Lost in translation - another view

Hi, The problem with the glorification of writing like Ms. Lahiri's is that we are letting her tell the stories of her parents rather than let her parents tell their own stories. This is different from Obama's memoir because his memoir is primarily about him and his attempts to come to terms with the absent father. It is most definitely not an attempt to tell the story of his father's life and times in America. It is high time publishers let us first-generation immigrants - the ones who actually physically straddle two cultures - tell our own stories. As one such person, who has written extensivley about these experiences, I find it very frustrating that there is no interest in publishing this alternative point of view. For, the story is far more upbeat, it is about gain more than it is about loss.

Posted by: NP | 2/14/09

Translation

As an American who couldn't decently speak or read any foreign language until I was in my twenties, I am in awe of people, like Aviya Kushner, who are completely at home in more than one tongue. I find the commonplace she quotes about having two souls (I think Ennius said it even before Charlemagne) deeply moving. Yet all my experience of translation, limited as it is by my monoglot background, tends to confirm the prejudice that a translation is never more than a shadow of its original. Of course some shadows are more interesting than others. An object most interesting for its outline will cast a more interesting shadow than one most interesting for its color, and there's no doubt some works lend themselves more easily to good translation than others. Dante almost always reads passibly well in translation, because he is a highly visual poet, and an image loses little of its force when its description is thrown into a different form of words (the range of sound, from harshness to sublimity, and the tremendous compression of Dante's language, of course, are not imitable). Virgil, on the other hand, is almost impossible to do justice to in English verse (prose translations, I think, are the best), because he is so much an aural poet -- "wielder of the stateliest measure ever moulded by the lips of man", in Tennyson's apt summation. In general, when translated poetry is good, it is good because it is good poetry in itself, and faithfulness to the original has hardly been attempted; e.g. Fitzgerald's "Rubaiyat", Johnson's "Vanity of Human Wishes". The Hebrew Psalms are said to be an exception since their chief rhythmic device, rather than rhyme or alliteration, is parallelism, and parallellism, depending on sense rather than sound, remains the same from one language to another. I don't know Hebrew and would be curious to know what Ms Kushner thinks about this? I wonder, too, about her confidence that bi- (or multi-)lingual writers can be equally at home in more than one language. Few seem to have lived up to that possibility. Perhaps accidental circumstances will account for Nabokov (for example) having written almost all his best works in English. But I remember reading somewhere that Conrad, when asked about his choice of English rather than Polish or French as his literary medium, said if he didn't write in English he would simply never have been a writer; writing, for him, meant writing in English. Most of the Early Modern Humanists felt themselves serenely at home in both Latin and the vernacular, and many wrote in both. But today no one reads Petrarch's Latin works (on which he expected his reputation to rest), and Thomas More's "Utopia" is probably the only work of Renaissance Latin that has survivd as living literature -- albeit in translation. And yet in More's time, as in Petrarch's, Latin was a thoroughly living spoken language among educated people. Milton's early writings, both prose and verse, were mostly in Latin. When it came time to produce his magnum opus, he pondered what language to write it in. There was much to recommend composing "Paradise Lost" in Latin. Educated people throughout Europe would be able to read it. The advantage of English was that, as his mother-tongue, it was the language richest in associations and immediate emmotional resonance for him -- though he had reason to expect (in the 1660s) that an English poem would never be read by more than a small number of people mostly living in the south-eastern part of Europe's largest offshore island. Happy choice for us as it turned out. Do you know George Steiner's book on translation? He makes the remarkable claim that he can do arithmetic equally quickly thinking in English, German, or French. It's commonly said that bi- or multi-lingual people always have a preferred language, which can be ascertained by asking them which they mentally use when doing arithmetic. I wonder what you think of that. In any case, thanks for the article, which I thoroughly enjoyed.

Posted by: Paul leopold | 2/14/09

mildly digressive referral to translations

Those interested in how the Old Testament came to be written and by whom, might enjoy reading "Surpassing Wonder: the invention of the Bible and the Talmuds" by Donald Harman Akenson.

Posted by: annie | 2/14/09

jerome and his translation

I'm about to bore you. Please excuse me. Jerome translated the bible from the septuagint which was in Greek and which, indeed, had been prepared from the original Hebrew by, if my memory serves me right, Jewish scholars some time B.C.E. With best wishes J. P. W.

Posted by: j. p. ward | 2/14/09

Jerome and Hebrew

I think you'll find Jerome worked from the Hebrew as well. Indeed you can find on the Internet his two versions of the Psalms, one from the Greek, the other directly from the Hebrew.

Posted by: PL | 2/14/09

Japanese comics

Would manga count as truly foreign literature, despite being comics? They take up large sections at book stores now. It's originally in Japanese, written and drawn for Japanese people (the idea of an American market doesn't even occur to the some manga writers). You even have to read them right to left, instead of left to right. They're full of references to Japanese culture that most Americans wouldn't get, outside of going to internet message boards for explanations. Despite that, it made $175 million in revenue last year (down %17 from the year before, due to the economy, apparently).

Posted by: Bubba | 2/14/09

protecting from foreign things

"This trend of protecting Americans from any unnecessary ­non-­English interference in their day..." Yes, and is part of a much wider field, not just books. For example, the measuring system. Americans must be protected from "unnecessary" exposure to the world's measuring system. Even in direct quotes, thus a news item will say, of a foreign leader in his own country, "He remarked, "the problem is widespread, covering 12,000 acres."" No, he didn't say that...

Posted by: wombat | 2/14/09

population

"Twenty-five percent of books published in Spain in 2004 were translations, according to Hoffman’s study. In Italy the figure was 22 percent, and in South Korea 29 percent." all three of these countries are considerably smaller than the US and have low birth rates and therefore aging populations - how many italian writers are there anyway compared to ones who write in english? of course a small country with a low birth rate will need to translate works written in other countries for there to be enough to read. America is big, and on top of that, we still have children at replacement rate so we raise new writers. There is much less need to translate. A better comparison would be to Britain, where they also read English. I'd expect more translation than in the Us because they are more interested in europe and india, but not as much as in spain or italy. Is that right? But anyway, I find it curious that there's no mention of population and demographics as an explanatory variable for translation rates and instead the essay instantly moves to criticize america. To me it is obvious that there is so much more written in english than in italian or spanish that there is less need to translate.

Posted by: non | 2/15/09

Situation is more complex

Ms. Kushner, you mention Sleepwalking Land, by Mia Couto and blame American readers-- the usual suspects. Blame the publishers too! Here's what happened when I, as review editor of the San Francisco Humanities Review, faithfully tried to find a reviewer for that book. (Translated by David Brookshaw. Serpent’s Tail (April 2006). 213pp. paperback $14.95 ISBN 185242897X) Reviews by George Leonard, Professor of Humanities. I’ve been supposed to find someone to write a review of Sleepwalking Land by Mia Couto. I could write the thing myself, but the whole point of The San Francisco Humanities Review, with its ferocious Rolodex of five hundred nationally known scholars, is getting authors a hearing by an expert in their field, then letting that expert write at length. This is no one-man book blog. But this one’s unexpectedly tough to place. I can’t even learn enough about him to figure out who would do him justice. Mia Couto isn’t even on Google! My local hardware store and bike shop are, but not an award winning African novelist. There is a “stub” on Wikipedia, the editor’s last resort, but it seems to be quoting the same PR material the publisher enclosed with the book. The best-read Modern African lit scholar in my College only replied, “Can’t help you much. He’s important. Is along with Henri Lopes one of the two most important Lusophone [Portugese language] African Writers. Heinemann’s did publish some of his stuff before it went out of business. But he’s been slow getting a reputation in the Anglophone world.” I asked my Africanist, quoting the material the publisher sends with the book, “This book was apparently voted ‘one of the 12 best African books of the 20th century’ by Zimbabwe Intl Book Fair. Is that a major organization?” “Not in terms of historical precedent but this was a very important poll,” was his reply. “Took and gave great status to the winners.” “He is,” my source added, “along with Ben Okri(Nigeria), Kodjo Liang(Ghana), and Sony Labou Tansi(Zaire), a major example of African Post Modernism.” Mia Couto, then, shouldn’t be passed over. If the SFHR had such trouble pairing him with a reviewer, the mass-market media certainly won’t bother. I asked my source about a blurb the publishing firm’s publicist, the energetic Meryl Zegarek, had enclosed. “A white man with an African soul.” I found that kind of praise problematic after my experiences in American ethnic studies. Americans used to praise Stephen Foster that way. But my expert challenged me on it. Apparently my unconscious equation of “African” and “black” was very much out of line. “Is this a problem for you?” he asked, plainly annoyed. “He’s native-born, raised and educated. Fought with the rebels against the Portuguese. And against the South African/US proxy army.” So Mia Couto had earned the right to call himself African in every way a human being could — by birth, education and blood. I ended the correspondence before I had to admit I had no idea which wars my source was talking about. One can’t know everything without turning into a jack-of-all-trades, and frankly, I don’t know Mozambique history, or Portugese literature, let alone African literature written in Portugese. I’m just not a member of the “Lusophone” world. But how many are, in America? Why, without my source, is everything useful I know about Mia Couto coming from a xerox folded into the book by its publicist? The publisher includes a scant two paragraphs printed at the front of the novel, which adds to my store of information that Couto was born in 1955, has been an important journalist — important in Mozambique, at least — and a poet. Two paragraphs at the front, the way Penguin does for Flaubert, say. That’s fine for Flaubert. But Mia Couto isn’t Flaubert and, frankly, his country isn’t as familiar as France is to the American reader (who would probably bail out on this puzzle of a book before a dutiful book reviewer will). Even the most assigned book in English, George Orwell’s 1984, includes in the cheap Signet edition an “Afterword” by Erich Fromm, positioning Orwell for the reader. By contrast, consider another African book that has just arrived for review: Pearson Longman’s new edition for the Longman African Writers of Sundiata: An Epic of Old Mali by D.T. Niane. It says proudly — and to my mind, significantly — in a golden starburst on the cover, “New Information Added” Before we get to Chapter 1, a helpful table of contents directs us to: “Introduction to the Revised Edition,” “Background Information,” “Who’s who of characters — glossary of places,” “Oral Tradition, Pronounciation, and Spelling,” and finally, “Preface” — fully twenty-four pages of information before we confront what would have been the intimidating first sentence “I am a griot.” D.T. Niane has already informed us that this book is “primarily the work of an obscure griot from the village of Djeliba Koro,” and given us a two-century history of how griots evolved from “the counselors of kings” into their present African decadence: “Nowadays when we say ‘griot’ we think of those numerous guitarists who people our towns and go to sell their ‘music’ in the recording studios of Dakar or Abidjan. If today the griot is reduced to turning his musical art to account or even to working with his hands in order to live, it was not always so in ancient Africa. Formerly ‘griots’ were the counsellors of kings, they conserved the constitutions of kingdoms by memory work alone; each princely family had its griot appointed to preserve tradition; it was from among the griots that kings used to choose the tutors for young princes.” (xviii) How exciting, for the middle-aged reader knows the word “griot” from the famous 1970s television series “Roots” and the novel it grew out of. Alex Haley claimed that the essence of it had been communicated to him by a griot before he novelized it. Reading Sundiata gives us something with which to judge the famous African-American work, which has often been accused of inauthenticity. The translation, by David Brookshore, is graceful. The griot narrator says of his craft, “The art of eloquence has no secrets for us; without us the names of kings would vanish into oblivion, we are the memory of mankind; by the spoken word we bring to life the deeds and exploits of kings for younger generations.” (1) There are homeric catalogs: “Sundiata pronounced all the prohibitions which still obtain in relations between the tribes. To each he assigned its land, he established the rights of each people and ratified their friendships. The Kondés of the land of Do became henceforth the uncles of the imperial family of Keita, for the latter, in memory of the fruitful marriage between Naré Maghan and Sogolon, had to take a wife in Do. The Tounkaras and the Cissés became ‘banter-brothers’ of the Keitas. While the Cissés, Bérétés and Tourés were proclaimed great divines of the empire. No kin group was forgotten at Kouroukan Fougan; each had its share in the division.” (78) The book ends with another eleven pages of helpful footnotes. Sundiata, its text only eighty-four pages long, is a painless and poetic introduction to the art of the griot and to this body of African literature in general. It not only excites one’s interest, it satisfies one’s interest. This should be the model. Memo to Mia Couto’s publisher then: in cases like Mia Couto’s, we would like to see the kind of reference help that Pearson Longman has given us for the Sundiata. For instance, Mia Couto is advertised as a novelist of his country’s war experience, so I’d like to know more about that. He’s billed as a “magical realist” — but how will I know what is “magic” when I don’t even know when he’s being a “realist?” Perhaps Mozambique, during wartime, really was littered with busses filled with charred bodies, like the one in which the protagonists take refuge, in Chapter One. “Look how small they ended up,” the old man remarks to the boy. “It seems fire likes to turn us into children.” (3) In this Rashomon-like setting (that movie also springing emotionally as well as physically from post-war ruins) they find notebooks on a nearby corpse, so recent “this fellow doesn’t smell.” To say that is to have become a conoisseur of death. The old man and boy entertain themselves by reading their find. The notebooks turn out to be a kind of magical autobiography written by the dead poet they have just pulled into a mass grave, “his teeth ploughing the soil.” Brookshore’s translation is smooth and terrifying, but I could use more editorial help evaluating it. Is Mozambique African speech so formal that a boy would really say, “It’s just that I’m aching with a sadness.” Or has Couto poeticized the speech to suit the “magical” action? When the dead poet, Kindzu, writes, “War is a snake that bites us with our own teeth,” I sense he is speaking poetry, or was in the original. In English, however, Kindzu’s prose poetry sounds like the self-consciously poetic novels of Tom Wolfe (Look Homeward, Angel): “O Lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost come back again.” For us, it was a period style. People often talk like that in John Steinbeck, too, even in the Grapes of Wrath, at occasions like Grandpa Joad’s funeral. “Won’t be so lonely, an old man under the ground, having his name there with him.” In Kindzu’s narrative, funerals are far more magical than that. When his drunkard father’s corpse is tossed into the waves, all the water “disappeared within an instant.” “Where there once was an expanse of blue, there was now a plain covered with palm trees. Each one was brimming with plump, shiny, tasty-looking fruit.” But does a tree “brim” with fruit? You need an object that has a brim to do that, like a cup. And how evocative, or even just euphonious, an adjective is “tasty-looking”? One feels for the translator, remembering the proverb about translating poetry, “The poetry is the part that doesn’t translate.” Later (67) an equally magical old man passes away, declaring, “My name is in the blood of this tree now.” The “blood” of the tree? Don’t ask questions, it’s poetry. He commits suicide by putting “his finger in his ear, inserting it deeper and deeper until they hear the muffled sound of something bursting.” How deep can a finger go in an ear? It seems almost an unintentionally silly Groucho Marx kind of death. “I can’t hear you, there’s a banana in my ear.” The old man extracts his finger and his ear spurts a fountain of blood. Gradually, he wastes away until he is no more than the size of seed.” [No typos — “size of seed” not “size of a seed.”] I had pictured the shrinking puddle of blood until that metaphor changed it to a completely inappropriate image. “Seed?” Singular. But that’s not a small expanse of liquid… unless he means, and I hope he doesn’t, human seed? But then the blood has to change color, too. Can this really be the author who, my source told me, “is along with Ben Okri (Nigeria), Kodjo Liang (Ghana), and Sony Labou Tansi (Zaire), a major example of African Post Modernism.” Not from what I’ve read. I am ready to believe that I am missing a lot here. Let the editors and authors learn from this contrast: the Longman Sundiata should be the model, not this nearly impenetrable edition of Mia Couto. Better to risk looking scholarly but being accessible than to try to brave it through without critical apparatus.

Posted by: George Leonard | 2/15/09

Language

Ms. Kushner writes: "A writer who chooses English today chooses to be both read more and paid better. But though she may gain the world, she stands to lose the chance to speak directly to family and community in a home language . . ." -- but I did not see any offer to show why this is true. It seems almost funny that Ms. Kushner makes no reference to Montreal, so close to New York where she grew up. The point is that practising Jews in Montreal have been for 150 years largely trilingual, maintaining either Yiddish or Hebrew at home and needing both English and French for secular careers. So far as I know they seldom say this means any religious or cultural loss.

Posted by: Don Phillipson | 2/15/09

More than languages are translated

Americans are notoriously monolingual, but that is simply because there is little need not to be, and it is extremely difficult to retain much of a second (to say nothing of a third) language without constant use and practice. However, there is far more than literature when it comes to involvement with foreign cultures. Although my professional background is (long ago; the 1980's was not a great decade for careers in the humanities) was originally academic, I have been in consulting for many years. One thing that surprised me early on was to discover that in international teams and departments in the business world, particularly when there are more than two national groups involved, Americans are disproportionally team and management leaders, whether officially or unofficially. They seem to have a much better ability to adapt foreign business cultures and synthesize them into a corporate culture. Perhaps the writer of this piece has it backwards: It is because American culture is so open to other cultures that the tendency is to immediately integrate them, rather than studying them as foreign entities.

Posted by: Joe Y | 2/15/09

Money talks (in many tongues)

One way to improve the situation: allocate more money to translation projects.

Posted by: impoverished translator | 2/16/09

Statistics don't lie.

Their interpretations do, however. In the US 172,000 book titles are published yearly (2005). In Italy - 35,000 (1995). Taken proportionally, the percentages of translations are of similar magnitude; one should also take into account that most books published today are in English, so there is less pressure in the English speaking countries to translate. The entire argument is thus false, and the few anecdotal cases attached to it do not make it stronger.

Posted by: semidolt | 2/16/09

Intermediaries

While reading this excellent article, I was struck that the answer to why translations have not been huge sellers is implied in the article itself: Works by foreign nationals often stretch people beyond their comfort zones. Rather than blame readers for their lack of ease, or see Americans as uniquely isolated or provincial (these traits are in no way unique to Americans), it might be wise to value the role of "intermediaries" -- those who are either immigrants, temporary residents or travelers to other lands. Those who cross borders with sensitivity and open minds have the ability to begin at familiar places for Americans, and then lead them beyond those places to explore "the other" in ways that are illuminating and informative. One hundred unsolicited responses to my book,"Through Dark Days and White Nights: Four Decades Observing A Changing Russia" (that is, 1965 - 2001),indicate the value to educated, urbane readers of works that begin with frameworks, topics, issues, questions, and perceptions that are familiar to them -- and from there, take the leap to journey into less comfortable territory of other cultures, traveling beyond what they knew or imagined. Anyone who can convey the feel of another culture to Americans can also be viewed as a translator, but not only of words and ideas, but also of sensibilities and reactions. When I read Oleg Grushin's work after writing my own, I was awed by her sensibilities in conveying the darkness - and choices - people lived daily in Soviet Russia.

Posted by: Naomi F. Collins, Ph.D. | 2/16/09

Correction

I regret mis-typing Olga Grushin's name.

Posted by: Naomi F. Collins, Ph.D. | 2/16/09

Translation of the "foreign"

A fine piece; I'd only add that one gaping hole in our international "canon" would be any sense of Palestinian literature. It's as invisible as African American literature was when I was an undergraduate in the early 60's. Some representation is long overdue. I hope translators get busy.

Posted by: George T. Karnezis | 2/18/09

No More

I have been reading, or starting to read, this sort of article for more than fifteen years. Sometimes I manage to get through the whole thing. They all express a well-worn orthodoxy, and therefore are predictable. They are full of cheap shots implicitly comparing Mongolian geniuses to Let’s Go, Ricky Martin, and Shakira. And there is always some kind of skimpy pragmatic justification for their arguments based on the political power of engaged literature. Americans are depicted as convenience-loving dullards who eat at McDonalds. (By the way, the title is not only banal but inapt; McDonalds is not an ‘ethnic’ restaurant. “Hunan Pavilion-Culture” or “Olive Garden-Culture” would have made more sense.) The compared is always an educated European gliding through Frankfurt airport. Why don’t we go to the middle of Spain, or even the outskirts of Paris, and talk to people about how much they enjoy the literature of Bhutan in translation? Do you know where McDonalds is operating most profitably these days? The idea of a general and profound interest in foreign cultures in a given population exists only in the fever dreams of Ph.Ds and nonfiction writing instructors. Moreover, why does Russian-born Olga Grushin choose to live near Washington, D.C.? Why does Peruvian-born Alarcon conduct his interview from his home in Oakland, CA, surrounded as he is by McNugget-fed cretins? The 25% in Spain – what proportion is from English or Italian or French or Portuguese? Does the neglected Mongolian genius really get a look-in? “You could probably almost read all the translations that come out in a year.” So Americans have more translated works of literature per year than any single person could read. “Greatness is a huge factor in the success of these authors.” There should be other factors, the article implies, including the difficulty of locating their country of birth on an atlas. Is reading about foreign cultures even the unmitigated good the article would have you believe it is? In Japan, from Tokugawa to Meiji, there was very little interest in or contact with other cultures. The only strong outside influence was the historical influence of China. Japan has a national literature of almost unparalleled intricacy and depth and remains one of the most literate countries on earth. Oh wait, now someone is going to write an article stating that wider reading of foreign novels in translation will have transformative effects on U.S. policy in the Middle East.

Posted by: Mee | 2/19/09

Blame the School

I think Americans' distaste for literature from other cultures has a lot to do with the way it's taught in school. My friends and I are avid readers--my personal record is 30 books in 5 days one lazy elementary school summer. We read everything from science to history to fantasy. But we all HATE the multi-cultural literature we were forced to read at school. So much of it was TERRIBLE from a literary perspective(Kokoro, I'm looking at you), and we were obviously only being forced to read it because it had a message about racism or sexism or political correctness that the author felt necessary to pound us over the head with for 300 pages. I will read ANYTHING before I read a translation recommended by a high school English teacher. Bring on the thickest, dullest 500-page medical journal you can find and I will take it before any story from Africa my university professors made me read. It was obvious to me even as a 10-year-old that the only reason we were reading thoses books was because the author was a woman/Hispanic/black/Asian/homosexual and the school district was trying to avoid charges of discrimination. It's not that I'm not interested in other cultures. As I type this, I'm in Japan. I'm fluent in Japanese and practice reading a little in Japanese every day. In two weeks I am going to stay with my father's friend in China. But there are foreign authors I enjoy because they are good authors (I hope to die with a battered old copy of Sei Shonagon's Pillow Book in my hand) and there are foreign authors I have been forced to read in the name of political correctness that wrote the most awful dreck I could barely force myself to finish the book.

Posted by: Kacie | 3/1/09

McCulture

Instant messenger was created in the 1970s with UNIX-based applications such as talker and IRC. Modern instant messaging, such as MSN, AIM, or Yahoo Messenger was started in 1996 with the release of ICQ.

Posted by: Neon | 3/17/09

Translations

Nicely put; as I'm sure you know, there are fine texts that can be well taught, and are selected for their literary virtues and not just for their being successful propaganda to assuage (white?) guilt. the real problem is the teaching which assumes that literature is a kind of medicine to be administered to the prejudiced.

Posted by: George Karnezis | 6/23/09

Translations

If such a book really exists the American people should be the first to read it. Instead of their own assumptions they have had for centuries. Mostly, those that felt the white race is only the superior race in which to rule over mankind. Why America has not learned from our past mistakes and tried harder to be loyal to all people including our own families makes me ashamed to be American. Why did America stay out of Germany during the Hitler's craze with the Jews??Because we were no better here to the African American people. Shame on us...We all need to come together for Peace and Love for all mankind. Keep the ball rolling for us all....

Posted by: review satisfaction | 3/11/12