{"id":277886,"date":"2010-04-19T19:18:04","date_gmt":"2010-04-19T19:18:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2010\/04\/19\/towards-new-ways-of-reading\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T16:40:56","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T16:40:56","slug":"towards-new-ways-of-reading","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2010\/04\/19\/towards-new-ways-of-reading\/","title":{"rendered":"Towards New Ways of Reading"},"content":{"rendered":"

Bonjour \u00e0 tous!<\/i> Chad Post has asked me to take some time off from designing my \u201cGoogle Translate is People!\u201d t-shirts (hint: the words are superimposed over a horrified and battered Charlton Heston<\/a>) and cover for him this week. I am delighted and honored to be guest blogging at “the threep.” I think this officially means I\u2019m cool now.<\/p>\n

This summer, The Southern Review<\/i><\/a> will feature my translation of French fabulist Georges-Olivier Ch\u00e2teaureynaud\u2019s \u201cAnother Story.\u201d At the recent AWP<\/span> I had a fascinating chat about the piece with editor Jeanne Leiby that touched on readers\u2019 expectations for translated fiction.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe deliberated a long time over this one,\u201d she confided. \u201cWe liked so much of it enough that if it\u2019d been a piece by an American author we might have requested rewrites. Since it was a translation, that wasn\u2019t a possibility.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAnother Story,\u201d which closes the Ch\u00e2teaureynaud collection out in May from Small Beer Press<\/a>, can be read as a meditation on storytelling: specifically, the wherefore of employing the fantastical elements that are Ch\u00e2teaureynaud\u2019s stock-in-trade. The question Todorov identified as central to the fantastical genre\u2014is the impossible real or just in the character\u2019s head?\u2014is nested in a metafictional layer, as the story is narrated by a French fantastical writer, the guest of a billionaire on an island that, as Brian Evenson remarks, \u201cseems half-built from The Tempest <\/i> and half from Alfredo Bioy-Casares\u2019s The Invention of Morel<\/i>.\u201d What reservations had the editors had about the piece?<\/p>\n

\u201cWell, we thought it was predictable at first. But instead it taught us to change how we read.\u201d It was a reaction to the author\u2019s work I\u2019d gotten in rejection slips before. Jeanne went on to say that having the same reaction to a collection of Herta M\u00fcller\u2019s stories had made her realize she was perhaps reading foreign stories against the expectations and fulfillments to which American stories had accustomed us.<\/p>\n

\u201cPart of the point of publishing translations,\u201d she concluded, \u201cis to expose readers to new and alternative narrative forms.\u201d<\/p>\n

This brings up all sorts of interesting issues. Storytelling shares features with other technologies: it has its pure mechanics, and can date in ways literature, generally said not to progress unidirectionally, doesn\u2019t. The manipulation of surprise is mostly a technical problem. (If conjecture were to masquerade as generalization, I might say it\u2019s one that delights every American\u2019s inner engineer and pragmatist, our homo faber<\/i> hearts.) Surprise is surely one of narrative\u2019s virtues, but do Americans overlook, in its favor, other narrative rewards and satisfactions, other priorities and uses? Pop and pulp especially, by standardizing story forms and making, so to speak, formula racers\u2014sleek, streamlined thrill machines capable of hugging hairpin plot reversals and sudden narrative curves\u2014have made us canny consumers of plot.<\/p>\n

We can ask of a piece, \u201cDoes this satisfy me in the ways I have come to expect to be satisfied?\u201d or we can assume it has succeeded on its own terms, and then expand our ideas of the possible by trying to define those terms. This is a challenge reading translations sets before us, but I might extend the argument to any kind of fiction you’re not used to<\/i>. Readers schooled in contemporary American realism may have difficulty with their first forays into fabulist fiction, where the unreal is often left unresolved, a wound in our consensual reality that the story\u2019s end makes no attempt to close. In approaching any unfamiliar literature, there\u2019s a learning curve, a disorienting period during which the standards and practices of what you\u2019ve come to take as quality are flouted or ignored.<\/p>\n

The Southern Review<\/i><\/a>, by the way, has a great issue out right now with, among other gems, Soren Gauger’s translation of a Witold Gombrowicz excerpt on palant<\/i>, a Polish ancestor of baseball, that all-American sport and the issue’s theme. Jeanne Leiby has asked me to put out the word that she is looking for translations. Translators, send in your best!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Bonjour \u00e0 tous! Chad Post has asked me to take some time off from designing my \u201cGoogle Translate is People!\u201d t-shirts (hint: the words are superimposed over a horrified and battered Charlton Heston) and cover for him this week. I am delighted and honored to be guest blogging at “the threep.” I think this officially […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":86,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67486],"tags":[1646],"class_list":["post-277886","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","tag-review"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277886","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/86"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=277886"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277886\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":322286,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277886\/revisions\/322286"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=277886"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=277886"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=277886"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}