Open to interpretation

The International Booker prize for translated fiction went to Taiwan Travelogue, written by Yáng Shuāng-zǐ and translated from Mandarin Chinese by Lin King. Emma Loffhagen spoke to the pair, who will share the £50,000 prize, about Taiwanese politics, LGBTQ+ rights and more.

The International Booker rewards exceptional works of translation. But for this novel, translation takes centre stage in more ways than one: the work is presented as a translation of a rediscovered text, and one of the main characters is a Taiwanese interpreter. In today’s Bookmarks, we look at why translators and interpreters make fascinating protagonists, and why the singular roles they play in fiction reflect the value of their work in the real world.

There is a long tradition of novels featuring translators and interpreters as protagonists. In Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto, published in 2001, Gen Watanabe bridges communication between captors and captives in a hostage crisis. Ricardo, the narrator of Mario Vargas Llosa’s 2006 novel The Bad Girl, is an interpreter for Unesco. More recently, Katie Kitamura’s Intimacies, Polly Barton’s What Am I, a Deer?, and, indeed, Taiwan Travelogue, have translators or interpreters at the centre of the action.

aggiungo Marias, Un cuore così bianco, uno dei miei scrittori e dei miei libri preferiti. 

a proposito di traduzione, If This Be Magic: The Unlikely Art of Shakespeare in Translation by Daniel Hahn (Canongate), recensito da Steven Pool, The Guardian 

A Very Cold Winter

A Very Cold Winter, by Fausta Cialente, translated from the Italian by Julia Nelsen (Transit). This novel, the first of the undersung writer’s books to appear in English, opens in 1946, just as winter is descending on Milan. An extended family of nine is preparing to hunker down in an attic apartment, a dilapidated space “divided up with curtains and partitions.” Though they share tight quarters, the family members—siblings, cousins, in-laws—are all preoccupied by disparate fixations. An omniscient narrator roves through the characters’ perspectives, illuminating their individual desires—to become an actor and a writer, to marry and to move out. Trapped “in the middle of a barren, frozen plain, without horizons,” a reality for which winter is not solely to blame, the family contends with what it means to move on in the aftermath of war. The New Yorker

The Magic of Translation

In fact, as Calleja demonstrates through several fascinating and detailed translations in progress, shepherding a piece of writing from one language into another requires so many minute responses, thought processes and decisions that the translator would find it impossible to suppress their own voice and experiences; and that if they managed it, the result would probably be worse, inert and undynamic. Alex Clark, The Guardian

recensione a Fair: The Life-Art of Translation, Jen Calleja (Prototype) 

anche: this year’s Booker prize longlist looks in new directions 

Translation’s Drift

Translations that show the jamming—that are self-evidently translations—may be especially generative. In seeking to be both accurate and majestic, the creators of the King James Bible ended up conjuring all sorts of strange idioms that are now utterly familiar (a thorn in the flesh, know for a certainty, the root of the matter, turn the world upside down). Some theorists of translation even think that there’s an ethical imperative to signal the strain. Kwame Anthony Appiah, The New York Review of Books

 recensione a due nuovi libri sulla traduzione: The Philosophy of Translation, di Damion Searls (Yale University Press), e Speaking in Tongues, di J.M. Coetzee and Mariana Dimópulos (Liveright).

 

 

Italiani in traduzione

I have never been honest with myself. It’s an attribute that has always disturbed me. I can’t accept even the most basic truths. What I am good at is coming up with excuses; it’s easy for me to invent excuses. And Giuseppe Trevisani, wonderful guy, is my favorite excuse of all. Many years ago, Trevisani, a translator, wrote an ending to a short story that, when I read it at the age of sixteen, led me to believe that the evil I felt inside me might actually be the mark of an exceptional character. Domenico Starnonte, "Tortoiseshell," The New Yorker

 

I read “Perfection” in a single hypnotized sitting. Time disappeared, as it does for Anna and Tom. In the following days, I described the book to myself with words like “flat” and “clinical” and “affectless.” I thought of it as a “case study” or a “kind of ethnography.” Reading it again a week later, I had the impression of meeting a beautiful, well-dressed person for the second time and realizing only then, with some embarrassment, that they were smart and funny and sensitive. “Perfection” is dense with ideas, feelings, political insights, beautiful turns of phrase, unexpected observations about ordinary occurrences—all the qualities I look for (and appreciate in real time) when reading fiction but which had, in this case, been obscured by proper nouns and mimetic precision. This is intentional, of course. Alice Gregory, The New Yorker 

il romanzo di Vincenzo Latronico, Perfection è stato pubblicato da Fitzcarraldo Editions e tradotto da Sophie Hughes

Epic win: why the Odyssey is having a moment

We live in an Odyssey time. The Greek epic about Odysseus’s tortuous, adventure-filled journey home after the end of the Trojan war, composed probably between the late eighth and late seventh century BC, is surfacing in our culture right now. Great artworks from the past, ones that are read and reread across centuries, have a way of doing that. You examine them on a particular day, and their intricacies look suddenly singular, different from how they seemed 20 years ago, 50 years ago, yesterday; they offer something new, something that illuminates the world afresh. It is the Odyssey’s moment to catch the light. Charlotte Higgins, The Guardian 

in particolare segnaliamo la nuova traduzione in inglese dell'Odissea di Daniel Mendelsohn, in uscita alla fine di aprile presso Penguin Classics

Literature in translation

Since its founding a decade ago, Tilted Axis has gained a reputation for bringing out a wide range of groundbreaking, genre-defying literature in translation. 

With only eight employees working part-time on a tight budget, it has published 42 books translated from 18 languages, including Indonesian, Thai, Vietnamese, Hindi, Telugu, Tamil, Eastern Armenian, Kazakh, Kannada, Bengali, Uzbek and Turkish. Alexandra Alter, NYTimes

On translating Ovid’s Metamorphoses

The term Ovid uses for the stones that Deucalion and Pyrrha are instructed to throw behind their backs is lapis, distinct from the saxum of Themis’s holy space. But as the episode unfolds, he uses lapis and saxum interchangeably. The ambiguity established between bones and stones — the fact that one can be read for, and also become, the other — is central to Ovid’s poetics in The Metamorphoses, a work in which change serves as plot, and pretty much anything can become something else. In the end, after Pyrrha is persuaded, she and Deucalion obey the oracle, and the earth is repopulated with other human beings. Jhumpa Lahiri, The Dial

The Mortal and Immortal Life of the Girl from Milan

Starnone’s prose captures the feverishness and weird juxtapositions of a child’s inner life. “Coherence doesn’t belong to the world of children, it’s an illness we contract later on, growing up,” he writes [...] Now he tries to cement his experiences in words: “The problem, if there is one, is that the pleasure of writing is fragile, it has a hard time making it up the slippery slope of real life.” The New Yorker

The Mortal and Immortal Life of the Girl from Milan, by Domenico Starnone, translated from the Italian by Oonagh Stransky (Europa).

 

Can AI replace translators?

As anyone who has tried pointing their phone’s camera at a menu in a foreign country lately will know, machine translation has improved rapidly since the first days of Google Translate. The utility of AI-powered translation in situations like this is unquestionable – but the proposed use of AI in literary translation has been significantly more controversial. Keza MacDonald, The Guardian

Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky

For Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, translating together extended naturally from their relationship as husband and wife. Now, it is their life’s work.

The first time Pevear, 81, and Volokhonsky, 78, translated a Russian novel together, it felt as though another man had joined their marriage: Dostoyevsky.
“It was a mariage à trois,” Volokhonsky said. “Dostoyevsky was always in our mind. We just lived with him.”

Since that first translation published in 1990 — it was “The Brothers Karamazov,” Dostoyevsky’s immense final novel — Pevear and Volokhonsky have become reigning translators of Russian literature, publishing an average of one volume per year. Their work includes classics by Tolstoy and Chekhov, as well as lesser-known books and works by contemporary writers like the Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich. In their reach, the couple are making vast swaths of Russia’s written word available to the West, for which they have received both adulation and full-throated condemnation. Instagram New York Times

Forbidden Notebook

Published in Italy in 1952, this intimate, quietly subversive novel is told through the increasingly frantic secret diary entries of a woman named Valeria. Against a backdrop of postwar trauma and deprivation, Valeria struggles with her household’s finances, a romance with her boss, her husband’s professional dissatisfactions, and her grownup children’s love affairs. Confiding these tensions to her diary—the only outlet for expression in her cramped life—she awakens to society’s treatment of working wives and confronts a deep ambivalence toward her husband and children. She concludes that all women, to make sense of their world, “hide a black notebook, a forbidden diary. And they all have to destroy it.” New Yorker

Forbidden Notebook, by Alba de Céspedes, translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein (Astra House).

Book Clubs e traduzioni

Book clubs, by their nature, interfere with the way a book is meant to be experienced. By removing enjoyment as an explicit factor in picking up or sticking with the book (because you’re reading it for the book club), they call into question the worth of the exercise as a whole. Naomi Kanakia, LA Review of Books

una lunga discussione sul perché i book club sono noiosi e come si dovrebbe discutere di un libro. E un'altra lunga discussione sull'arte della traduzione,"The Art of Betrayal: Translation in an Age of Suspicion"

Each language is a world unto itself and has been at least since the destruction of the Tower of Babel. It may share certain territories or weather systems with others, but it is not, nor ever can be identical to another. As Emily Apter pointed out in her introduction to the Dictionary of Untranslatables, “Nothing is exactly the same in one language as in another, so the failure of translation is always necessary and absolute. Apart from its neglect of the fact that some pretty good equivalencies are available, this proposition rests on a mystification, on a dream of perfection we cannot even want, let alone have.” Tess Lewis, The Hudson Review

The Order of Things

La difficoltà a essere fedeli alla sintassi, nella traduzione:

Let’s think about syntax, why it’s hard to translate (why there are mixed opinions in translation studies about how to handle it), why it matters and possible ways to move forward.

The word “syntax” comes from the Ancient Greek “σύνταξις,” meaning “coordination”: “syn,” or “together,” and “táxis,” or “ordering.” Today, in English, it designates the “set of rules and principles in a language according to which words, phrases, and clauses are arranged to create well-formed sentences,” or “the ways in which a particular word or part of speech can be arranged with other words or parts of speech.” These are, respectively, the ethical and intersubjective aspects of the word. Jennifer Croft, Literary Hub

ancora sulla lingua, questa volta su come l'inglese sia diventato la lingua franca. Una bella recensione a Rosemary Salomone, The Rise of English (OUP):

An American law professor and linguist addresses the babel of controversy over the predominance of the English language as the world’s lingua franca. Kirkus

 

Case

From Charlotte Brontë’s Norton Conyers to Alan Hollinghurst’s Canford Court – the little known locations that inspired the most famous homes in literature. Phyllis Richardson, House of Fiction: From Pemberley to Brideshead, Great British Houses in Literature and Life (Unboun, 2017). Phyllis Richardson, The Guardian 

e un lungo articolo sulla traduzione, che in realtà mi ha attratto per la descrizione iniziale di una casa londinese: 

A couple of years ago we rented a beautiful apartment in London, a large flat where we must have stayed four or five times. It was perfectly comfortable and perfectly private, and the location, directly behind the British Museum, was ideal for visits to theaters and museums. It was decorated in the taste of a refined gay man of my parents’ generation. It had good Chinese porcelain, carefully chosen oriental rugs, witty French prints. It also contained the kind of photographs which, in that mysterious way, have grown dated without becoming quite old — gently pushed, by an accumulation of tiny changes, into the past. Some minute evolution in eyewear, some invisible reformulation of lipstick, some arcane improvement in cameras, betrayed their age. They did not look ancient. But though I couldn’t say exactly why, I knew that the pretty young bride was now middle-aged, and that a lot of the jolly middle-aged folks at Angkor Wat were now dead. 

I also knew, as soon as I walked inside, that the house belonged to an American. Benjamin Moser, Liberties

 

 

Sandro Veronesi, lavorare a Venezia e la storia dell'asterisco

Recensione entusiastica di The Hummingbird (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, tradotto da Elena Pala) del nostro Sandro Veronesi, "Everything that makes the novel worthwhile and engaging is here: warmth, wit, intelligence, love, death, high seriousness, low comedy, philosophy, subtle personal relationships and the complex interior life of human beings". Edward Docx, The Guardian

Sconfortante analisi del mercato del lavoro a Venezia, "Among the lousy job options for Venetians: serving pizza, selling fake local “artifacts,” and working at the Venice Biennal", Giulio Piovesan, Hyperallergic

Molto interessante questa recente storia dell'asterisco (Claire Cock-Starkey, Hyphens & Hashtags*: *The Stories Behind the Symbols on Our Keyboard, Bodleian Library Publishing), che lo fa risalire ad Aristarco di Samotracia, "Sumerian pictographic writing includes a sign for “star” that looks like a modern asterisk. These early writings from five thousand years ago are the first known depiction of an asterisk; however, it seems unlikely that these pictograms are the forerunner of the symbol we use today. Palaeographers know that Aristarchus of Samothrace (220–143 bc) used an asterisk symbol when editing Homer in the second century bc, because later scholars wrote about him doing so. Physical examples of Aristarchus’ asterisks have not survived, so we cannot know their physical shape, but as the word asterisk derives from the Greek asteriskos, meaning “little star,” an assumption has been made that they resembled a small star. Aristarchus used the symbols to mark places in Homer’s text that he was copying where he thought passages were from another source".  Claire Cock-Starkey, Lapham's

Elena Ferrante parla di sé

Rispondendo a domande molto interessanti da parte di traduttori ed editor americani e inglesi.

For Lila and Elena, the experience of reading Little Women is extremely important. What (other) literary figures affected you as an adolescent? Stefanie Hetze, bookseller, Germany

[...] But the book I read and reread obsessively was Wuthering Heights. Today I still find extraordinary the way it describes love, mixing good and bad feelings without any break. Catherine is someone who should be revisited from time to time: she’s useful, when you write, for avoiding the danger of sickly-sweet female characters. The Guardian.

Reading Elena Ferrante in English

Millions of readers in thrall to Elena Ferrante, the secretive and wildly popular Italian novelist, must accept certain conditions.

[...]

And if they are reading Ferrante’s books in English, they are absorbing, whether they realize it or not, the nimble translation work of Ann Goldstein. Joumana Khatib, NYT.

Tradurre Natalia Ginzburg

“Dribbledrams! Doodledums! Nitwitteries!” These are a few of the signature eccentric sayings that Italian novelist and essayist Ginzburg ascribes to members of her family in this unusual portrait of everyday life in Italy from the 1920s to 50s. An experimental novel-cum-memoir first published in 1963, it features her parents, older siblings, in-laws, dissident friends and acquaintances, as well as those known through her mother’s oft-recounted reminiscences, who had “assumed the step of the dead, light and elusive”. Family Lexicon, translated by Jenny McPhee, is published by Daunt. The Guardian.

Tradurre l'Iliade

"But the magically appearing bathtubs at the end of Book 10 are a marker of a very deep-seated feature of Homeric poetry. Objects can be conjured out of the air by a set of rules for narrative plausibility which are not ours. Diomedes and Odysseus are rich and powerful. They are exhausted and they have been successful. Rich and powerful warriors have baths, so the bathtubs have to be there and must be ‘polished’. The way Homeric narrative deals with objects is determined not by probability or the laws of physics, but by social ambience, and by what a poet thinks an audience is likely to expect". Colin Burrow, LRB.

Homer: ‘The Iliad’ translated by Peter Green (University of California Press).