{"id":295326,"date":"2013-10-04T08:28:34","date_gmt":"2013-10-04T08:28:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2013\/10\/04\/elizabeth-harris-talks-translation\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T15:56:32","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T15:56:32","slug":"elizabeth-harris-talks-translation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2013\/10\/04\/elizabeth-harris-talks-translation\/","title":{"rendered":"Elizabeth Harris Talks Translation"},"content":{"rendered":"

Elizabeth Harris has translated fiction by Mario Rigoni Stern, Fabio Stassi, and Marco Candida, among others. Her translation of Giulio Mozzi\u2019s story collection Questo \u00e8 il giardino (This Is the Garden)<\/strong> will be published by Open Letter Books in 2014; the individual stories have appeared in The Literary Review<\/a>, The Missouri Review<\/a>, The Kenyon Review<\/a>, AGNI<\/span><\/a>, Words Without Borders<\/a>, and elsewhere. Her translation of Mozzi\u2019s \u201cCarlo Doesn\u2019t Know How to Read\u201d appears in Dalkey Archive\u2019s annual anthology Best European Fiction 2010<\/strong>, and her translation of an excerpt of Candida\u2019s Dream Diary<\/strong> appears in Best European Fiction 2011<\/strong>. She teaches creative writing at the University of North Dakota.<\/i><\/p>\n

First off, let me say what an honor it is to have been asked to help judge this competition, which provides one of the largest prizes in the US to my kind (to translators) and which also, by dividing this ten thousand dollar prize equally between the author and the translator, emphasizes the place of the translator as something like a \u201csecond author \u201cof the work. <\/p>\n

But how to discuss this second author? What I as a judge have to work with is an enormous pile of more than three-hundred books in English with two names (well, sometimes two names) on the cover. One of my initial quandaries in this judging (besides that enormous pile of books) was how I\u2019d determine the quality of that second author\u2019s efforts, how I\u2019d evaluate the translator\u2019s contribution, without looking at the original books. Honestly, I\u2019m still working this out. <\/p>\n

Oh, I can tell when something is badly translated, and I don\u2019t need the original to do it\u2014I can spot the clumsy pawing of an ineffectual translation a mile off because I\u2019ve done so much clumsy pawing of my own. It\u2019s the other kind of translation\u2014the good kind\u2014that\u2019s hard to talk about. But I\u2019ll give it a try with a couple of the books I\u2019ve admired so far.<\/p>\n

First, there\u2019s Sondra Silverston\u2019s translation of Between Friends<\/i><\/a>, by Amos Oz. Silverston, in my view, has done a masterful job of handling voice in these interconnected stories about life on a 1950s kibbutz; we\u2019re swept into this quiet, lonely world that\u2019s at times funny, at times awful, from the very first, beautifully phrased line, \u201cOn our kibbutz, Kibbutz Yekhat, there lived a man, Azi Provizor, a short fifty-five-year-old bachelor who had a habit of blinking.\u201d Of course the line is originally Oz\u2019s, but Silverston has recognized and interpreted what was in his sentence and then created this wonderful, musical sentence of her own, with its side-stepping quality leading at last to an aging bachelor, and his charming \u201chabit of blinking.\u201d There isn\u2019t a sentence in the collection that doesn\u2019t have this sort of control, and the stories are quite varied, too, from different points of view, with different nuances of voice apparent throughout. I\u2019m sure Oz\u2019s original was a joy to work with and a great challenge, too\u2014translating spare, quiet prose might be the most challenging of all, since there\u2019s nothing to hide behind. That the prose seems effortless and clean is no doubt the result of Silverston\u2019s sensitivity to the original and is also, no doubt, the result of a whole lot of hard work.<\/p>\n

Finding the voice (or voices) of a piece of fiction is one of my great joys. I don\u2019t know about other translators, but I actually feel like I can\u2019t continue in a translation until I\u2019ve wrestled with and gotten hold of an author\u2019s voice in English. I very much admire Heather Cleary\u2019s translation of The Dark<\/i><\/a> by Sergio Chejfec because of this novel\u2019s complicated, challenging voice, which I think she\u2019s done a terrific job of capturing. <\/p>\n

Here we have a very interior story, a distant narrative voice, as an educated, middle-class man recalls his past relationship with Delia, a young factory worker that he may have loved and whose child he fathered. What I was struck by especially in the novel was the level of abstraction I found\u2014when I encounter abstraction as I translate, I feel like groaning; it is incredibly hard to render in English without sounding stilted and clumsy. But there is nothing clumsy about how Cleary handles abstraction here. Consider the gorgeous opening lines of the novel: <\/p>\n

\n

It has always unsettled me that geography does not change with time, with the changes that take place within it, within us. We retain something immaterial, similar to that something retained by geography, also immaterial. And yet, though it remains unaltered, geography is the measure of change. Just as happens with the temperature of a body, the trace it retains of its former heat allows it to continue being itself, yet this trace marks a difference. Bodies are and are not; they are at once more and less than.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I can only imagine how much work Cleary put into these lines; the opening of a novel is so important and to be faced with all of this abstract reflection besides!
\nIn the case of the Chejfec, I did take a peek at the Spanish, and just as I thought, Cleary was true to what was there in terms of meaning and sentence structure, yet she also created something new in the English that was extremely effective. Consider the first two lines in the Spanish: <\/p>\n

\n

Siempre me ha inquietado que la geografia no cambie pese al tiempo, pese a nuestros cambios y los cambios que se producen en ella. Conservamos algo immaterial, equivalente a lo que conserva la geograf\u00eda, tambi\u00e9n inmaterial. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

My (very) rough translation of this would be: <\/p>\n

\n

It has always worried me that geography does not change despite time, despite our changes and the changes that are produced in it. We conserve something immaterial, equivalent to that which conserves geography, also immaterial. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I\u2019m very impressed with that first line in Cleary\u2019s translation, what she\u2019s done to control a potentially flat sentence, by incorporating the repetition of \u201cwith\u201d (\u201cwith time\u201d and \u201cwith the changes\u201d) instead of the repetition of a rather awkward-sounding \u201cdespite\u201d (\u201cdespite time\u201d and \u201cdespite our changes\u2026\u201d), and then echoing this \u201cwith\u201d again, at the end of the sentence, with the rhythmically sensitive \u201cwithin it, within us.\u201d Here, Cleary got the sense of Chejfec\u2019s words, but the sound of her ending and her use of repetition are much more effective for the English. That Cleary chose to break that first sentence down with that final brief phrase (\u201cwithin us\u201d) is perhaps also speaking to Chejfec\u2019s second sentence that makes use of this technique, with the small additional phrase at the end, \u201ctambi\u00e9n inmaterial.\u201d She also very wisely reversed \u201cnuestros cambios\u201d and \u201clos cambios que se producen en ella\u201d in her first sentence so that she doesn\u2019t both begin and end her first line with a pitiful little \u201cit.\u201d My own fumbling explanations don\u2019t do the opening lines of the translation justice; they are beautiful, and they are Cleary\u2019s. <\/p>\n

Ultimately, I don\u2019t know if Oz\/Silverston\u2019s Between Friends<\/i> and Chejfec\/Cleary\u2019s The Dark<\/i> will make my long list or not. I like both books very much, but I also have an enormous pile of books to get through. In any case, I\u2019m very impressed with the work of the two translators, who have made the complicated, challenging voices of the original authors seem so effortless in English. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Elizabeth Harris has translated fiction by Mario Rigoni Stern, Fabio Stassi, and Marco Candida, among others. Her translation of Giulio Mozzi\u2019s story collection Questo \u00e8 il giardino (This Is the Garden) will be published by Open Letter Books in 2014; the individual stories have appeared in The Literary Review, The Missouri Review, The Kenyon Review, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":186,"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-295326","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\/295326","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\/186"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=295326"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/295326\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":318056,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/295326\/revisions\/318056"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=295326"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=295326"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=295326"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}