{"id":292246,"date":"2012-12-04T16:30:00","date_gmt":"2012-12-04T16:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2012\/12\/04\/quarterly-conversation-30-the-translator-interviews\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T16:04:17","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T16:04:17","slug":"quarterly-conversation-30-the-translator-interviews","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2012\/12\/04\/quarterly-conversation-30-the-translator-interviews\/","title":{"rendered":"Quarterly Conversation #30 [The Translator Interviews]"},"content":{"rendered":"

Following on the earlier post about Quarterly Conversation<\/em>,<\/a> here are excerpts from two interviews with translators that appear in the new issue, starting with Heather Cleary,<\/a> the translator of two Open Letter books—The Planets<\/i> and The Dark<\/i> by Sergio Chejfec. This interview was conducted by Stephen Sparks, one of the members of this year’s BTBA<\/span> Fiction Panel.<\/p>\n

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SS: You\u2019ve written elsewhere that Chejfec\u2019s prose \u201cboth deflects and draws the reader in,\u201d which I\u2019ve found to be a very apt characterization of his work. That indeterminacy or wavering\u2014as if Chejfec is inviting the reader in while keeping his foot against the door\u2014is one of the more compelling (if occasionally frustrating) aspects of his writing. How, then, do you as a translator find your way into the text?<\/b><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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HC: Yes, and I think this is particularly true of The Planets.<\/em> Sergio wrote a beautiful essay a few years ago called \u201cSimple Language, Name,\u201d in which he talks about his development as a writer and the way his father\u2019s difficulty learning Spanish late in life affected his own use of the language, driving him toward a certain stylistic opacity that he was only able to move away from over time. Then there\u2019s the fact that so much of what\u2019s going on in The Planets has to do with navigating the space between oneself and another, particularly when that other person exists in an entirely internalized form, that is, only as a memory. This is explored in the prose itself, which often gives the language an air of being borrowed, somehow unnatural. That said, The Planets is a beautiful book, as thorny as it can occasionally be, and an important one in that it approaches the themes of friendship, loss, and memory in an innovative, even startling way.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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So, it was never really a question of whether I would try to make my way in . . . the how of it, I suppose, was through certain passages I found particularly moving, and which offered insight into the more abstract sections. For example, during one of the disjointed conversations M and the narrator have as boys, the narrator repeats something M has said as though it were his own thought, though he doesn\u2019t even fully believe it. It\u2019s such a simple moment, but that detail seemed so true and really crystallized the dynamic between the two boys for me; it also anticipates what comes later, as the narrator struggles to preserve M\u2019s memory by keeping his voice alive, in some very surprising ways. There are many moments like this\u2014the image of the narrator running around an entire city block so that he can have a second chance to acknowledge M\u2019s mother when their paths unexpectedly cross; the guilt he feels at not having fully invoked M\u2019s memory in conversation with a mutual friend. Those anchored the story for me, and lent depth and immediacy to the more abstract passages. [. . .]<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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SS: What is your translation process like? Do you have a particular passage that proved tricky, etc. that you\u2019d like to discuss? I\u2019m interested in some of the nitty-gritty of the act of translation here. How many dictionaries do you consult? How many drafts do you go through?<\/b><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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HC: It\u2019s a little different with each project. I usually start with a period of pre-reading\u2014going through the text to be translated once or twice, as well as other works by the writer, interviews when possible, sometimes criticism. Whatever might help me find my way into the narrative voice. Then there\u2019s the actual translation part. I use the RAE<\/span> (dictionary of the Real Academia Espa\u00f1ola) and the OED<\/span>, and often ask search engines or kindly friends about how a word is used colloquially. This has been key with Sergio\u2019s work, since he tends to slip in phrases that are just a shade off from typical constructions. I end up with a chaotic draft full of notes, and then revise. And revise, and revise. There\u2019s generally a lot of snacking involved at this stage.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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I can\u2019t recall any one passage that proved particularly tricky (they all were, each in its own way), but I had to pay very close attention throughout to the tension between the narrator\u2019s philosophical reflections and his reminiscences about his lost friend. It felt to me that there was something underneath that first kind of rumination; while obviously thematically relevant, they also felt like a means of withdrawing from the experience of remembering M and feeling that memory fade. The challenge was to get this across, balancing the concrete and the abstract within a single narrative voice in a way that suggested a deeper connection between the two, without letting them bleed together or pull the narrative apart at the seams (any more or less than they do in the Spanish, that is). It was a similar process with the other voices at work in the novel\u2014in addition to the first-person narrative, M and his father intervene to tell a series of elliptical, grotesque stories about nomads and eyeballs and a wedding gone awry, and then there\u2019s the meta-commentary that appears in italics, contesting the first-person narrative at times, corroborating it at others\u2014though these were more clearly delineated.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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Finally, there’s also an interview with Georges Szirtes conducted by Bethany Pope:<\/a><\/p>\n

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Bethany W. Pope: Which is more important to you, the literal word-for-word translation of the text or reconstructing the atmosphere of the piece?<\/b><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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George Szirtes: There is no such thing as a literal word-for-word translation, at least not one that will sound anything like literature. There is however a difference between that impossibility and the other, the full rendering of meaning in terms of atmosphere or anything else. In translating you are entering a world with rules and manners that have meanings (plural) for the native reader. You are trying to understand some aspect of those meanings and to transplant it into the receiving language using any means possible, which will include a degree of lexicographical fidelity as long as it works.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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B.W.P: In your translation of Gyula Kr\u00fady\u2019s The Adventures of Sindbad I noticed that the atmosphere of the piece\u2014that slightly humorous melancholy\u2014had a lot in common with the tone and atmosphere of your own work, most recently found in your tweets about the ageless crustacean doctor and his lobsteresque paramour. How much influence does translation have on your own work?<\/b><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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G.S: Sindbad<\/em> was a pleasure to translate because I felt I understood Krudy\u2019s world as soon as I entered it. There may be a difference between the person who is primarily a translator and the one who is primarily a writer who translates. The two may overlap, and there are translators who become writers in the act of translating. For me it was a writerly recognition. Krudy\u2019s Hungary was not my Hungary, not by a long chalk, but it was a real world, particularly in the minds of close friends. The humorous melancholy in Krudy is, as I discovered, an aspect of my own imagination, one that working on Sindbad brought to light. It is possible to hope that any engagement in translation will bring out some latent possibility in the writer-translator.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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The Adventures of Sindbad<\/em> was the second work of fiction I translated (the first was Anna \u00c9des<\/em> by Kosztolanyi) but by that time I had translated a good many poems and the verse-tragedy. Sindbad came along at the right time. I think my imagination was ready for it, ready, that is, to render it into English but also to feel it as a voice that might be adapted to my own. Most of my translations have been a kind of enrichment of voice. I have learned a great deal from them.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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I should add that the longer poems I wrote as a result of my first 1984 visit, that constituted the backbone of the resulting book, The Photographer in Winter<\/em> (1986) are not at all Sindbad like. They are darker, heavier, more cavernous things.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Remember, you can read the whole issue of Quarterly Conversation<\/em> by clicking here.<\/a><\/p>\n

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

Following on the earlier post about Quarterly Conversation, here are excerpts from two interviews with translators that appear in the new issue, starting with Heather Cleary, the translator of two Open Letter books—The Planets and The Dark by Sergio Chejfec. This interview was conducted by Stephen Sparks, one of the members of this year’s BTBA […]<\/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":[49086,9556,46496,8536,25446],"class_list":["post-292246","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","tag-bethany-pope","tag-george-szirtes","tag-heather-cleary","tag-quarterly-conversation","tag-stephen-sparks"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/292246","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=292246"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/292246\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":340356,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/292246\/revisions\/340356"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=292246"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=292246"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=292246"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}