Languor Management

The Water

The Water

Kindly agreed

To Flow!

It

shone

So pure

It didn’t quench your thirst

Nor cleanse you.

But this wasn’t necessarily

An oversight.

It

Didn’t have the willow’s

Weeping vines.

It

Didn’t have fish

That snapped at dragonflies.

It

Had no

Lapping waves

Nor did it flow anywhere.

It had no life:

It was pure,

Distilled

Water!

(1946)

--Leonid Martynov (translated by me)

Sorrow

Night. An unfamiliar station.

And here is Sorrow.

I just now realized

How much I fear for you.

Sorrow – that’s when

Fresh water tastes bland,

Apples, sour

And cigarettes, stale.

And like the cold stab

Of a knife’s steel wedge,

The thought that you might die

Or become sick.

(1925)

– Leonid Martynov (translated by me)

Red Shift Festival

The Annual Red Shift Festival has announced it's 2005 Winners:

RED SHIFT FESTIVAL is an artistic, political and cultural organization committed to premiering the works of young Russian film, video and animation artists living in the West.  The Festival was conceived as a mechanism for debuting a new generation of artists who were born in the former Soviet Union, but built a life abroad.  Located in the heart of New York City, the Festival is well-positioned to fulfill its mission of discovering and promoting emerging independent filmmakers while drawing worldwide attention to Russan immigrant culture.  In January 2003, New York's growing community of Russian artists and media-makers convened at the Anthology Film Archives for the first-ever Red Shift Festival.

A not exactly small bundle

For our part, however, we shall say: 'O, Russian people, Russian people! Do not let in the crowds of gliding shadows from the Islands! Fear the Islanders! They have a right to settle freely in the Empire: It is evidently for this purpose that black and gray bridges have been thrown over the waters of Lethe to the islands. They our to be pulled down...

Too late...

The police did not even think of raising Nikolayevsky Bridge; dark shadows begin ton throng over the bridge; among those shadows the shadow of the  stranger began to throng, too. In its hand evenly swung a not exactly small, yet the same not very large little bundle.'

-- Andrei Bely (from Petersburg)

One Hundred Years of Solitude

Michael Dirda reviews Gregory Rabassa's If This Be Treason: Translation and Its Discontents, a Memoir for the Washington Post:

In this easygoing ramble through a distinguished career, Gregory Rabassa -- the esteemed translator of Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude , Julio Cortázar's Hopscotch , and dozens of other modern classics of the Latin American fiction "boom" -- comes across as a charming (if somewhat garrulous) old coot. His style is loose and conversational, utterly without airs. He prefers digression to exposition, makes terrible puns and drops in repeated references to old jazz songs and even older movie stars. Rabassa also writes with striking honesty about his disdain for the New York publishing industry and his dislike for academic literary criticism. Such humanity and a sometimes contentious forthrightness are unexpected from an eminent, if retired, Columbia professor.

Though dubbed a memoir, If This Be Treason -- the title derives from the Italian catchphrase " Traduttore, traditore " (to translate is to betray) -- remains more scrapbook than book. It opens with some reflections on translation, follows with a bit of personal history, and then proffers a chronological "bill of particulars" -- two- to six-page essays on the 30 or so writers and books Rabassa has brought into English. Nothing here is really what you'd call profound, but much of it is excellent literary entertainment. Read these pages while sipping a Brazilian caipirinha , and you'll spend a fine and mellow evening.

[Via Jamie at translation eXchange]

The radical left literary clique

Alyssa Lappen doesn't really care for my old professor, as she makes clear in this March 5 American Thinker item:

Born and raised in Boston, Alcalay, 48, is the son of Sephardic Jews from Bosnia[8]. But his family background seems to have taught Alcalay nothing about the deficiencies of previous eras or the evils of communism. Not only does Alcalay seek a return to pre-democratic times[9], he wishes for a revolution such as outlined by French Marxist and anti-colonialist Frantz Fanon (1925-1961), author of Wretched of the Earth.[10]

Nominally literary in discipline, Alcalay is, like his idol Edward Said, better described as a political narcissist, preoccupied with his own role as arbiter of radical politics and the arts[11]. As such, he is the true interpreter and defender of ‘memory.' "'Terrorists' hijack planes but 'ideologues,' in the form of states and other acceptably licensed power structures, hijack a people's collective memory, or at least make the attempt," Alcalay writes in a review of Said's After the Last Sky, in his own vainglorious attempt to nullify Israel's independence and statehood[12].

The Great American Con Game

This is another bit on Queens College professor Ammiel Alcalay's view on the limitations of translation. I came across it in the latest issue of BookForum this afternoon. It's a response to the magazine's "BookForum Question":

Susan Sontag was exemplary in bringing attention to non-American authors who might otherwise have not been translated into English--from Roland Barthes and Dailo Kis to E. M. Cioran and W. G. Sebald. With Sontag's passing, where can interested readers turn to find insightful literary criticism with an eye toward other countries?

Unfortunately, it's not available online but I've gone to the terrible trouble of typing it out for you:

After more than twenty years of activity as a translator, I am both encouraged and discouraged by the present scene. One can only be encouraged by the anonymous donation to PEN for a translation endowment, by public initiatives that have characterized our lack of translated texts as a national crisis, and by the activities of small presses to bring texts from elsewhere into circulation.

On the other hand, we remain wedded to the great American con game -- that you can get something for nothing. Translations arrive without context -- no collections of letters, no biographies, no social, political, or literary histories; no gossip, no controversy. In the free-trade zones of our NAFTA delirium, where all the labor is occluded by the finished product, it is a most difficult task to insulate the lone and privileged text against the slings and arrows of fashion and the marketplace. Sad to say, I've even become convinced that sometimes such translations do more harm than good, reinforcing the illusion that we have added a significant element to our vocabulary when in fact we may not be even remotely prepared to comprehend what it is we're getting.

It comes down to a question of power, and one of the ways to relinguish some of the power we're witting or unwitting heirs to is to take the time to learn other languages and immerse ourselves in other cultures. As important as it is to uphold the need for translations and access to other literatures, there is no preplacement for personal initiative, because its transformative effects are real and prodfound -- and that much harder to package and throw away.

Other respondants to the "BookForum Question," included Amitava Kumar, Michael Henry Heim, my old graduate professor instructor Marjorie Perloff, Curtis White, Lucas Klein, Ilan Stavans, Susan Barba, and David Draper Clark.

If the French love Poe it is because he was translated by Baudelaire

In conjunction with Pen World Voices, Words Without Borders presented three live forums on literary translation.

This from another former professor of mine, Andre Aciman:

Translation is an attempt to render into one language the meaning and wording of another. This is the easy part. The difficult part is translating meaning and wording from one language into the literary conventions of another. In other words, what literary translation ultimately entails is transposing what is art in one language into art in another. Because each language and its epoch have their own idea of what is art, of what "literary" means, translators are faced with a many-headed monster. They must not only transpose meaning and wording, but they must also convey as persuasively as possible why a particular piece of prose or poetry is considered literary. One can take a poem by Leopardi or by Verlaine and translate it quite nimbly and yet leave a reader totally baffled as to why this poem was important enough to merit translation. Italian literary conventions and Leopardi's tortured language may do nothing for an American reader unless an American reader is given something in English that approximates -- persuasively -- the luster of Leopardi's syntactic genius. Word for word Leopardi won't convey it. In the end, English may not be able to "tolerate" as intricate a syntax as Leopardis's. Similarly, Verlaine's melodies may fall totally flat in English. Leopardi's beauty lies in his syntax, not in the power of his images, or even in the larger meaning of his poems; Verlaine's magic will be found less in the relatively simple things he says than in the cadence of each verse. To convey the meaning of Verlaine is to stay on the surface. If the French love Poe it is because he was translated by Baudelaire -- perhaps the greater artificer. The list of famous translators is, thankfully, a long and ancient one. What great translators do -- and the out-of-print Van Doren An Anthology of World Poetry, 1928-1936, is unbeatable in this respect - is provide us with works that are not only faithful to the original's meaning, but that convey the genius of one language into the genius of another. Something must be great in English too. Some languages accept assonanced rhymes; others—English, for example -- do not. Some languages -- Italian, for example, prescribe an 11-syllable verse; others do not. There is no point in giving assonanced rhymes in 11-syllable verse in English, when the literary conventions in English prescribe rhyming pentameters. Might as well give a prose translation than one which reduces a work of art into something entirely tortured and artificial in another.

We're breathing," they answer. "We're breathing air"

Soviet novelist Boris Gorbatov, working as a war corresondent, was with the Red Army as it entered Berlin in late April 1945.

In his dispatch, "In Berlin's Neighborhoods", Gorbatov naturally took the opportunity to gloat and taunt the Berliners. But he was also careful to point out that some Germans were anti-fascist. Gorbatov's main message is that "Hitler's citadel of obscurantism and piracy is at its end."

In Berlin, our forces captured a film processing factory. We were inside it. Film was still soaking in vats of developer; on the inspection table lay the latest reel. It was the most recent edition of the newsreel "News of the Week". But it didn't include the most important "news" of this historic week: Soviet troops have burst into Berlin to put an end to the Hitlerites' dark chronicle

Constant negotiation

I was terribly excited to come across Ramsey Scott's interview with a former professor of mine: essayist, editor, translator, poet, and scholar Ammiel Alcalay. He is the author of After Jews and Arabs: Remaking Levantine Culture, the cairo notebooks, from the warring factions, and Memories of Our Future: Selected Essays, 1982-1997. He has edited and translated the anthologies Keys to the Garden: New Israeli Writing and For/Za Sarajevo: A Tribute to Bosnia, in addition to translating The Tenth Circle of Hell, by Rezak Hukanovic; Portraits of Sarajevo and Sarajevo: A War Journal, by Zlatko Dizdarevic; and Nine Alexandrias and Sarajevo Blues, by Semezdin Mehmedinovic. Ammiel Alcalay teaches at Queens College, CUNY and the CUNY Graduate Center.

Here's an interesting excerpt on the limitations of translating literature:

This idea of NOT translating has become increasingly important to me. As I said before, now that we've entered a kind of post-NAFTA world, along with the post 9/11 idea that it might not be a bad thing to be informed about other parts of the world, all kinds of people are ready to step in as speculators, in some sense panning for the gold of some unknown potential Nobel Prize winner by suddenly becoming interested in all kinds of previously obscure literatures. I think of Thoreau's wonderful line that goes something to the effect of, if a man comes to your door trying to help, turn around and run. While there are a lot of good intentions out there now and some very valuable work being done, I remain deeply skeptical and suspicious about how translation continues to be done in this country. We get solitary literary works, removed from any context, and often this only helps to buttress and reconstitute the privileged ideas of art and the literary artifact in our own tradition, removing texts from social, political, economic, historical and spiritual contexts. So we get the one or several great novels of a writer or the book of selected poems without the letters, biographies, literary histories, politics, gossip, and everything else that embeds a text in a particular time and place.