\u201cA person lives in his language like a fish in water,\u201d says Latvian writer Inga \u0100bele. \u201cThat\u2019s why authors don\u2019t know that much about their own work\u2014because they live inside it. If an author wants to test the strength of her work\u2014be it a novel, story, or play\u2014it should be translated.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u0100bele\u2019s 2008 novel, High Tide<\/em>, has been tested multiple times. First translated into Italian and Swedish, in 2013 it was translated into English by Kaija Straumanis<\/span> \u201912 (MA), a graduate of Rochester\u2019s literary translation program and editorial director at the Open Letter Press. Housed in Dewey Hall, Open Letter is one of only a few publishers in the English-speaking world devoted to literature in translation.<\/p>\n In Straumanis\u2019s hands, \u0100bele\u2019s novel held up extraordinarily well. In December, the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages chose Straumanis\u2019s translation, published by Open Letter, over 37 other translated works for the 2015 Best Translation into English award.<\/p>\n \u0100bele is unrestrained in her admiration for Straumanis\u2019s work. \u201cKaija isn\u2019t just a translator, [she\u2019s] my coauthor,\u201d she says. \u201cShe had her vision of how the text could continue to develop. When we translate, we also edit.\u201d<\/p>\n Straumanis first translated the novel for her master\u2019s thesis. \u201cIt\u2019s just a very beautiful book,\u201d she says of the original work. \u201cIt\u2019s very poetic in certain ways, without being poetry. There\u2019s a bare bones emotionality to it. It\u2019s spare without being minimalist.\u201d<\/p>\n For Straumanis, translation involves capturing \u201cthe structure, the register, and the tonality\u201d of a work. For High Tide<\/em>, as in all her translations, she strove \u201cto duplicate the experience that you get from reading the original.\u201d<\/p>\n Straumanis was raised in Minnesota by Latvian parents. She grew up bilingual, speaking Latvian at home, and going to Latvian school and summer camp. Latvian culture is \u201cvery literary,\u201d she says. Her home was full of novels, books of poetry, and plays. The language itself, she adds, \u201cis very poetic, and it lends itself very well to poetry, song lyrics, literature, and things like that.\u201d<\/p>\n She wasn\u2019t entirely satisfied with the corpus of Latvian literature to which she was exposed in her supplemental schooling. One of the three Baltic republics, Latvia has spent most of its history under Polish, Swedish, Russian, and later, Soviet rule. A history of occupation produced a rich body of nationalistic literature. Even some of the more recent Latvian literature, she says, continues to reflect that past. But not \u0100bele\u2019s High Tide<\/em>. \u201cOne of the reasons I loved the book so much is that it wasn\u2019t heavy with the post-Soviet sensibility,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n The novel is the story of a woman\u2019s life, told in reverse chronological order. It examines choices and their consequences, allowing readers to see consequences before being introduced to the conditions and choices that produced them.<\/p>\n What makes the work especially challenging for translators is that each chapter is stylistically distinct. One chapter is a dialogue, another a monologue, another a letter, and so forth. \u201c\u0100bele is also a poet and a playwright, so the book plays with those stylistic genres,\u201d Straumanis says.<\/p>\n Straumanis, who travels to Latvia about once a year, met and came to know \u0100bele as she was completing work on her translation. \u201cWe clicked,\u201d she says of their first meeting. \u201cNow every time I go back to Latvia I go and stay with her and her family.\u201d<\/p>\n Just as \u0100bele does not have the final, or only, word on her own work, Straumanis knows\u2014or certainly hopes\u2014that her translation won\u2019t be the one and only English rendition. \u201cFifty years down the line, someone may pick up my translation and say, \u2018I think I would do it differently,\u2019 and retranslate it,\u201d she says. \u201cTastes will differ, language usage in English will differ. The text is a living thing. It moves on, and it moves on from one language to another.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Kaija Straumanis \u201912 (MA), a graduate of Rochester\u2019s literary translation program and now editorial director at Open Letter, speaks about her work with Latvian writer Inga \u0100bele.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":742,"featured_media":139672,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[456],"tags":[576,586],"class_list":["post-139662","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-society-culture","tag-literary-translation","tag-open-letter"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n