{"id":291976,"date":"2012-10-22T15:03:06","date_gmt":"2012-10-22T15:03:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2012\/10\/22\/an-alta-so-great-it-made-the-new-york-times-alta-2012\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T16:04:19","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T16:04:19","slug":"an-alta-so-great-it-made-the-new-york-times-alta-2012","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2012\/10\/22\/an-alta-so-great-it-made-the-new-york-times-alta-2012\/","title":{"rendered":"An ALTA So Great it Made the New York Times [ALTA 2012]"},"content":{"rendered":"

Way back at the start of the year,<\/a> I promised that this year’s ALTA<\/span> would be “THE<\/span> GREATEST<\/span> CONFERENCE<\/span> IN THE<\/span> HISTORY<\/span> OF THE<\/span> UNIVERSE<\/span> OF CONFERENCES<\/span>.” Now, I’m not sure that was the case—although it was the most interesting ALTA<\/span> I’ve ever attended—but it was awesome enough to get mentioned in the New York Times.<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

\n

[A]mong the polyglots who convened this month in Rochester for the annual meeting of the American Literary Translators Association \u2014 where the topic was \u201cThe Translation of Humor, or, the Humor of Translation\u201d \u2014 there is a sense of cautious optimism. At least some measure of levity, these dedicated professionals believe, must be able to migrate between languages. The French, after all, seem to appreciate Woody Allen.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

\u201cIt takes a bit of creativity and a bit of luck,\u201d said David Bellos, a professor of French and comparative literature at Princeton, who, as he prepared his keynote speech for this year\u2019s conference, confessed to finding a disconcerting shortage of jokes beginning: \u201cA pair of translators walk into a bar.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

(During the conference, Alex Zucker actually came up with a joke using that opening: “A pair of translators walk into a bar . . . (It was better in the original.)”)<\/p>\n

The humor panels we had at the conference were pretty spectacular, especially one moderated by Open Letter editor (and U of R translation grad) Kaija Straumanis and featuring Emily Davis (fellow U of R translation grad), Matt Rowe,<\/a> and Helen Anderson and Konstantin Gurevich, translators of The Golden Calf.<\/em> One of the reasons this panel worked so well was because of Kaija’s introduction, which centered around the different ways George Saunders’s “Pastoralia” is funny in English and in the German translation. <\/p>\n

\n

Might some funny bits actually get funnier in translation? In the title story of George Saunders\u2019s \u201cPastoralia,\u201d a character is paid to impersonate a cave man at a theme park, his employers providing a freshly-killed goat to roast daily, until one morning he goes to the usual spot and finds it \u201cgoatless.\u201d Among the many possible renderings of this made-up word, Saunders\u2019s German translator chose ziegenleer, a lofty-sounding melding of \u201cgoat\u201d and \u201cvoid\u201d with no exact equivalent in English.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

\u201cThe German translation is accurate, but the word combination tickles some kind of orthographical, sound-receptive funny bone,\u201d explained the Latvian translator Kaija Straumanis, the editorial director for Open Letter Books, the University of Rochester\u2019s literature in translation press and one of the conference organizers. \u201cThe more high-minded you make it sound in your head, the funnier it gets, implying a rusted-out box into which this man is staring and seeing a severe and disconcerting lack of goat.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The whole article<\/a> is worth reading—and thanks to Jascha Hoffman for writing such an informative piece about such an interesting topic.<\/p>\n

\n<\/a>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Way back at the start of the year, I promised that this year’s ALTA would be “THE GREATEST CONFERENCE IN THE HISTORY OF THE UNIVERSE OF CONFERENCES.” Now, I’m not sure that was the case—although it was the most interesting ALTA I’ve ever attended—but it was awesome enough to get mentioned in the New York […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":292,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67486],"tags":[45696,12286,48816,39476,226,28166,1646],"class_list":["post-291976","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","tag-alta-2012","tag-david-bellos","tag-jascha-hoffman","tag-kaija-straumanis","tag-new-york-times","tag-open-letter-books","tag-review"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/291976","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\/292"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=291976"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/291976\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":318856,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/291976\/revisions\/318856"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=291976"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=291976"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=291976"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}