Snippets from the American Literary Translators Association Conference

The University of Indiana campus has creeks running through it, gentle slopes, woods, buildings of Indiana limestone the color of tea with cream. Bright red and gold leaves glitter the grounds. At Nick’s English Hut, we slide into a booth to read a framed notice that Dylan Thomas sat here following his reading on May 5, 1950. We raise our glasses.

On the IU campus

“That Doesn’t Work in English” and Other Things Editors Say: New Perspectives on Editing Translations.

Sal Robinson, Melville House: you can edit the text as if it were written in English, but you must keep the original in mind. Editing a translation shouldn’t usually deal with content. Scott Exposito, Two Lines Press: publishing a translation is always a matter of “balancing the exotic with the domestic.” An editor remarks that this is the first time she’s spoken to an academic group. Jim Kates, prize-winning translator and co-director of  Zephyr Press calls out instantly: “we’re not academics.”

Many are connected to universities, but many also have “independent translator,” or “student” on their nametags. Neither fish nor fowl, translators occupy a literary limbo between arts and humanities. Many languages are spoken here: twice on the first morning someone looked at my nametag and said, “Slavic.” This is the only place that happens.

A grad student tells me she doesn’t want to teach, plans to make her living as a literary translator. She’s taken a technical translation course, but wouldn’t want such “soul-sucking” work. My heart aches for her. How many of us can hope to be Margaret Sayers Peden or Gregory Rabassa? I say nothing. You never know what the energetic idealism of youth may accomplish if you let it be.

Bilingual Readings VI: Argentine Fiction by Women

Eighty people wanted to do bilingual readings, the most ever. We are translators, yes, but poets too, many of us. Poets adore reading their work to an audience, and this audience understands the original language when you read it and appreciates the choices you’ve made when you go to your translation.

Besides the Latino Café, where I read Mónica Lavín and Agustín Cadena, I heard Andrea G. Labinger read a startling excerpt from a novel by Argentine Alicia Kozameh, ghoulish and dark and funny at once, in which the protagonist examines the exhumed skeleton of her long-dead father.

Translator, discussing a publisher deal: “I worked a year for what? Mythical royalties?” There will never be any royalties. These are not the kind of books that earn royalties. How many read such novels? How many read any novels in translation? Besides Scandinavian crime novels, of course.

We visit Caveat Emptor, a second-hand bookstore with a six-shelf section of novels in translation—Fuentes, Vargas Llosa, Cortazar, Paz—more Latin Americans than I’ve seen in one place for years. Phil guesses many customers come from the university. “All of them,” the bookstore owner replies. “No one else reads anymore.”

Knotty Little Things:One-Sentence Translation Workshop

I attend this session at the last minute, after I’ve taken a seat, read that participants were to bring a problem sentence.

“I didn’t bring a sentence,” I inform facilitators Steven Bradbury and Aron Aji.

“Go stand in the corner,” Bradbury promptly replies.

Bradbury translates from the Chinese, puts up his knotty line of poetry. Chinese has no tenses and the word “zheng” in the line means now. Another word means “100 ways of nothing to do.”  Bradbury has translated that “bored,” but it seems—insufficient. We offer alternatives, none sufficient.

We also look at a Catalan poem, the line in question deliberately ambiguous. The problem is how to translate the sense of it without over-clarifying. Adam Sorkin, who translates Romanian, reminds us: “Poetry does not mean fuzzing things up.”

Cole Swenson, Friday’s keynote speaker, observes about the translation issue she’s elaborating for us: “I have a solution, but it’s not nearly as interesting as the problem.” This, I think, is typical of translators: the difficulties are what we relish.

Money and Translation Panel

There isn’t any. Money, that is. Hearing of potential grants, one translator says, “I’d give some of my most cherished dictionaries to have that information.”

Appreciative chuckles ripple the room. Translators may use Google Translate half the time now, but they are mad about their dictionaries. You can’t have too many. Old ones are sometimes the best. Have you ever looked up the same word in six different dictionaries? Fascinating.

Say What? Untranslatability in Literary Texts

In Clare Sullivan’s panel, Breon Mitchell, who translates German, presents a metaphor for nearly impossible translation problems. IU’s Lilly Library, which he directed, has a collection of mechanical puzzles. One of those is of the post with rings variety, the kind that you have to take a certain number off, then put some back on again in a prescribed sequence. This particular puzzle has so many rings that solving it would take, he says, eons.

“A solution exists and we may even know what it is. We just don’t have the time.”