{"id":295626,"date":"2013-11-18T16:00:00","date_gmt":"2013-11-18T16:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2013\/11\/18\/2013-alta-conference-micro-review-reading-out-loud\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T15:44:31","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T15:44:31","slug":"2013-alta-conference-micro-review-reading-out-loud","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2013\/11\/18\/2013-alta-conference-micro-review-reading-out-loud\/","title":{"rendered":"2013 ALTA Conference Micro-Review: Reading Out Loud"},"content":{"rendered":"

A current MALTS<\/span> student here at the University of Rochester, Allison M. Charette is also a translator from the French who recently helped launch the Emerging Literary Translators’ Network in America.<\/a> After attending this year’s American Literary Translators Association (ALTA<\/span>) conference, she wanted to write up a couple of the more interesting panels. Here’s one.<\/em><\/p>\n

You know those list-y blog posts, right? \u201cTop Ten Things You\u2019re Doing Wrong at Work\u201d or \u201c8 Commonly Mispronounced Words\u201d or \u201c25 Ryan Gosling GIF<\/span>s to Make You Smile\u201d?<\/p>\n

Don\u2019t worry, this isn\u2019t one of them.<\/p>\n

But I, a true member of my generation, read lots of them. Some of them even have to do with translation (which I also do). And those lists of \u201cTop Ten Things to Make You a Better Translator\u201d always include a directive to talk. Specifically, to read the original text out loud. Then to read your written translation out loud. Everything is supposed to make more sense when you do.<\/p>\n

Jordan Smith agrees. As he pointed out in his panel at the recent ALTA<\/span> conference, \u201cDecentering Semantics: Poetics and Meaning in Translation,\u201d there\u2019s more to words and characters than just their content and contextual meaning. He\u2019s currently translating some wonderfully experimental poetry by Yoshimasu G\u014dz\u014d, a Japanese poet, which involves a lot of puns, wordplay between different languages, and homophonographic play within its own language.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a practice in Japan called ateji<\/em>, which replaces a normal kanji<\/em> character with different characters that are pronounced the same. English has these word games, too\u2014mondegreens<\/i>, or the physical card game Mad Gab<\/i>\u2014but it seems to be more poetic and less slapstick in Japanese. Jordan gave an example from G\u014dz\u014d\u2019s \u201c\u706b\u30fbFire . . .\u201d (published in last summer\u2019s Poetry Review<\/em>):<\/p>\n

\n

smoke: kemuri \u7159
\nke               mu                           ri
\n\u6bdb               \u7121                             \u91cc
\nHAIR<\/span>          NOTHINGNESS<\/span>    VILLAGE<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

By sounding out each word carefully, the reader gets a new, alternate meaning in each character (or, in English, set of letters). Sounding it out gives it a new sense. In this particular poem, it\u2019s a deeply interesting feature and a novel idea.<\/p>\n

In poetry translation, though, it\u2019s something more: the most extreme way to support the idea that sound is more important than content. Rendering a poem literally into another language is stilted at best and wildly off the mark at worst. Jordan argued that the best approach is to keep the semantic meaning decentered, or at least to recenter it somewhere in the space between languages.<\/p>\n

To translate this ateji<\/em>, though, Jordan was faced with a challenge. No matter how you elongate or twist the sounds in the word \u201csmoke\u201d in English, you\u2019ll never hear anything about hair, or village, or a void. But if the sound is all that matters, then \u201csome-oak\u201d or \u201csumo-oak\u201d should work just fine. And so it does, in Jordan\u2019s translation:<\/p>\n

\n

          Thinking of the fire in the heart of Adonis<\/b>
\n     \u00abdrap\u00e9 de feu\u00bb<\/b>
\n\u201csoft flames of the earth\u2019s surface, \u2026\u2026.(<\/b>July 8, 2000. From Miyake-jima, like the hand of an infant,<\/i> \/\/ fresh some,oak (smoke,<\/i> \u2026\u2026.) = hair,nothingness,village (ke\u6bdb,mu\u7121,ri\u91cc, \u2026\u2026)\u201d
\n     door = \u00ab\u6238\u00bb<\/b>
\nseed of the fire even beyond the seed of the fire in the heart of Adonis-san
\n     door = \u00ab\u6238\u00bb<\/b><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

My first reaction to this poetry was \u201cwow, this is strange.\u201d This poem includes three different languages in just this one little excerpt, plus bibliographic information as part of the poem itself. It\u2019s not something you see every day. But it\u2019s beautiful. It sounds beautiful when you speak it out loud. Even though there\u2019s no semantic reference to \u201coak\u201d in the original poem, it fits. The sound itself fits. And in the end, with poetry, that\u2019s what matters most.<\/p>\n

This poem and more will be included in a forthcoming anthology entitled<\/em> Alice, Iris, Red Horse: Selected Poems of Gozo Yoshimasu: a Book in and on Translation,<\/a> edited by Forrest Gander.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A current MALTS student here at the University of Rochester, Allison M. Charette is also a translator from the French who recently helped launch the Emerging Literary Translators’ Network in America. After attending this year’s American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) conference, she wanted to write up a couple of the more interesting panels. Here’s one. […]<\/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":[53766,53786,1286,53776,6696,1646],"class_list":["post-295626","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","tag-allison-charette","tag-alta-2013","tag-japanese-literature","tag-jordan-smith","tag-poetry-in-translation","tag-review"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/295626","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=295626"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/295626\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":310346,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/295626\/revisions\/310346"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=295626"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=295626"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=295626"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}