{"id":298906,"date":"2014-08-08T17:00:00","date_gmt":"2014-08-08T17:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2014\/08\/08\/ottilie-mulzet-on-translating-seiobo-there-below\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T14:39:24","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T14:39:24","slug":"ottilie-mulzet-on-translating-seiobo-there-below","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2014\/08\/08\/ottilie-mulzet-on-translating-seiobo-there-below\/","title":{"rendered":"Ottilie Mulzet on Translating "Seiobo There Below""},"content":{"rendered":"

English PEN<\/span>’s “World Bookshelf” blog has a fantastic piece<\/a>
\n by Ottilie Mulzet on the complexities of translating L\u00e1szl\u00f3 Krasznahorkai\u2019s Seiobo there Below<\/em>, which won the both of them last year’s Best Translated Book Award. <\/p>\n

The whole article is worth reading, but here are a few really interesting key points:<\/p>\n

\n

As you may have gathered, the amount of ground that Seiobo<\/em> covers and the level of erudition displayed by the author are both formidable. This collage in my head of all the fragments of material acquired while translating it is, by necessity, enticingly eclectic and incomplete. Some of my discoveries were like poignant codas, scattered hints embedded in the real world, perhaps only to be found by a more assiduous reader. But, of course, it\u2019s the translator who should always be the most assiduous reader of all.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

The question of the writer\u2019s voice when translating is crucial, and when translating a writer such as Krasznahorkai, it is even more so. The narrative voice in Seiobo first overwhelms the reader, then proceeds to harangue, mystify, and baffle. This voice carries the weight of so much fateful knowledge that the reader is not so informed by it as infected by the weight of all the human episteme. For all its encyclopaedic awareness, however, the voice is elusive, endlessly shifting between an anonymous narrator, anonymous protagonists, and objects themselves. I wondered at times if this torrent of words, seemingly drawing us nearer to these objects, was actually functioning as a kind of protective screen for the Divine \u2013 the principle of the Sacred \u2013 which is represented by the goddess Seiobo and by visitations of Andrei Rublev\u2019s angels in the book, to cite just two examples. A torrent of words as a shield from the irrevocable crassness and damage of our secular world.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

*<\/p>\n

\n

Both in interviews and in the book, the author uses a Hungarian verb that is hard to translate, elles, which consists of the main verb les with the addition of the verbal prefix el-. Les means to lie in wait for something (usually not with the best of intentions) but with the prefix el-, the verb is glossed as \u2018to observe secretly and closely.\u2019 The Magyar \u00c9rtelmez\u0151 Kis Sz\u00f3t\u00e1r dictionary gives these definitions: \u20181. to learn something from somebody by observing, whilst remaining unobserved. 2. to happen upon something: He ~ my secret.\u2019<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

This is not the time or place to embark upon a rapturous appreciation of Hungarian dictionaries, but the very existence of such a verb in Hungarian, expressing such a complex notion in a mere two syllables, is striking. Perhaps an even greater sphere of complexity resides in this one word than in the phenomena of the medieval workshop or the Asian master-apprenticeship, both of which are brought to light in the book. No, this is not just any sort of observation, but a \u2018secret\u2019 observation: the kind that does not encumber its object with the knowledge of being observed. Observation and perception are perhaps the most crucial elements in Seiobo. The wealth of material absorbed to make writing this book possible, and Krasznahorkai\u2019s observations on the process of observation itself, suggest that it is the most fundamental aspect of acquiring skill. That, coupled with the grinding reality of the immense distances the author must have had to travel to witness all the experiences and facts that are communicated in this book, is perhaps a powerful rebuttal of the global \u2018cyber-brain\u2019 that is the Internet, which has otherwise become a universal mental prosthesis.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Read this, then read Seiobo.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

English PEN’s “World Bookshelf” blog has a fantastic piece by Ottilie Mulzet on the complexities of translating L\u00e1szl\u00f3 Krasznahorkai\u2019s Seiobo there Below, which won the both of them last year’s Best Translated Book Award. The whole article is worth reading, but here are a few really interesting key points: As you may have gathered, the […]<\/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":[67476],"tags":[35996,34326,3996,9546,53816],"class_list":["post-298906","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-best-translated-book-awards","tag-btba","tag-english-pen","tag-hungarian-literature","tag-laszlo-krasznahorkai","tag-seiobo-there-below"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/298906","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=298906"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/298906\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":331276,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/298906\/revisions\/331276"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=298906"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=298906"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=298906"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}