other languages into his poetry and even translating whole works (see: Enrico Pea‘s Moscardino). Avoiding the mode of stiff, word-to-word translation, Pound followed his ear, sometimes creating a translation that was outrageously loose — but gorgeous.

And then went down to the ship,
Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly seas, and
We set up mast and sail on that swart ship,
Bore sheep aboard her, and our bodies also
Heavy with weeping, and winds from sternward
Bore us out onward with bellying canvas,
Circe’s this craft, the trim-coifed goddess.

My favorite example of his translation skills is in his “Canto I.” The majority of the poem is a loose translation of a brief episode from Homer’s Odyssey. Notice the trios of alliterative words and vowel-sounds at the beginnings of each line. Rather than follow Homer’s dactylic hexameter meter, which doesn’t work in the same way as it does for Ancient Greek and Latin, Pound chose to set the poem in a similar meter as Beowulf. Pound saw his task beyond translating the words: he translated the meter, from one language’s epic tradition to another.

 

For those in the know — or willing to Google the reference — Pound admits toward the end that he isn’t translating from the original Greek, but from a 1538 Latin edition translated by Andreas Divus.  Pound’s resulting creation feels like a direct address to the Art of Translation, its wonders, its pitfalls, and its importance.

 

Check out all of Canto I on the Poetry Foundation website here, with a great recording of Forrest Gander giving his thoughts and reading the first section.

 

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GUEST POST: Mary Ann Newman – Translators: Handmaidens or Guerrillas?

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Catalan translator Mary Ann Newman kicks off our GUEST POST series which features translators, thinkers, and enthusiasts in the field. Newman offers her invaluable insight into the underappreciated world of the translator:

 

The core challenge for translation is the question of professionalism. What, for translators, is almost always a vocation, is treated by the publishing industry as an avocation.  The office of translator, and the act of translation, is gravely undervalued, and all the judgments that derive from this lack of esteem–compensation, reflection in reviews, presence in bookstores, etc.–suffer the effects.

 

I believe there is a blind spot in this regard. One of the great Catalan fiction writers, Quim Monzó, is also a great translator, with a true vocation. Twenty years ago he wrote what amounted to a manifesto renouncing translation. His reasoning was professional: publishers paid whatever the market rate was for paper, ink, machinery, wrote off checks of 200,000 pessetes for cover art that took at most a day, and in many cases, a matter of minutes, and yet balked at paying translators more than 100,000 pessetes for three to six months’ work. Monzó makes his living as a writer and a journalist: he was not willing to treat translation as anything less serious.

 

This challenge, this unacknowledged professionalism, contains its own opportunity. Translators must devote our own (precious, underpaid) time to reflecting on our work, both theoretically and empirically. The Translation Committee of PEN American Center has been grappling with these questions and will soon be publishing a toolkit to offer support and solutions, and a reviewers’ Hall of Fame to acknowledge excellence in translation criticism.

 

Strides have been made of late in bringing attention to translated literature–the Bridge Series, Chad Post’s Three Percent website, Susan Bernofsky’s Translationista blog, et al.–, and translations, even from lesser-known languages, are proliferating. Yet there is still a sense of swimming against the tide. Recently translators have been trying to establish a dialogue with publishers and reviewers–in sessions at the PEN World Voices Festival or the ALTA conference, for example–but both groups have seemed loath to cede much territory to translation. Some publishers are fearful that any mention of the translation, or space devoted to the translator’s name, is a disincentive to purchase. Reviewers, often constrained to 500- or 750-word reviews, are reluctant to expand the space they allot to mentioning the translator’s name and “able” or “seamless” (or “clumsy”) translation. Or, they are understandably fearful of making mistakes when they do not speak the original language or have knowledge of the context of the text.

 

The standard attribute of a quality translation–its invisibility–is at least partially responsible for the situation. Translations are not invisible. They are palpable and three-dimensional: that book you hold in your hands (or on your kindle) was written by a translator, no matter who the author is. The translation is an indispensable stage in the history of the text. The translator is a witness, a privileged actor in the regeneration of the text. He or she has information no one else is privy to, and which every reader could potentially be interested in.

 

Hence it would be useful for translators to provide publishers and reviewers with interesting information regarding, let’s say, the history of the book–if it is a rediscovered classic, why did it fall out of favor, or why was it never translated?; or the challenges of the language–what words, phrases or concepts have no equivalent, and might affect the reception of the book?; or the cultural or literary context: what aspects of the book have appeared in criticism and reviews in the original language, to which reviewers do not have access?; what are the possible parallels in English or other familiar languages; what historical information will enrich references in the text?…

 

Translators are shape shifters:  we perform and are transformed by every new book and author and character even as we transform the text. And we are accustomed to being the handmaidens (and manservants) of authors. We can also serve the publisher, reviewer, and, ultimately, the reading public, by bringing the translated text into the foreground. But we must also be warriors: denial or omission of the translation is, frankly, not only lazy but duplicitous. There is no reason for translations not to be hot properties or for their sale not to be good business. Translators can help make them cool or sexy. But there must be a sea change in the perception–no, the attitude–of the industry toward the translated work and toward the translator’s role.

 

We claim to live in a globalized world–translation is our medium. Surely it is time for translators, publishers and reviewers to sit down together and bang out a new set of rules.

 

Mary Ann Newman is the former Director of the Catalan Center at New York University, which was an affiliate of the Institut Ramon Llull. She is a translator, editor, and occasional writer on Catalan culture. In addition to Quim Monzó, she has translated Xavier Rubert de Ventós, Joan Maragall, and Narcis Comadira, among others.

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Tim Parks on Why Translation Matters in The New York Review of Books

jasperjohns-flagsJasper Johns, Three Flags, 1958

In 2010, renowned author and Archipelago translator Tim Parks offered an exceptional insight into the practice of translation, its thanklessness when done well, and why it matters for fiction writing all over the world, not just in America.

…it would be futile to seek to establish how much we should be praising the author and how much the translator: the author wrote a fine story, which inspired the translator to make a fine translation. Of my own translations, I should say that I was always happy when the author got the praise and I escaped mention; it’s self-evident that only a good translation makes it possible for the reviewer to praise the author.

(“America First?”, NYRB July 15, 2010)

Coming off of the American Independence Day, Parks’s article is a thought-provoking and compelling article about the cross-cultural literary conversations that translation makes possible among some of today’s greatest writers, and how American’s are isolating themselves, intellectually.

 

The whole article, “America First?” is available for New York Review of Books subscribers, here.

 

[See also: Tim Parks’s translations of Antonio Tabucchi, The Flying Creatures of Fra Angelico & The Woman of Porto Pim]

 

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BOOK CURRENTS: Tanpinar & the Istanbul protests

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Image Courtesy of Thanassis Stavrakis/Associated Press 

To launch BOOK CURRENTS, a series of posts that looks at current events through international literature, we asked one of our interns, Scott Beauchamp, to use one of our books to briefly reflect on some of the political unrest that’s happening in the world. He chose Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar’s A Mind at Peace:

 

The connection between literature and current events isn’t always obvious. Sometimes, like in the case of The Great Gatsby, we only realize the social importance of a work in retrospect – with time and circumstance giving us enough perspective to understand what a book might mean politically or socially. In other cases, works are so very personal (or sometimes, in the opposite direction, mythical) that they seem to come from a world where newspapers don’t even exist.

 

Usually though, great works simultaneously comment on both our shared experiences as well as those of the individual, enriching and deepening our understanding of each. A Mind At Peace, by Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar, for instance, is a wonderful example of a work that does just that. It’s a love story, a lyrical ode to Istanbul, and a novel of ideas – and it expresses itself in a voice both intimate and social. It shows us, not only what it was like to live in Turkey during the turbulent years of radical Kamalist political and social change – but also how people existed in the aftermath of those changes.

 

One is reminded of those radical historical changes as the protests that began in Taksim square continue to strengthen and spread through Istanbul and other Turkish cities. It originally began as a protest to keep public green space from being turned into a mall, but has since grown diffuse. Changing from a bid by citizens to assert local control over their community, it has become a nebulous and multifaceted articulation of a much larger concern – how Turkey will remain both modern and itself at the same time. This is the very issue, in fact, that Tanpinar writes about.

 

It’s something that’s worth remembering, as we read headlines of protests in Turkey and elsewhere around the world – how important literature is to our understanding of what’s happening now. It’s much more than just “News that stays news”, as the famous saying goes. It’s about connecting emotional depth with cultural knowledge in such a way that we’ll be able to acknowledge the limitations of our understanding, and at the same time desire to understand more.

 

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Walts of the Fairy Tale: Benjamin & Disney

a. MON - Benjamin Fairy Tales

I’ve been reading (wrestling?) with some essays by German thinker and translator Walter Benjamin lately. Many of his essays relate directly to the work we do here at Archipelago Books, so over the next few Tuesdays, I’ll be pulling some relevant sections from Illuminations, translated into English by Harry Zohn, and attempting to digest them. Feel free to comment with your own thoughts, rants, professions, or raves.

 

To begin, here’s a passage on fairy tales from “The Storyteller,” which illuminates a few aspects of our recent Selected Tales of the Brothers Grimm, translated by Peter Wortsman:

 

“And they lived happily ever after,” says the fairy tale. The fairy tale, which to this day is the first tutor of children because it was once the first tutor of mankind, secretly lives on in the story. The first true storyteller is, and will continue to be, the teller of fairy tales. Whenever good counsel was at a premium, the fairy tale had it, and where the need was greatest, its aid was nearest. This need was the need created by the myth. The fairy tale tells us of the earliest arrangements that mankind made to shake off the nightmare which the myth had placed upon its chest. In the figure of the fool it shows us how mankind “acts dumb” toward the myth; in the figure of the man who set out to learn what fear is it shows us that the things we are afraid of can be seen through; in the figure of the wiseacre it shows us that the questions posed by the myth are simple-minded, like the riddle of the Sphinx; in the shape of the animals which come to the aid of the child in the fairy tale it shows that nature not only is subservient to the myth, but much prefers to be aligned with man. The wisest thing—so the fairy tale taught mankind in olden times, and teaches children to this day—is to meet the forces of the mythical world with cunning and with high spirits. (This is how the fairy tale polarized Mut, courage, dividing it dialectically into Untermut, that is, cunning, and Übermut, high spirits.) The liberating magic which the fairy tale has at its disposal does not bring nature into play in a mythical way, but points to its complicity with liberated man. A mature man feels this complicity only occasionally, that is, when he is happy; but the child first meets it in fairy tales, and it makes him happy.

 

I’m interested in this idea of a forked courage – both cunning and high spirits in the face of adversity. The heroes and heroines as the Brothers Grimm portrayed them have this three-dimensionality.

 

Maybe this is why many of the Disney versions of folk characters seem flat to me: they lack this two-pronged personality, verve and wit. Snow White certainly has Übermut – but cunning? Cunning belongs solely to the Witch.

 

I’m not sure what Belle was reading, but I bet it wasn’t Benjamin.