Pe aceeași temă
Translation and Publication Support Programme (TPS) - 2007
The Romanian Cultural Institute in New York has been implementing TPS and other RCI translating programs in the United States since their inception in 2006. Our efforts included contacting and securing a contract with Spuyten Duyvil Press for Stelian Tanase’s Auntie Varvara’s Clients, a chapter of which was published by the on-line review Archipelago (the 2006 summer issue). We have facilitated the funding of Dalkey Archive Press for the publication of Dumitru Tsepeneag’s Vain Art of the Fugue and we have amply publicized translation projects, such as the Romanian and American poetry anthologies from Talisman House and Cartea Romaneasca, respectively. RCI New York has also worked as a liaison between the publishing communities in Romania and the United States has assisted proposals and preliminary evaluations of books by Gabriela Adamesteanu, Magda Carneci, Filip Florian, and Radu Paraschivescu towards their publication by American presses. One of the major focuses of the RCI New York Literary Translation Festival featured here focused was to raise awareness of the aims and scope of RCI Translation Programs. Below is a brief outline of one such program.
The Translation and Publication Support Program (TPS) aims to enhance the access of foreign audiences to Romanian literature and to support the presence of Romanian authors on the international book markets. TPS supports the publication and dissemination abroad of high-quality Romanian works in the fields of literature and the humanities. Grants are awarded to publishers for the translation of seminal works and essays that are of interest to a wider readership.
Objectives for 2007
promoting internationally cultural dialogue and dissemination of the Romanian culture and history;
supporting the free circulation of Romanian literary products in the European and international space.
TPS supports the publication of fictional and non-fictional works belonging to authors of Romanian origin in the fields of literature and the humanities. Only private or public publishing houses headquartered outside the territory of the Romanian state shall be considered eligible applicants.
Eligible Costs
TPS will cover exclusively translation fees up to 100% (but not exceeding 17,000 EUR, and, in certain cases, production costs up to 50% (paper, plate making, printing, binding, etc.) from the total budget of the operation (but not exceeding 3,000 EUR). For applications requesting only production costs, TPS will cover an amount not exceeding 9,000 EUR of the eligible costs. The final amount will be decided according to the fulfillment of the evaluation criteria.
Further details at http://www.icr.ro/Pag/VizualizarePagina.aspx?PaginaID=15# or contact: E-mail: [email protected], Tel.: +4031 71 00 614; FAX: +4031 71 00 607
THE ARGUMENT
CORINA SUTEU
"What matters can’t be translated"
Corina Suteu is Director of the Romanian Cultural Institute in New York
My title is a sentence I picked out from Calin Andrei Mihailescu’s speech at the Literary Translation Festival organised by the Romanian Cultural Institute in New York last autumn. I believe it encapsulates the paradox of translating literature. By trying to be understandable you might miss the essential part of communicating about yourself. However, the whole meaning of the sentence needs to be placed back into its context and for this we invite you to read not only Mihailescu’s article in the following pages, but also the wide range of oppinions expressed in what follows. They compose what we hope to be a varied and interesting panorama dedicated to the belief that translation is a vocation.
The Romanian Cultural Institute in New York thanks the 22 editorial board, the contributors, and the translators of the articles in the present issue (academics and students from the English Department at the University of Bucharest). We are anxious to see to what extent initiatives such as this that we have been developing at RCI New York are sustainable and able to raise collective interest and intellectual commitment.
BOGDAN STEFANESCU
Literary Translations: The Rematch
Bogdan Stefanescu is Deputy Director of the Romanian Cultural Institute in New York; moderator, curator of the Literary Translation Festival
This festival was meant to bring together people from the relevant fields of literary translation, such as translators and translation scholars, writers, editors and publishers, cultural and academic managers, and have them talk and listen to each other in the hope that they would better understand what they are doing and what they need. We hoped that this would sparkle new endeavors- and it did. We hoped that it would initiate a network of translation and literature exchange programs - and it did. We hoped that the participants would learn more about, and become more interested in each other’s culture - and they did.
We originally aimed to strengthen the Romanian-American connection, but the bicultural purity of this intention did not stand a chance in a country like the United States and, especially, in a city like New York. We ended up bringing quite naturally into the equation writers, translators, and academics from Afghanistan, Albania, Bangladesh, Belgium, Estonia, France, India, Indonesia, Iraq, Kyrgyzstan, Libia, Mexico, Palestinian Authority/Ramallah, Russia, Senegal, Sri Lanka, Turkey, Uruguay. That’s when we realized the extent to which literature and translation are part of a constant mingling of voices and that fidelity is polyphonic, multilingual, and intercultural.
In the three days we spent in New York and Hoboken, New Jersey, in November last year, we held poetry, fiction, and staged drama readings, we had a symposium on translation, book presentations and displays, we had editors, writers, and translators share their experience and goals at a round table - but most importantly, as always in these cases, we met new people and learned new things.
Everybody agreed it was a success. That is why we want to organize another edition this fall. That is why we wanted to share in this magazine the exchange of ideas on translation that occurred in and around the symposium, since some of the contributors to this issue had something to say about it even though they could not actually be there.
It turned out (and people in the field might have well expected it) that people take roughly two roads when they practice and theorize about literary translation - the high and the low. Picking up on Calin Mihailescu’s ball-game analogy, I structured the debate as a friendly between two teams, the dreamers and the down-to-earth. The Gallactic or Dream(ers’) team play an all-starry-eyed game and take translation to be an ineffable if not divine experience. The Terrestrials plod the earth never taking their eyes off the ball, never looking up; they are all about business and they treat translation as a skilled profession. It’s really a rematch of Plato’s Ion. Then inspiration and metaphysical enthusiasm won against the professional technique and routine (though the referee was far from impartial) in judging the nature of rhapsodic interpretation. Since then, the idealist and the pragmatic teams clashed on several occasions and while the Western spectator seems to root for the latter in recent centuries, the former plays a good defense game when it comes down to literary translation. By the looks of it, the score will not be settled so easily, so expect overtime in the magazine’s next issue.
At half time, you can have a look at the showcase where trophies won not long ago may attract the nostalgic. At the end of the game, stay tuned for our breaking news.
CALIN-ANDREI MIHAILESCU
Nonagonal Globalkanism
Calin-Andrei Mihailescu is a Professor of Comparative Literature, Critical Theory and Spanish at the University of Western Ontario in London, Canada; moderator of the Symposium on Literary Translation
As if things could still take a turn for the playful amidst this world’s les jeux sont faits - this throw of dice. With(in) there come a few sketchy strategic lines that would have Romanian literary texts kick and spoil the American psyche’s underbelly.
The world should-become the turf of translation, rather than of the "clash of civilizations”. For, fuelled by the brisk piety of fanaticism, that clash between this law and that law occurs under no Law. As the world is not a stage anymore but a stadium to fill the sacred temples’ fishy shoes, we’d wait in vain for Calderón, when Ronaldinho is here to deliver; or for Will Shakespeare, for OJ Simpson’s everywhere, to please and aggravate. Not to double-cross the world’s funny heterogeneity, the big match in Globaltown pits soccer against American football.
Amerifootball is the great circus that spices up America’s bread; it is the dirt highway that links rural America to its hyper-urban counterpart; it is the hyphen that unites the liberal and the fundamentalist. Amerifootball is an eminent embodiment of Ameriball: short-lived moments of very intense energy expenditure are separated from each other by long breaks. As is the case with baseball and golf, the energy is spent in spurts in this male-orgasmic Ameriball, which spatializes time with "naïve” enthusiasm. Perhaps America Magna does not exit, but its fiction coagulates - in ways imaginary, symbolic and real - on the Amerifootball field.
Wars enjoy games as proleptic or interpretive models. Say, Norman Schwarzkopf, the articulate Commander-in-Chief of the American forces in the 1990-1991 Gulf War, invaded Southern Iraq by using the Amerifootball strategy called "Hail Mary” (falling behind the enemy lines from the left and right flanks to cut support to the first parallel, then to the next, and so on, till the bomballs were delivered frontally). Sports, though, whether spurty or flowy, are those wars-in-peace that kill not.
However, both spurty gladiators and computer games-trained pilots are driven forward by the gutsy wind of progress, that drive that localizes its globalizing purpose in a future accessible only to American technology. Globalization à l’américaine is, first (and for most), an instance of pensée militaire temporalizing space from the standpoint of the future. America’s spurtball rhymes with its fits of the survivalest; but looking backwards toward the present, the gladiators and the pilots have their backs left uncovered, like a Potemkin village in Hollywood’s Far West. This voiding of the past lets melancholy throw the gladiators into lands tidied up for depression.
Now: via flowing lines of soccer, Romanian Globalkanism could enter the largest game in Globaltown: spurtflowball (after all, what’s not funny at heart is not worth translating). Because of the voiding of the past effected via that mourning of the present which accomplishes itself in the global future, a wasteland of wandering, unrequited feelings is thrown into being. It is through this wasteland that Romanian waves may enter America. What we bring is our nonagonal Globalkanism (i.e., being in aesthetic touch with the world in ways that express and retain their own ironic agonism): exotic intensities, metaphorical cunning, sublunary playful violence. Subtle, multiple invasions via melancholy inducing memories solar America never had, and of the "minor” idea that the world is smaller than our language. In time, our translated texts could carry that "minor” task better than David Beckham, who just moved from the Real Madrid Galácticos to the LA Galaxy to bend it as the universal salesman.
Does this image seem improbable? But it is also charming, like the one of the Amerifootball player tucking himself in the Macedonian Phalange of his team to read Stefan Banulescu.
THE GALLACTIC OR DREAM(ERS’) TEAM
EDWARD FOSTER
Poems exist simply because they exist*
Edward Foster is a poet, editor, essayist, and critic. The founding editor of Talisman: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry and Poetics and Talisman House, Publishers, he has been the recipient of numerous grants and awards and is the Director of the Division of Humanities and Social Sciences in the Imperatore School of Sciences and Arts at the Stevens Institute of Technology. He is the author or editor of two dozen books, the most recent of which include What He Ought to Know: New and Selected Poems and The World in Time and Space: Towards a History of Innovative Poetry in Our Time, which he edited with Joseph Donahue. He provided the introduction to and, with Leonard Schwartz, the selections and notes for Naming the Nameless: Contemporary American Poetry (2005) in Romanian translation. His poetry has been translated into, and published in, many languages. Recent book-length translations of his work have appeared in Slovenian and Russian.
Clearly there are poets - and they may be among the best - who are not concerned with reputations, international or otherwise, and who do not wish to represent or be identified with a national, or any other, collective identity. If their communities are small, they prefer it that way and leave it to others to make what they write known. This is a common situation in the United States, where there seems to be a Dickinson for every Whitman, a Bronk for every Lowell.
Jack Spicer is among those who had little or no desire to be widely read or to be part of an American or Western tradition or identity in literature. I have been asked to speak today on "The Chance of ‘Small’ Literatures”, focusing on the question "What and how do we promote in the field of literature?”. What I have to say is embodied in the example of Spicer’s work.
Spicer was adamant that his work be kept within a small group of writers in San Francisco, and for the most part, his wish was followed. Since his death in 1965, however, that work has taken its place among the country’s most respected, at least among poets. His novel, The Tower of Babel, was commercially published in 1994, nearly thirty years after his death. His collected lectures, The House that Jack Built, appeared in 1998, and a two-volume edition of the poems is scheduled for publication soon. A biography, Poet Be like God by Kevin Killian and Lewis Ellingham, appeared in 1998.
All of Spicer’s work will be readily available soon, and it is possible, given the very substantial influence it has had on American poetry, that it will enter the mainstream soon and be anthologized, studied, and transformed into subject matter for dissertations and scholarly articles that Spicer himself would surely have wished never to be written.
Spicer was a linguist by profession, aware that words are socially determined. "Couch”, "divan”, and "sofa” are used by different groups to indicate the same object, but each word has acquired connotations unique to it. Although the words are labels for the same object, they don’t "mean” precisely the same thing. If poetry is to be "exact”, it can be so only within a group that uses a given language and its terms in the same way. For Spicer, that group consisted of certain poets in San Francisco who worked closely with him and shared his poetics.
Although Spicer was a "gnostic” writer for whom poetry was neither self-expression nor political comment, he was not within the Emersonian tradition. His immediate predecessors were post-Symbolists such as Yeats, Lorca, and Rilke. For each of these, poetry was, or could be, "dictated”. In such cases, said Spicer, poems "came from the outside rather than the inside”. The poet, he said, was in effect "a radio”, transmitting the poem rather than composing it. The poem existed prior to language and assumed the words of the poet as it became manifest. To be understood, the poem in the garb of a particular set of words required readers/listeners who shared that vocabulary.
There is, in Spicer’s cosmos, another "dictation”, for which the source is Eros. Within the poetics of dictation, the personal is necessarily as irrelevant as the political. Eros transcends the personal, is indifferent to it. Spicer’s community of poets is bound by a poetics of Eros, writers drawn together by the presence of Eros, beyond personal ambition or sensibility. The poem is not a solitary act any more than it is a personal act or a social act. It proceeds from another realm and makes itself manifest, like Eros, though people but, however much it may affect them, is indifferent to them as such.
When he was a student at the University of California, Berkeley, Spicer met daily with a group of other students who wished to be poets, including Robert Duncan. During one of these meetings, Duncan - whose religious training as a child was in Theosophy, to which revelation is central - wrote the first in the series of poems published eventually as Medieval Scenes. Spicer watched as the poem came into being, apparently unmediated by any intention on Duncan’s part. Spicer then began directing his own work toward a moment when it, too, would be free of intention. That was achieved, he believed, in a series of books beginning with After Lorca, published in 1957.
After Lorca invokes Lorca’s presence as language rather than as historical being. Some of the poems are true translations of Lorca’s work; others are dictated "new” poems, allegedly in Lorca’s voice. There are letters, too, which define what will become central notions in Spicer’s poetics.
In one letter to Lorca, Spicer writes, "Things do not connect; they correspond. That is what makes it possible for a poet to translate real objects, to bring them across language as easily as he can bring them across time”. Language maps the complex of correspondences, this network of things. When emotion is "encysted” as language, it "will itself become an object, to be transferred at last into poetry like the waves and the birds”.
But to what end? If there is a reason, a cause, it is inscrutable. Like waves, poems exist simply because they exist. They do not exist to justify or to explain or to amuse. Or to be read or to be heard. According to Spicer’s most frequently reprinted work - the opening poem in Thing Language (1964):
No one listens to poetry. The ocean
Does not mean to be listened to. A drop
Or crash of water. It means
Nothing.
....
Aimlessly
It pounds the shore. White and aimless signals. No
One listens to poetry.
In Spicer’s version of "pure poetry”, all political and personal configurations are subsumed in a manifestation of "the real”, existing for its own, undefinable ends. A poem is not part of Romanian poetry or American poetry or lyrical poetry or dramatic poetry. There are no "small” or national poetries. To speak as if there were is to move away from poetry’s essential nature. Poetry, real poetry, simply and purely "is”.
*Talk for the International Literary Festival and Colloquium in Neptun, Romania, September 2006
CARMEN FIRAN
Unequal Mirrors
Carmen Firan, born in Romania, is a poet, a fiction and play writer, and a journalist. She has published fifteen books of poetry, novels, essays and short stories. Her writings appear in translation in many literary magazines and in various anthologies in France, Israel, Sweden, Germany, Ireland, Poland, Canada, UK, and the USA. She lives in New York. Her recent books and publications in the United States of America include: The Second Life (Columbia University Press) 2005, The Farce, (Spuyten Duyvil) 2004, In The Most Beautiful Life, (Umbrage Editions) 2003, The First Moment After Death, (Writers Club Press), 2001. She is a member of PEN American Center, and associate editor of Interpoezia literary magazine (New York). www.carmenfiran.com
What do we translate? It is every smaller culture’s obsession to make itself known and to obtain international recognition for whatever it deems are its fundamental values. Often time, however, what seems important and major to an insider may not yield the expected outcome when confronted with the expectations and taste of a foreign market.
Should we blame this on the quality of the translations? Or, perhaps on the special character of that area literature being too specious? Romanian culture is still frustrated that Eminescu, Blaga, Arghezi, Nichita Stanescu remain entirely unknown to the world, while avant-garde poets from Celan and Tzara to Gherasim Luca and B. Fundoianu1 have attained mythical stature in Europe and America. Again, is it because they were translated well and at the right time? Because they emigrated and started writing in a widely known language? Or because they belonged to a modern and innovative literary movement and they fused with a cultural spirit that animated Europe at a given historical moment? Similarly, when we turn to fiction, why should the Russian peasant be endowed with universality over time while ours is forever marginal and resistant to a foreign reader’s perception? Is this a conspiracy or the whim of the greater cultures? Or is it our own inability to select authors and works that deserve to be known abroad? An unprofitable promotion and translation strategy?
Acquiring novel nuances and losing some of their shrillness, such questions are likely to be around for a long time, but the obsession of translations that ought to strike big in the greater cultures will still be haunting authors, translators, publishers, and cultural managers. Even the most modest of attempts that may look like no more than tiny drops in the ocean, are still to be preferred to laments and complexes, myths, and prejudices. This has been the choice of the editors of Born in Utopia. An Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Romanian Poetry which brings together 66 poets and 100 years of poetry from Romania, hurling them into the vast American territory with the hope that some day, someone may find a few original voices, emotions with no mascara on, depth and playfulness, nonconformism and modernity, a fresh air and the courage to synthesize and surpass the spirit of a small country where, during 50 years of dictatorship, poetry was the best politics and economy.
The sister of this book, Naming the Nameless, a parallel anthology of 36 American poets, came out in Romania to be enjoyed by many readers eager to sample the poets of "language”, the gnostics and the unwilling to be enrolled in schools and trends, individual voices across 40 years of writing against the grain of mainstream American poetry. The selection belongs to Leonard Schwartz and Ed Foster, the latter of whom is also the director of Talisman House, which published Born in Utopia, the Romanian poetry anthology. But the significant link between the two books that came out in unequal mirrors, each with its brilliance and particular reflexions, is the presence in both volumes of Andrei Codrescu, a Romanian and an American poet rather than a Romanian-American one, since there is distinction in his destiny within each of the cultures and each proclaim him as the spearhead of their poetic idiom. While, hitherto, Transylvania has mostly been known as the land of Dracula, Romanian poetry has every chance to draw attention to itself by virtue of Codrescu’s well established, authoritative, singular, and ineffable voice. He features in Born in Utopia as one of the anthologized poets, author of the preface, and translator of Blaga, a Transylvanian poet listed as a Nobel Prize candidate in the 1950s. The originality and, possibly, the success of the two volumes is that many of the poets have been translated (whether in English or Romanian) by other poets, which has worked wonders in preserving the flow in transposing the magic.
Acoustic associations inside a word are just as important as logical explanation. Children learn to speak by associating words with objects or persons they can see or touch. When real-life references are missing, imagination will build on descriptive images, a short film where the meaning of a word is gathered in the unfolding of the "story” of that word.
People learn a foreign language the same way. Before it can infiltrate the mental structures and have the words come out naturally, unaware, without having first been "translated in the mind” by us, a foreign language operates with the images of the word that is transposed in the mother tongue. The film of the translated word precedes its utterance. A foreign word is acquired when its images in the mother and the foreign tongue overlap. It is only then that we may claim to "think” in a foreign language. Or, more poetically, dream in it.
Sometimes, expressions that are rich and meaningful in the mother tongue may end up as dull, placid shipwrecks on a foreign shore. An idiom is more than its words. It collects and juggles with cultural references, myth and the transcendental, the matrix of folk philosophy and the stages of civilization, all fine tuned by music and accent and the subtle hints at the historical context. Language gathers all the stories of its words, the vital images and unique metaphors to recreate a world from scratch in a peculiar key.
In the special case of writers, emigrating is first done in a foreign language. The process amounts to a rebirth in a different shell of words, at times to an equally symbolic, if nonetheless tragic, death. The psychological impact of such a profound displacement exceeds the effort to learn a new language. Moreover, while being a decent user of his or her adoption tongue, a writer may fail to create in it, lacking access to its intimate nuances and thus being unable to activate the mental ramifications of creation, the mechanisms that yield the ineffable.
Many writers who emigrate in a different culture experience the alteration of their identity. Uprooted, suspicious and insecure, they invent an interval between cultures where they remain suspended, a sanctuary and excuse for their feebleness on either shore. That is when a writer feels the strongest ally, language, has betrayed him or her, falling short of expressing the depths of one’s soul.
The theme of translation and of the relationship writer-translator has been amply debated. World literature abounds in remarkable translations. They have delivered sacred texts and ancient manuscripts, world classics and landmark books, yet still creators and theorist alike obsess over traduttore-tradittore. The essential element of this controversy is metaphor itself, its code and the key fit to decipher the symbols. Correct rendition is of no consequence here. Language is a mysterious animal, partly mythical, partly alive and unfathomable. Metaphor will always protect its uniqueness, lock its magic thoroughly, and then let the key loose.
*Better known under his French pen name of Benjamin Fondane (translator’s note).
CHRISTOPHER MERRILL
The Imperfect Passion of a Word: On the Art of Translation
Christopher Merrill’s books include Watch Fire, for which he received the Peter I.B. Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets; translations of Aleš Debeljak’s Anxious Moments and The City and the Child; and four books of nonfiction, The Grass of Another Country: A Journey Through the World of Soccer, The Old Bridge: The Third Balkan War and the Age of the Refugee, Only the Nails Remain: Scenes from the Balkan Wars, and Things of the Hidden God: Journey to the Holy Mountain. He directs the International Writing Program at The University of Iowa.
Her name was Chantal, and she lived in Le Puy, in the south of France. I was a sixteen-year-old boy on my first trip abroad. A French teacher had brought my class to the small city at the base of a rock, five hundred feet high, capped by a bronze statue of the Virgin, and there I fell in love with a dark-haired medical student who spoke no English. Chantal was five years my senior ― an unimaginable gulf at the time. Details blur from this distance, but I remember a Christmas dinner with her relatives, which began with foie gras and ended with her aunts smoking cigars. Then there was a pillow fight in the attic between her younger sister and my classmates, with down feathers flying like snow. Later still Chantal took me to her apartment.
"As-tu excité?”, she whispered in the dark. But she spoke so quickly that I had to ask her to repeat herself ― not once but several times.
"Are”, she finally said in heavily accented English.
I nodded.
"You”, she continued.
I nodded again.
"Excited?”, she said.
"Oh”, I said. "Oui, oui, oui!”
Ours was a brief affair: a week in Le Puy, a trip to Lyons, walks in the rain, bread and ham washed down with red wine, Galoise cigarettes. Joseph Brodsky said that ninety per cent of lyric poetry is post-coital, and the letters that Chantal and I exchanged over the next three months must have contained some of that energy. The poems that I had begun to write before my trip became love letters. Which made the abrupt end of our correspondence (Chantal canceled our plan to spend the summer together) all the harder to endure. Perhaps everything I have written since may be traced to that affair; what was left unfinished between us ― on the page, in the flesh ― may inform my desire to get something right in language, as Howard Nemerov described the art of poetry. For sometimes when I speak French now I experience the same sensation that I do in writing a poem: the structure of the language is intact, the words remain to be filled in.
"Perhaps art”, I might conclude with Octavio Paz, "is only the expression of the tragic joy of existence”. This was what I discovered in the work of the Slovenian poet Aleš Debeljak, whom I met on a reading tour in upstate New York, in the fall of 1989. He was said to be the best young Slovenian poet, and he was a brilliant conversationalist, especially on the subject of the Berlin Wall, which had just been dismantled. He made a forceful connection between poetry and politics, but the translations in the chapbook of poems he gave me lay lifeless on the page. I wanted to know his work better. And I got that chance in 1991, when we translated his collection of prose poems, Anxious Moments.
Poetry, Paul Valéry noted, is a language in a language, and this applies to the translation of poetry, which may yield new ways of hearing that meta-language. I propose to defend the indefensible ― translating from a language one does not know ― in the hope of promoting not only works from other lands but, more importantly, intellectual freedom, which depends upon knowing the Other. If translating with the help of an informant is heretical in the eyes of linguistic purists, let me remind you that W.H. Auden favored the practice: he had a better chance of creating a poem unfettered by the curse of the literal, because poetry must be translated thought for thought, not word for word, poetic thought being intrinsically musical. What is the experience of working this way? If, to borrow a figure from John Updike, translating from French is for me like sailing close to shore, then translating from Slovenian is like setting out to sea: a riskier enterprise. In French I can see the shore ― the trees and beaches, the sunbathers and swimmers. In Slovenian I feel as if I am writing a new poem, under the poet’s supervision, which is doomed to failure. I do not know if or where it will make landfall until the last word finds its place.
Aleš and I translated Anxious Moments in the same manner in which it was composed ― at white heat. His is a curious method of writing: after a long poetic silence, albeit filled with essays, reviews, commentaries, and translations, he sequesters himself for three weeks to write an entire book. In like manner we worked for twelve to fourteen hours a day, in a flat in New Orleans, until it was complete. An unintended consequence of working so closely with him is that I came to know his poems from the inside; when I observed how he had used the same image or phrase in a previous poem, a look of consternation would come over his face, and then he would say, "Let’s change it”. Which we did, notwithstanding my uneasiness, especially given his mystical regard for the prophetic power of poetry. Indeed certain images in this book seemed to prefigure events in the Third Balkan War. Here is the last poem in Anxious Moments:
"Your story’s simple. You won’t see many loved ones when you return, like an otter surfacing in a lake to catch its breath. You won’t find words for short greetings, the seasons, unsuccessful missions, white phosphorus lighting the passion in soldiers’ eyes, a distant whistle on steep hillsides you never climbed, children’s cane baskets floating silently across a river basin, the way you have a constant burning pain, the constellations discovered in a premonition, Oriental love songs, the disappointment of everything we were and will be. Believe me: this is your story. Later, I’ll tell it again ― only better."
The prose poem did not really exist in Slovenian literature before Anxious Moments. Indeed Aleš was inspired by translations of prose poems by Baudelaire and Rimbaud, Kafka and Zbigniew Herbert. But his next book, The City and the Child, which he wrote in the aftermath of Slovenia’s secession from Yugoslavia, is firmly rooted in his national tradition. Like Anxious Moments, the book took shape quickly, in 1995, again in seven sections. But this time he wrote a cycle of sonnets, each line of which was roughly three beats longer than the pentameter norm, with internal rhymes replacing end rhymes ― effects that we tried to maintain in translation. The sonnet lies at the heart of Slovenian poetry; in 1834, France Prešeren published a wreath of sonnets, which laid the foundation for the literary tradition of a people then on the verge of acquiring a national consciousness. Ales’s decision, then, to write a sonnet cycle gave him the chance to meditate on the war, fatherhood, and his national literature. Here is a poem in the translation that we completed in the fall of 1997:
The Imperfect Passion of a Word
Where a flock of starling should fly―only the emptiness
of air breaks open. Barrels of oil have been burning for a long time.
Hardly an image of paradise, it’s true. But not yet hell. Old men
sing lamentations under the ruins of the brick arcades. It’s enough
that one solitary child listens to them from a foreign land. The echo
of a ballad gives him strength. Heavy, dark birds glide through
sleep, and in their unbridled lust boys discover light. A razor blade
slashes a young face and tenderness now seems heroic. They say
a draft of a sonnet can’t be squeezed out of memory’s decay.
Well, perhaps. But that would be a bitter image. I can only say:
silence interests me less than the imperfect passion of a word,
from which a seed explodes into flower. Channeling the delirious
vows of strangers, the century’s bodies and souls, into the aqueduct
of language: I know in my blood that this is not in vain.
Given the choice between silence and "the imperfect passion of a word”, I choose the latter: anything to maintain "the aqueducts of language”.
THE TERRESTRIALS’ TEAM
SEAN COTTER
Three Questions for Romanian Translation
Sean Cotter is a professor of Literature and Translation Studies at the University of Texas in Dallas, where he collaborates with the Center for Translation Studies. Published in various literary and academic periodicals in the United States and Romania, Cotter has translated several books of Romanian poetry, including Second-Hand Souls: Selected Writings of Nichita Danilov and Goldsmith Market by Liliana Ursu. He is a member of the American Literary Translators Association, PEN USA, and is on the board of PEN Texas.
Living in Dallas gives me hope for translation. I say this not only because our soccer team’s anthem comes from the TV show, Dallas, and every time I hear it, I am transported to the first year I was in Romania, 1994, when Dallas was going off the air. I say this also because Dallas is an exceptionally diverse city. Dallas is the product of immigration: from the east, largely Scottish and English, the American south, white and black, from Mexico and countries beyond, from India and other Asian countries, and Germans and East Europeans who chose Galveston, Texas as their port of entry into the United States. Three hours south of Dallas is a bilingual Czech town, and when I moved to Dallas I bought my furniture from a Romanian business, conducting the transaction in Romanian. This diversity means the city is formed by constant translation. Translation is possible; it is a constant creativity that lets the inhabitants of Dallas live their lives. If living people can survive translation, then literary works can survive, as well.
Translating Romanian literature is not like, and should not be like, translating other literatures. My translations and my studies of translators are concerned with being true to the specificities of Romanian literature. My work revolves around three questions of broad interest to translation: how do I translate, who else will translate, and how do Romanians translate literature?
How do I translate Romanian literature for American readers? I wish I could simply answer that I translate "well”. In fact, as Eugen Coseriu argued thirty years ago, there is no general definition of a good translation, just as there is no general definition of a good thing to say. Rather, "there is only this text’s best translation for a given addressee, given goal, and given historical situation”. A translator works with an artist’s sensitivity to the language of his time.
This pragmatic approach returns our attention to the text. We must ask what qualities make each author individual. A translator’s ear must be attuned to hear these individualities and feel the different Englishes that might suffice the original. Each Romanian text extends a different hand toward English. For example, Lucian Blaga shakes hands with T.S. Eliot, George Bacovia with H.D., and I.L. Caragiale with Mark Twain and Oscar Wilde at the same time. The best translation will be the result of a creative imagining of these connections.
Who will translate Romanian literature? The question is not "Who should we translate?", because Romania overflows with worthy literature, much more than the current corps of translators can bring over. Nor does the country lack fluent speakers of English, French, Spanish, etc. Romania lacks translators, for two reasons.
1) Translators must be paid. A translator recreates a literary work, giving it an afterlife in another culture, something the original author did not do. Edgar Allen Poe would not have the international importance he does, were it not for Charles Baudelaire, his translator. Germans would not read Franz Kafka, were it not for his initial success in English, in translations by Willa and Edwin Muir. Translators should be paid on par with original authors. The Institute of Romanian Culture’s Translation Support Program, which has supported my work, is a welcome step in this direction.
2) Translators must be trained. A profound knowledge of Romanian or English is not enough to translate literature ― you don’t hire the miller to make a wedding cake. Translators must be trained in workshops, like sculptors and painters. In addition to almost infinite knowledge of both of the languages and literatures involved, a translator should be familiar with a range of translation techniques and schools of thought. A translator should know the difference between foreignization and functional equivalence, in order to choose the appropriate technique for the text at hand.
Our school, The University of Texas at Dallas, does not provide language training; rather, it specializes in teaching students to combine a sophisticated theoretical understanding with literary ability.
Is there a Romanian school of translation? Why should we believe that all the best translation techniques have been created in the West? Romania, an island of Latins, Slavs, Germans, Hungarians, Rroma, Greeks, and Turks in a sea of Latins, Slavs, Germans, Hungarians, Rroma, Greeks, and Turks, has an exceptionally rich history of cultural and linguistic interaction, both with its neighbors and countries even farther away. During moments of cultural transformation, Romania publishes more translations than original works. This is true of periods of cultural contraction, for example, after 1948, as it is of periods of cultural expansion, for example, after 1989. This rich cultural history means that Romania has an unusually vast experience of translation (here I am referring primarily to translation into Romanian).
The best example I know of the difference between an American and a Romanian perspective comes from the Tony Judt controversy of a few years ago, in connection with his article, Romania: the Bottom of the Heap. His last comment in an interview with a Romanian journalist was to ask why Romanians would get so upset by something written as far away as New York. This quip exemplifies a lack of international perspective. A New Yorker may live as though nothing important happens outside New York. A Romanian knows that cultural and political movements may originate outside Romania. In this sense, the inhabitant of the metropole acts like a provincial, and the "provincial” turns out to be the most cosmopolitan.
Translators in Romania and, especially, outside Romania would benefit from an anthology of writings on translation. The collections we have in the United States, The Translation Studies Reader, for example, are focused heavily on widely spoken languages and powerful nations (Germany, France, the United States). We would all benefit from a collection of writings on translation from working translators and literary critics, considering the complicated ways in which the practice of translation continues to allow Romania to thrive, both at home and abroad.
ADAM J. SORKIN
Some Remarks Not Given November 18, 2006, at The New York Literary Translation Festival
Adam J. Sorkin’s recent translations include three 2006 books: Magda Carneci’s Chaosmos (Buffalo: White Pine Press), Mihai Ursachi’s The March to the Stars (Bucharest and New York: Vinea Press), and Mariana Marin’s Paper Children (Brooklyn: Ugly Duckling Presse). He has published thirty books of Romanian translation.
Saturday afternoon at Stevens Institute of Technology, I was supposed to contribute words of wisdom, or at least some words, at a Symposium on Translation: How to Translate, How to Get Translations Published, and How to Get Paid for What You Do. I suppose I accomplished that, my prepared text being probably the shortest conference presentation in history: "Good work, hard work, volunteer work”. However, I should say more here, and the comments below reflect more comprehensively my experience as a translator.
I became interested in translating poetry by accident. I was in Bucharest teaching American literature as a Fulbright lecturer; this was the beginning of the most difficult, but fortunately, last decade of the Ceausescu regime. A colleague at the time, Irina Grigorescu Pana, asked me to look over her versions of the fine lyric poet Anghel Dumbraveanu, who began writing in the 1950s but flourished in the temporarily more free-spirited Romanian 1960s, and after. I did, and got hooked: translation brought back to me a creative side that as a student led me to want to be a poet, not a professor. I sometimes say I was born again ― into translation. Translation found me, and I in turn found poetry translation exciting, stimulating, personally rewarding… all those good things that keep the spirit effervescing. From then on, my involvement grew apace, and my experiences in Romania kept me fascinated.
I think this is the story of most translators’ conversion into being the name seldom found on a book cover. A reader gets hooked on a poet through knowing something of a foreign language and wanting to read, then convey, the work; perhaps gets sucked in by helping a friend in a collaborative arrangement; etc. Tah-dah! another translator is made (I suspect translators are never born, the way poets are sometimes said to be).
Interestingly, language fluency in the original is not essential. In Romanian, I’m especially good at misunderstanding orally. However, I have a broad passive vocabulary, can often work on my own, can correct some hasty errors by co-translators without recourse to dictionary or grammar. It’s quite enough on the language side. By now I know traditions of Romanian poetry pretty well, and that helps a great deal. I also really know culture and society, cities and landscapes: this lets me imagine the mindscape to work from. Culture knowledge may be much more important than language skill, and translation of cultural difference is much harder than doing a literal "pony” or "trot”.
Collaboration is an advantage, too. I can ask for elucidation, about allusion, about idiom, about register of diction and voice when I don’t catch it from the first-draft version or the Romanian, which I always go back to. And it’s a big help that many of the poets know English. Intention still counts, at least to me, whatever theory proscribes.
When I began, times called for political poetry, overtly or covertly. Romania’s is a very strong poetry ― both under the communists, when it often evidenced a socially significant role of implicit between-the-lines dissidence, of speaking, or at least hinting at, the unspeakable; and then after, when the native metaphorical strength and love of absurdity and a gusto in verbal strategies of evoking process and fragmenting "ordinary” reality served to liberate writers in varied ways under social conditions offering suddenly increased freedom of expression but, as some poets bemoaned, less and less to say. That’s political too, isn’t it? We take subjects for granted, but huge shifts in society occasion both denuding and redressing human nature.
Before 1989, I had the sense I was doing something very important: bringing human individuality and creative to light in American English, messages from a society at least on the surface idolizing a collective mentality.
Robert Bly sometimes referred to his translations as "versions”, a suggestive notion. One metaphor I use for translation is the performing artist, say a classical pianist, and let’s choose the Romanian pianist Radu Lupu. One doesn’t go to the concert hall to sit there and watch him read Schubert’s score. One goes to hear Radu Lupu’s Schubert, the notes that Schubert wrote, but in the pianist’s interpretation. Yes, a version. It’s always a version. There’s nothing other than versions ― listeners or readers, we’re captives of our subjectivity.
At times I think this is a straitjacket (not that I write on my own, but I do "feel” the need to change things, or the wish to). Other times, this is liberating. What scope for craft, for re-vision, for a kind of negative capability so as to impersonate another human being, enter into his or her gender and background and closeness to or distance from my own narrow patterns of mind and feelings! Subjectivity be damned, I can become what I want! To put it another way, I sometimes say that the translator is really the last writer who believes in the muse, for she or he is there on the page, in black and white, directly before the translator, whose job it is to follow the muse’s dictates. The best the translator of poetry can do is a "version”, the worst the translator can do is fail to produce something alive, a corollary poem, a realized interpretation in the target language.
I explore Romanian poetry through translating it, I explore myself by translating Romanian poetry. I "become” a poet this way (I don’t write "original” works though I once wanted to―maybe now I write "original translations”). I consciously try to keep on translating old friends ― and translation for me is social, and as I’ve implied, an intimate process of getting inside another person’s head and heart and self through words on a page ― but I also consciously reach out to the younger and youngest generations. There’s a role I can play in helping them win a bit more recognition in a paradoxical process in which the mirror of translation magnifies into greater future domestic recognition.
Being faithful to the literal is often felt as flat, dull. Should one "outdo” the original, then? I don’t consciously try to "outdo” a poet; but English has resources that Romanian doesn’t (and vice versa, of course), and perhaps the need to clarify reference and syntax, or the greater richness of vocabulary, or the accidental coming together of words that should have come together at that moment provides something more. I’ve had poets who are friends (and, in this case, collaborators) change their original to match the English. One could turn the issue around, of course; Borges has spoken of the original being unfaithful to the translation.
Yes, there’s faithful dullness and faithless beauty, but there’s also the impulse to let language lead the translator down unusual roads of correlative language, meaning, and metaphor wherever language decides to wander, even on occasion (as I like to think to myself) to elbow the translator with a reminder to give a little gift to someone he admires. I love those moments when I say to myself about a passage "Wow, that’s good” not really conceitedly, but with a translator’s modesty, the sense that the poet made me do it.
CALIN-ANDREI MIHAILESCU
How We Are Untranslatable and How Nobody’s There to Care
Calin-Andrei Mihailescu is a Professor of Comparative Literature, Critical Theory and Spanish at the University of Western Ontario in London, Canada. His publications (in English, French, Romanian and Spanish) span a wide variety of genres, only some of which are familiar. His recent books in Romanian, all published by Curtea Veche Publishing in Bucharest, include A Europressed Country (essays in Romanian culture, literature and politics; 2002), Nocturnal Calendar (2003), The Coming of Don Global (stories written in collaboration with his children, Ilinka and Andrei; 2003), 16-17. Renaissance, Mannerism, Baroque (2nd ed. 2005), Anthropomorphine (postmodern philosophy in fifteen addictions; 2005), and What Was It Like? Something Like That… Memories from the years of (Romanian) communism (editor, 2006).
Romanian culture is not alone in cashing in the belief that its literary gems are hard, if not impossible to translate into others’ mother tongues. Yet this culture’s claim is the one most of those present know best. I trust, we are gathered here to water down this belief, which seems to me to be misplaced at best, and malignant oftentimes. The genealogy of this belief is fraught with a Romanticism quickly ingested, yet poorly digested over the last two centuries. Under the thin umbrella of the Romanian genius (the genius of "our” language, history, psyche, etc. - an umbrella that rarely stands firm under the acid rain of history), the nationalisms of the nineteenth century lifted the self-representations of Romanianness up on the One pedestal: the ground and elevation of the unalienable. According to this belief, the sturdier the screws holding tight to the pedestal the statue of this Eminescu or that Iorga, the less translatable is these statues’ message. The less translatable - the more original and originary is their message, as if these statues were part and parcel of the hard core of being Romanian. Profound Romania could be found from the lowest to the highest steps of this chain of being Romanian: a network of bolgias, a verticalization of nombrilism. The statues become idols, their shadows turn a sacred screw, and anything said against the aforesaid runs the risk of blasphemy. Such an image goes on a par with distributing precise social roles to the critic, the teacher, the priest and, perchance, the ruler: in the cultural economy of the untranslatable, pastoral power wins the day to make the heretics dig into the night. A long line of male phantasms crowds - to give direction to - this dominant fiction of Romanian culture: that we must gaze proudly into the pedestal of the past - because it’s ours -, while throwing into the future a furtive glance, which is ironic, slightly bored, and ultimately dismissive. This is "Profound Romanian 101” for the novice and the forgetful.
But the depth of a romantically conceived past is no less conceited than other simulacra. Take the ideology of that entity called dor (a longing, painful or just slightly so, for what’s gone by or unattainable; the anti-translators will not be slow in telling us that the word, which comes form the Latin dolus (pain), cannot be fittingly rendered by the Portuguese saudade, the German Se(h)ensucht and the like. Dor is ours: no one else has it; or so it goes. This grounding feeling has been discovered in Romanian folk literature by the 19th-century champions of our uniqueness (Russo, Alecsandri, etc.) who, based on this textual evidence, have used it as ground and fertile soil for the Romanians’ traditional right to symbolic autonomy. Yet, in the hands of these pioneers, pious fakes and fakes galore came to beleaguer the luminous truth of our confident past. Dor may be genuine for the ailing individual, or for the one taken with local Bovaryism, but when it comes to making it into a national feeling, one shouldn’t have an easy time accepting, somewhere in the grounding background, hordes and generations of melancholy shepherds marching slowly towards nowhere. A matter of taste, one would say - dor was placed in a past both ineffably deep and certain. Yet, the frailness of textual evidence was hidden by the ideological thrust of champions like Russo and the others: dor was discovered in the past to cover the indecisive character of the past itself, its lack of textual documentation. The dor case is a loop: the desire for a certain past as firm and legitimizing as a divine law is objectified as the past itself. This loop is a self-grounding figure, whose self-referential content leaves it in mid-air like a Spanish castle. Generations of schoolboys and -girls that were to grow into the makers and unmakers of modern Romania were taught to contribute their moments of unnumbness to the hardening of the national feeling of dor. And so Romanians taught themselves to believe that they were the inhabitants of a country of dor (as Eminescu put it in one of his less felicitous lines): a country whose essence was not only untranslatable, but also, and mostly, not to be translated. The ideology of dor is only the best known secular example of a matriotism whose object of desire - an exorbitant past - dwarfs and breastfeeds its present subject. This subject could not belittle itself further by trading his subjection to the past for a subjection to the chatty vanities of the West.
Such self-referential loops are enabled not only by archival shortcomings and ideologies gone awry at a historical moment (or another). More to the point, such loops are structural regularities of the nombrilism typical of modern Roman cultures (including the political, business, and industrial ones). The misguiding missile of nombrilism has these cultures look at themselves when it doesn’t matter too much, and glance sideways when they shouldn’t. In the case of translation, this faux pas de deux is expressed such: what matters can’t be translated, thus translation is a dumping ground for lukewarm approximations. Yet we need translations to enhance the image of our culture abroad, a concession made so that gold, myths, and glory may be admitted into our realm. This symbolic economy of translation is typical of minor cultures, whose missionary, colonial and imperial drives are found missing or misplaced into the land of funny. It’s sentimental and a little moralizing, but I have to say it: a culture overcomes its minor fate only by alienating itself, by misplacing itself to renew, reinvent, and find itself anew. Through translation, for instance.
One is attracted to see oneself tenderly in the strange mirrors held by minor languages, as if one were one’s own mother. In this self reflection, one’s native tongue shines in too familiar tones not to make one blush (and blushing crops up only in one’s native language), for it pinches the die-hard nerve of the ridiculous as if it were a serpent in the paradise of taste. For fear of leaving this fetal space - the infancy of the pure mother tongue -, the legion and paradigm of minor cultures’ anti-translators will reject the work of translation as anything but a lure for sponsorship coming from abroad: in order to keep dim that light that keeps them in power. When this utopian language is cuddled and pestered by this "fetal desire,” the infantilization drive is deemed to take over whenever the going gets tough. Language will tend towards its negative state of infancy; the speaker will revert to a cute mute; the world’s exteriority will be banned by nationalism and other less radical instances of centripetal directionality. But infancy is said to ignore the other, so the self-pampered muteness at the end of the day will be real only as traffic accident victims are real: as traces of suffering. I mean: the unjust suffering of being ignored just for having ignored in the first place. And this is what a minor culture gets.
So, let’s get real! After decades of infantilization in the communist wooden-tongued cradle, it is too late to play cute. Now, as ever, light gets in through both blushing and its overcoming. If nothing else, it is for fear of blushing that we must go on translating (till we bounce off the opposite wall of shame: that of PR-ing on behalf of what would never make us blush). The universe may not be cuddly, but at least it’s open for business.
SUCCESS STORIES
MIRCEA CARTARESCU
Some Facts
Mircea Cartarescu was born on June 1, 1956, in Bucharest, Romania. He is associate professor in the Romanian Literature Department of the University of Bucharest. He is the author of more than 20 books of poetry, prose, journalism, and literary criticism which brought him all the important Romanian literary prizes. His most important works are Levant (an epic poem), Nostalgia (a collection of novellas), Travesty (a novel), and the first two volumes of Blinding (Orbitor), a trilogy in prose. His work is translated in 11 languages and was short-listed for the Medicis Prize and for the Latin Union Prize in France. Winner in 2005 of Premio Acerbi in Italy. He travels a lot, giving readings and conferences in the most significant cultural centers of the world. At present he lives in Stuttgart.
Nostalgia is my first fiction book. I wrote it all between 1983 and 1985, so I was less than thirty when I finished it. The five texts included in it observe the order in which I wrote them. The book is made up of three stories and two short novels. I’ve always regretted putting them together in one book, which I felt stifled my two novels whose potential is so much more than what they yield in this collection. This is the reason why I have decided this year to tear apart my Nostalgia, no matter how used the public has gotten to its formula and no matter how coherent this collection of texts from my youth might have been. I think the biggest gain is going to be a new life for the short novels The Twins and REM, which can now go their own separate ways. Nostalgia was put on hold for four years at Cartea romaneasca and only came out in 1989. One of the stories was missing and also great chunks from the others. The title had been changed to The Dream. After 1989, the book was turned down by three publishers, including Nemira. It was finally published in its entirety by Humanitas, which have since issued six more separate editions and a great deal of additional print runs.
Nostalgia was translated as Le Rêve in France in 1992 at the small Parisian press Climats. The poet Alain Bosquet wrote a beautiful article about it in Magazine litteraire. La Quinzaine litteraire came out with the author’s picture on the cover captioned "Une revelation: le jeune ecrivain roumain Cartarescu”. The subsequent international career of Nostalgia has been rather spectacular. It was translated at Volk und Welt in German and got more than twenty five reviews in Germany’s biggest dailies and literary reviews. The book was also translated in Spanish for Seix Barral, in Swedish for the famous Panache collection from Albert Bonniers, in English for the wonderful New York publisher New Directions, and also in Norwegian, Hungarian, Italian, Slovenian, and Bulgarian. New editions are coming out this year in Germany and Spain.
In the following years I wrote some two thousand pages of fiction, but Nostalgia still remains special to me. I can never re-read pages from it without my heart pounding. I shall never forget the atmosphere at the Junimea literary society where I read, one after the other, all of the chapters in the book, except for REM. It took a lot of guts to read in front of the much more established Nedelciu, Sorin Preda, Constantin Stan, Cusnarencu, Craciun, and many others like them. But the fiction writers at Crohmalniceanu’s Junimea treated me kindly and generously encouraged me. To this day, I am still a poet lost among the real fiction writers.
It so happens that Nostalgia is my first book to be published in the United States. It was beautifully edited by New Directions of New York, at the recommendation of my friend Andrei Codrescu, to whom I really owe the American edition. The translation was done by Julian Semilian, a Romanian avant-garde enthusiast, himself a poet and fiction writer. It all amounted to the fortunate encounter of three people at a famous publisher. The book was reasonably successful, with positive reviews and a modicum of sales, as was to be expected. I think it is a good starting point for someone who wants to make a name for himself in the United States. What’s really important to me is that, with this book, a new landmark for the little known Romanian fiction becomes available to the American readership (and hopefully more books from Romania will follow) beside the much more visible work of Norman Manea.
For next year, I am contemplating having my short novel Travesty translated for the United States and I am still looking for a publisher for the only book I wrote that I believe might have a real impact on the American market in its current framework: De ce iubim femeile (Why We Love Women). The rest is wishful thinking.
English translation by Bogdan Stefanescu
JULIAN SEMILIAN
On Translating Nostalgia
Julian Semilian is a poet, translator, novelist who currently teaching film editing at the North Carolina School of the Arts, after having worked on more than 50 movies and TV shows in his twenty-four-year career as a film editor in Hollywood. Romanian born, Semilian is a member of PEN America. He has published five books and a great amount of his own poetry and Romanian poetry translations in American and Romanian periodicals including the October 2004 issue of Words Without Borders. His most recent book is a translation of Nostalgia by Mircea Cartarescu at New Directions. His translation of Gherasim Luca’s The Inventor Of Love will be out later this year from Spuyten Duyvil. Along with his wife Laura Semilian, he translated Max Blecher’s Scarred Hearts (awaiting publication from Oldstreet Publishing).
Translate carries the meaning "to carry across”. "Latus” is the past participle Latin of "ferre”, "to carry”. And everyone knows what trans means: Trance. I shouldn’t pause to linger over each particular participle but I was carried away by this particular joy. I could go on and on getting carried away with only an inexpensive dictionary and thesaurus by my side, if I didn’t need money.
Questions of the market aside, I don’t think a translator chooses his literary work; it is rather the other way around. We are merely channels, chosen by and for the works that want to get translated. I am purposefully putting the concerns of the market aside, I would rather get carried away in a trance, not that those concerns don’t stick out their tongue for spite. But we must continue to recall Borges and his story about Omar Khayyam and his translator, Fitzgerald, carried away by Khayyam a thousand years later, a thousand years a mere hop, skip and jump in the mind of God. The original words, having orginated there, the writer being only the first translator, the chosen "carrier across”, choose their carrier across the border-guard-less-(almost) border of tongues.
The notion of translating Nostalgia was such a notion to me, and I was carried across in a trance by a notion greater than nation. Notion and words carried me away in more ways than one and across the ocean and back to the land where my first words originated, and for the first time since I left, thirty-eight years before. There were the people, still speaking the words I left, which never left me, but continued speaking in me, calling out, choosing to carry them across into the new words I had been forced into. My tongue lost the chains of the new tongue, and the words eased themselves easily into the new tongue, mirroring themselves, as themselves, in the easy fit of new guises.
Translating Nostalgia, I felt that I recovered Bucharest, which I’d left in adolescence, but it was a Bucharest transformed alchemically by Mircea: "I found myself”, he wrote in a recent book of essays, Forever Young, Swaddled in Pixels, "the writer who generated it... a plastic, proteiform city which my imagination shaped according to its will....” I discovered through Nostalgia also a literary Bucharest I wish I’d experienced. Mircea speaks in the same essay of Ovid S. Crohmalniceanu’s ("Papa Croh”) salon, a defining place for Romanian writers of the Eighties Generation, a movement that was seminal in postwar national literature. It was a literary underground that began at the end of the ‘70s, with a style and impact resembling the Beat Generation and heir to the traditions of the avant-garde and surrealism. The young members of this group - Mircea among them - were initially called the Blue-Jeans Generation, because of the strong influence of American writing. Their work, independent of the official communist ideology, was opposed by the regime from the very beginning. The famous "Monday Night Salon” saw the poets gathering under the direction of literary critic Nicolae Manolescu, while the fictioneers were led by the immensely erudite Papa Croh himself. The Bucharest of literary salons was the heir of a long tradition with immense consequences for Romania’s intellectual life, and the vibrancy of Mircea’s city inspires his fiction with magic. He compares his three Bucharests, that of his mother, that of his first love, and that of his poetry to three superimposed brains hiding underneath the human skull: the reptilian, the mammalian, the human. To these he adds speculation about a fourth brain, wondering about an archetypical Bucharest, the Hieropolis of an angel’s brain. This Bucharest is the rich city where Nostalgia unfolds.
During my two years of work on this translation, Mircea and I often communicated daily, exchanging hundreds of e-mails in order to discuss certain words. An edition of Rimbaud’s poetry with a deep green cover, the same one that he mentions at the beginning of REM, lay on my desk by chance when I started translating that chapter. Both of us took this as a good omen. Mircea turned out to be a terrific collaborator. Many times I would ask him questions about unrelated matters, and he always gave me far-reaching and enlightening answers that mysteriously enhanced the project. I long for work on a new translation, if only to continue participting in our exchange.
I lied about the borderless words. When I returned to my adopted country, the wary customs man asked me: "Why would anyone go to a country like Romania for two weeks?”
"Nostalgia”, I answered and smiled. "Nostalgia”.
He waved me through. It must have clicked with him.
PETER GLASSGOLD
On Editing Nostalgia
Peter Glassgold is an editor, writer, and translator long associated with New Directions. Some of his recent books are the novel The Angel Max (Harcourt, Brace, 1998), Anarchy! An Anthology of Emma Goldman’s "Mother Earth” (Counterpoint, 2001), Living Space: Poems of the Dutch Fiftiers (Green Integer, 2005), and Byways (2005), the verse memoirs of late poet-publisher James Laughlin, which he edited for ND.
These remarks of mine are of a practical nature. They are about how one American publisher goes about finding works to translate and how one editor went about preparing such a work for publication―strictly from the hands-on editorial point of view.
New Directions, a literary publishing house that has just celebrated its seventieth anniversary, has from its very beginning published the work of writers foreign to the American mainstream, not simply in the matter of language, but also of style ― that is to say, avant-garde. After seven decades, there’s no need to reel off the names. One reason for ND’s strength and success in the field of literary translation is that its editors have always taken the advice of their authors and translators very seriously, understanding that in the world of international letters, these are the people who are generally far more knowledgeable of real literary worth than the ordinary run of agents and foreign publishers. And so, around four years ago, when my old friend Andrei Codrescu suggested that I look at a sample translation of Mircea Cartarescu’s novel Nostalgia, I of course was interested, even though I hadn’t heard of the author before or of the translator, Julian Semilian ― though Julian and I, it turned out, had something in common: both of us had had our work published by another literary publisher, Green Integer Books.
What Julian sent me was his first draft of the opening section of Nostalgia, "The Roulette Player”, and it knocked me out. I asked him for more, and this time he sent me the concluding section, "The Architect”, and at my request, photocopies of the original Romanian texts for both pieces. Again, I was floored. The translations needed polishing, I could see that, though not major revision (and getting that far with Cartarescu was already a remarkable accomplishment!), but something came through those first drafts which told me that here was something very-very-special. Gregory Rabassa, one of America’s most prominent translators, once said that when something is wrong in a translation, it sticks out like a lump in a mattress. Something similar might be said of the opposite circumstance: when the original work is something extraordinary, its qualities will push through even a cursory translation or the roughest of drafts ― neither of which, of course, could be said of Julian’s work. This was the real stuff: it glowed.
Three other things that I asked of Julian at this early stage were: some biographical information about Cartarescu as well as himself; that his translation be printed out double-spaced, so that I could pencil in changes and suggestions clearly; and that it accurately reflect the original in regard to paragraphing and the spacing between paragraphs. In other words, if a paragraph opening is indented, indent it; and if not, don’t. And if there is no extra space between paragraphs, then keep it that way in the translation. As petty as all this may sound, I’ve found over years that carelessnesses in such details can find their way into a printed translation, and they can radically affect the feel of a work. Block paragraphs with spaces in between them have a jagged, fragmentary stylistic effect. And if that isn’t the author’s intention, it shouldn’t be the translator’s either.
As to the original Romanian text, what would I need with that, not knowing a word of the tongue? Well, it’s always important for an editor to have the original for reference, both visual and textual, if he or she has any entrée at all into the language ― and in my case, some reading knowledge of Latin and various Romance languages gave me just that, along with a Romanian dictionary.
Here let me say that I am not a specialist, simply a literary editor and writer with a good deal of experience working with foreign texts. Very few of them, however, have been of East European origin, and of those, most have been Russian, with a scattering of Estonian, Hungarian, and Polish, languages of which I have no knowledge at all. In such circumstances, one can only read closely, query the translator about what doesn’t feel right or quite seem to make sense, and if possible, pay some attention to previous translations of the work, with an eye out for unexplained excisions or additions.
All the material I received from Julian I passed along to my colleagues at ND, and in due course they agreed that we should go ahead with his translation of Nostalgia, which of course he then had to complete. Now the fun began. Julian’s way of working was to feed me the book section by section in rough drafts, and I went over them intensely, his manuscript in front of me and, propped up on bookstands, a copy of the complete Romanian original (courtesy of Mircea Cartarescu) and the French translation (courtesy of amazon.ca). Not knowing Romanian, I found the French translation extremely useful. To extend Gregory Rabassa’s mattress analogy once again, if there’s a lump in the translation, there’s likely to be a resistant lump in the original too. In the case of Nostalgia, Julian and the French translator were both likely to toss and turn on the same troublesome lumps.
What was I looking for as an editor of this translation? Relative smoothness in the English. (I say relative, because something of an author’s style must be allowed to come through, and Cartarescu is much more profusive a writer than is generally current these days in English, especially the American variety.) Consistency in spelling. Accurate paragraphing. Missing passages inadvertently dropped in preparing the drafts. (A common problem in translation, in prose especially.) How best to handle proper nouns. (That is, do we keep things like "First Street” or "Baker Street” in Romanian ― which would sound very exotic to American ears ― or do we translate them? Or is there a middle ground, when the original quite isn’t so pedestrian and carries cultural and historical significance? We chose a middle ground.) Accurate quotations. (In this case, T.S. Eliot, Thomas Mann, and quite a bit of ‘70s rock ‘n roll lyrics.)
All the foregoing constitute the common line-editing procedures for translations ― or should, if the editor is being thorough. I would return the edited drafts to Julian, he’d work them over and send me his revised versions, and I’d repeat the procedures, finding fewer things the next time around. If my memory is right, we went through two drafts for most of Nostalgia ― in some parts, three ― over the course of some eighteen months, before the book was ready to go into production.
Somewhere along the way, Andrei Codrescu was good enough to read through one of Julian’s drafts. This was a practical thing to do, since Andrei writes wonderfully in both English and Romanian. He also contributed a fine introduction to the finished book, putting Cartarescu in a literary and cultural context unknown to English-speaking readers. And because ND holds translation, and translators, in high regard, I asked Julian to contribute an afterword, addressing his thoughts about the novel, the author and, most important, his own efforts. It is Julian, after all, who rewrote Nostalgia ― in English ― so he certainly would have plenty to say about it, after his months of grueling work. I’m happy to say that his comments were all positive. Julian, you’re a peach!
BREAKING NEWS
The Association of Translators from Romanian Literature recently established at the Romanian Cultural Institute in Paris
Dear Mr. Stefanescu,
On January 27, 2007, the Romanian Cultural
Institute in Paris announced the founding in Paris of the Association of Translators from Romanian Literature (ATLR), chaired by writer Dumitru Tsepeneag. The ATRL board includes Laure Hinckel, Linda Maria Baros, Magda Carneci, and Honorary Chairman Alain Paruit. Hosted by the Romanian Cultural Institute in Paris, the Association sets out as a catalyst for more coherent strategies of translating and distributing Romanian literature in France and elsewhere. We have asked noted Romanian writer Dumitru Tsepneag to give us his statement on this occasion. Mr. Tsepeneag’s Vain Art of the Fugue is scheduled to come out at Dalkey Archive Press early in 2007 with partial financing from a TPS grant offered by the Romanian Cultural Institute. Below is Mr. Tsepeneag’s answer.
Thank you for your email. My publication at Dalkey Archive is a rather complicated story. I was helped by the Serbians, more precisely by Petru Cardu who has translated Vain Art of the Fugue in Serbian. Ana Lucic (of Dalkey Archive), born Serbian, read the book, liked it, and looked for me in Romania. She eventually found me in Paris. We signed the contract as early as 2004, when the Romanian Cultural Institute was run by Buzura and only financed the president’s trips and books. It also took some time to find a translator from Romanian… I don’t know what the status is now, the book’s release has been announced for February 2007 and it is already available on the Internet.
I am content that you want to be involved in the publicizing of my book. It is a difficult book, it can’t have too many readers. It doesn’t compare to Norman Manea’s books… Next, Dalkey Archive has selected two even more difficult books that I’ve written in French: Le mot sablier and Pigeon vole. Slightly closer to the readers’ taste, though never scratching their belly, this is part of the trilogy that begins with Hotel Europa. I really don’t know what to say… In any case, I am grateful for your interest in me. It is the first time a Romanian institution is taking the time to deal with me.
As for the newly founded Translators’ Association in Paris, this has been the Romanian Cultural Institute’s initiative, and rightly so, they do need literary agents. A translators’ association may serve as a literary agent, especially in France, where, for some obscure reason, nobody likes the literary agents proper. An association carries more weight.
Naturally, the president of this association should have been Alain Paruit, the best translator from Romanian literature into French who has published over 70 books. Unfortunately, Alain Paruit is seriously ill and has declined our offer.
This is pretty much what I would have to say for the 22 weekly and so, I wouldn’t mind it if you could translate these lines and send them to be published.
Respectfully,
D. Tsepeneag
