Although I’m dying to get into the Venuti part of this book—maybe in part because I’m simultaneously watching the NL Wild Card game as I write (Brewers up 2-0 with no outs in the top of the 1st!) and there’s some sort of weird parallel between two teams battling it out, and a theorist trying to pick apart centuries of ingrained thinking about translations?—I’m going to stick to my original concept . . . So, let’s talk a bit about Ěýby Ingeborg Bachmann, translated from the German by Philip Boehm, which New Directions reissued earlier this year.

If you’re expecting an incisive, smart analysis ofĚýMalina, then, well, you’ve probably never read any of these posts, but, also, here, in brief, is what I think of this novel: It’s fucking great. It’s a weird book, in which it’s hard to find your footing, as each of the three sections unveil different aspects of the mind of the narrator—a female writer in Vienna involved with two men. (Read into that what you will.)

That might sound straightforward enough—as jacket copy, it gives you somethingĚýto hang on to—and the first part is pretty emotionally charged.

Because Ivan and I only tell each other good things and sometimes things intended to make each other laugh (but without ever laughing at anyone), because we’re even able to smile when preoccupied and so find the right way to get back on track, to get back together, I hope we might effect a general contamination. Slowly we will infect our neighbors, one after the other, with the virus whose most likely name I know already, and if an epidemic should ensue, it would benefit all humanity. But I also realize how difficult it is to catch, how long one has to wait to be ripe for contamination, and how difficult, how completely hopeless things were for me before it happened!

*

I’m thinking about Ivan.

I’m thinking about love.

Ģą˝´«Ă˝ injections of reality.

Ģą˝´«Ă˝ their lasting only a few hours.

Ģą˝´«Ă˝ the next, more potent injection.

I’m thinking in silence.

I’m thinking it’s late.

It’s incurable. And it’s too late.

But I survive and think.

And I’m thinking it will not be Ivan.

Whatever’s ahead, it will be something different.

I live in Ivan.

I will not outlive Ivan.

*

I would like to write an incunabulum standing up, for today twenty years have passed since I’ve loved Ivan, and it’s been one year and three months and thirty-one days on the 31st of the month since I’ve known him [. . .]

*

Ivan and I: the world converging.

Malina and I, since we are one: the world diverging.

 

Part 2, “The Third Man,” is much darker, more dangerous, more unnerving, a bit more imagistic, definitely filled with abuse. I mean, shit, Bachmann is a writer’s writer.Ěý

My father came home once more just by accident. My mother is holding three flowers, the flowers for my life, they aren’t red, or blue, or white, but they must be for me, and she throws the first one in front of my father, before he can approach us. I know she’s right, she has to throw him the flowers, but now I also know that she knows everything, incest, it was incest, but I’d still like to ask her for the other flowers, and I watch my father in deadly fear as he tears the other flowers from my mother’s hand, to take his revenge against her as well, he tramples them, he stomps on all three flowers, as he has often stomped about when enraged, he treads on them and tramples, as if he were trying to kill three bugs, that’s how much my life still means to him. I can’t look at my father anymore, I cling to my mother and start to scream, yes, that’s what it was, it was him, it was incest. But then I notice that . not only is . my mother silent and unmoved, but . from the beginning my own voice has been without sound, I’m screaming but no one hears me, there’s nothing to hear, my mouth is only gaping, he’s taken away my voice as well, I can’t pronounce the word I want to scream at him, and as I am straining with my dry, open mouth it comes once more, I know I’m going crazy, and in order to stay sane I spit into my father’s face, but there’s no saliva left, hardly a breath from my mouth reaches him. My father is untouchable. He is unmovable.

Really: Just go read this book. Whatever words I use to talk about it will be inadequate, will approximate its power and craft in ways that will seem embarrassingly lame tomorrow morning. Especially since I know that Rachel Kushner’s introduction (fortuitously reprinted at theĚý) is so much better, and is the piece youĚýshouldĚýread aboutĚýMalina.Ěý

Also, it’s the pivot that I’ve been building toward . . .

MalinaĚýwas initially written in 1971, and this Philip Boehm translation (great guy! great translator! I met him at the PEN West gala last year when I was on the jury that awarded him the Translation Prize forĚýChasing the King of HeartsĚýby Hanna Krall) came out originally in 1990. The only truly “new” aspects of this book are the introduction (stellar!) and the cover (quite good!).

To anyone in the industry, this whole section is going to be remedial and boring. (Unlike the other things I write? right? right?) For everyone else: It’s impossible to underestimate the value of a press’s backlist. If managed correctly, the books you’ve published over your past decades—titles your newer employees probably haven’t even heardĚýof—can be the goldmine that keeps your press afloat for decades.Ěý

I can’t tell you how many members of Literary Twitter encounteredĚýMalinaĚýfor the first time this summer. A lot! Despite the fact that this was issued in 1990, again in 1999 (when I first read it), and now, 20 years later.

On the first episode of the new season of the Two Month Review (you can download this podcast tomorrow morning), Dan Wells of Biblioasis mentions how you can publish a great book that goes unnoticed because you published it six months too early or too late.

Now, look back over the New Directions catalog. There are dozens of books that might have been published at the “right” time originally, but time has moved on, and they need to be refreshed. No. They need to be reintroduced.ĚýEvery six years there are enough new additions to the literary community that the most lasting books can find aĚýsignificantĚýnew audience.

For YEARS, this was the bread and butter of Dalkey Archive Press and the New York Review Books classics series.ĚýRemember this? Well, if you don’t, you need to check it out. We got a cool, of-the-moment writer to tell you why it’s so good, why this is a sort of bridge to literary history. This is one way to join our group.Ěý

I’ve decided right this second (as Scherzer strikes out Hiura to save the Nationals’ season) that this is a provable fact: There are always 10 times more interesting books notĚýin bookstoresĚýthan interesting new titles that came out within the last year.

That seems bold. Provocative. A good pivot to the next section of this post? Not yet, not yet.

Over the past year, how many titles have been published that will beĚýreprinted with new introductionsĚýthirty years from now? Like, maybe 4? Is 4 too high? Let’s say there are 20. Over the course of human writing from 1900-2000, are there 200 amazing books that none of us have heard about because capitalism and social trends and the fact that publishing employees are underpaid and no one thinks anymore and everyone just tries to be the “cool new thing” and . . .

Holy shit, I am old. I turned 44 last week, which means that I’ve been alive for approximately five different Henry Green rediscoveries. (I even participated in one!)

Everything can be new again. Which is encouraging. There’re always new readers who will read these amazing books. These life-changing books. Like our reissue of The Invented PartĚýin 2039 with a new cover and an introduction by an author who is currently twelve years old. Literally.

*

One thing that I’ve always harped on in my translation classes is how there is no stable “original,” no “infallible genius writer.” It sometimes comes out as anti-German (because there’s no one quite as enamored with the idea of received genius as the German literary establishment), but it’s not intentional—I just always found this naive and annoying.

Which is why Lawrence Venuti’s new book,Ěýis so exciting. This review by Matt Reeck in is so good, so smart—go check it out.

But to summarize—to the best of my 8th inning ability—Venuti’s statement, it is this: Leave behind the core idea that a source text has fixed, unchanging elements that needĚýto be conveyed in a translation. What would those even be? Not only is the source, original text in flux, but the concept of some sort of “instrumental” (to adopt Venuti’s incredibly helpful terminology) viewpoint in which the source is perfection and a translation is an approximation of an X factor (word meaning, impact, intent, reaction among readers of the original) is so philosophically dense that it needsĚýto be overthrown.

In the place of “lost in translation,” and “poetry is what’s lost in translation,” and every other silly, trite, misleading statement we’ve all heard, Venuti proposes a “hermeneutic approach” in which we start from the core concept that every translation is an interpretation of the original text and the translation is also a version of that interpretation. By starting from that viewpoint, the discussion around and evaluation of translations—and the field as a whole—can advance beyond the conversations that have been weighing it down for centuries.

To be honest, I don’t see the tenets of Venuti’s book to be a provocation. At all. It seems natural to me, and has provided me with the terminology and perspective to really clarify the muddier statements about translation I’ve been trying to work through with students (and here) for years. Even if there are times when the language reaches the post-structural academic stratosphere, it’s a book that’s definitely worth reading and, in Venuti’s words, change the way you think about translation.

I see this book functioning as a device of “desiring-production” in [Deleuze & Guattari’s] sense, producing in you, my reader, the will to critique a model that has been so deeply entrenched in thinking about translation for so long as to be unconscious, knee-jerk, rote. The difficulty or apparent inability to criticize instrumentalism means that coolly detached reasoning is not enough to be persuasive, this model is heavily cathected with desire, and the provocation of polemic has become necessary to release and direct it.

Even the chapter of the book on subtitling—the one I thought I would be least interested in—was absolutely fascinating. There’s a lot to mull over, but the ways in which he dismantles instrumentalism and demonstrates how it’s baked into so many seemingly innocent comments and metaphors can definitely open things up for a translator, scholar, or reader. I know it has for me . . .

It will be really interesting to see how the translation community reacts to this book, though. Although I think his ideas are sound, Venuti does nothing here to alter his reputation for being incredibly direct and willing to go after other theorists or translators.

I have to admit that, in the most self-involved way, I was terrified at the start of this that he would rip apart some crap article that I wrote in the past. It wouldn’t be hard! But I’m also nowhere noteworthy enough to merit any such attention. There are some pretty pointed attacks in here though . . . Here’s a smattering, starting with a response to a quote from Emily Wilson that she “wants to be saying, after multiple different revisions: This is the best I can get toward the truth.”

Whatever Wilson believes the truth of theĚýOdysseyĚýto be, she has assumed the existence of an invariant, contained in the Greek text, and that becomes the goal that she works “toward” achieving through successive revision of her translation. Wilson obviously remains unaware of any logical inconsistency in her comments. So does Wyatt Mason, a literary translator himself, who authored the profile and unwittingly chose to emphasize Wilson’s instrumentalism by concluding with it.

Ģą˝´«Ă˝ Polizzotti’sĚýSympathy for the Traitor, which I read, enjoyed, and plugged in the aforementioned “Controversy & Value” post:

Polizzotti’s text does not offer a coherently argued account of translation substantiated by exhaustive research, but rather a string of largely unexplained assertions couched in overstatement, metaphor, and clichĂ©. [. . .] His manifesto, not surprisingly, is riddled with contradictions that display how the instrumental model cuts off thinking about translation among translators and publishers.

Even Emily Apter’sĚýAgainst World LiteratureĚýcomes under scrutiny:

Apter has simply asserted her reading of [Eleanor] Marx’s translation [ofĚýMadame Bovary], not argued it with textual analyses and historical research. It is purely speculative, lacking any grounding in empirical data, making only the rare textual reference. It is the epitome of theoreticism, a fetishizing of theoretical concepts at the expense of linguistic, cultural, and social specificity. For the fact is that Apter is interested only in theory, not in translation. [. . .] Apter’s reliance on the current critical orthodoxy leads to half-baked formulations that require more careful exposition to make sense, but that would still seem of dubious value in understanding translation.

Is Venuti the translation studies equivalent of Tim Parks? Not in terms of their ideas (Parks is most definitely an instrumentalist), but in the way that neither are afraid to criticize specific authors, translators, or works.

But for Parks, this has earned him a bit of a dodgy reputation. I personally find his takes to be stimulating and interesting, but there are a lot of people I know who think of him as simply a curmudgeon whose translation “criticism” is just “mean.” Mostly they don’t care for his takedowns of specific translations (like his repeated criticisms of Deborah Smith for her Han Kang books), but once you get a reputation like that, it’s hard to win people back over.

I can’t say for sure how well Parks’s keynote at the American Literary Translators Association conference in 2017 was received, but I’m going to guess that it was “mixed”—much like the reaction to Venuti’s keynote back in 2011.

Translators—and academics—can be pretty sensitive about things like this. But I do think what Venuti is doing here is a bit different than simply hacking apart someone’s work. He’s examining a very ingrained way of thinking that has been rather damaging to the reception, promotion, and study of translation. Although some of the above might seem a bit personal (which is often the complaint about Parks), I read the intent as being more aimed at how instrumentalism has even infected some of the smartest translation thinkers.

(Also: That Nationals-Brewers game was WILD. I’m finishing this a day late because I got sucked up in Soto’s 8th inning heroics. And Grisham’s flub.)

This week’s music is “” by Metronomy.

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Ěýby Virginie Despentes, translated from the French by Frank Wynne (FSG)

The set-up for this book is simple enough: Vernon Subutex, former owner of a hip record shop that went out of business, has been evicted from his apartment. He had been scraping by for a few years selling memorabilia and getting his rent paid by his most famous musician friend, Alex Bleach, who just passed away. Subutex finds himself on the streets, couch surfing with one questionable friend after another, and in possession of some VHS tapes containing Alex Bleach’s “confessions.” (Which no one—not even Subutex—has seen.)

The tapes serve as a MacGuffin for the novel, with Subutex’s bouncing from one apartment to the next working as the book’s engine, allowing Despentes to delve into the minds of one asshole after another.

No book is for everyone, but it’s my sense—based in nothing but occasionally reading the Twitter and devouring all —that the quickest way for a book to be “not for everyone” is by depicting characters who have qualities that are offensive (“cancellable?”) to the majority of socially conscious readers.

Before I run through a litany of offensive shit to make a pretty basic point, I want to state my own take on Despentes books: Her presentation of the limited (re: awful, racist, misogynistic, unsettling) viewpoints of her characters serve to make the reader uncomfortably aware that a)Ěý these viewpoints exist in the world, and b) these viewpoints are damaging, damaged, fucked up. Despentes books are likeĚýmeta-woke. The wokeness is in the response to the non-woke characters. She’s making her point not by stating it, but by illustrating the opposite in an entertaining, non-strident, non-dogmatic way. These novels are character-based in the best possible way.

So let’s get to some controversial quotes! Taken out of context, each and every one of these could launch a Twitter avalanche of outrage—if the majority of Twitter users read books for adults. (Also: Trigger Warning. For real. I’m intentionally pulling out the most offensive things I can find. Not statements that I in any way endorse, at all, but sentiments that are part of Despentes’s overall strategy for crafting fiction that can have an impact on real life.)

Five minutes in Monoprix and Xavier feels like blowing the place sky high. His local Monoprix Supermarket is run by morons. [. . .] Xavier feels like giving the fat Arab woman wearing the hijab in front of him a good kick in the ass. Would it be possible, just for once, to walk two hundred yards down the street without having to suffer their hijabs, their hamsas dangling from their rear-view mirrors, and their belligerent little brats? A filthy race, hardly surprising everyone hates them. [. . .] Now, here in Monoprix, he wishes he had brought a bazooka. The fat blonde flashing her ugly thighs in a pair of tight shorts who dresses like she’s a supermodel when actually she’s just a cow? Bullet in the head. [. . .] The fat piker staring at women’s asses while he picks out his halal meat? Bullet in the temple. The Yid in the fright wig with the repulsive tits that hang down to her belly button—he hates women with sagging breasts: bullet in the knee.

This depiction of an imaginary, yet frightful and very racist, mass shooting in a supermarket takes place on page 57, in the first chapter depicting Xavier. I half-joked about this on a Three Percent Podcast, but if this were a movie, its release would be delayed indefinitely.

Obviously, even if there were another WalMart shooting between now and the November 5th pub date, FSG wouldn’t postpone the publication of this novel (which has been available in the UK for a while, along withĚýVernon Subutex 2), since potential backlash and monetary losses for a novel in translation are a fraction of a fraction of a potential opening weekend for a Hollywood movie.

At the same time, and to go back to the point above, there are so many examples of YA titles being cancelled before publication in recent years for accusations of various forms of racism (see or ), including when characters don’t realize fast enough that they shouldn’t judge our friends from Frolix 8 by the size of their tentacles.

From theĚýVultureĚýarticle ´Ç˛ÔĚýThe Black Witch, the first book of aĚýtrilogy:

The Black WitchĚýcenters on a girl named Elloren who has been raised in a stratified society where other races (including selkies, fae, wolfmen, etc.) are considered inferior at best and enemies at worst. But when she goes off to college, she begins to question her beliefs, an ideological transformation she’s still working on when she joins with the rebellion in the last of the novel’s 600 pages. (It’s the first of a series; one hopes that Elloren will be more woke in book two.)

It was this premise that led Sinyard to slamĚýThe Black Witch as “racist, ableist, homophobic, and . . . written with no marginalized people in mind,” in a review that consisted largely of pull quotes featuring the book’s racist characters saying or doing racist things. Here’s a representative excerpt, an offending sentence juxtaposed with Sinyard’s commentary:

“pg. 163. The Kelts are not a pure race like us. They’re more accepting of intermarriage, and because of this, they’re hopelessly mixed.”

Yes, you just read that with your own two eyes. This is one of the times my jaw dropped in horror and I had to walk away from this book.

I’ve not readĚýThe Black WitchĚý(and never will) and am not part of this subculture of Twitter, so I really shouldn’t comment, but if we applied this viewpoint toĚýVernon Subutex 1Ěý . . . I can only imagine that most people would be appalled by its publication. And miss out on Vernon’s comments a few pages later, after he spends some time with Xavier, who, we all know—readers, characters, and author alike— is a garbage human. Here’s Xavier talking about Elisabeth LĂ©vy, a newscaster, followed by Vernon’s internal response:

“If you don’t like it in France, just pack your bags and fuck off back home, you bitch. They really piss me off, these Zionists, they’re everywhere these days. This is a Christian country, last time I checked. I’ve never been anti-Semitic, but if you want my opinion, we should napalm the whole region, Palestine, Lebanon, Israel, Iran, Iraq, same deal: napalm. Use the land to build golf courses and Formula 1 racing circuits. I could fix the problem in no time, let me tell you . . . But it’s a pain in the ass to have to listen to some half-wog Jew talking about France like this is her country.”

*

Xavier has always been a right-wing cunt. He has not changed, it is simply that the world is now aligned with his obsessions. Vernon does not rise to the bait. Personally, he likes Elisabeth LĂ©vy. You can tell she’s a woman who enjoys sex. And coke—which is an added bonus.

As a reader, we go from shock and uncomfortableness, to a sigh of relief (tinged by a bit of moral anxiety over the use of the “c” word), back to uncomfortable, since Vernon’s viewpoint might evade Xavier’s racism, but leans into some misogynistic assumptions.

Pulling quotes like this . . . man, this book should be so controversial. Or, if the world were more rational and less knee-jerk Twitter, this book would engender a discussion about how non-PC authors can convey socially progressive ideas. A paper/panel on the moral discomfort of reading this book (which, again, is one of the best Man Booker International finalists of the past few years) would beĚýfascinating.ĚýI want to see/read someone much smarter than me—and with much more time to devote to this—work out all the subtle ways that Despentes manages to dismiss all of the perspectives in the book. (Minus The Hyena, who might be our moral compass?)

It’s not just the male characters who are offensive in this novel—just check this bit from Sylvie, one of the women Vernon gets “involved with” in the course of his itinerant travels:

When Laure comes to dinner, Sylvie discreetly steers her toward the sofa for fear that her gigantic ass will break her favorite armchair. When they talk about guys, Laure joins in as though she were one of the girls. But with the face like the back end of a bus and the manners of a trucker, her only hope of getting fucked occasionally is the rise and rise of functional alcoholism. It must be awful to have a figure that no amount of dieting, exercise, or surgery could make attractive.

Oof.

Since I really, really want you to read this book, I’m going to step away from theĚýmostĚýcontroversial statements and just include some nice jabs at social media (because trying to offend chronic Tweeters and Facebook users is 100% my brand):

But then Facebook came along and this generation of thirtysomethings is made up of solipsistic psychopaths verging on insanity. Naked ambition stripped of any sense of legitimacy.

*

She would like to track down the asshat who came up with the idea that every headline on the Yahoo! homepage should be a riddle—the “incredible discovery at the Chicago airport”—the psychopath who came up with the most irritating clickbait formula imaginable by not telling readers what the article is about.

*

Past the age of forty, everyone is like a bombed out city.

I’m going to stop here, I think my point is made: this book is offensive to everyone in a way that gives rise to a more nuanced point of view. It reminds me of the best of Ismael Reed. Books likeĚýReckless EyeballingĚýthat pillory everyone—from the obvious targets of those in control (whites, males, capitalists) to those who are marginalized, yet still imperfect.

If you don’t like it? Don’t read it. But there’s a reason Virginie Despentes is a rock star in France and the rest of the world, and the precision with which she depicts these offensive, limited viewpoints is an incredible reminder of what people need to rise above.

*

That post above was initially going to be part of the Women in Translation posts, but I didn’t get it done in time, and it felt/feels not in the spirit of the month.

So I decided to do something different. And although it’s always fun to write posts with secret connections that no one seems to pick up on, it can also walk me into one of my depressive episodes, so, to avoid that, here’s a spoiler: I decided to pair a book by a female author (one controversial, one that’s not), with a bookĚýaboutĚýtranslation that’s written by a male (one that’s not controversial, one that might be).

Ěýby Mark Polizzotti (MIT Press)

What makesĚýSympathy for the TraitorĚýby Mark Polizzotti valuable to emerging translators and others involved in this field of study?

1). It’s not an overly theoretical book. From the “Ground Rules”:

As an additional disclaimer, I should note that those looking for a flashy new theory need not bother reading any further: there are plenty of them out there, from the prescriptive to the prohibitive (not to mention the plainly abstruse), and I don’t intend to add to the noise. Consider this rather an “antitheory,” or perhaps just a common-sense approach.

 

2). Raises criticisms of Schleiermacher and Benjamin’s most famous translation essays.

More recently, [Schleiermacher’s] prescription of “moving the reader toward the author” has been embraced by proponents of foreignization, who aim to resist perceived Anglo-American ethnocentrism by bending English to the source language’s norms, and who see in Schleiermacher’s arguments a counterweight to the imperialistic, “domesticating” approach of most contemporary translations. The irony is that there is also a nation-building subtext to Schleiermacher’s argument that harks straight back to the Romans—and that, with its historical imperative of gathering all foreign treasures into the Teutonic storehouse, rings both idealistic and ominous.

*

Because translation is seen as derivative and abstract, its ultimate merit in Benjamin’s view is not to produce a new literary work, but rather to have “extended the boundaries of the German language,” the same case that Schleiermacher made for it in the previous century. [. . .] “No poem is intended for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the listener.” Consequently, “whenever a translation undertakes to serve the reader,” it is by nature a failure. Translation, breathing of a “higher and purer linguistic air,” instead points the way toward, but never reaches, the “inaccessible realm of reconciliation and fulfillment of all languages.” It’s an enticing theoretical construct [. . .] But, devoid of human presence and disdainful of human response, it exists only in the most rarefied atmosphere, unconnected to real linguistic exchange, and its end point might be not so much pure as sterile.

 

3). Not 100% behind the “morality dictum” for why we should publish and read translations.

This is where I can’t help but feel uneasy with the moral subtext of , however much I agree with them in spirit. On the one hand, I recognize the ethical benefit of seeing things from different angles, breaking out of our arrogant parishes. At the same time, there is a true-believer aspect to this way of putting the matter that ultimately does translation a disservice—not helped by the fact that the listings for many presses, especially the earnest independents, tend to skew toward a fairly homogenous, equally earnest, profile. As with many well-meaning efforts, the accent is laid on shoulds and oughts, whereas the real joy of translation is precisely the new vistas it affords, the thrill of discoveries not otherwise possible, the appeal to our sense of pleasure rather than duty.

 

4). Provides translators with a positive, “depends on the situation,” outlook. (This is something sophisticated translators know, and although it would be useful to articulate the intricacies of the “why translate X in this way and Y in another” situation, this is the sort of book that a grad student translator can read and alleviate their pure anxiety over what they’re working on—that is incredibly important.)

The question, as always, is whether the text produces the desired effect, to which the answer is, ultimately, subjective: a translator must first interpret the original, see what effect it has on her, and then try to represent that effect in a language and culture not the author’s own. Whether that original will have the same effect on other readers is anyone’s guess. [. . .] A translation has to represent the original in a way that allows a target reader to experience as much as possible the spirit and purpose and pleasure (or distaste) and vigor (or indolence) of the work on which it’s based. It has to speak to the reader in a way that justifies the original’s claim of being worthy of translation to begin with. It has to beĚýconvincing.

 

5). References me, indirectly. Not going to quote this, but being in an index is ´Ú±ô˛ąłŮłŮ±đ°ůľ±˛Ô˛µâ€”especially because they included my “W.”—and seeing Open Letter name-checked with Archipelago, Dalkey, and the like is gratifying.

6). Has some ideas about Venuti—whose latest books book is the one that will be featured next post. (Because I know from the index that Venuti’sĚýContra Instrumentalism addresses this particular book, I decided to start with Polizzotti first.) At the moment, I don’t favor Polizzotti’s viewpoint over Venuti’s or vice-versa, I’m just overjoyed that they are in conversation with one another. (Although Venuti not using the Oxford comma is a strike!)

Some of these academics champion “foreignizing” translations that intentionally flout the conventions of the target language to retain those of the source. [. . .] In Venuti’s telling, the literary translator comes off as a kind of CIA wet boy, perpetrating a terrorist act whose “violence . . . resides in the very purpose and activity of translation: the reconstitution of the foreign text in accordance with values, beliefs and representations that pre-exist it in the target language . . . [which constitutes] an appropriation of foreign cultures for domestic agendas.” [. . .] Venuti’s basic point is that translation must not be used to homogenize other cultural viewpoints, and that the “illusion of transparency” resulting from current practice obscures the culturally weighted contribution of the translator. [. . .] But as with many polemics, Venuti’s wilts under its own heat.ĚýOf courseĚýtranslation is a product of interpretative choices conditioned by the translator’s home culture. [. . .] (The irony is that Venuti’s own translations tend to read with at least reasonable fluency, further pointing to the academic gap between theory and practice.)

Perfect place to stop for today. Next week’s “Value & Controversy” will flip-flop today’s post, looking atĚýMalina‘s value to culture and New Direction, and Venuti’s “controversial” new book.

But more to the point of this website, they’ve also launched a more digital component to the Review—the “TIR Forum on Literature and Translation.”:

Translations have played an important part in the history of The Iowa Review, especially through the magazine’s various affiliations with writers from around the globe who have visited Iowa City over the years, to read at Prairie Lights Bookstore, study or teach in the Writers’ Workshop, participate in seminars and conferences, or in the International Writing Program or Summer Writing Festival, or because we’ve published their work and they have an inkling to meet us in person. Iowa is also the home of the oldest MFA program devoted to literary translation in the United States, a spin-off of the Workshop from the 1960s, guided for many years by Daniel Weissbort, long-time editor of Modern Poetry in Translation and translator of Joseph Brodsky, Nikolai Zabolotsky, and Claude Simon, among many others.

Here we are proud to publish a new forum on literature and translation, with an inaugural essay by translator and scholar Lawrence Venuti. This essay originated as a plenary lecture delivered to the annual conference of the American Literary Translators Association in October of 2010, where, to put it mildly, it caused a bit of a stir.

Yes, yes it did. You can read Venuti’s piece in full by but as a gloss, here’s a few key paragraphs:

This state of affairs, however, is not only to be recorded and lamented. It must also be interrogated. What, I want to ask, can a translator learn from rejections? I will present two recent instances from my own experience, although I have chosen to preserve the anonymity of the editors in question. What follows is not a personal attack on these particular editors, but a critique of current editorial methods and their assumptions about translation. My account, therefore, should not be dismissively reduced to sheer sour grapes. What happened to me can and does happen to many other translators. I have decided to go public in an effort to engage issues that urgently need to be discussed by both translators and readers of translations alike. [. . .]

After an editor with whom I was acquainted had rejected some poems, I questioned the decision. I didn’t expect the rejection to be reconsidered. No, I rather wanted to force the magazine to do what magazines rarely do: to make explicit the standards by which it judged the translations, or if not this particular submission, then translations in general. Editor X was kind enough to reply, explaining that the poems “didn’t make us feel as if the tops of our heads were taken off.” I pressed further: had Editor X ever considered that translations, by their very nature, should be judged differently from original compositions in English, or that the standard might include but should nonetheless differ from a visceral reaction that is evidently rooted in a homegrown sensibility? After all, Emily Dickinson was being quoted at me. Editor X thought my view novel and promised to give it some thought, but the conversation stopped there. [. . .]

The experiences I have been describing reflect the continuing dominance of a belletristic approach to translation among literary translators, whether they are affiliated with academic institutions or work independently, whether their writing also includes poetry and fiction or focuses on translation, and whether or not they also write about translation in the form of reviews and commentary. The belletrism stretches back to the early twentieth century: it originated in modernist literary practices, particularly in the insertion of translations or adaptations in original compositions, but also in the polyglossia that characterizes many modernist texts, the use and quotation of foreign languages, whereby the reader is turned into a translator. These practices erased the distinctions that can usually be drawn between first- and second-order creations, permitting a translation or adaptation to be regarded as an original composition. [. . .]

Remarkably, Pound makes no mention of the source text when he describes the sort of translation that is “original writing” or aspires to be such through adaptation. He assigns it an aesthetic autonomy from the source text and judges it not according to a concept of equivalence, but according to the “standards” by which he judges original compositions.

I call this approach belletristic because it emphasizes the aesthetic qualities of the translated text itself. It is also impressionistic in the sense that it is vague or ill-defined. Pound’s essay is filled with intriguing ideas, but it is the statement of a practitioner, not a theoretical formulation, and he does not make explicit exactly what the standards might be. They could be inferred from his practice, it might be argued, although any inference would constitute an interpretation, dependent on and varying with the theoretical assumptions that different readers bring to the interpretive act. [. . .]

During the 1960s the belletristic approach was decisive in improving the cultural status of translators because it characterized translation as a writing practice. As Edmund Keeley has observed, “translators began to be accepted as legitimate creative artists during the mid-1960s and, eventually, as legitimate teachers of translation in the various university workshops that came into existence as part of the rapidly expanding field of study called Creative Writing.” In 1963 Paul Engle, then director of the Writers Workshop at The University of Iowa, invited Keeley to teach what was the first translation workshop in the United States. The pedagogy was belletristic, emphasizing the translation as an independent literary text. When in September of 2010 I interviewed Keeley about his work at Iowa, he recalled that Engle instructed him to “treat [the translation workshop] like a poetry or fiction workshop” and to “focus on the product in English.” The students were master’s candidates in poetry or fiction who translated from a variety of foreign languages. They were asked to present their translations to the workshop by explaining why they chose the foreign text, what rival translations they might have worked with or against, and what specific problems the text posed for translation into English. The content of the course consisted solely of the students’ translations. Keeley saw no need for readings in translation theory and commentary. In the interview, in fact, he described himself “as ardently against the idea of translation theory. You don’t read the theory of poetry to learn how to write a poem or to teach the writing of one.”

What recommends the very different hermeneutic model is both its explanatory power and its practical application. The interpretive activity begins with the choice of a source text and continues in the development of a strategy to translate it. These stages in the translation process are determined not merely by the source text and culture but by values, beliefs, and representations in the receiving culture. Translators should be able to give an account of their work that is cognizant of these cultural conditions. They should be able to show how, given these conditions, their translation aims to fix the form and meaning of the source text so as to inscribe a particular interpretation. The inscription can never be more than provisional, one interpretation among several different possibilities, and it is always subject to further interpretation by the range of cultural constituencies in the receiving situation. Nonetheless, translators should be capable of articulating the interpretants that make possible their translations. By “interpretants” I mean the various factors that every translator applies to transform the source text into a translation. Interpretants can be formal, including a concept of equivalence, such as a semantic correspondence based on dictionary definitions, or a concept of style, a set of linguistic features linked to a particular genre (as when a foreign crime novel might require a suitably hard-boiled prose in the translating language). Interpretants can also be thematic, meanings or codes. Examples include an interpretation of the source text that was presented elsewhere in commentary (such as scholarly research) or an ideological standpoint affiliated with a specific social group (as when a feminist or queer translator encodes a foreign text with a political agenda).

OK, I know that’s a pretty long quote, but I think it’s worthwhile in laying out the basics of Venuti’s argument, his objections to the “belletristic” approach to translation, and his belief in creating a more theoretically informed translation culture. (And, just a reminder: read the

Since the “TIR Forum” is geared towards discussion and argument, yesterday they posted Tim Parks’s reaction to Venuti’s piece:

But let us turn to the more interesting area of the paper: the insistence that translation theory be at the fore when we present and publish translations. Venuti doesn’t offer a theory of his own here, so it’s not easy to be entirely sure either what he means by theory in the context of translation, or whether he envisages any number of competing and equally valid theories, or assumes that through a scientific approach one might arrive at a theory superior to all others. [. . .]

Rather, he wants to change the nature of the phenomenon, to change the way people translate and the way readers approach translations (“the new translator I am fashioning,” he says boldly). In particular, he appears to be encouraging translators to be unconcerned that their work seem originally written or effortlessly fluent in the language into which they translate, and encouraging readers to accept the idea that reading a translation is a different experience from reading a text originally written in their language, requiring on the contrary a more “thoughtful” rather than “spontaneous and immediate” response. (Here I have difficulty with the idea that the two responses are mutually exclusive. Many fine works of literature provoke both an immediate and a thoughtful response, the latter being largely prompted by the former.) [. . .]

Such an approach arises from an optimistic and political vision that ascribes to translation not the task of making a product of one culture available for appreciation in another but the meta-task of constantly heightening our awareness of language and the way we use it, regardless and perhaps at the expense of the commercial and maybe even the critical success of the work. This approach is thus in line with aspects of Benjamin’s famous “The Task of the Translator” and Derrida’s famously abstruse commentary upon it. (What remains of Derrida is always a sense of wonder that he should have rendered a quite reasonable line of thought so strenuously obscure and nearly mystical, as if it were important that only a small group of initiates or acolytes subscribe to it.) [. . .]

If we assume that Venuti is proposing that a translated text offer a series of surprises and novelties in our language unlike those of an original text, how are those surprises generated, and how are they linked together to form a coherent whole? How do they stand in relation to the content and style (if we can ever separate the two) of the original text? What if our author had a considerable investment in the conventional forms of languages—was a member, perhaps, of a highly conservative society—and wished to have nothing to with subversive techniques or texts that foregrounded the problematic of translation?

Venuti’s position perplexes me to the point that I feel sure that there is something I haven’t understood, something he could set me right on, and I wish he would spare us his litany of complaints and offer some exciting in-depth analyses of translations that he feels exemplify all he aspires to and admires; or if he has already done this (for I haven’t read all he’s written), then he might refer us to it so we can go away and do our homework. [. . .]

But to get back to my question for Venuti: when a translator works this way, each word he sets down—and of course, above all, the play of words semantically and rhythmically—has to do with what he understands of the original and the pattern of impressions it creates on his mind. I repeat: it is not a question of elegance or “belletrism” (how I hate that word), but of trying to find a way to make a particular text, which the translator has explored in-depth, happen in his or her own language. If I ask one of my students why he chose this word or that syntactical structure, he will show me something in the original that prompted this solution; he will tell me how this fits in with what he thought was going on in the original—it is conventional or unconventional, fluent or awkward, in a way he feels was prompted by the original and appropriate in the present context of Italian letters.

My question is simple: when Venuti’s aware and progressive “new” translator chooses solutions that are provocative and non-standard in his own language, provoking a thoughtful rather than a spontaneous response, heightening awareness and alerting the reader to the translated status of the text, is he doing so in response to the pattern of effects and impressions he believes he has found in the original? Or is he imposing a predetermined strategy that could perfectly well lead to similar effects being generated in translations of quite different originals (the case with Pound), and translating regardless of the impressions those originals created in the translator?

Both pieces are extremely interesting, and should be read in full. (Again, click for Venuti’s, and for Parks’s.) And they should be debated. Expanding this sort of discussion is great for translators, scholars, and all other interested parties. TIR has a great comments section, so if you want to speak your piece you can go to it.

Anyway, MLA was a pretty interesting experience. This was the first time Open Letter has displayed at MLA (or any conference for that matter), and the one thing I noticed was that women tended to avoid our booth like the plague. We shared the booth with (awesome), and it must’ve been our discussions about football (Seattle?), or something. Regardless, it was an interesting show, and hopefully we’ll be back next year with a larger reception and even more books. (FYI: Next year’s MLA Presidential Theme is “Language, Literature, Learning.” Which seems, at first glance, to a quasi-outsider, to be, well, obvious, but there you are.)

In addition to all the presentations, panels, cocktail receptions, and job interviews, the MLA also includes a number of book awards, including the which is awarded each even-numbered year. (I know, but it’s for the works from 2010, and since the MLA used to take place between Christmas and New Year’s Day, this made a bit more sense.)

This year’s award went to Breon Mitchell for his retranslation of Gunter Grass’s The Tin Drum. Here’s what the selection committee had to say:

On virtually every page of Breon Mitchell’s new translation of The Tin Drum, the reader finds brilliant solutions to vexing problems. This meticulous work, marking the fiftieth anniversary of the original publication of GĂĽnter Grass’s classic novel, accomplishes precisely what one hopes for in a retranslation: it brings us closer to both source and target languages. Mitchell makes us aware that even good work, such as Ralph Manheim’s respected earlier translation, bears improvement, as great consistency, coherence, and tempo are achieved throughout the entire volume in rendering its obsessive drumming theme. The translator’s afterword, where Mitchell explains carefully and concisely all the “tools of the trade” available to twenty-first-century translators, performs an enormous contribution to the field by lifting the curtain on the translator’s craft and making clear to readers the huge challenges at hand.

Congrats, Breon! I’ve heard him speak about this translation a couple of time (most recently at the Wolff Symposium, which include this about his career in translation and work on The Tin Drum.)

It’s also worth nothing that honorable mention went to Lawrence Venuti for his translation of Edward Hopper by Ernest FarrĂ©s. Again, the committee:

Lawrence Venuti, one of our foremost translation theorists, has applied his principles of pragmatic and ethical translation to the contemporary Catalan poetry of Edward Hopper with superb results. Venuti’s translation of Ernest FarrĂ©s’s volume, written in a source language whose literature is little known in the English-speaking world, constitutes a beautiful triangulation of cultures and media. We read with fascination as the North American translator captures the Catalan poet’s meditations on the works of an iconic, popular North American painter. Venuti has not only accurately followed FarrĂ©s’s shifting styles through the progression of poems but also sought out some of Hopper’s own idiosyncratic vocabulary through excavation of the painter’s correspondence and diaries. This brilliant choice on Venuti’s part, explained in the volume’s introduction and demonstrated in the endnotes, results in an original translation strategy that redefines traditional fidelity to the source text.

Congrats, Larry! Ironically, at the last MLA, Erica Mena and I interviewed Venuti about his translation of Edward Hopper for what became the very first Reading the World Podcast. Venuti is always interesting, and he’s totally on in this podcast—definitely worth listening to.

Anyway, jokes aside, this is a solid issue, with the key piece being an excellent long essay by Larry Venuti on his career as a translator. Entitled the piece covers Venuti’s entryway into literary translation, some of his thoughts on fidelity, and an awesome bit about his editorial arguments with Grove/Atlantic about his translation of Melissa P.‘s 100 Strokes of the Brush Before Bed. (This section is really interesting, but it’s obviously a one-sided account of the story, so before quoting anything, I just want to say that I love&respect all the Grove editors . . . )

But before getting to the controversial sections, here’s an excerpt about how Venuti sees the role of translator:

After translating fifteen books into English, mostly from Italian, after collaborating with many different publishers, large and small, commercial and university, after reviewing a steady stream of translations for newspapers and immersing myself in the growing academic industry of translation studies, certain truths have become self-evident. Translation is transformation. A translation can never reproduce a literary work, even though it is routinely read as if it were precisely that work. A translator offers no more than an interpretation, one possibility among others, which is both less and more than the foreign text. Merely to be readable, a translation must obviously be written in a language with which the reader is familiar. To go beyond readability, however, to enable a powerfully engaging experience, the language must somehow be appealing to the reader, who, it can’t be overemphasized, is not the reader for whom the foreign text was written. How can a translator avoid transforming it?

From this point of view, time-worn yet still unquestioned clichés prove to be utterly false. Take “traduttore traditore,” the Italian slur wherein the very name of “translator” is turned into a pun on “traitor.” Translation can be considered treachery only if one naively assumes that it can and should communicate a foreign text in some direct, untroubled way. Such loyalty is impossible, even if the translator consults a dictionary for every foreign word. That would just widen the spectrum of semantic possibilities, splintering the foreign words into so many scintillating chips of ice that start melting as soon as any interpretive heat is applied to them. Whereas the translator’s task is to freeze meaning in a form that is intelligible and interesting in another language and culture. The inevitable thaw occurs as the translation warms to the touch of different readerships, its charm dissolving with changes in literary taste, ultimately creating a demand for a new version.

For anyone interested in translation and translators, you definitely have to read the entirety of Venuti’s piece. It is really fascinating, and filled with great anecdotes, etc. But, like any stats driven normal journalist knows, controversy sells. So I’m skipping right over all those bits to get to the section on how Grove fucked with Venuti’s translation.

An editor’s approach to a translator’s choices, regardless of how reflective or calculated they may be, can vary widely from unquestioning acceptance to intransigent opposition. Put a page before most editors, of course, and you can expect it to be altered. Still, translations seem to invite the most extensive sort of editing. When my version of Melissa P.’s 2003 memoir, Cento colpi di spazzola prima di andare a dormire, had been copyedited, I received back a manuscript that was heavily marked up, almost every page containing some change. The editor at Grove/Atlantic spelled out her agenda in a cover letter: everything must be made “smooth and natural for the American/English reader.” I was shocked that she would describe her editing in these terms. Her experience with translations was limited, since she had spent most of her time selling foreign rights. Worse, she hadn’t a clue that her approach was now regarded as disreputable.

OK, before going on, I just want to say that I’ve heard (and even witnessed) about this sort of thing happening quite a bit. And from presses both big and small. Certain publishers take the view that by being the publisher, by having decided to invest heavily in a given book, they have every right in the world to massage the text until it resembles what they feel has the best chance to help them make bank on the titles they decide to publish. I’m not saying I agree with this (I pretty much don’t), just want to point out that this is how the business functions, and that Grove is not alone in this criticism. OK, back to the fun stuff:

Why translate this book? I was attracted by its status as a pop-culture phenomenon. With over one million copies sold in Italian, it was saying something about Italy, even if that something was up for interpretation. The controversy aired in reviews, on chat shows, and across internet blogs dredged up a tangle of ideas about youth and sex, women and writing. The most telling refrain: the book couldn’t (read a subliminal shouldn’t) have been written by a girl. Popular literature can offer a revealing glimpse of a foreign culture. Yet until very recently anglophone publishers customarily neglected it in preference for the elite aesthetic. I wanted to confront readers with a current craze that, for Italians at least, was rivaling the value assigned to high-brow works.

Melissa’s writing uniquely suited this task. The shifts in style and genre allowed me to depart from standard English, the most familiar form of the language and the most likely to foster the cherished illusion that the translation isn’t a translation, but the foreign text. Melissa’s Italian ranges from slang and obscenities to purple prose and poeticisms to porno cliché. Mimicking these nonstandard forms promised to frustrate any reader’s expectation for transparency. I aimed to foreground the strangeness of the book, calling attention to its artificiality, although the titillating material guaranteed that my choices would not be unpleasurable.

My editor thought otherwise. I had to use “beautiful” instead of “lovely,” since “American teenagers generally don’t use this word to describe things.” Likewise “pants” instead of “trousers,” “crying” instead of “weeping,” “totally” instead of “utterly.” Archaisms provoked disagreement, even in a Gothic sex dream in which the cold enters the “finestrello” (embrasure) of the castle cell where Melissa lies naked, and she smells her “umori” (humors) on her monkish companion’s face. Ethnic dialects were out. For the “sugo” on the spaghetti eaten by Melissa and her parents I chose “gravy” precisely because the word is Italian-American for this meal. It was changed to “sauce.”

Occasionally my choices met with obtuseness. “Some people have plans that are linear and orderly,” Melissa is told at an orgy, “while others prefer a rococo caprice.” That curious phrase is my calque of the Italian (“un capriccio rococò”). My editor judged it “so obscure as to be meaningless,” so she consulted colleagues at Grove/Atlantic, who concurred. Yet Melissa is simply using an art historical metaphor to distinguish between conventional sex and kinkiness. Amazing that a publisher of erotic classics doesn’t employ editors who could get the point.

This is all pretty aggressive, and Venuti even points out the NY Times review bashed his translation (“Cringe-inducing euphemisms abound here [. . .] Perhaps these words are more euphonious in Italian than in Lawrence Venuti’s translation.”), which, employing the logic of all that came before, is more the fault of the Grove editor than anyone else.

What’s ironic though? The book has sold more than 100,000 copies when most translations sell about 5,000 3,000 500. So maybe the smooth language did appeal to the masses? Just wondering aloud and remembering a call-in radio show I did a few years ago which ended with a woman calling in to complain about how she can’t read international literature because she can’t stand not being able to pronounce the names. And, not to beat dead a dying horse, but we recently got a postcard from a woman who returned her Open Letter subscription, claiming that nothing in her past could’ve prepared her for the incomprehensibility of cultural references in The Golden Calf. In her own words, “this book isn’t at all like The Elegance of the Hedgehog.“ Great.

Anyway, Venuti’s piece aside, I’d also recommend checking out the Emily Toder’s translation of some poems by the and the that Oana Sanziana Marian translated from the Romanian.

Well, at long last, we’re ready to release the first episode, featuring Lawrence Venuti, translator, theorist, and scholar. He talked with us about Edward Hopper, a collection of poems by Catalan author Ernest Farres that Venuti translated and that was published by Graywolf earlier this year.

In contrast to some of the upcoming podcasts—which include conversations with Susan Harris, Esther Allen, Suzanne Jill Levine, and Bill Johnston—this one’s a bit on the long side, but well worth it. Venuti is fascinating to listen to, and the way he breaks down his translation—and Farres’s project as a whole—is spectacular.

Anyway, you can listen to the podcast via this post, or by downloading it through iTunes (assuming that iTunes will start working again—it was having “technical difficulties” yesterday). And stay tuned—we’ll release episode #2 at the beginning of March . . .

One might expect a poetic work of ekphrasis to be centered around the image, but what is most immediately enticing about this book is the narrative-lyrical arc which appropriates Hopper’s works and biography, subjugating them to the voice of the poet while the poet simultaneously becomes subsumed in them. It is a book of poetry that demands attention from the reader at every move, and demands that attention on its own terms. Like listening to a symphony in full, the poems in their individual movements culminate into a picture of a life that is at once specific and universally recognizable. Venuti, like a great conductor, moves the poetry through his own language that neither obscures nor clarifies the richness of the original, but allows it to be heard in its full tonality. The composition and translation both are ekphrasis at its most successful, its most layered. In “Self Portrait, 1925-1930” —the first poem in the book, and the only one with an overt intrusion of FarrĂ©s’s voice—Hopper is reincarnated through the Borgesian mirror of the painting into the body of FarrĂ©s. But the transmigration is incomplete, and the voice slips in opportune places throughout the book to reveal a Catalan poet seeing Hopper’s North America, and in it the broader scope of modernity’s disillusionment. FarrĂ©s shares Hopper’s “fears, obsessions, anxieties” and the immediacy of their pressure on the landscape and people resonate through the language, preventing even the slightest distancing of the voice.

The ordering of the poems is brilliantly narrative, moving from the self-reflective interior to a railroad station and train that takes Hopper/Farrés from a rural setting to the archetypal city and eventually through middle age to Cape Cod. The bulk of the book is comprised by a sequence of cityscapes, including Hopper’s famous “Nighthawks, 1942” as an existential dialogue between the man and woman in the painting confronting the realization that “nothing in life is irreplaceable.” These insights, sometimes heard in the voice of Hopper, sometimes in a muted Farrés, and sometimes in the voice of the subject of the painting (which is always ultimately the self of the artists) border on the overly philosophical. It is the ironizing context of retrospective engagement with modernity, and the plurality of persona, that pushes these reflective moments into poignancy. Voyeurism and aural intrusion into the painting implicate the reader as well as the poet/painter/translator in these mini-dramas in which every subject is self. “Hotel Room, 1931” exemplifies this, spinning into the dizzying progression of time:

          At the hotel a woman in her underwear
          pores over a train timetable. An hour later,
          in low spirits and bone-tired,
          she’ll start to pace around the room
          leaving a fruity fragrance in the air
          that reeks of mustiness.
          A week later they’ll be no
          tangible results. A year later
          she’ll be the object of caresses.
          Another four and no lullabies.
          Another ten and the delicate balance
          between youth and age will be gone.
          Another twenty and she’ll cling
          to an expansive ethics of listlessness
          and Triumph of the Will.
          Another century and nobody’s
          going to remember a thing about her.
          In two centuries there’ll be
          no polar ice caps. When five
          billion years go by,
          there won’t even be a sun.

The fixed moment in history recorded in the painting expands into present and future—a bleak shared future of oblivion. We intrude on the intimacy of the moment, as Hopper does, and intrude on the intimacy of the moment of Hopper’s painting it, as FarrĂ©s does. This woman, privacy violated, becomes the catalyst for an ironic nihilism in which we are “directly implicated” (“The City,” 1927).

The city poems pulse with motion and frenzy, the fears and passions of a young Hopper/Farrés. In “The City, 1927” we along with him are submerged “deep down, in the very marrow, amidst a whorl / of elliptical subjects, colorful scenes.” Here, the careful density and pace of sound and rhythm in the language is evidence of a masterful translation, and Venuti’s Farrés is most powerful in places like “Summer in the City, 1949”:

          The man is looking for trouble,
          thrills, sublime ecstasies, places
          short on folklore, deals,
          calculated approximations, objects
          of desire that grab
          your attention and keep
          your cool, the latest rage
          at your fingertips, binges,
          infatuations, sexual icons,
          irrefutable proofs, joyrides, advice
          within parentheses, green lights, comfy shoes,
          forms of expression that presuppose
          supremacy, free tickets to the game,
          ways of killing time that are reckless and frenzied,
          the upper hand before bellyaching, answers
          as plain as the nose on your face.
          The woman, however, is looking for love.

The building, pulsing momentum of desire, of the city, and of moving through life is enthralling. The places where syntax slips over the enjambment—“grab,” “keep” and “rage” sliding into “advice” and “answers”—brush against the erotic tension of this poem, and the concise unenjambed second sentence of the poem counterpoints the cascading frenetic energy of male desire. Just glancing across the page at the Catalan reveals Venuti’s masterful treatment of the poem, which in the Catalan is one line shorter and doesn’t place the woman on a line of her own. There’s also the surprise of “bellyaching” which glides smoothly in the voice of Hopper, until the startling realization occurs that this is Hopper speaking Catalan and so “bellyaching” is a moment of linguistic impossibility that prevents the reader from becoming too comfortable with the language.

The frenzy of youth and the city thread through the bulk of the book, tempering bit by bit as the feminine (the presence of Nivison, Hopper’s wife and model for many of his female figures) becomes more prominent. The diction becomes mimetic of the journey out of the city to the bucolic Cape Cod setting, expanding into placid, airy and languorous description. The prosaic overtakes the poetic as comfort and familiarity replace the angst and frenzy of youth. Towards the end, as we fall into a comfortable rhythm, we are told:

          You’ve got this down pat. We sketch orbits
          around a highly valued microcosm,
          a landscape composed of organic dust,
          and calmly accept that the march of time
          will make us different from what we were,
          filling with meaning what was empty
          emptying of meaning what contained it.
          (“Sea Watchers,” 1952)

In “Sun in an Empty Room, 1963” (my personal favorite Hopper painting), which is placed near the end of the book, Hopper via Farrés via Venuti tells us:

          I rediscover myself and leave a sign.
          . . .
          All the same, I’m not moving very far.
          No matter where you go, you never find
          the way out of the labyrinth.

The labyrinth of these poems are much more than an homage to Hopper. They are a rediscovery. A new look at the intricate stories that make up the imagined life of one of the most important twentieth century U.S. painters. A poetical-fictional biography that succeeds in its imaginative power to entice the reader into believing it as truth, which of course it is. Like the works of great art they illuminate, these poems reveal a moment (of life, of time, of history) in its fullest dimension. In this book’s ambitious transcendence of the individual, FarrĂ©s shines through Hopper as a poet to pay attention to.

I’ve been interested in this collection for a while—partly because I love Catalan lit, but also because Quim Monzo’s Gasoline (which we’re publishing in April) opens with a Hopper image, which seems like an odd coincidence. (Or maybe not, since it’s not like Hopper’s unknown or anything.)

Anyway, Erica and I interviewed Larry Venuti about this book for our forthcoming Reading the World podcasts, and it was an absolutely amazing conversation. Larry’s explanations of how the project came about, all the theoretical and practical implications, his unpacking of one of the poems . . . very amazing.

That will be online soon (er, relatively speaking), but in the meantime, I want to encourage everyone to check out Erica’s new blog about poetry, translation, and poetry in translation (there’s a great post about definitely worth reading). And instead of trying to write a one-sentence bio, you can find out more about Erica via her entry in the Making the Translator Visible series.

And here’s the opening of her review:

Edward Hopper (Graywolf, 2009) is a complex and striking work of narrative-lyrical poetry, skirting on the epic, that is also one of the more interesting books of poetry to be recently published in English. There are a number of things that make Lawrence Venuti’s translation of Ernest Farrés’s book of poems in the voice of Edward Hopper unusual. One should be obvious from the previous sentence: a tripled persona in which translator speaks for poet who speaks for painter. Another is the scope of the project as a whole; Edward Hopper is envisioned as a complete sequence, gripping in its narrative-lyrical arc, though the poems equally stand alone. The book is also a work of ekphrasis—each of the 51 poems taking its title from a Hopper painting—but radically departs from mere description. The biographical (or pseudo-biographical) engagement with Hopper’s oeuvre sketches its own chronology, re-contextualizing each painting, and shedding new light or shadow on the works.

One might expect a poetic work of ekphrasis to be centered around the image, but what is most immediately enticing about this book is the narrative-lyrical arc which appropriates Hopper’s works and biography, subjugating them to the voice of the poet while the poet simultaneously becomes subsumed in them. It is a book of poetry that demands attention from the reader at every move, and demands that attention on its own terms. Like listening to a symphony in full, the poems in their individual movements culminate into a picture of a life that is at once specific and universally recognizable. Venuti, like a great conductor, moves the poetry through his own language that neither obscures nor clarifies the richness of the original, but allows it to be heard in its full tonality. The composition and translation both are ekphrasis at its most successful, its most layered. In “Self Portrait, 1925-1930” —the first poem in the book, and the only one with an overt intrusion of FarrĂ©s’s voice—Hopper is reincarnated through the Borgesian mirror of the painting into the body of FarrĂ©s. But the transmigration is incomplete, and the voice slips in opportune places throughout the book to reveal a Catalan poet seeing Hopper’s North America, and in it the broader scope of modernity’s disillusionment. FarrĂ©s shares Hopper’s “fears, obsessions, anxieties” and the immediacy of their pressure on the landscape and people resonate through the language, preventing even the slightest distancing of the voice.

Click here to read the full review.

The prize—which was awarded for the first time last year—is given each year to a translation who has “shown exceptional skill in translating a book of contemporary poetry into English.”

Venuti is an incredible force in the world of translation and translation studies. He translated from Italian, French, and Catalan and is also the author of The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation. He’s been awarded a number of grants and fellowships, including ones from the NEA, NEH, and PEN, and in 2007 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship. He currently teaches at Temple University.

I’ve read some of the poems from Edward Hopper in Two Lines, Calque, and and it promises to be an interesting collection. (It’s coming out next year from Graywolf Press.) Basically, each poem is named after and based on an Edward Hopper painting. Based on that, it’s sort of surprising that Edward Hopper has been “adapted to the stage in both Catalan and Spanish.” In addition to writing poetry, Farres is also an editor for the cultural supplement of La Vanguardia.