International Translation Day: Where do academics fit in?

On Friday 30 September the British Library hosted International Translation Day, an annual celebration of the work of translators - especially literary translators - organised by Free Word Centre and English PEN. It was a great chance to catch up with friends and colleagues, but it left me wondering where academics fit in.

The day began with a plenary session highlighting how many stages a book goes through on its journey from one language market to another. Chaired by translator Daniel Hahn, the session featured: literary scout, Rebecca Servadio; editor of Hispabooks, Ana Pérez Galván; Kate Gunning, who organises sales to independent bookshops for Penguin Random House; Sarah Braybooke, publicist for Scribe UK; everyone's favourite bookseller, Gary Perry from Foyles; and Fiammetta Rocco, culture editor of The Economist. Each explained their role within the field of literary translation and reflected on how their own section could work better. The general consensus was that there is too much to read and too little time, leading to the conclusion that "We don't need to publish more, we need to publish better".

While I really enjoyed this session, I would love to see academics as an integral part of the chain, both at its early stages and at the very end. Those of us who work in modern languages and specialise in literature spend most of our lives reading books in other languages, often seeking out writers who haven't found success outside their country yet. If we didn't love these books, I doubt we would spend so much time painstakingly researching them and writing academic articles on them, so why aren't we more instrumental in pushing these books to publishers, or scouts, or even to translators? I know there are some academics who do just that, but there seems to be scope for this to become much more common practice. At the other end of the spectrum, I'd like to see translations recognised by academics as more than just an easy alternative for those students who can't be bothered to read the Spanish or French original. The translation market, the way books are selected for translation, reviewed and read by the public, tells us so much about the way that the English speaking world views or imagines other countries, other cultures, and yet this is something almost totally ignored in academic circles. In this respect, Dr Richard Mansell's work on the translation and reception of Catalan literature is pioneering and a real inspiration for my own fledgling research into the way books from across the Hispanic world make it into English translation. More generally, I believe academics in modern languages should be promoters of literature in translation, given that among our core values is understanding people from different places and different backgrounds. Although I teach in the Spanish department, I would like my students to be curious about Russia or Korea, to be open to new ways of seeing the world, and reading translations can help them to do that. I recently asked my final year class if they read translations and they said no, with the exception of one girl having read Ana Karenina. I'd like us to have a discussion, between translators, publishers, booksellers and academics about what we can do to promote translations to our students and better incorporate them into the syllabus.

In this respect, I was particularly looking forward to the panel on 'The Current State of Translation in Higher Education', but found that the panel was focused almost entirely on how we can better involve professional translators in university programmes in translation and improve the translation training offered at universities. I wholeheartedly agree that professional translators - like Ros Schwartz, who spoke very engagingly about her experiences of teaching translation in university contexts - should be hired as professors in literary translation, following the model I recently witnessed at King's Policy Institute, where the likes of Dave Willetts and Nicholas Macphearson have been given professorships based on their work in government and the treasury respectively. Their expertise and experience of translation as an industry - as opposed to abstract theory - is essential for training future generations of translators. But I also think we could make better use of them to understand the translation industry as a force in shaping the way people in one country view those in another. In one of my modules, I'm asking translators to tell us how and why the book they translated came to be chosen for translation instead of another, or the cultural background they needed to translate that text well. 

Within this panel, successful literary translator Peter Bush spoke about his experience of the RAE/REF, the bureaucratic nightmare by which academic output is judged. Peter first submitted his translations from Spanish to English as a research output in modern languages. The feedback was that, although brilliant translations, for the purposes of the RAE they could go straight into the bin. The linguistic and cultural knowledge necessary to write a good translation was not taken into account. At the next research exercise four years later, and renamed the REF by then, Peter submitted translations not in modern languages, but in creative writing, and the creative writing submission as a whole was judged world leading. While this approach works if you are only submitting translations, what about those of us who consider ourselves primarily members of modern languages, who want to submit a mixture of academic articles and translations? Peter mentioned Prof Nick Harrison's Translation as Research Manifesto, published on Modern Languages Open, which argues for translations to be accepted to the REF. Although translations are already acceptable, the problems come from many places, including managers who don't want to risk a low REF score with submissions they're unsure of, and other academics who don't feel confident assessing the research quality of translations. With the impact agenda and recognition that translations are a way for academics to reach a much wider audience, it seems attitudes are changing, but a lot more training and discussion will be necessary. What I would like to see more of, and what was not even mentioned at ITD, is exploration of how translating adds to our research, and our research adds to our translations. Working on contemporary Venezuelan literature, I've found that I've learnt an enormous amount about my subject from co-editing and contributing translations to an anthology of Venezuelan writing in translation. I'd love to hear more stories about academics who have had a similar experience, and to share ideas about how to bring what we've learnt through translation practice into cultural studies classes.

If any translators, editors, publishers, academics or readers of translations are reading this, I'd really love to know your ideas.

Fabrication: KCL Arts & Humanities Festival 2015

Given that I started my PhD writing about the KCL Arts and Humanities Festival, it seems only fitting that I end in the same way. This year's theme is Fabrication. As usual, it's a broad theme, ambiguous enough to allow King's staff and students to shoehorn in their wide range of interests, but - to the joy of my inner five year old - staff from the Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies department took it literally and got us engaging in arts and crafts.

Fabricating Across the Atlantic

My beloved supervisors, Professor Catherine Boyle and Dr Elisa Sampson Vera Tudela, decided to celebrate the Andean tradition of making arpilleras, small tapestries sewn onto sacks, which have been used for decades as a form of protest or a way to share life stories. Chilean Human Rights advocate and researcher Roberta Bacic curated an exhibition of arpilleras from Chile, Argentina and Peru, with narratives of dictatorship, strikes, or making a stand against domestic abuse. Also on display was an arpillera created by Chilean exiles in Sheffield and South Yorkshire, telling the story of how they had started a new life.

Catherine and Elisa wanted to take the festival as an opportunity not only to display arpilleras but to consider how they can be understood in and adapted to our own context. They asked: 'What does it mean to tell our own stories of here and now in a city of movement and transition like London, through a creative form borrowed from elsewhere?'

To answer that question, they turned the Council Room of KCL into an arpillera workshop, led by artist Linda Adams who, inspired by the Andean example, explores political themes through tapestry. Armed with thread, fabrics, paper templates and PVA glue, we were challenged to make a collective tapestry narrating our own experience of London. Naturally, I made myself dancing.

The day ended in a dramatised reading of Tres Marias y una Rosa, a Chilean play by David Benavente and Taller de Investigación Teatral depicting an arpillera workshop. The four women of the title discuss their financial and marital struggles as they make arpilleras for export, the only way for them to support themselves and their families. Catherine had worked with the Head For Heights Theatre Company in a mixture of translation and devising to make the play work and resonate in an English context. While we had been busy cutting and sticking, Catherine, director Karen Morash and four very brave actresses spent the afternoon locked away rehearsing. After only a matter of hours with the play, they put on an incredibly engaging performance. I was surprised to learn that the original play had been written in 1979 as the frank discussions between the women and their struggles to support their families through economic crisis are just as relevant today.

Translation games: weaving translation into a poetic collage

I've been a fan of Translation Games since it launched in 2013, to the point where I invited the organiser Dr Ricarda Vidal to introduce her fascinating project at the Migrating Texts colloquium last year. Translation Games plays with translation across not only different languages but different media in a ‘public-facing programme of ludic workshops’. The project employs the arts to make languages interesting for the general public, while at the same time trying to discover whether there is an ‘essence’ of a text which carries through different media.

As Ricarda explained, Translation Games began with a project called What We Made in which a short narrative text commissioned from the American Colleen Becker was translated in a sort of telephone game from English to French to Italian and so on. Each translator only had access to the previous step, although the text was also translated back into English at every stage. At the same time, the text was translated from writing to film to ceramics to an audiovisual piece and finally to choreography, and simultaneously from text to textile. Translation Games has since run further projects, including translation from poetry to scents, and a challenge for students and artists to translate a photographic version of a poem by the Serbian Vasko Popa into an English poem.

My favourite Spaniard Dr Maria-José Blanco has now joined Ricarda and thanks to an AHRC grant the pair organised a translation train beginning with the poem Still by Denise Riley, through 12 artists, each using a medium of their choice. They then set a competition to translate the final image back into poetry. The original poem, 12 images and the winning poetry translation can be seen here. One of the artists, Sarah Sparkes (whose playful musings on death and the afterlife I was first introduced to at the launch of Ricarda and Maria-José's book The Power of Death), also teaches classes at the Tate on paper engineering, and so it was decided that participants at the Fabrication event would be challenged to translate one of the poems or the images into a paper structure.

After practising different cuts and folds, I chose the last image in the chain by Domingo Martinez to translate into paper. Although I had a great time cutting, sticking and drawing with ink, I did also reflect seriously on what were the key aspects of the image which gave it its meaning: the colours, the contrast between dark and light, the layering and the image of one hand grasping another.

At the end of the day, all the translations were sewn to canvas to be displayed in KCL. As you can see below, we each had very different ideas, which demonstrates the impact of the personality and interests of the translator on their output, but we still found elements in each of them which convey the meaning of the original poem.

This is just a tiny part of a packed two weeks of festival. For the highlights, check out King's Arts and Humanities' Storify.

Posthumous Publication and Translation of José Saramgo's Skylight

The story behind José Saramago's Skylight (Claraboia) could grace the pages of one of his novels: a Nobel Prize winning author is reunited with a manuscript written in 1952 which had lain dormant in a publisher's draw after 36 years. As Saramago's wife Pilar del Rio explains in a touching prologue to this new English translation (released by Harvill Secker on 3 July 2014), the Portuguese Nobel Laureate was somewhat weary of this "lost novel" at the time, and refused for it to published until after his death. Although Saramago went on to have a glittering literary career in later life, hearing nothing back from the publisher about Claraboia deeply wounded his pride and it would take nearly two decades before he dared to write another novel. As a result, it was only following Saramago's death in June 2010 that Claraboia was published, and in that way became, as Pilar affirms, a gift from beyond the grave.

In her introduction, Pilar delights that so many germs of Saramago's later writing are already present in Skylight. As this is the first time I've read anything by him, I can't comment, but on the strength of this utterly absorbing character study, I certainly want to read a lot more.  Skylight is a portrait of the six families who occupy an apartment block in Lisbon, their loves, loneliness, fierce domestic battles and everyday struggles, all overheard and gossiped about by the neighbours. 

While the novel's setting is identifiably the 1950s, and the shadow of Salazar looms large, this ensemble cast are strikingly modern. Saramago does not shy away from the thoroughly taboo topics of his day, from lesbian love to domestic abuse. Given the glorification of the family as the cornerstone of the nation under Salazar, Saramago's unsentimental portrayal of many unhappy marriages (and one beautifully happy one) is particularly brave. His refusal to pander to the morals of his day is striking. Lucía may be a kept woman, but Saramago portrays her with great respect, as her behaviour puts that of those who call her a whore to shame. The bullying brute Caetano is put in his place by his long-suffering wife. It is this type of thinking, totally at odds with the conservative dictatorship of the time, which Pilar assumes intimidated the publishers at the time of submission and doomed this brilliant novel to the draw.

The autodidact Saramago's prose is a joy to read. He effortlessly peppers the day to day speech of the working class with erudite references to Beethoven, Shakespeare and Diderot, with a glimmer of pride at the knowledge of these great figures he acquired for himself. As many readers have already noted since the Portuguese version was published in 2011, this novel feels as alive and fresh as those he published just before his death. Thankfully, Harvill Secker have done justice to the original by entrusting the translation to the multi-award winning Margaret Jull Costa who always demonstrates that remarkable skill of making readers forget that they are reading a translation.

Readers familiar with Saramago's work will no doubt enjoy playing detective, hunting through Skylight for hints of later works. For those, like me, with no previous experience of this fantastic author, as both his first and last novel, Skylight seems the perfect initiation. 

Click here to buy the eBook from Amazon, or here for the hard copy.

 

The Spectacular Translation Machine

At the King's Cultural Institute Creative Labs on Thursday I had the pleasure of meeting Dr Ricarda Vidal who does all sorts of exciting things with translation, such as the upcoming Translation Games. Thanks to her, I found out about The Spectacular Translation Machine event at the Southbank Centre's London Literature Festival this weekend, which as a language nerd I would have been really sad to miss out on.

Translation can be a lonely activity, with nothing but you, your source text and a pile of dictionaries. The Spectacular Translation Machine aims to change that. For one weekend, members of the public - from French native speakers to absolute beginners - will collectively translate an entire French book into English, under the guidance of experts lead by award-winning translator Sarah Ardizzone. The book in question is On les aura!, a graphic novel with a fascinating story behind it. On les aura! began life as the diary of a soldier fighting in the first few months of World War I. The soldier is never named, and what happens after the diary ends remains unknown. French illustrator Barroux recently found the diary and decided to publish the text verbatim accompanied with his distinctive line drawings (Paris, Seuil: 2011). The project is therefore a double first: the first time ever that a book will have been translated collaboratively over one weekend, and the first translation of this work into English.

Click here to purchase On les aura ! : Carnet de guerre d'un poilu (août, septembre 1914) from Amazon

The space in the Royal Festival Hall allocated to the project felt like a magical translation playground, designed to make translation as engaging and interactive as possible. Large whiteboards on the walls were covered in alternatives for the title, for visitors to add to, and the table was littered with not only a range of dictionaries, but maps, reference books and other items to get people into the frame of mind of a French WWI soldier. A washing line was strung across the whole room with each panel of the graphic novel pegged up. Visitors could choose which of the panels they would like to work on, write their own translation and then peg it up with other people's versions. Participants are encouraged to discuss their translation attempts with each other, creating a real sense of community, as everyone seems so passionate about language and literature. At the end of the weekend, the experts will put all of the panels together into a complete book. What I love most about the project is that its truly collaborative nature will ensure the best possible translation of the book. Because translations are often individual efforts, the end result is naturally a subjective interpretation of the original; for as much as translators try to stay faithful to the source text, they cannot avoid making choices between different words or ways of interpreting a phrase. 

Another reason why this project is so exciting is the opportunities it opens up for translating texts quickly, accurately, and most importantly in today's market, cheaply. The chronic under-representation of foreign fiction in British markets is undoubtedly due in large part to the unwillingness of publishers to finance translations. Turning the activity of translation into an event not only reduces these costs but creates invaluable publicity for the finished product. While this event is thanks to the British Centre of Literary Translation, I really hope that publishers take note and run events like this of their own in the future, not only for the fun of being part of a community activity, but to help other wonderful books from other languages achieve the translation they so desperately need if they want to find an audience outside their country of origin. 

My attempt at translating one of the first panels from On les aura!

Translation continues at the Royal Festival Hall on Sunday 26, Monday 27 May. and Saturday 1 June. The results will then be presented in a celebration on Sunday 2 June at 3pm. Full details are available here.

Palabras Errantes: Voices from the Venezuelan City Launch

Palabras Errantes is a project originally set up by students from the University of Cambridge, to translate Latin American literature into English and publish it online. So far, they have brought us contemporary Uruguayan women’s writing, contemporary Argentinian poetry and Argentinian narrative. Now it’s Venezuela’s turn.

Last night, we headed to Passing Clouds in Dalston to celebrate the launch of the project with readings, discussions about Venezuelan literature and live music. There was a great turn out and a shared excitement for the project and for Venezuelan literature in general, which just proves how, as Carlos Colmenares Gil affirmed in his opening speech, this is a 'golden era' for Venezuelan literature.

Rebecca Jarman (editor of the Venezuelan edition) and Cherie Elston (editor of Palabras Errantes)
 present the latest project.

I was lucky enough to be involved in the project, translating Ana García Julio's short story, The Incident, about the human side of a random act of violence, which I read at the launch party.

The first five translations - including The Incident, plus the first two chapters of Gustavo Valle's Underground, and stories from the wonderful Dayana Fraile, Mario Morenza and Juan Carlos Méndez Guédez - are now available at here. New translations will be released each week so stay tuned!

Minority Literatures and English Translation

While doing some dissertation research, I came across a website which lists every Galician book ever translated into English. All 45 of them. Out of the thousands of books published in Galician every year, only 45 have reached our bookshelves, and 14 of these were in the last two years. Many of them only had runs of a few hundred prints too.

 

I found the list from an article in the Galician version of Spanish daily El País, featuring my lecturer Dr Craig Patterson (listen to my interview with him about translating Eduardo Blanco Amor's A Esmorga here). He explains that English is the medium by which most minority literatures reach publishers in other countries (they probably don't understand Galician but they certainly do understand English), so if we don't publish them, it is unlikely that anyone else will. The problem is that it's a vicious cycle: translations will only get published if they're guaranteed to sell, but there's no way of knowing whether they would sell until they've been published. If you consult the list, you'll notice that a lot of the texts are by a select few authors, because if one of their books sells, it's likely people will want to read another. Unproven authors don't stand a chance. 

This is particularly interesting for me, because it's at the heart of my interest in Latin American literature. In the last week, I've been busy organising a panel for the annual Hispanists (people who study anything to do with Spain or Latin America) conference on 'Canonicity and Latin America's Marginalised Literatures'. This stems from a deep frustration that the only literature from Latin America that tends to be studied over here is from a few big countries: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Mexico and Peru. In commercial terms, success is even more limited to big names like Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, Isabel Allende... It's not surprising people know so little about other Latin American literature when so few books make it into English, especially from countries which haven't proven their worth in terms of best-selling authors. This is turn leads to devaluing of literature in it's own country, at least in Venezuela, as it is thought that if no-one abroad wants to read it, it is clearly not very good (they're wrong, it is).

I'd like to make a list like Jonathan Dunne's Galicia one for Venezuela when I have some free time. I doubt it would be very long. Of the books I've read recently, only one has an English translation: Alberto Barrera Tyzska's The Sickness (La Enfermedad) which has had international success and also been translated into French and Italian. It's a thoroughly engrossing story of a doctor who has always been cold and removed with patients, seeing them more as bodies than spirits, until his father is diagnosed with cancer. I highly recommend it and it's only just over £5 for Kindle.

Also, if you're a poetry fan I have to recommend Guillermo Parra's translation of selected works of Venezuelan poet José Antonio Ramos Sucre which has just been published after many years of hard work .

These are very rare examples though. If the rest of the world is ever going to be able to enjoy the wonderful, multi-faceted literatures of Latin America - and other world literatures in general - publishers need to start taking a punt on unproven translations.

On A Bender book launch

Between enlightening students like me at Cardiff University or being President of the Association of Galician Studies, Dr Craig Patterson has somehow found the time to translate Eduardo Blanco Amor's 1959 classic A Esmorga, widely considered the greatest work of Galician literature. Now the translation, On A Bender, is about to be released by the Welsh publishers, Planet, starting with a launch at Chapter Arts Centre in Cardiff on Friday 30th March at 7.30.

I spoke to Craig about the book, what it means to Galicia and the process of translating:

What's not included in this clip, but that I think is a wonderful idea, is that you can follow the route set out in the book around Ourense, partaking as you go along. They even have helpful signs on the walls.

I can't wait to read it! You can buy On A Bender on Amazon here.

Anant Kumar - Poetry Beyond Borders?

"Poetry is what gets lost in translation" - Robert Frost

I'm back from Iceland and have lots to write about that, but first the talk I went to today: Anant Kumar - Poetry Beyond Borders. Kumar is a poet of Indian origin, living, working and writing in Germany. His talk was meant to address how to overcome cultural differences in poetry. It didn't. At least not explicitly. Instead, Kumar read the introduction to his new book, Stories Without Borders, and several poems, in German and English simultaneously (one verse in each language at a time). Then he repeatedly reminded us that he is "not a best-selling author" while asking why people - academics he has never met - have given so much time and effort to translate his work for free. While I wasn't particularly enthralled with Kumar's poetry and disappointed that his talk didn't give me what I expected from it, it nonetheless got me thinking.

Firstly, Kumar's question - while not what the talk was supposed to be about - is an interesting one. Why do people translate for free? Kumar himself suggested that it comes down to funding. There is so little funding for translators to get their work published that they will work for free if it means getting their name in print. This seems a bit cynical for me though. While he's probably right, I like to maintain a more romantic view that people fall in love with texts and want to share them with the world. I know there are many books that I love and would one day like to translate just so that they could reach a wider audience.

Secondly, Kumar unintentionally made an interesting case for poetry beyond borders by talking in German to an audience who he assumed understood the language when many of us didn't. My German is rudimentary at best (aber ich lerne!) but I enjoyed listening to Kumar read his poems in their original language, more so than in English. It made me think that perhaps the sound of words, their rhythm, their intensity can produce a stronger effect than their semantic meaning. It occurred to me then that poetry can escape linguistic borders in a way that no other literature can. Geographical borders are even more easily transcended, as Kumar himself pointed out that his readers are not 'German' but 'German-speaking', be that in Austria, Switzerland, Turkey or indeed a German teacher in the United States.

What about cultural borders then? When asked if he tried to bridge the gap between Indian and German literary traditions, Kumar said that it is not his intention, but he cannot avoid references to India and its culture. He nonetheless insisted that he was a German writer, as he writes and is almost entirely received in German. Does this mean that the language something is written and read in affects how it is read and interpreted? Does reading a language imply certain cultural understanding? Are we returning to Herder's argument that language is an expression of the soul of a people?  That would surely imply that poetry cannot truly transcend borders, but experience would tell me otherwise. As usual, I have no real answers, only questions to ponder.

What is Culture?

It's a good question and one that I've encountered again and again in class and on the radio. An anthropologist would say that culture is everything that makes us human, that isn't the result of science. Different groups - tribes, nations, social classes, generations - can be said to have a different 'culture', encompassing ways of expressing themselves, rituals, beliefs. However, in every day parlance, culture is often taken to mean 'high culture': classical painting, sculpture, opera, ballet, auteur cinema. What I'm interested is somewhere in between: all kinds of artistic expression, including that high culture, but also popular culture, comedy, rom-coms, pulp fiction, musicals, graffiti - things that are often written off by the self-proclaimed defenders of 'culture' (although graffiti for one seems to be becoming rather establishment these days...).

'Culture' is such a loaded term that I have been criticised for being elitist in calling my radio show The Culture Show. Yet as much as I tried to avoid the perils of the word culture (and also the stealing from BBC2 implied in the name), there was no other word that conveyed the huge range of things I want to talk about: literature, music, theatre, dance, art and films of all kinds. So culture it is.

But as I've established, culture is a scarily vast term. So what exactly do I want to do? Well, as I'm forced to narrow my interests into some form of coherent PhD proposal, I'm not ready to let the others go just yet, so this is a place for me to consider cultural things that interest me. Sometimes that might just be 'This play/exhibition/film is awesome, go see/watch!', sometimes it might be an interview with someone that I've been lucky enough to meet through the radio. But what really gets me going is cultural analysis, so there will mainly be musings on what can be learnt from the book/film/musical/picture in question. I've always had incredibly multi-disciplinary interests (which is why I've always taken the broadest academic path, nothing can be vaguer than 'European Studies' which doesn't even know where the limits of 'Europe' are), and what I'm learning in class will undoubtedly prompt reflections here, so expect the following to appear somewhere:
-Questioning 'identity' in all its forms
-Nationalism, national identity and foundational myths
-Psychoanalysis
-Cultural mobility/intertextuality
-Translation and the politics thereof
-Foulcault and discursive techniques
-Orientalism and post-colonialism
...and probably a whole lot more! As for the source of materials, Spanish and French speaking countries will feature heavily, but I have spent the last 5 years studying 'Europe' so those influences will certainly crop up too, and as I currently live in Cardiff, how could I not be fascinated by Welsh culture?

I hope this will be not just interdisciplinary but multi-media. As well written ramblings, I will be putting my finely honed talking into a microphone skills to good use making podcasts, especially when visuals aren't essential. And when I eventually learn to use my camera, I hope to post videos too. And finally, I hope that all this inspires you to check out some of the things I talk about. My passion for languages, for travel, for research, for cultural analysis, was inspired by the films, books, music, theatre and art which I discovered one way or another and never cease to fascinate me. I hope some of them will fascinate you too.