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January 23rd, 2011

Talking Translation at Ugly Duckling

Ugly Duckling Presse‘s Cellar Series, a semi-secret salon held at irregular intervals in the Presse’s basement headquarters at the Old American Can Factory in Brooklyn’s Gowanus neighborhood, offered up a pair of blue ribbon speakers last night: Richard Sieburth of NYU, who is known for his excellent translations from both German and French (e.g. Hölderlin, Büchner, Leiris and Michaux), and poet Christian Hawkey, whose latest book, Ventrakl, published by Ugly Duckling, I recently reviewed. The series can’t be made open to the public in the broader sense, because there just isn’t room. Even as it was, audience members were crammed in between (if not on top of) pieces of printing equipment and big boxes of paper. But never fear, the readings were recorded for podcast, and I’ll post the link to it when it goes live. It’s definitely worth a listen. Hawkey’s book is a stunning meditation on, with and through the poems of the great German expressionist poet Georg Trakl, and Sieburth read a series of beautifully translated geometry-based poems by Eugène Guillevic, who like my beloved Raymond Queneau studied mathematics; a book of these poems, Geometries, is just out from Ugly Duckling, and a sample poem can be read on the Presse’s website. The Q & A after the readings was fascinating, with Sieburth and Hawkey (along with Celan translator Pierre Joris, who chimed in from the sidelines) talking about the materiality of language and the transformative process of shifting poems from one language to another. Hawkey, responding to a question from the crowd, talked about the role played in his work by so-called homophonic translation, a technique made famous by Louis Zukovsky. Hawkey did a lot of it in the process of composing the poems that make up the bulk of his Trakl book, but, as he explained to the audience, in his own work homophonic translation is only an early step in the process of composing a poem, never the final one. A certain randomness inevitably results when you replace words in one language with words in another on the basis of their sounding vaguely similar, though of course the process is never truly random, it’s just that you’re using the focus on sound to turn off the bossy, cognitive, semantics-obsessed part of your brain – i.e. the dumb part that can’t write poetry – so that the other part can give you some words to work with. Homophonic translation proved a fruitful way for Hawkey to interact with Trakl’s work, and the poems he composed using the material thus generated seem to slide in and out of a Traklian universe, creating what I’ll call a sort of Übertraklung (Trakl + Übertragung [translation]) that both is and is not a translation of Trakl’s poems. Hawkey admitted that he also lifted lines from other Trakl translations to knit back into these poems, tightening the weave. I myself make occasional use of homophonic translation when I teach translation; it helps nudge students who are too caught up in struggling with the semantics of the poems they’re translating to just stop and listen. A little of it goes a long way. Richard Sieburth concluded the discussion by talking about his relationship to the two languages he translates from, German and French. Listening to him speak about them, I was left with the impression that German, which he spoke as a small child, really is the language of his heart, while French, which he started learning at 11 or 12, is more the language of adult desire and erudition. All of these are powerful forces.

P.S. By the way, if you missed the event and are curious, there’s a podcast posted (in two parts) here – look for the files dated 2/15/12 and 4/20/12.

Posted By Susan Bernofsky Comments Off

January 21st, 2011

Festival Neue Literatur

This winter I was invited for the first time to curate a literature festival – a smallish one, with a co-curator, Paul North of Yale University. We were asked to select six younger German-speaking writers from Germany, Austria and Switzerland – two from each country – to come to New York and present their work in English-language translations to an American audience. In three weeks, the Festival Neue Literatur – German for “festival of new literature” – will present the authors we chose: Andrea Grill and Andrea Winkler of Austria, Dorothee Elmiger and Peter Weber of Switzerland, and Julia Schoch and Antje Ravic Strubel of Germany. They will be joined on panels and readings by two wonderful American writers, Francine Prose and Rivka Galchen. Organizing the festival proved complicated beyond my wildest imaginings, but now that all the details have been worked out, I am thrilled to be able to present the work of these writers to a new audience. They will be reading from and speaking about their novels on two early-evening panels the weekend of Feb. 12/13. In addition, at noon on Sunday, Feb. 13, NYU’s Deutsches Haus will host a Frühschoppen featuring micro-readings by all eight authors along with a traditional German brunch of sausages and beer; the word Frühschoppen used to mean a glass of beer consumed in the morning, especially on a Sunday, but now it is used more broadly to indicate a brunch or late-morning gathering, particularly one involving a discussion of some sort. Write to [email protected] to RSVP to the Frühschoppen.
And here’s the scoop on the two evening panels:
Saturday Feb. 12: “The Future of the Novel,” featuring Peter Weber, Andrea Winkler, Andrea Grill and Rivka Galchen, with moderator Paul North, to be held at Powerhouse Arena at 37 Main Street in Brooklyn’s DUMBO neighborhood (first Brooklyn stop on the A, C or F trains), 6:00 – 8:00 p.m.
Sunday Feb. 13: “Writing and Memory,” with Antje Ravic Strubel, Julia Schoch, Dorothee Elmiger and Francine Prose, moderated by me, at Idlewild Books, 12 W. 19th St. @ 5th Ave., 6:00 – 8:00 p.m.
There’ll be receptions as part of both events, with time to mingle with the authors and fellow book-lovers.
For more detailed descriptions of the events along with information about the authors and excerpts from their books, see the festival website. The festival is a co-production of the Goethe Institut, the Austrian Cultural Forum, Deutsches Haus, the German Book Office, the Consulate General of Switzerland and ProHelvetia, the Swiss Arts Council.
I hope you’ll come out for some great storytelling! It’s a guaranteed cure for the winter blues.

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January 17th, 2011

The Architecture of Translation

Yesterday I spent several hours with German poet Uljana Wolf – a book of whose poems I’m translating for Ugly Duckling Presse – going over the texts of the poems. This certainly isn’t something I always do with an author whose work I’m translating, but Uljana herself translates from English to German and speaks outstanding English. She also tends to have excellent ideas about navigating the thornier passages in her poems, which is particularly useful in the present case, since the book in question is an abecedary of sorts, each poem inspired by “false friends” or German/English cognates that wind up meaning completely different things in the two languages, and written in a mix of German and English. The “i” poem, for example, invokes the German word “igel” that appears doubly in English: both as its semantic equivalent “hedgehog” and its homophonic translation “eagle,” which get linked in a semi-narrative passage involving the sorts of animals that figure in fairy tales. In any case, being able to pick Uljana’s brain during the final revision process was invaluable, and certain choice tidbits in the translation are her personal contributions; in the “c” poem, for instance – a sensual take on love – the word “donut” that got deconstructed in the German into “du not go, or i’ll go nuts” (du = you) now reads, in the purely English version, “do nut go, or i’ll go nuts.” It’s a shame that the overtly bilingual character of the poems has to be glossed over in the translation, but the fact of the matter is that while most educated Germans read enough English to understand bilingual poems with ease, making substantial use of German in the translations would limit the poems’ readership dramatically. In any case, while revising we found ourselves swapping phrases back and forth and pinching out individual words and bits of lines that didn’t quite work, replacing them with others. And it invariably happened that the rhythms of these missing building blocks presented themselves before the words themselves could be found, a phenomenon I’ve written about elsewhere. While we were talking about our collaboration afterward, it occurred to us that this way of thinking about the translation process was well described by the great Heinrich von Kleist‘s aphorism: “The arch stands because each of its stones wants to fall.” Kleist described this phenomenon in a letter to his betrothed, Wilhelmine von Zenge, whom he was attempting to educate epistolarily, and even drew a picture to show her what he was talking about:The point of the arch was to serve as an allegorical symbol of human fortitude in the face of trials. Kleist recycled the image eight years later in his play Penthesilea, in which a consort of the beleaguered Amazon queen uses a quite similar phrase to encourage her regent to buck up. In any case, something in our conversation reminded me of this image, and when I quoted it, Uljana pointed out that it also described the very activity we’d been pursuing all afternoon: trying to find just the right combination of (individually fallible and failing) words that would prop each other up to hold the lines of poetry together. If you are curious to see the results of our efforts, I’m afraid you’ll have to wait until approximately April for the appearance of our book False Friends: A DICHTionary of False Friends, True Cognates and Other Cousins, by Uljana Wolf. I’m sure we’ll be throwing a nice book party when the time comes, so watch this space for details.
(Photo of Uljana Wolf © Timm Kolln)

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January 12th, 2011

Collaborative translation = phone sex?

My poet colleague Kimiko Hahn and I were just talking about translation of the sort in which a native speaker of language X collaborates with a native speaker of language Y to produce a collaborative translation from X into Y, and she remarked, “It’s just like phone sex!” Of course translation isn’t exactly the same as phone sex – there’s no telephone involved, for one thing – but the wonderful new journal Telephone was most certainly on to something when it presented itself as a forum where poets can experiment with translation from languages they may or not master directly. The telephone simile works well to express something about the immediacy deficit incurred when a translation is created not within a single cranium but in the space between two communicating brains. Yes, even the communication between brains is mediated, because thoughts must be translated clumsily or incisively into speech and that speech uttered and heard – leaving so much room for distortion. But in fact this distortion can be productive, because it allows us some possible remedies for one particularly dire malaise that threatens translation in general and poetry translation in particular: the sort of slavish attentiveness to the letter of the original that causes the translator to lose touch with the proclivities and potentialities of the language into which she is translating. By splitting the translator into two actual separate persons, one of whom is responsible for safeguarding the original, the other for safeguarding the new text that is being engendered by the two together, the translating team can practice a sort of dual advocacy for the text’s incarnations. Of course, translators who fly solo can achieve the same effect (I certainly hope I succeed in this when I’m translating), but it’s good to be reminded of the play of directness and distance inherent in every act of translation.

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January 9th, 2011

Retranslating the German Classics

I was just talking with star translator (and author) Joel Agee, who confided in me that he’s flirting with the idea of doing a new translation of Goethe’s iconic play Faust. Now, trumpeting someone’s just-barely-hatched plans is not something I would ordinarily do, but in this case I’m making an exception, because I would like all of you to immediately start dreaming and praying (whatever works for you) that this comes to pass, and if you know Agee, please do everything in your power to egg him on. Publishers, take note! Granting organizations, ditto! If you read Agee’s phenomenal translation of Heinrich von Kleist’s masterpiece Penthesilea – the work that inspired me not to drop out of graduate school, just so that I could do more work on Kleist – you will know what I am talking about. The difficulty of translating Kleist’s early 19th-century verse dramas – nearly every line of which displays a knife-sharp precision of language and tone, with irony and pathos intricately interwoven to stunning effect – far exceeds that of most any other translation project one might encounter. Kleist is for the brilliant, the bold and/or the foolhardy. Agee, with his skills, was just the man for the job. The play in English couldn’t have come out better. And now he’s thinking of a Faust. Admittedly, for true lovers of Kleist, Goethe is a difficult character. Goethe was a generation older than Kleist and had been thrust onto the public stage at the tender age of 25 with his international bestseller The Sorrows of Young Werther, and soon he found himself all but universally revered in Germany. He was a powerful figure both in the literary world and on the stage – he ran the Hoftheater in Weimar for many years – and was perfectly positioned to launch the careers of young writers. In Kleist’s case, he preferred not to. Kleist’s thorny sensibility and love of nasty moral dilemmas displeased the Prince of Poets, whose aesthetics were more based on the harmony principle (though he loosened up a bit in his last major work, the posthumously published Faust II). So it’s easy for die-hard Kleistians to hold a grudge. But Goethe remains the iconic writer of late-18th-century Germany, and his Faust – the story of a scholar who makes a pact with the devil in his search for knowledge and worldly pleasures – is deservedly canonical, a truly magnificent work, and I would love to see what Joel Agee can do with it in translation. If you’re in a position to help make this happen, please act now!

Posted By Susan Bernofsky 1 Comment »

January 7th, 2011

Translation and Procrastination

If you’re wondering why I did so little blogging over New Year’s, the answer is quite simple: I had four translation jobs all come due at exactly the same time, Dec. 31. Now, “I’ll get it in by the end of the year” seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to promise someone in, say, August. Lots of surplus months in there. I recently heard or read somewhere that we are much more generous with the time of our future selves than with that of our current ones. Our current selves are the ones who don’t have time to grab a quick coffee with you, sorry, and probably didn’t pick up the telephone in the first place because they were doing something urgent, like blogging. Anyhow, having several jobs going at once (we’re talking short stories here, not novels) turns out to work for me, because the older I become, the more incapable I seem to be of getting anything at all accomplished if I am not, at the same time, avoiding some other, preferably even more urgent task. Yes, this is psychological, and therefore no doubt surmountable – I do understand this. So would someone please send me the step-by-step instructions that will lead to my cure? On the other hand, what is procrastination if not a form of what the illustrious Walter Benjamin described so eloquently under the name Zerstreuung (distraction)? See, so it’s a philosophical category; why would you want to mess with it? And the fact is that the faint twinge of guilty conscience produced by the knowledge that one is irredeemably shirking automatically puts one (me) on such fertile soil. I like it here – just look at that view! And these multiple deadlines have served me well these past two weeks. By avoiding two of the translation jobs, I got the other two done lickety-split, and then the sheer difficulty of the fourth (fine-tooth-combing my translation of Friedrich Schleiermacher’s long essay on translation for a new edition of the anthology in which it first appeared) frightened me into putting my nose to the grindstone on the third (an excerpt from Shanghai Performance, the new novel by writer Silke Scheuermann). Then, just as I was despairing of ever getting up the nerve to stare down old Friedrich, a miracle intervened: I received an e-mail from the editor for whom I sometimes translate art reviews, reminding me that I had promised her three short reviews sometime this week. Eureka! Schleiermacher is done.
Oh, and if anyone reading this happens to be a student of mine and you find that these thoughts about procrastination and creativity resonate with you, please note that procrastination works only when you are doing the homework for my class to procrastinate doing something else. Hey, I wrote this blog entry while procrastinating making myself dinner. ’nuff said.

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January 6th, 2011

The Language for the 2011 Sontag Prize? Italian!

Happy new year, everyone!
As most of you probably know, the Susan Sontag Prize for Translation, which is awarded yearly to a young (under 30) translator, switches languages each year, and the language that has been chosen for the 2011 competition is Italian. The purpose of the prize, in keeping with Susan Sontag’s well-known love of foreign-language literature, is to encourage the growth of a community of young translators by offering a substantial incentive (in the form of a $5000 grant) for young people with literary aspirations to try their hands at translation. Every year, in conjunction with the announcement of the prize, the Foundation puts on a symposium related to translation and to the literature of the language(s) in question. Application instructions can be found on the Sontag Foundation website.
This year’s deadline is March 1, 2011, and the winner will be announced on May 13, 2011.

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