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Author: Don Gillmor
Illustrator: Marie-Louise Gay (on JOMB)
Published: 2000 Fitzhenry & Whiteside (on JOMB)
ISBN: 0773732187 Chapters.ca Amazon.com

Enchanting moonlit expanses, snappy, intelligent narration and plenty of clever details turn the tiny personal experience of that awkward first crush into a sweeping, surreal adventure that feels almost as big as infatuation.

You can hear a JOMB chat with Marie-Louise Gay here.

You can read more about Stuart McLean here.

The following is the third E-Panel of literary translators who have made it possible for those of us reading in English to enjoy works from authors we otherwise would never have had the chance to enjoy.

Adam Sorkin

Christopher Bakken

Sean Cotter

Steven Stewart

Chris Andrews

Dan:

Hello, and thanks for participating in this E-Panel, especially now during Reading the World month.  What language(s) do you translate from and to what language(s)?

Adam Sorkin:

And thank you, Dan, for inviting me to take part. I translate from Romanian into English, mostly poetry.  Through contacts and friends, I’ve also been asked to work on some poems from Flemish (Dutch), Georgian, and soon Serbian.  But, not at all knowing these languages (in two cases, not even the alphabets), for me this is less translation than the application of whatever skill and craft I can bring to a “raw” poem so as to turn it into something more or less alive in English.

Christopher Bakken:

Modern Greek into English.

Sean Cotter:

All my translation is into English. I translate Romanian the most, and I have published work from Spanish and German, as well.

Steven Stewart:

I primarily translate from Spanish into English.  I have done some English into Spanish, though as a non-native Spanish speaker I’m not confident doing that alone (I’m currently working on translating American poet Robert Duncan’s book Bending the Bow into Spanish along with Mexican poet Antonio Ochoa).  I have also co-translated some Korean poetry into English along with the author (I don’t speak any Korean) and have done a few translations from Old English and French into English by working with original texts and existing translations.

Chris Andrews:

English is my native language. I learnt French at school and university, and through living in France for a while. Spanish I learnt at university and traveling a bit in Latin America.

Dan:

Which of the languages you translate from and to is your native language?  How did you come about learning the other language(s)?

Adam Sorkin:

English.  I’m not fluent in Romanian, especially in oral situations.  I mostly learned it on the page, a kind of passive knowledge.  I didn’t really study Romanian; my experience with Romania and Romanian goes back to when I was a Fulbright lecturer at the University of Bucharest in 1980-81, when it was difficult for people to talk to me unless they had some sort of official permission and reported the contact.  This limited conversation mostly to markets and maneuvering on and off crowded buses and trams: for such things, one hardly needs sentences or verbs, and it’s possible to joke now that in that time of increasing scarcity for Romanians, for me it wasn’t meat or cheese or sugar but parts of speech that were in short supply. Since I mostly work with a co-translator (and when I don’t but instead muddle along with my limited knowledge and a dictionary, a native speaker friend always checks my work), this is less of an impediment than it might seem.

Christopher Bakken:

My native tongue is English, which I manage to speak proficiently on my best days.  I learned my Greek while living in Greece, mainly on the soccer field and in tavernas.  As a result, my spoken Greek (barbaric, coarse and utterly demotic) is quite a bit better than my “reading” Greek. I did endure some classroom study of the language during my Ph.D. program at University of Houston, which allowed me to deal with the grammatical architecture of Greek, finally, and to match what was happening in the mouth to what was happening on the page.  Actually, the past four years of translation has improved my Greek substantially—it’s not the approved method for learning a language, certainly, but it does work.

Sean Cotter:

English is my native language. Spanish I learned in college and a summer school in Santander, Spain. German I learned also in a summer course, in Staufen, and I interned for a summer with a catalog company in Hamburg. I learned Romanian while a Peace Corps volunteer, for two years. I lived there for another year on a Fulbright.

Steven Stewart:

English is my native language.  I learned Spanish while living in Spain for a couple of years in the early nineties.  I also studies French in high school and Old English in college.

Chris Andrews:

English is my native language. I learnt French at school and university, and through living in France for a while. Spanish I learnt at university and traveling a bit in Latin America.

Dan:

Do you consider yourself bilingual?

Adam Sorkin:

As should be clear from what I’ve said, not at all. Working with a collaborator has it’s advantages – the translation team can be said to be bilingual.  Usually, combining both of us, the translation pair can be said to be bilingual in common speech (from the demotic to the most formal) and in the registers of poetic language, and equally so in the source language and the target language. 

Christopher Bakken:

My standards for being bi-lingual are rather strict and according to those standards I don’t make the cut.  Greeks are very kind—any barbarian who makes a casual attempt to speak their language is rewarded with generosity and praise.  Most of the Greeks I encounter when I’m in Greece (which is frequently), tell me my Greek is quite good. It gets better when I drink ouzo, no doubt.

In fact, I suspect my accent is good, I speak with a sense of humor, and I have a good command of the ways in which the culture is embodied in speech: through gestures, shrugs, expressions, the kinds of things that work outside fluency, yet involve actual communication in the Greek way of being. But fluent?  No, I am not.

Sean Cotter:

No, I am still working on my English.

Steven Stewart:

No.  To me, bilingual means that you are equally fluent in both languages.  While I think my Spanish is very good, my Spanish will always be inferior to my English and will always be that of an outsider (which isn’t such a bad thing for a translator; it gives me perspective).

Chris Andrews:

No.

Dan:

How did you get into translating?

Adam Sorkin:

I think it’s the way many translators do – by happenstance, luck, fate, what you want to term it.  In the spring of 1981, a young colleague in the English Department at the University of Bucharest, both a lecturer in English and a poet and novelist in her native tongue, asked me to look over her translations of a selection of poems from the well-known lyric poet from Timi?oara, Anghel Dumbraveanu.  I did and immediately got hooked on translation, which I felt was a sort of return to a creative part of me that had somehow gotten lost in the process of becoming an academic. Once, if asked, I would have said I aspired to be a poet, not an academic.

Christopher Bakken:

A friend started translating my own poems into Greek and once I got involved in the translation process with her (the puzzling out of compacted images, the agony over certain elements of diction, the complete submersion in language that any poet is a sucker for) I couldn’t stop there. 

Once she had completed bringing me into Greek, we began working together on translating some Greek poets who had not yet found a way into English.  It was purely selfish for me at first: I loved excavating another poet’s language so methodically and found it helpful to my own sense of creative process—in short, it fueled my own poetry in exciting ways.  But slowly we developed a sense of responsibility about what we were doing—the need to get it “right,” if you will—and rather than merely tinkering we started working in earnest, questioning ourselves and our methods rather unconsciously, but questioning them nevertheless, and laboring in the direction of translations we could put before readers who did not have any Greek without feeling like we were being dishonest to the original texts.

Sean Cotter:

I wanted to combine my interest in foreign languages and creative writing, so I went to graduate school for translation. The more I studied, the more I understood how bizarre stories of translation can be, and how much we need to develop ways of talking about translation that go beyond “spirit versus sense” etc. One example: Norman Manea’s novel, The Black Envelope, was written in the 1980s in Romania. Because the published version was brutally rewritten by the censors, Manea kept the original manuscript, only to lose it while immigrating to the United States in 1987. When the book was published in English, the translation was done, not from the original, but from a new version Manea based on the censored version. How is the translator to take the complicated history into account? Several paragraphs of the new Romanian version were not translated into English. The translation was published before the new Romanian version. When this new original was published in Bucharest, it included excerpts from reviews of the translation. This kind of story is more the norm than you might guess.

Steven Stewart:

Learning a new language turned me very naturally toward translation.  Even when I was fairly new to the Spanish language, I would take poems and other bits of text in either English or Spanish and translate and backtranslate them.  As I progressed I would translate Pablo Neruda and Antonio Machado poems and then find published translations of the poems with which I’d compare my versions.  I found that I liked many of the choices I made, and I paid close attention to and learned from what the other translators did better.  On a trip to Spain in 1999 I found a book by Spanish poet Rafael Pérez Estrada that I was really taken with; it was at that point that I decided to try to translate for publication (I later published a book of selected poems of Pérez Estrada).

Chris Andrews:

I began in the 90s by translating a couple of travel narratives for Lonely Planet, a company that publishes mainly guide books and is based in Melbourne. The books were Luis Sepúlveda's Full Circle (about South America) and Ana Briongos' Black on Black (about Iran). I would have liked to be translating literary fiction too, but it's extremely rare for an Australian publisher to commission the translation of a novel, so I wrote letters to British publishers and translated some stories, including an early story by Cortázar, "The Season of the Hand", which was published in the Melbourne magazine Meanjin with the permission of Cortázar's literary executor, the translator Aurora Bernárdez.  In 2001 I visited some publishers in London, including Christopher Maclehose at Harvill, who had recently bought the rights to Roberto Bolaño's By Night in Chile. I had been reading Bolaño enthusiastically and expressed my interest, but they had a translator lined up for the book. When that translator wasn't able to do the job, they needed someone to step into the breach, so they asked me to do a sample, then the rest of the book. It was a lucky break. New Directions bought the translation of By Night in Chile, and that's how I came to work with them, translating books by Bolaño and by César Aira.

Dan:

When you are reading material in the original language, are you thinking in English – translating on the fly, or thinking in that original language?

Adam Sorkin:

This is not a question for me.  I translate, definitely, and it’s not on the fly, but rather like one of those slow “fast trains” I take across the gorgeous mountain ranges and high plateau landscape from one northern city in Romania to another.

Christopher Bakken:

What a fascinating question.  I’ll assume you are talking about material that I’m trying to translate.  If I’m reading casually, there’s no doubt I’m more or less thinking in Greek, but when it comes to material for translation it is more complicated, especially since I work with a native speaker.  Since I often read with a dictionary in hand, I think the answer would be that I’m reading in both languages at once.

Sean Cotter:

The question of “thinking in English” touches on a larger issue in Translation Studies. There is a school of cognitive science that studies what happens in the brains of people who read more than one language. Can a native speaker of English think in German the way a native speaker does? Maria Tymosczko has suggested that Translation Studies use cognitive science to address questions of accuracy in translation: a good translation would elicit the same cognitive experience as the original. This, for me, is not a very interesting approach to translation. Would we be interested to prove that a reader of an untranslated work is having exactly the same cognitive experience as the author? I think we are more interested in the fact that the same text can generate a variety of readings.

To answer your question: I do not translate on the fly when reading the original. The original is the original, the translation is something else. If I am reading because I am going to translate the work, I might take note of passages that will present particular trouble, and try out possible versions in my head.

Steven Stewart:

Mostly in the original language I suppose, though I’m regularly thinking in both Spanish and English, so I’m probably going in different directions at times.  It’s not uncommon for me to be reading something in Spanish and not be aware that I’m reading in Spanish, if that makes sense.

Chris Andrews:

I don't think I translate on the fly very much when reading a text for the first time, although I do notice things that seem hard to translate. However, once you actually get to work, the problems that initially seemed hard can turn out to be tractable, while new problems emerge from what seemed perfectly straightforward passages in the source language.

Dan:

Do you prefer to reading one language over the other(s)?

Adam Sorkin:

I like reading other languages in the skilled English versions of my many translator colleagues.  That’s in one sense what translation is all about, isn’t it?  To transfer the reader’s experience, to transport the reader’s self, to another place, another time, another tongue, another sensibility.  The translator has to make him or herself into another self, another voice, another psyche, sometimes another gender, as well, but the carrying across of translation is also from the other direction, from the reader’s experience through the work to another way of speaking, thinking, being.

Christopher Bakken:

Yes, I prefer reading in English.  First, as a poet it is the language I’m married to (and I’m faithful to that beloved tongue).  Second, reading in English is easy for me—I’ve been doing it since I was five years old.  Reading in Greek is not usually a fluid experience, nor is it one I take great pleasure in (though reading Cavafy or Ritsos in Greek is truly sublime). 

Sean Cotter:

No. There are authors I prefer over other authors in each language.

Steven Stewart:

It often depends on what I’m reading.  I do tend to read more quickly in English and get more from it.  Nevertheless, there are quite a few writers whose work I only enjoy reading in the original Spanish.  Neruda and García Lorca, for example, simply don’t work for me in English, no matter how skillful their translators are.

Chris Andrews:

No; I don't have a preference; the pleasures are different. Reading in a second language can give you an exciting sense that you're setting off to explore a country or a continent that remains partly or largely mysterious, but when I think of all the things I would like to read in English, the various anglophone literatures can seem almost as unfamiliar. Like many translators, I like to keep some good literary prose in English handy when I'm revising a translation, to remind myself how it can sound and flow.

Dan:

Do you find it helps to know the author you are translating?  Know their thought processes and beliefs?

Adam Sorkin:

Absolutely, except when the author claims to “know” English better than the native English translator. That has rarely happened to me, but I have colleagues who have found that, for instance, the false friends in going from a Romance language to English feel so much more comfortable to a Spanish or French or Italian or Portuguese speaker that the writer wants, no, insists, that the translator use them.  I’ve had the problem with dictionary meanings that aren’t the right phrasing for the context. The solution I usually resort to is silent assent, later editing to undo the awkward or misleading phrase.  If questioned by my fellow translator, I can always resort to, “Oh, the copy editor did that,…” although usually there is no such person.

Frequently, I work directly with the author, and I find that an author (once trust is established) is usually amenable to whatever is reasonable and makes the poem or prose piece more effective in English.  I’ve not been silent when I think a change might help the original, and I’ve known writers to like the English variant better, and thus revise the original to include it.  I sometimes think that the love of pragmatic detail in English-language tradition and the analytical necessities of English syntax lead to some of these shifts from expressive vagueness to evocative exactitude in both grammar and reference.   

Christopher Bakken:

Yes, though it is certainly messy.  Getting to know Titos Patrikios, the poet I’ve been translating these past five years has been once of the great experiences of my life—he’s become a close friend and also a mentor in many ways (he’s exactly twice my age).  But that’s a personal response to your question, I realize.

Much of our manuscript was actually roughed out during one week in December on the island of Rhodes—along with the poet himself.  Because his poetry is so rooted in the recent, violent history of Greece (one that is almost forgotten by Greeks, since it is so painful), having him there to provide context for the work was a great luxury and I’m sure it has helped us create translations that are more historically and politically accurate. 

Really, more than anything, having him there, listening to his human voice, made a big difference—I wanted the sound of his voice to come across in English, the voice I hear in my head when I read his work in Greek.  I’d like to think that vocal presence, that physical presence, affected the timbre of our translations.

Of course, it can be very detrimental to have the poet there too—some of the compromises and negotiations involved in the process of translation have to be made with a kind of ruthlessness that’s not always easy when the author is in the room.  Also, we were in the process of selecting poems from his entire oeuvre to use in our volume and at times it felt a little like we were rejecting his progeny, at times even rejecting poems he felt very strongly about.  That led to a few delicate moments.

Luckly, Titos yielded to us at every turn, often preferring our English versions to his originals.

Sean Cotter:

Yes, in two ways. It helps to know something about the author, because it gives you more possibilities for reading. For example, when I work on Nichita Danilov, I know that Eastern icons are important to him. This knowledge gives me a different possible way to read his portrait poems. A good translator has what a good literary critic has (according to T. S. Eliot): infinite knowledge. 

The invaluable benefit of knowing the author, however, is cover. Translations are sometimes subject to unreasonable levels of suspicion. If I can say that the original author has seen and approved the translation, then readers are more open to engaging with the choices I have made. Emil Cioran once observed that the worst part about being an author in a second language is that you don’t have the right to play with the language; your aesthetic choices are read as mistakes. I think that translators’ choices are often read in the same way. If your translations carry the author’s imprimatur, then you are read with more indulgence.

To continue with this idea of mistakes for a moment: I keep a notebook of my translation mistakes, to use in my own work. My favorite line is one Liliana Ursu did not write, “She kept her poems in the hollow of her spine.” The actual line hides the poems in a spinet piano. The other possibility that comes from knowing the author is that he prefers the mistaken translation to the original line. This has happened to me, too. The poet changed the original to match the (formerly mistaken) translation. What then?

Steven Stewart:

Yes.  Good translation is not just a matter of putting words from one language into another language.  It is instead a multifaceted activity that entails a good deal of research.  Nevertheless, with regard to translating poetry, I find that it’s at least as valuable to see or hear poets read their work aloud as it is to know what they think or believe.  I like to get a sense of their speech rhythms and manners of expressing themselves.

Chris Andrews:

I have found it very helpful to be able to ask the authors questions by email, and they have all been generous in their replies, but I haven’t actually met them, with one exception. I think it's definitely a help to know the author's work beyond the book you're translating. There are some things that are very hard to understand in the context of a single book, for example the relation between autobiography and fiction in Cesar Aira’s work. In order to understand the game he’s playing, you need to see how his first person narrators give contradictory accounts of their lives in a range of novels.

Dan:

Looking back at the works you have translated – how did you determine they were works you wanted to translate?

Adam Sorkin:

From the start, I’ve listened to advice.  I’ve become very close friends with a number of writers and have learned to trust their recommendations.  From the start, also, I’ve asked quite a number of contacts, again and again, sort of taking my own little survey of literary reputation.  I explore Romanian poetry by translating it.  Sometimes I’ve just fallen into doing more than a half dozen or so poems, even a whole book manuscript.  Other times I’ve as it were pursued a writer and his or her permission; one such instance was when I wanted to go far afield from poetry to translate the traditional folklore-like stories of the Romanian Roma writer Lumini a Mihai Cioaba.  I am not methodical; if I were, I probably wouldn’t like myself.      

Christopher Bakken:

They were poems I admired, poems I believed other people would find important, poems other people deserved to have the opportunity to read.

Sean Cotter:

Sometimes writers ask me to translate particular works or participate in translation projects, sometimes I am simply drawn to works I think are interesting and would interact in interesting ways with contemporary American literature. Once I picked an author simply because I thought he had a good sense of humor.

Steven Stewart:

I’ve always had the luxury of being able to translate works that I really like.  I’ve translated a lot of aphorisms, prose poems, and microfictions—genres that I enjoy reading.  I have to feel passionate about a work—it has to electrify me—for me to be able to put in the time and effort necessary to translate it.  And, luckily, works that appeal to me in this way have tended to appeal to others as well (editors and readers).

Chris Andrews:

When you're translating prose fiction under contract, the publisher calls the shots. As a translator you can write enthusiastic reader's reports and translate sample chapters, but the publisher has to decide whether or not to make an offer for the rights. And that's as it should be; publishing requires a different set of skills from translating. Having said that, I've been very lucky in recent years: I've been able to work on books — by Roberto Bolaño and César Aira — that I wanted to translate before the opportunity arose.

Dan:

Are there some other authors that you would like to translate in the future?

Adam Sorkin:

Oh, I could go through a whole litany of names, but to almost no one here would they mean anything.  There are a lot of new, young poets whose work I’d like to sample, at least by doing a few poems each, maybe more.  Will I mention any?  I tend to be a bit superstitious about listing future projects.  I think it’s wise to not commit vague intentions to published promises.  So I’ll just say that Romanian culture has been extraordinarily fortunate to be rich in excellent poets, and it continues to be so. In parallel, I myself feel fortunate to play a part in making these writers known to a wider audience through what, at least for the present, is the world’s imperial language, the broadest communication medium of exchange.

Christopher Bakken:

Yes, almost every Greek poet since WWII, since so few of them have been translated into English with any real depth.  But we’ll probably start with Manolis Anagnostakis, Marigo Alexopoulou, and Nikos Karouzos.

Sean Cotter:

An infinite number.

Steven Stewart:

I would really like to translate the microfictions of Argentinean writer Marco Denevi.  Apart from that, there is so much great work left to translate of the writers I’ve already been working on (including Carlos Edmundo de Ory, Eduardo Milán, and Rafael Pérez Estrada) that I would have a lifetime’s worth of work to do if I were to limit myself to that.  Nevertheless, I’m always encountering new writers whose work I want to translate.  In the future I expect I’ll do translations of writers I as of yet haven’t even heard of.

Chris Andrews:

There are, but it will depend on publishers, as I said. And there are books I would like to see translated, whoever gets to do it, like Rodrigo Rey Rosa's La Orilla africana (The African Shore). A fantasy: I would like to try translating Le cri du sablier by the French writer Chloe Delaume, to see if it's possible.

Dan:

Are you aware of journals out there like TWO LINES and Absinthe, that are only publishing translated work?

Adam Sorkin:

Well, yes, and I’ve published material in both.  I’ve been on the Advisory Board of Absinthe from the start, not that I really do anything – just to support it.  There’s the excellent Circumference, too (I suppose I’m being nice in mentioning them, for they’ve consistently rejected my submissions!), and a new online journal, Ezra, and the established online journal of international literature, Words Without Borders, as well.

Christopher Bakken:

Yes, and I admire both journals.  I’m also aware of a forthcoming anthology of contemporary European poetry in translation that seems long overdue—it has been organized by the gentlemen who edit the journal PLEIADES and I think it will make quite a splash.  Almost all American readers, myself included, are pretty ignorant of what is happening in European poetry now.  Journals and anthologies like these help correct that a little.

Sean Cotter:

Words without Borders and Poetry International come to mind. The American Literary Translations Association keeps a list of journals interested in translation on its website (www.literarytranslators.org).

Steven Stewart:

Absinthe is one of my favorite journals.  I admit that when I read any literary journal I look for and go to the translations first.  Not merely, I believe, because I’m a translator myself, but because the works in translation tend to be richer and more interesting.  There tends to be a sameness or monotony to much of the poetry and fiction currently being written in English, and it’s necessary to look outside to find something that sounds fresh and interesting.

Chris Andrews:

I know their websites, and they seem to be doing some very good prospecting.

Dan:

Can one make a living as a translator?

Adam Sorkin:

Some who get commissions or contracts from major publishers probably can.  This would be for prose, not poetry.  Likewise, if one specializes in medical or legal or technical translation, well, that’s another, more prosperous situation.  But literary translation is usually unsung and unrewarded.  I think most of us teach or do other things to pay the bills.

Christopher Bakken:

Yes, if you translate court documents, divorce settlements, property titles, or if you work for the UN.  But literary translation…..um, nope.

Sean Cotter:

As a literary translator, it is very difficult. I do not know anyone making a living from translation who solely translates literature. A large number of the members of ALTA, for example, are professors.

Steven Stewart:

Perhaps some people do make their living as literary translators, but if they exist they are few and far between.  I personally couldn’t make my living translating; I’m too committed to translating work that has little to no commercial viability.  Nevertheless, whatever money I do get as a result of my translating (including recent grants from the NEA and the Idaho Humanities Council—thank you to both organizations!) is welcome and really helps.

Chris Andrews:

I haven't tried, but I think it would be difficult. It's not just a question of how much or little you get paid as a translator, but also of the insecurity of free-lance work. Work can dry up if the author with whom you are principally associated doesn't catch on, or if the publishing house changes direction and decides to commission fewer translations. I think it's harder to make a living from translating into English than from translating into many other languages, because English-language publishing is linguistically insular in general, and the translation of fiction is mainly undertaken by small literary publishing houses or imprints. At the commercial end of the market, there is, of course, some interest in finding another book like The Name of the Rose, but not much steady investment and involvement in translation, whereas in Europe and Latin America, for example, many mass-market titles in English are translated, as well as literary fiction.

Dan:

What is the typical number of pages you get through in a day?  Or, how long would it take to translate a couple hundred pages of work?

Adam Sorkin:

Since I work collaboratively, I’d never undertake this directly.  I work with my co-translator’s first English draft, always going back to the original, then going over the English, then back and forth a lot.  I’ve translated a book of short stories, as well as the book of Gypsy tales I mentioned, and a long essay on Bucharest in terms of its smells, and it’s slow going for me.  I’m painstaking, nitpicking.  I like the feel of words in my hand and on my tongue, their heft, their taste.  I’m drawn more to poetry.

In a later stage I read the English only, by ear, for the rhythms, the flow.  Then I go back to see if I’ve distorted anything.  Maybe I have, but I like it too much.  Sometimes, of course, one has to give up what one knows is good, because it isn’t in the original.  Anyway, then I’m back to English-only again.  Whether it’s prose or poetry, it has to read well in the target language or it ought not to have been done at all.  That doesn’t necessarily mean fluently or unobtrusively, if the original was demanding or fractured or quirky or murky in its style.  But there’s nothing wrong with fluency and seamlessness in style. I don’t think a translation has to sound like a translation in order to reveal its problematic status as a derivative literary work.

Christopher Bakken:

I’m only now starting to translate some prose, which goes much more quickly (ten “rough” pages a day if we’re really cooking).  Poetry is slow—a few short poems in a morning, depending on whether I’m in Greece with my collaborator or whether we’re working by email, which slows things down considerably. 

Back on Rhodes with Patrikios, we translated up to twenty short poems a day—fueled by immense amounts of Greek coffee and wine when the coffee ran out.  That was an astonishing pace.

Beyond that, there’s always revision, revision, revision.  The actual hourly wage cannot work out to much.

Sean Cotter:

It depends on the work. Imagine the difference between reading a Harry Potter and Finnegans Wake. There are also works written in a straight-forward language that reference fields of knowledge I know nothing about, such as Napoleonic military history, and these translations require a great deal of research. It could take a half-day just to use the right kind of cannon.

What you do during the day is one thing, and what you do at night is another. Frank Bidart tells a story about translating a short poem by Catullus, in which he decides not to use the word “crucifixion” because the Christian connotations are anachronistic. Some ten years later, if I’m remembering the details correctly, God appears to Bidart in a dream and instructs him to re-translate the poem, using “crucifixion.” So, how long did it take him to translate the poem?

Steven Stewart:

As a sometimes sporadic translator of poetry, I don’t really have an answer to this question.  I’ve sometimes done upwards of 20 pages of poetry in a day; I’ve sometimes spent weeks working on a single page.  A lot depends on how busy I am with work and my family responsibilities.

Chris Andrews:

I'm pretty slow: about three pages a day, so about half a year for a two-hundred page book, including revision.

Dan:

What is your translating process?  Do you read the whole work first in the native language and then begin?  Do you discuss it with the original author?  Do you just start translating from word one?

Adam Sorkin:

I think I’ve anticipated this in previous answers.  I’m flexible, depending on the situation, so it’s all that you mention, including starting with my own plodding horse going directly ahead, plowing the row from word one on and on.  Even when I know the author, I’ll often not have much of a discussion until after I’ve translated a first draft, or reworked on.  And I make clear that I hope the author will chastise me, when needed.  I’m the English expert, but that doesn’t prevent wrong choices, a bit of unfaithfulness for which I might need to get my hand figuratively slapped.

Christopher Bakken:

When I begin work on a new poem, I plow my way through the Greek first, trying to rough out my sense of what the poem is doing in the original.  Then I turn to the rough English trot that my collaborator sends me and I compare my mangled version and her more or less literal trot.  From that point on, most of my work is in English, with the Greek poem open on the desk, glaring at me the entire time, reminding me where I hope to go.  My task is to make a poem in English—an English poem that still sings like the original.  I often err on the side of singing.  The my collaborator gets the text back and a kind of beautiful tug of war begins—she tugs back toward the “faithful” trot and the Greek original, while I tug toward lyric expression and music.  What we end up with is the product of much compromise.

Sean Cotter:

It depends what the “work” is. If it’s a poem or short story, then I read the entire piece before beginning. To go back to an earlier question, one of the problems of working with an author you know is that the work might change during the course of collaboration: a collection of poems can expand, shrink, or be re-arranged. It may not be possible to read the entire collection before beginning. Translators often work under time constraints: editors need a work finished, or the translator only has the summer free to work. It is not uncommon to dive into the translation without reading the work.

Steven Stewart:

If I’m just translating individual poems or stories from a book, I’ll read the book and take notes of which pieces I want to come back to and translate.  Then I’ll let some time pass before I translate.  If I’m translating a whole book, I just dive in.  I actually think it’s important for me to not be aware of or thinking about the end of a piece while I’m translating the beginning.  While working in this way can create more revision work for me later on, it helps infuse the translation with a necessary tension that all good art depends upon.

Chris Andrews:

I read the whole text first, do a first draft, and generally collect my questions for the author, or for native-speaking informants, while revising the first draft.

Dan:

Frequently when reading a translated work, I’ll come across words left in the native language – what is your typical reason for doing this?

Adam Sorkin:

Sometimes the “thereness” of another place, another experience, has to be preserved, not necessarily as an exoticism.  Nor when I can’t get the range of associations or a pun; translation always means interpretation, analysis, making choices. Usually when I leave a word in the original, it a cultural term.  Two examples from Romanian:  mamaliga (the boiled cornmeal that is a staple, poor-folks, peasant food) and ?uica (tswee’ka, Romania’s plum brandy, also called by the term derived from the Hungarian, palinca, especially when it’s Transylvanian and stronger – many of us might know this drink as slivovitz, under which name I can find it on the shelves of my local state liquor store here in Pennsylvania).  To call the first corn meal mush, hominy, polenta, or what have you, is to falsify culture, place, time. And the Romanian word happens to be in the OED (I just checked it online), with an 1808 citation.  The second, too, is there, first cited as of 1927 – although I do sometimes use “plum brandy” to gloss it quickly, when the reference appears frequently.  As these examples suggest, English itself favors this kind of assimilation of words from other languages, and this isn’t news.  Romanian, by the way, has been doing this a lot very recently, as well, often with tech terms, but also all the claptrap and advertising lingo of modernizing, and usually from American English (some examples: “computer,” “hamburger,” “email,” “trainer,” “weekend”…       

Christopher Bakken:

In one Patrikios poem, a snippet of a famous song sung by resistance fighters was quoted in a poem—to translate that little fragment into English would have missed the point entirely.  I wasn’t important to know what was being said in the song; the readers just needed to hear that bit of song on its own.  That moment of haunting would have been destroyed if it had been crammed into English.

Sean Cotter:

There are many reasons this might be done, some aesthetic, some political, some practical. In my case the reasons have been practical: the word has no English equivalent. Foods often fall in this category. I was working on a poem to which the Balkan setting was central, and which ends with the presentation of a plate of mici. These are small, grilled garlic and meat concoctions that resemble sausages. You can see that that description would not make a pithy end line to the poem. Literally they would be “smalls,” which I like but could not use: “He received a plate of smalls.” I only see three solutions to this kind of translation problem: to keep the word in the original, to make up a new English word for the translation, or, the only honorable solution, to think more long term: introduce the food to English speaking-countries, cook it at home, and convince restaurants to serve it. Wait to see what they call it on their menus, and use that word in the translation. Alternatively, I suppose, one could wait for fast food to usurp the place of mici in Romania, and then translate the line, “He received a plate of chicken nuggets.”

Steven Stewart:

I try to avoid doing that.  The only reason I would do it is if the original word could create some sort of necessary effect in the translation that I couldn’t achieve any other way.  An example of a translation that uses words from the original language to a stunning effect is John Felstiner’s rendering of Paul Celan’s “Death Fugue” (http://mason.gmu.edu/~lsmithg/deathfugue.html).

Chris Andrews:

I try to avoid doing that, but occasionally it is the best solution, particularly if there is metalinguistic reference to a particular item in the source language . For example, in Bolaño's Amulet, the narrator, Auxilio Lacouture, who is from Uruguay, says how she hates the Mexican slang word chido (great). The Mexican-ness of the term is essential to the meaning of the passage, so the point wouldn't really come across if an English slang term was used instead. In similar contexts, Natasha Wimmer occasionally keeps a word in Spanish in her translation of The Savage Detectives, and I think it works really well.

Dan:

Do you also write your own material?  If so, in which language?

Adam Sorkin:

I must claim that my translations are “my own” and form the body of my creative work insofar as I have any.  I think translation is a co-creative, or re-creative, performance art, so this claim isn’t necessarily outlandish or egotistic.

Christopher Bakken:

Yes, I am a poet (and sometimes a prose writer) in English.

Sean Cotter:

Yes, I have published in English and Romanian.

Steven Stewart:

I do write my own poetry, primarily in English.  I sometimes compose in Spanish, though I don’t consider anything of mine begun in Spanish finished until I’ve translated it into English.

Chris Andrews:

Yes: poems in English.

Dan:

Do you belong to any organizations of translators?  If so, what benefits have you found by having joined up?

Adam Sorkin:

I’ve been a member of the American Literary Translators Association, or ALTA, since I first found the group and went to a meeting in 1995, at Austin, Texas, as it happened.  I was amazed and gratified to find others doing the same thing I was, grappling with literature in interpreting it, reading the text closely, transposing it into the key of English, and facing similar problems, dilemmas, misunderstandings, maybe imposing parallel solutions, maybe despairing at analogous impossibilities, but finally (to shift metaphors again) somehow crossing the whole landscape of translation, including what delectable peaks there are and the more familiar sloughs of despond.  I had viewed myself as working in isolation, and it wasn’t so – though it is always the writer’s isolation when one does one’s thing.  The friendliest and most supportive group one could find, by the way, and the conferences are truly enjoyable, a gathering of old friends.  Much less ego preening than at other conferences I’d been to in English.  Perhaps this is because as translators we are more or less seldom the name on the cover, more likely a mere footer on the page.

Christopher Bakken:

No, but I’ve heard from Sean that the parties at ALTA aren’t to be missed, so I should probably join one of these years.

Sean Cotter:

I’ve been active in ALTA for ten years. The great benefit has been the people in the organization. They are creative, fun people who love to talk about other authors, not just themselves. I have also encountered lots of good literature for the first time at these conferences, and the depth of knowledge about the profession is very useful. It can also be a good place to find publishers. 

Steven Stewart:

I belong to ALTA, the American Literary Translators Association.  ALTA’s website provided me with very useful information when I was first trying to publish my translations.  I’ve also gotten some ideas for places to submit my translations to from the ALTA website (I have a book of translations forthcoming with the University of Nebraska Press, and I got the initial idea of submitting to the press from there).  The thing I like best about ALTA is the possibility for a community that it offers, especially through its annual conference.  I’ve met a lot of great translators (and great people) through ALTA.

Chris Andrews:

No, I don't.

Dan:

Well, I’d like to thank you, both for taking the time to answer these questions, and also for making the efforts that have allowed me to read some fantastic works that I’d never have been able to had you not done so.

Adam Sorkin:

Dan, this has been fun.  I appreciate your putting us virtually together, and I’m happy to hear that my translations have at least one reader somewhere.

Christopher Bakken:

Parakalo (that’s “you’re welcome” in Greek).

Sean Cotter:

My pleasure. Thank you for reading literature in translation.

Steven Stewart:

Thank you.  It’s been a pleasure.

Chris Andrews:

It's a pleasure. It's nice to hear from adventurous readers.

The following is the sixth E-Panel of LitBloggers – as more of these pop up, I’ll try to continue to find those that are both interesting and varying in some nature from the others.  Please take a visit to their sites and look around.  This now makes 55 blogs that have participated to date - you can still read the others.

Matthew Tiffany – Condalmo – www.condalmo.typepad.com

Jessica Stockton – Written Nerd – www.writtennerd.blogspot.com

Darby Dixon – Thumb Clocks and Oven Drives - http://www.thegrue.org/tdaoc/

John Fox – BookFox - http://www.thejohnfox.com/

Callie Miller – Counterbalance – www.counterbalance.typepad.com

Carol Novack – I am Not Who I Think I Am, or is it Whom? - http://carolnovack.blogspot.com/

Carolyn Kelloggg – Pinky’s Paperhaus – www.pinkyspaperhaus.com

Levi Asher – Literary Kicks – www.litkicks.com

Kelly Spitzer – Kelly Spitzer – www.kellyspitzer.com

EWN:

Thank you all for participating and passing along information about your blogging experiences.  First of all, as I don't see much income generation on your sites, what do you all do for a living?

Matthew Tiffany – Condalmo:

I have a masters in clinical counseling, and I'm slowly working toward getting the license to be a practicing counselor/therapist.  In the meantime, I'm a case manager on an ACT Team - Assertive Community Treatment, which means we help people with severe mental illness to function in the community and stay out of the hospital.  It also means a lot of paperwork.

Jessica Stockton – Written Nerd:

I work as the events coordinator at McNally Robinson, an independent bookstore in New York City.  And when that doesn't quite pay the bills, I do some light freelance writing/editing.

Darby Dixon – Thumb Drives and Oven Clocks:

I'm currently a technical writer for a software company.

John Fox – BookFox:

I teach English Composition to occasionally bright and occasionally stubborn undergraduates at the University of Southern California.  It’s the third university I’ve adjuncted at, and since I usually only teach a course or three, I use the spaces in-between for writing fiction and blogging.

Callie Miller - Counterbalance:

Graphic designer.

Carol Novack – I am Not Who I Think I Am:

Ha. As we say in New York, you call this a living?  Seriously, I haven't looked into "blogging for money."  It's just something I do, basically, to get news out about my new publications, Mad Hatters' Review readings/events, and where I occasionally ruminate in public instead of talking to myself and annoying people at zoetrope.com.   I also post articles on various topics that interest me as a writer, a regular person that blogs, and someone who cares about the BS the greedy, narcissistic rulers of my country are downloading on all of us. 

After a long career in the legal arena and a couple of years spent acquiring another higher degree of experience, I'm not yet making what anyone would call a living.  I have a very part-time, seasonal job as an instructor in what I call lyrical fiction writing, and I've been a paid humor/love advice columnist.  So…I'm thinking of selling the cats and moving to Cambodia.  As long as I can get high-speed Internet connection.

Carolyn Kellogg – Pinky’s Paperhaus:

I’m a full-time graduate student. My very existence is the inverse of “income generation.”

Levi Asher – Literary Kicks:

I am a web applications developer and content management specialist.  My current main gig involves data mining for corporate litigation support, which is more interesting than it sounds.  I also do music and literature websites, currently PearlJam.com and WordsWithoutBorders.org.

Kelly Spitzer – Kelly Spitzer:

I’m lucky enough to have a husband who wants me to focus on my writing (and him!) so I don’t have an income generating job at the moment. Actually, I haven’t had one in years. I think I’m afraid of the “real” world now.

EWN:

If you don't mind, in an attempt to determine if this ability to blog has any restrictions, what ten year age range do you fall into?  Twenties, thirties, etc.?

Matthew Tiffany – Condalmo:

Early thirties.

Jessica Stockton – Written Nerd:

I’m in my late twenties.

Darby Dixon – Thumb Drives and Oven Clocks:

Twenties.

John Fox – BookFox:

I’m in my late twenties.

Callie Miller – Counterbalance:

Early thirties.

Carol Novack – I am Not Who I Think I Am:

Over the hill, but below the mountain.  What does age have to do with blogging, as long as one has adequate prescription eyeglasses?  Really!

Carolyn Kellogg – Pinky’s Paperhaus:

Thirties.

Levi Asher – Literary Kicks:

Fortysomething.

Kelly Spitzer – Kelly Spitzer:

Twenties. For another six or seven months anyway…

EWN:

When did you begin your blog?

Matthew Tiffany – Condalmo:

August of 2006, in its current incarnation.  My previous failed attempts at lit-blogging can still be found online by the enterprising Googler with a complete lack of other worthwhile hobbies/interests.

Jessica Stockton – Written Nerd:

I started in October of 2005, when I was working at a bookstore where no one seemed quite as excited as I was about books and book culture; I wanted a way to talk to more people about books and bookstores, and blogging seemed to lend itself to that.

Darby Dixon – Thumb Drives and Oven Clocks:

January 2005.

John Fox – BookFox:

BookFox started in May 2006 with a stutter and some misfiring pistons, but as I learned The Way of the Blogger (i.e. how to carve out time to write online as well as personally), posting came up to a rather steady hum.

Callie Miller - Counterbalance: 

2 years ago.

Carol Novack – I am Not Who I Think I Am:

A sudden and unexpected gale of peer pressure gripped me circa Fall 2005.  I mean, everyone was blogging, so why not?  It was free and offered another means not to spend enough time writing. I'd never publish anything new on my blog. I mean, I'm so brilliant, someone would steal it.  Either that, or some journal editor would say well, I won't publish that whatever the hell it is because it's been published.

Carolyn Kellogg – Pinky’s Paperhaus:

August 2004.

Levi Asher – Literary Kicks:

I started LitKicks in the summer of 1994, but it wasn’t a blog.  I added something called Beat News from 1995 to 2001, and I think this is historically the world’s first literary blog, though hilariously I only updated it once a month (and I thought that took a lot of work).  I then dropped away for awhile, then relaunched LitKicks as a message board site, then shut that down and recreated it again as a blog in 2004.

Kelly Spitzer – Kelly Spitzer:

I started setting up my website in January of 2006. It took several months from there, however. I think my first blog post was in April, and it pimped Roy Kesey’s novella Nothing in the World. It went slowly from there, until I started Picks of the Week (now The Showcase) and the New Yorker threads, in late August, and then, in March, I kicked off The Writer Profile Project. I’ve been pretty busy since then.

EWN:

How difficult was it for you to learn how to maneuver within your blog and get things looking the way you wanted them to?

Matthew Tiffany – Condalmo:

My first computer was a Commodore 64, back when that was the good stuff.  I was pretty involved with the BBS scene, ran up some debt with Q-Link.  I am not especially savvy with HTML, or whatever, but I know enough from years of half-assed tinkering to get by.  Which does not really equate to things being the way I want them to look, but what are you going to do?  I try (and often fail) to leave well enough alone with the site design.

Jessica Stockton – Written Nerd:

Pretty easy.  I use Blogger, which seems to be kind of the lowest common denominator.  Posting was as simple as typing, and I figured out how to change the template by cutting and pasting.  I'm still learning, though, and still pretty low-level when it comes to working with code (as Bud Parr can attest, since I had to beg him for help in getting Brainiads set up on my site!)

Darby Dixon – Thumb Drives and Oven Clocks:

Not too hard. There were a few challenges, like the random header image with the text floating on top, which drove me batty for a while. But I'm sort of a huge geek, so I enjoy learning how to do that stuff.

John Fox – BookFox:

Incredibly difficult. My Typepad BookFox is my second site – I started on Blogger, back when everyone had access to their HTML so it was actually possible to change things. The downside was that I spent weeks fiddling with a code that looked suspiciously like hieroglyphics. Of course, it all begins to make sense after a while, and then I felt very pleased with myself. In December 2006 I moved to Typepad, which seems easier, but since I wasn’t using a template, it took me some time to get the colors and formats and everything just right. It helps that my wife is a photographer and dabbles a lot in graphic design – she told me when something didn’t work and when I was getting warmer to an aesthetically pleasing layout. The misconception is that you can set your template and just leave it alone for a while. For me, I’m always adding things in the sidebars, and considering whether I should change the header, and trying to dream up new additions. So it’s a continual job, not just one in the past tense.

Callie Miller - Counterbalance:

Rather easy, but, that’s what I do for the day job!

Carol Novack – I am Not Who I Think I Am:

Big assumption. I'm barely able to figure out how to make things look the way I want them to look.   And I can't spend the time to learn how to look fascinating.

Carolyn Kellogg – Pinky’s Paperhaus:

That wasn’t hard, being as I was, at the time, a professional web producer. But that also means that I tend to get frustrated with different blogging platforms and hosting companies, and I’ve swapped and futzed a lot. I sense a design itch in the near future.

Levi Asher – Literary Kicks:

Being a Java programmer, naturally I had to code my blog in Java, which made it very difficult since I had to build everything from scratch.  I have practically the only Java-based blog in the world.  What this means, basically, is that I’ve made everything about ten times more difficult than it should be.  I’m switching to WordPress later this year if I can only find the time.

Kelly Spitzer – Kelly Spitzer:

I’m extremely fortunate to have a brother who does web and software design for a living. He’s so talented that he works for company—Fluid—based in San Francisco, and lives in Colorado.  They even gave him a raise to move to Colorado so he could buy a house where he could work from home! (Clearly I’m very proud of him!) Anyway, I basically told him how I wanted the site to look and function, and he put it together from there. With plenty of better ideas, I must add. He used a program called Word Press, which we both adore. It makes life on both of our ends much simpler. The one thing I had a ridiculous time learning was how to upload images. What a pain in the rear. Now, it seems so easy, but back then… my stomach hurts just thinking about it.

EWN:

What is the significance of your site's name?

Matthew Tiffany – Condalmo:

No significance that I'm aware of.  The word Condalmo comes from a name my grandfather used to bandy about, some fictional country music singer.  At least I think he was fictional.

Jessica Stockton – Written Nerd:

I've embraced the title Book Nerd for a long time – my enthusiasm about books and bookstores makes me a little geeky.  But I thought it would be fun to have some sort of witty title for the blog, so The Written Nerd is a play off of "the written word" (obviously).  It may have been a mistake, though, since no one seems to be able to distinguish my handle (Book Nerd) from my blog title.  Oh well.

Darby Dixon – Thumb Drives and Oven Clocks:

I was sitting at my kitchen table when I decided to start the blog. I needed a name, so I looked up from my laptop, and I took the first two objects I saw and stuck 'em together. Voila: Thumb Drives and Oven Clocks. Random, but I like the sound of it. It's got a good beat, I think.

John Fox – BookFox:

Simple: A Fox that reads Books. Of course, I wanted to name it so many other things – like Book DJ, which has to be the best name for a book blog (if someone steals it, you have to give me credit) because just as a DJ is so knowledgeable about all the hip and upcoming musicians, so we bloggers are spinning an eclectic mix of authors that offer a familiarity with the old while shuffling in the new and offbeat. The drawback of my current name is the formatting: I chose to make it one word and capitalize the F of Fox. While this has always been very pleasing to me, no one can ever get it right. They write Book Fox or Bookfox. Not that it matters to an excessive degree, and it’s probably my own fault for formatting it that way.

Callie Miller - Counterbalance: 

The Webster’s take on counterbalance is something to do with equal and opposing forces. I’m interested in the push-pull of reading vs. writing, writing vs. reading, working vs. reading, working vs. writing. Now, ironically, I’ve got to throw blogging vs. writing, blogging vs. reading and blogging vs. working into that mix.  I could get completely Jungian here about how your creative brain makes itself known when you’re working too much and how your working brain makes itself known when you’re writing too much and how the ideal state is one of balance, rather than a constant state of balance/counterbalance. But that would be highly nerdy and, well, too revealing…

Carol Novack – I am Not Who I Think I Am:

It's the title of an absurdist language-driven piece that was published in the print magazine Anemone Sidecar.  The protagonist is overwhelmed by a perpetual grammatical, (in)tense, and cultural/socio/political identity crisis. 

One of these days, the aforementioned piece will appear in an e-journal.  That's the big problem with print magazines.  I can't say in my blog --- here's the link to my site's title.  Though if nobody publishes the piece soon, I'll post it on my blog – I shall, I shall!

Carolyn Kellogg – Pinky’s Paperhaus:

It began as the accompaniment to an internet radio show I had on killradio.org. Knowing my straightlaced job wouldn’t appreciate my participation in an anarchist collective, I needed a pseudonym: Pinky’s Paperhaus. I started playing with ways to make the radio show into a podcast; by the time I left the radio station, Pinky’s Paperhaus was going strong as a litblog. Come to think of it, that’s about the time I left the straight job. By then, the name had stuck. (And yes, sometimes my hair is fuchsia.)

Levi Asher – Literary Kicks:

When I started LitKicks I was reading a lot of Beat Generation novels, and I wanted the site to have a Beat flavor.  Kerouac and Ginsberg are always writing about “kicks” this and “kicks” that, and I think it’s a great word.  The name “Literary Kicks” came to me one day when I was shopping in a supermarket, and I knew this was the name for the site I wanted to build.

Kelly Spitzer – Kelly Spitzer:

Oh, geez. I must seem very self-absorbed. My site is named nothing other than Kelly Spitzer. That’s because I meant it to be nothing more than a place to park links to my work and make announcements about my, um, “career.” Or what I hope will one day be my career. At the time I started my site, I was just finishing up a novel, and I thought it would be an appropriate tool in the agent/publisher hunt. I’d read somewhere that author sites are a good idea, that agents/publishers love them. So I created the site, and then somewhere down the road, got sidetracked. Well, not sidetracked exactly, but excited about the possibilities of blogging. I’ve since thought about giving my blog an actual name, but people know it as is, so it would probably be counter-productive.

EWN:

Are you able to track traffic?  If so, what's the average amount of hits per day your site receives?

Matthew Tiffany – Condalmo:

I am able, but loathe to do so.  I don't want to get in competition with myself for one-upmanship.

Jessica Stockton – Written Nerd:

Yep, I've got a site meter that tells me I've got an average of around 100 hits a day.  That varies a lot, since I only post three days a week, and if there's a mention of me somewhere the stats shoot up.

Darby Dixon – Thumb Drives and Oven Clocks:

Numbers makes me nervous--I'm worried they'll either sound pitiful or self-inflated. Let's say that according to my dubious math there's currently a couple hundred people hitting the site each week. That's a couple hundred more than I ever expected would pay any attention to me. If I had the means, I'd personally buy each of them cookies.

John Fox – BookFox:

My site is low on the totem pole, I believe – usually from a hundred to a couple hundred hits a day, but sometimes I’ll get a spike from some links and it’ll jump up higher. But I’m fine with that kind of traffic – I’m not trying to be Ed or Maud. I’m also not willing to post multiple times a day, every single day, over a long stretch of time, to build up my readership. I’m fine with being a periphery source in the blogosphere, and just fulfilling my niche.

Callie Miller - Counterbalance:

I was able to track traffic until Typepad modified its interface and now it’s wonky so I can’t. When I first started I had very few visitors a day. 30 at most. Now I average about 500 unique visitors. On a very good day, when a “big” blog links to me or a newspaper, it shoots up dramatically but then falls back to the status quo a few days later.

Carol Novack – I am Not Who I Think I Am:

Well, my blog virtually crashed the other day and the site counter disappeared. The blog's back now, but I haven't fixed the stat counter. I often don't post anything, and my traffic is modest.

Carolyn Kellogg – Pinky’s Paperhaus:

Pinky’s Paperhaus averages more than 2,500 pageviews a day.

Levi Asher – Literary Kicks:

Lately about 3500 hits a day, representing about 1200 unique users.  I get more when it’s not summer, though.

Kelly Spitzer – Kelly Spitzer:

I do have a “webalizer.” I don’t know if it’s accurate, but its most current statistic is this:

May 2007:

average hits per day: 2230

average visits per day: 204

EWN:

How much time do you spend on average per day on your site?

Matthew Tiffany – Condalmo:

As many of you know, it is now Reading the World month (for some great attention, wander over to Scott's Conversational Reading throughout June - currently he's got a weeklong interview with Chad Post running), and I'll be doing many things.  The following should be the first of three or four e-panels of literary translators.  I'll also be reviewing many translated titles and looking at individuals stories, poems, and essays from the latest issues of Absinthe:  New European Literature.  I hope you enjoy.

The following is an E-Panel of 4 literary translators who have made it possible for those of us reading in English to enjoy works from authors we otherwise would never have had the chance to enjoy.

Howard Curtis

Katherine Silver

Paul Olchvary

Richard Jeffrey Newman

Dan:

Hello, and thanks for participating in this E-Panel, especially now during Reading the World month.  What language(s) do you translate from and to what language(s)?

Howard Curtis:

I translate from French and Italian into English

Katherine Silver:

Principally Spanish to English.

Paul Olchvary:

Hungarian to English

Richard Jeffrey Newman

Classical Persian

Dan:

Which of the languages you translate from and to is your native language?  How did you come about learning the other language(s)?

Howard Curtis:

My native language is English.  I learned French at school and taught myself Italian over the years.

Katherine Silver:

English is my native language. I learned Spanish first in Israel, then in Latin America, and always because of the bad company I kept (and still keep).

Paul Olchvary:

Born in America to parents of Hugarian descent who made sure I learned their language, I grew up with a good feel for Hungarian---which in my subsequent years of life in Hungary (where I moved at the age of 25) has become what I might call a second, quasi-native language alongside English (which I am indisputably more of a native in).

Richard Jeffrey Newman:

My native language is English. I speak and understand Persian, though not with anything resembling native fluency, and neither read nor write the language. I learned Persian mostly from spending time with my wife and her family. I began to learn to read last year, but time constraints have made it impossible for me to pursue that education further—for now. I do plan to study the language more formally when I have the chance.

Dan:

Do you consider yourself bilingual?

Howard Curtis:

No, I certainly don’t consider myself bilingual.  I can get along pretty well in spoken French, perhaps somewhat less well in spoken Italian, but only because I haven’t had so much practice in the past few years.  In my opinion, translators doesn’t necessarily have to have a total spoken command of the language(s) they translate from, but they do need to know the written language very well, to read a lot in that language, and to make constant efforts to extend and update their vocabulary, knowledge of idioms, etc. 

Katherine Silver:

I speak four languages, and a spattering of others, but I I’m still learning all of them, especially English.

Paul Olchvary:

Yes. (See above.) My years of life in Hungary have by now polished what had been a rusty knowledge of Hungarian to the point where I’d say I know it almost as well as I know English.

Richard Jeffrey Newman:

If by bilingual you mean “able to function like a native-speaker in each language,” then no, absolutely not. But if bilingualism exists along a continuum of competencies in each language, then, yes, I can function bilingually in each of the languages I speak other than English—Hebrew, Persian and Korean—though I have very different levels of competency in each one.

Dan:

How did you get into translating?

Howard Curtis:

Twenty-two years ago I was working as a stage director, with little success, and decided it was time to go in a new direction.  As I’d always been considered “good at languages”, I thought translation might be that direction.  I read somewhere that the way to go about getting work as a translator was to translate a sample chapter of a book you liked and submit it to publishers.  I was a big fan of Georges Simenon (still am) and it struck me that some of the English translations of his work that were coming out at the time were pretty bad.  So I took a Simenon novel I knew hadn’t been translated yet (there happened to be a copy of it in French in my local public library), translated the first chapter, and sent it to Simenon’s British publisher.  They liked it well enough to commission a complete translation, not of that Simenon novel, but another one (though I did get to do that one a year later).

Katherine Silver:

I read a book in Spanish and began translating it, then sent it around to publishers. I found translation to be an excellent way to “practice” writing, the way a painter might learn perspective or a musician do scales. I also had a fabulous teacher, Dr. Eddie Williams, at San Francisco State University, who taught translation as a rigorous craft, and understood that translating was a way of reading as deeply as possible.

Paul Olchvary:

I’ve always been a writer, and somehow it seemed natural for me to actively seek out (literary) translation opportunities when I first landed in Hungary, in 1990 (to take up a job teaching composition skills at a university English department). By the mid-1990s, I realized that translation, though it might not pay too many bills for a while, is (1) a deeply satisfying “cultural mission,” (2) a pursuit that improves my own writing (both by informing my style and giving me good ideas), and (3) a means of nurturing my contents in the publishing world.?

Richard Jeffrey Newman:

The opportunity, quite literally, fell into my lap. I received a call from a friend of mine, an Iranian, who said he had gotten a call from a friend of his about a third person who had started a non-profit in Manhattan called the International Society for Iranian Culture (www.isicweb.org). ISIC was looking for someone, my friend told me, to read through a series of scholarly English translations of classical Persian texts and write summaries/retellings of them for a general audience. Would I be interested? Of course I said yes. It seemed to me a wonderful opportunity to learn not only about a literature of which I was entirely ignorant, but also about my wife’s history and culture. When I met with ISIC’s executive director, however, Mehdi Faridzadeh, he explained to me that he was looking for a poet who was a native speaker of English to use these scholarly translations, which are generally accepted as accurate, to create literary translations for a contemporary audience. At first I said no, not only because my knowledge of Persian is so plainly inadequate to making any use whatsoever of the originals of the texts I would  be translating, but also because I knew nothing about that literature, and I did not feel qualified to do the job.

Mehdi persuaded my to try, however, and, motivated both by the pleasure I took in working up the samples I submitted and by the knowledge that I would be bringing into the 21st century works of literature that were already regarded as masterpieces—not to mention that they would represent the primary access my son and other Iranian-Americans of his generation would have to Persian classical literature—when Mehdi offered me a five book contract, I accepted.

My experience, in other words, is quite different from many other literary translators, who tend to choose the works they translate because they know them and love them. Not only were the books I was to translate chosen by other people—specifically, a committee of scholars that Mehdi convened in Iran—but that committee also chose which parts of those books I should translate. They, of course, had their own agenda—which is partially clear to me and which I understand even if I do not always agree with it, or at least with my understanding of it, based on what they have given me to work with—and so the result has been that some of the work I have been doing has required me to create poetry in English, or to try to create poetry in English (I do not think I have always been successful) from originals that I disagree with and/or find really, really boring. On the other hand, I am now really intrigued by Persian classical literature as a whole, and I would love the opportunity to expand the selections I have translated into the entire work.

Dan:

When you are reading material in the original language, are you thinking in English – translating on the fly, or thinking in that original language?

Howard Curtis:

I try to think only about the original language, but I can’t always escape the professional deformation of translating the odd sentence that leaps out at me as I go along.

Katherine Silver:

All of the above. I always read the original through before beginning to translate, and if I’m lucky, I hear a tinkling in the background, some faint melody in English beginning to emerge.

Paul Olchvary:

Both, in a sense. Although I am thinking primarily in the original language, when reading something in the original that seems to be just crying out for translation--that seems sufficiently “universal” to exist, to breathe, in English---I can’t help but imagine certain passages in English (i.e., translate on the fly). Yes, when I encounter such a text, I am so excited that I can’t help but test it out at least parts of it in my mind as I read along.

Richard Jeffrey Newman:

This question doesn’t really apply to me, since I am working from English to English.

Dan:

Do you prefer to reading one language over the other(s)?

Howard Curtis:

No. I’m happy to read in any language I can understand!  But when I’m in the middle of a translation, I prefer to read in English, because I think it helps to have the rhythms of good English prose going around in my head. 

Paul Olchvary:

Since the most thrilling reading experiences of my youth occurred in English, and I did, after all, grow up in America, I generally prefer reading in English. Besides, there is more wonderful original literature to choose from in English than in Hungarian, simply because there are many more writers out there with an incredibly wide range of life experiences. That said, I prefer reading Hungarian literature in Hungarian (perhaps this is obvious), and I often prefer reading literature from the region (e.g., Czech, Russian, Serbian) in Hungarian than in English; for a translator living in Budapest is probably more in touch with certain aspects of the cultural-political circumstances of the region than, say, a translator in New York who is translating into English and gets to visit this region less often.

Richard Jeffrey Newman:

Again, this question doesn’t really apply to me.

Dan:

Do you find it helps to know the author you are translating?  Know their thought processes and beliefs?

Howard Curtis:

Do you mean know them personally or be familiar with their other works?  If the latter, I think it can be very useful.  If the former, it isn’t essential but it can certainly be useful, not so much to find out their beliefs (which are usually implicit in their work, anyway) but to be able to ask them specific questions about tricky points of vocabulary or nuance.   
Ottavio Cappellani, the author of the book that’s featured in Reading the World – Who is Lou Sciortino? – was very helpful in elucidating the Sicilian dialect of which the book is full, as well as explaining various arcane aspects of Sicilian society and history.  I’ve translated three books by an Italian writer named Gianrico Carofiglio, who’s a lawyer by profession and whose books are full of Italian legal jargon: again, the author was very helpful in explaining these things.  I’ve met quite a few of the authors I’ve translated, and have almost always found them very willing to help with that kind of thing.   

Katherine Silver:

I don’t care particularly about their processes or beliefs, for I am translating their words, not their persons. Collaboration with an author can be very helpful when it comes to specific queries or difficult passages; it can also be a pain (current projects definitely excluded).

Paul Olchvary:

Absolutely. Indeed, if an author is alive and not too old or busy to respond to queries, I consider it the translator’s responsibility to fire away at the author with queries throughout the translation of a larger project especially. Of course, having strong oral and written skills in the original language (or in some other, common language) helps a great deal in this respect if the author does not know English. The downside of being in contact with the author is that it can make the translation process much more timeconsuming than it might be otherwise---which is a problem if the translation pays peanuts to begin with. But if the work in question clearly deserves such meticulous attention---might it be read a century from now?---why then, the author is only an email or a phone call away..... (And most authors are tickled pink to be translated into English.)

In closing, I might add that I cannot imagine knowing the language I translate from so well that I wouldn’t have at least some questions for an author. A translator should not be shy about having questions to ask---and then asking them, too, whether of the author or some other authority (if the author is, say, dead).

Richard Jeffrey Newman:

Since the poets I am working with are all dead, it is impossible to know whether knowing them would have been helpful. What I can say is that, generally speaking, the biographical research I have done has added little in terms of the actual translations. What has been helpful has been learning about the religious and cultural values that were held at the time. So, for example, it was very useful to me to understand in a very basic way some of the Sufi concepts with which Saadi works, and it has been similarly helpful to learn a little bit about Zoroastrianism now that I am working on the Shahnameh, the Persian national epic.

Dan:

Looking back at the works you have translated – how did you determine they were works you wanted to translate?

Howard Curtis:

I’ve almost never chosen the books I’ve translated.  In most cases I’m approached by a publisher who’s already chosen the book for publication in English.  As I consider myself a professional, performing a service, I don’t usually turn anything down.  Perhaps in some cases I should have, because the books turned out not very interesting to translate.  But those are the exceptions.  Mostly, I’ve been happy to translate the books I have translated, even though they weren’t my choices.  In some ways, I envy those who only translate the books they choose, but on the other hand, I’ve had the chance, thanks to publishers, to get to know books and authors I might not otherwise have known about.      

Katherine Silver:

At a minimum, I want to enjoy the read. Then, I hope to “hear” the English as I read the Spanish. The ones I feel compelled to translate (few and far between) present a challenge to English, a call to expand and stretch my limited mastery over its innate prowess.

Paul Olchvary:

Initially, I accepted anything that chanced to come my way. But, with time, it was generally a question of whether I could immediately imagine the English text while reading the original---and whether I LOVE the book. Certainly a book that clearly speaks primarily to readers of the original language---the sort of text full of cultural allusions that would require a slew of footnotes---scares me away. But fortunately (for me and for the cause of Hungarian literature abroad), there are some Hungarian writers who speak to universal human themes with such beauty that I think to myself, their imaginative worlds really must breathe in English. And if I don’t do it, someone else will, with time....

Richard Jeffrey Newman:

As I said above, the works were chosen for me.

Dan:

Are there some other authors that you would like to translate in the future?

Howard Curtis:

Some years ago – and this was one of the few that was my own choice – I translated a book called Memoirs from Elsinore by a little-known Belgian writer named Franz Hellens, whose work I’ve read a lot of and whom I consider a neglected twentieth-century master.  I did the translation for an academic publisher in New York, which meant that the book was exorbitantly priced and not generally available in bookstores.  Consequently, it’s only sold about 80 copies in 7 years!  I’d love to find a publisher willing to reissue the translation in a more commercial edition, because I think the book is a masterpiece, and then I’d like to translate other books by the same author, because there’s a lot of great stuff by him, all completely unknown outside Belgium and pretty well unknown in Belgium too, where he’s almost forgotten (he died 35 years ago).          
As a matter of fact, I’ve spent quite a bit of time in Belgium and there are other (French-language) Belgian writers I’ve had the chance to read whom I’d love to translate, especially those in the field of littérature fantastique: I’m particularly fond of the work of Gérard Prévot and Anne Richter.   

Katherine Silver:

I hope so, otherwise I’ll have to find another occupation. I’m currently translating a novel by Horacio Castellanos Moya for New Directions. I’d like to translate more of his works. He’s a fascinating, complex, and brilliant writer.

Paul Olchvary:

There are always authors out there I’d be happy to translate. That said, if the author whose wonderful novel I just finished translating completes his next book, I look forward to translating that.?

Richard Jeffrey Newman

This is an interesting question for me. On the one hand, I would love the opportunity, eventually, to go back and translate Saadi’s two major works—Gulistan and Bustan, which are the ones of which I have done selections—in their entirety. The next three authors I will be translating are Ferdowsi, Nezami and Attar. I have collaborated with Professor John Moyne, who was Coleman Barks’ original collaborator, on a new book of Rumi translations, and I know that Mehdi has another five books waiting for me when I finish these first five. On the other hand, I have since learned of other Iranian poets, ones who wrote closer to our time, whom I think it would be fun to try. The one I am thinking of right now was named Iraj Mirza, whose work, as far as I can tell, has some interesting similarities with the Earl of Rochester’s work. But I will probably need to learn to read Persian in order to tackle him.

Dan:

Are you aware of journals out there like TWO LINES and Absinthe, that are only publishing translated work?

Howard Curtis:

I’ve heard of TWO LINES, but never read it.  Never heard of Absinthe.

Paul Olchvary:

Yes, but one does have to go looking (e.g., on the ALTA website) to find them. Thank goodness for such journals, even if they are generally unable to pay more than complimentary copies.

Richard Jeffrey Newman:

Another journal whose name people should know is Circumference, which is published in New York City.

Dan:

Can one make a living as a translator?

Howard Curtis:

Just about, but only if you get offered a lot of work, and accept everything you’re offered.
That’s my position right now, but for many years it wasn’t.  I’ve been translating for more than twenty years, and it’s only in the past five years that I’ve been getting enough work to do it full time and earn anything approaching a normal living.

Katherine Silver:

Maybe if I lived in Thailand. Since I live in Berkeley, I have to heavily supplement my income, such as it is, by working in publishing as an editor and project manager.

Paul Olchvary:

Not easy at all, at least not as regards literary translation. Fortunately for me, there are relatively few people out there translating in my specialty language, Hungarian, so book publishers looking for translators do not have a hundred names to choose from. That said, as vast and wonderful as the universe of Hungarian literature is, little of it is sufficiently universal in theme to prosper well beyond the confines of its own language. And of those works that do “qualify,” only a few have what it takes (e.g., an emotionally gripping narrative, a page-turning quality) to make it to the radar screens of big publishers capable of paying enough of a translation fee to live on.

That said, if I continue living in Hungary, where life is a tad less costly and I own a home, I could probably get by on literary translation. But no way could I do so if I resettle in the States (which I am planning at some point); then, translation will be a supplementary income alongside teaching or else my own writing.

Richard Jeffrey Newman:

I certainly can’t, though that’s also not something I am complaining about.

Dan:

What is the typical number of pages you get through in a day?  Or, how long would it take to translate a couple hundred pages of work?

Howard Curtis:

Pretty well impossible to answer.  It depends on many factors: how closely printed the pages are, how difficult the text is, how tired I am!  In general, I’m quite a fast worker.  Last year I was asked – by an agency, not a publisher – to translate a six-hundred page book in two months (it had to be ready for the Frankfurt Book Fair).  I somehow managed to do it, but it was a punishing schedule, and I didn’t do much sleeping or eating during those two months!  Luckily, the style of the book was fairly simple, but I don’t think I’d ever want to do something like that again.       

Katherine Silver:

Depends on the text. Ten pages a day is a good average. But that’s just the first draft. Then the text undergoes a process similar to a copyedit/rewrite, which usually means reviewing it twice more.

Paul Olchvary:

Somewhere between five and ten pages (1500 to 3000 words) a day, depending on the text. It would take me four to eight weeks to produce a decent first draft of a work around 200 pages long. Of course, some Hungarian prose is just so unwieldy that the time spent editing my own translation can be 50% of the time I spent rendering that first draft.

Richard Jeffrey Newman:

If I am able to set aside time to work, I can get through as many as 50 lines in a day. These days, however, since I am teaching and the only time I am able to devote exclusively to translating is at most an hour in the morning before I go to work, I am happy if I get through 10 lines.

Dan:

What is your translating process?  Do you read the whole work first in the native language and then begin?  Do you discuss it with the original author?  Do you just start translating from word one?

Howard Curtis:

I almost always read the book through once in the original – twice if I have the time, which I don’t always.   I never discuss the book with the author before starting, but may send him/her any questions I have after doing the first draft.  I usually start from page one and just keep right on to the end.

Paul Olchvary:

Ideally, I read the book first in the native language. But I am a slow reader, so I must also consider that if I am not likely to be paid much for a translation, this is not a luxury I can afford. It all depends on the work, too. Some books are just so exciting from page one---and do not require an understanding of the whole in advance---that it seems natural to sit down and read as I translate.

Richard Jeffrey Newman:

I tend to read and then produce work in chunks, a poem at a time, if I am working on a book of poems; a narrative section at a time if I am working with a continuous narrative. (I should add that all the work I am translating is poetry.)

Dan:

Frequently when reading a translated work, I’ll come across words left in the native language – what is your typical reason for doing this?

Howard Curtis:

I very rarely do this unless there is a particular reason for it.  For example, in the case of terms relating to food and cooking, there is often no English equivalent for the French or Italian terms, so naturally they stay in the original language.      

Who is Lou Sciortino?, the Ottavio Cappellani book featured in Reading the World, was a very special case.  The book features a mix of Sicilian and Sicilian-American characters (mostly Mafiosi) and is written partly in standard Italian and partly in Sicilian dialect, with the odd American word or phrase thrown in.  It was obvious from the start that there was no way to exactly reproduce this linguistic richness in English, so my solution was to put it into a very stylized kind of American Mafia-speak, and to throw in a fairly large number of Italian words, but only if it was clear from the context more or less what they meant.  This was an unusual procedure for me, but I only did it to try to convey at least a little of the linguistic mix of the original.       

Katherine Silver:

Each case is different, but in general it is because the word encapsulates so much specific meaning in such a specific context that it would be futile to attempt to find an equivalent in the target language (the language the text is being translated into). This overlapping, in written and spoken form, is one of the ways languages borrow from each other and change.

Paul Olchvary:

I try not to do that. But, of course, I translate not from French (and there is a long tradition in English of embellishing prose with French words), but Hungarian. However, occasionally there are just some words or expressions that, if “translated,” are so far removed from the sense of the original that it’s best not to bother. Besides, a certain exotic touch may lend a degree of authenticity to a work. For example, while technically speaking, the Hungarian name Jancsi equals “Johnny” in English, as it is the diminutive of János (John), I would certainly not write “Johnny” in the translation: even though it’s more readily pronouncable, it carries a boatload of associations that have nothing to do with “Jancsi” in Hungarian. But this is a less than perfect example, because the reader would know at least know that “Jancsi” is a person. If however I leave the Hungarian fruit distillate pálinka as is in English---e.g., “Jancsi had a shot of pálinka”---and do not explain what this drink is, I have failed in my job as a translator---which is to make the experience of the English/American reader as close as possible to that of the Hungarian reader (who has the inside knowledge to tell him/her what pálinka is). If I were translating from Serbian or some other Slavic language and the particular fruit distillate was made with plums, I could of course write slivovitz, which has meaning in English---but because that does have a rather Slavic ring to it, I’d probably translate the Hungarian equivalent drink (plum pálinka) as plum spirits or, perhaps plum distillate.

Richard Jeffrey Newman:

There are some words that simply cannot be translated. Take, for example, the word farr, which in Persian denotes the aura understood to emanate from a just king who rules with God’s favor—though, the god in question, in the original meaning of the word, is not Allah, but is rather Ahura Mazda, the Zoroastrian deity. I have seen the word translated as “refulgence,” which is absolutely unacceptable to me, and “aura” just has too many connotations in English that I would want to avoid. So I use the Persian word and explain its meaning in a footnote. In addition, though, I think there is real value in code switching like that, independently of whether or not there are adequate English equivalents. As a teacher of English as a Second Language, and as a man married to a woman whose English is very much inflected by her native tongue, I have lived much of my life, professionally and personally, in an environment where elements of non-English languages got mixed in with English, almost always—in my opinion, anyway—to the betterment of English and absolutely always in making the cultural space of American English more welcoming of foreignness, something I think is very important.

That said, I don’t think that code switching in literary translation should be done willy-nilly, for its own sake. There need to be clear reasons for doing so and those reasons need to apply/be applied consistently throughout the text.

Dan:

Do you also write your own material?  If so, in which language?

Howard Curtis:

Many years ago, I wrote a couple of plays that were broadcast on BBC radio.  I have many ideas for novels but no time right now to sit down and try to write them as I’m so busy translating!  Obviously, I write in English.

Katherine Silver:

Yes.  In English.

Paul Olchvary:

Lots—in English. I just completed a novel (and my agent is seeking a publisher) and am writing another one. I like to daydream that I could live off my writing and translate on the side.?

Richard Jeffrey Newman:

I write my own poems. Indeed, I think of myself primarily as a poet, not a translator. My first book, The Silence Of Men, was published last year by CavanKerry Press. I am also an essayist, though I have had to put that work aside since I began doing my translations.

Dan:

Do you belong to any organizations of translators?  If so, what benefits have you found by having joined up?

Howard Curtis:

I am a member of the Translators Association in the UK.  The main benefit for me has been the chance to meet other translators from time to time.  It’s a very lonely profession, and a lot of the time you feel as if you’re working in a vacuum.  It’s nice to talk occasionally to people who know what you’re talking about. 

Katherine Silver:

ALTA (American Literary Translators Association). I’ve met some really smart and funny fellow translators.

Paul Olchvary:

Not yet, but I am considering joining ALTA.

Richard Jeffrey Newman:

I am a member of ALTA and have applied for a membership to PEN.

Dan:

Well, I’d like to thank you, both for taking the time to answer these questions, and also for making the efforts that have allowed me to read some fantastic works that I’d never have been able to had you not done so.

Howard Curtis:

Thank you, it’s great to get a chance to emerge from anonymity sometimes.

Katherine Silver:

Thank you for doing this.

Paul Olchvary:

You’re welcome. And thanks for the opportunity to contribute.

Richard Jeffrey Newman:

Thank you, Dan, for the opportunity to be a part of this panel. I have enjoyed it thoroughly.