And, as always, you can get by using NONFICTION at checkout.

I just got done talking with the legendary Howard Goldblatt as part of my “World Lit & Translation” class and he brought up the video above that Michael Henry Heim made on “Role of Motivation in Learning Languages.” In this 6 minute video he talks about four of the ten (yes, you read that right) languages that he spoke. And in French, German, Spanish, and Russian, he explains his motivation for learning that particular language.

I miss Mike so much. He was absolutely one of a kind. And so down to earth. So unassuming. He’s one of those people who you know, ���Բ��ٲ��Գٱ�����is a verifiable genius, and yet, he made you feel completely on the level, worth talking to, worth listening to. He treated everyone with such respect and in ways that were so encouraging. I could go on and on, but I don’t have time to cry right now.

Mike’s impact on the world was incredible. His impact on the world of translation is beyond description. In sports—especially Tackle Ball—there’s often talk of a “coaching tree.” This head coach inspired these assistants who became head coaches who trained these assistants, on and on for ages.

Well, Mike’s “translation tree” is more like a translation forest. It’s virtually impossible to find anyone connected to the world of international lit during the time that he was alive who ��DZ����’����have an anecdote or a story or something. Virtually impossible.

And I’m not even counting the dozens of translators who have receive PEN/Heim Translation Fund awards.

He was/is/will forever be a legend.

Which is all a prelude to saying that The Man Between: Michael Henry Heim & A Life in Translation is one of the nonfiction titles we’ve published that you absolutely must own if you’re at all interested in words. Or books. Translation. Being inspired. Amazing people. Trust me—this is a book that you’ll definitely love.

The book is made up of three sections: “The Man,” which includes a long interview with MHH and his complete bibliography (over 60 publications), and his essay on “The Three Eras of Modern Translation” (excerpted below); “Community,” with pieces from Dubravka Ugreic, Andrei Codrescu, Rosanna Warren, and more about Mike as a person; and “Impact,” a collection of essays from people like Russell Scott Valentino (“New Frontiers for Translation in the Twenty-First Century: The Globe, The Market, The Field”), Sean Cotter (“The Un-X-able Y-ness of Z-ing (Q): A List with Notes”), Breon Mitchell (“The Lives of Translators”), and Esther Allen (“Michael Henry Heim: A Theory”), among others.

By the way, this book is �����ڱ𳦳���for teaching. Get (NONFICTION at checkout) and then use it for the next decade, inspiring hundreds of students along the way.

Here’s a taste. From Michael Henry Heim’s “The Three Eras of Modern Translation,” a talk he gave at the Center for the Art of Translation. (Side-note: If you want to know more about the Salzburg conference he referenced, just click here. I wrote a lot about that magical week.)

I’m terribly proud to be here because this is such a wonderful occasion. I first heard about this fantastic organization two years ago when I met Olivia [Sears, founder of the Center for the Art of Translation]in Salzburg, Austria. She is a powerhouse, as you all know. I’m so glad that things are working well here and you are moving forward in these times when nothing seems to be moving forward, everything seems to be moving back.

What I wanted to do, rather than give a reading, was to talk about the translator’s new visibility, from reactive to active to proactive. I’m going to try to be positive. We’re moving in a vector toward something that I think does exist, and we want to keep it existing. The ears of many of you will prick up when you hear that word “visibility,” if you’ve read Lawrence Venuti’s The Translator’s Invisibility, which came out in 1995.It was a revisionist history of translation. Instead of going through all kinds of technical innovations, he tried to show why translation has been swept under the carpet, basically. What I thought I would do here is talk about what I have seen translation do in the years I have been involved in it.

I start with the Cold War because that’s when I began thinking about translation. That is what I call the reactive period, in which basically—I’m exaggerating, of course—but basically a work was translated because there was an event that took place, and the work was either part of the event itself or was reacting to the event.

Let me give you two examples. First is Doctor Zhivago, by Boris Pasternak, which came out in 1958,3 and it was a sensation—twenty-six weeks on the New York Times best-seller list. I won’t go into the personal story, but I did meet Max Hayward, the book’s British translator, and he told me exactly how he was forced to work when he was translating that novel, which was a sensation because it was the first time a work had been exported, smuggled out of the Soviet Union, and by Isaiah Berlin, of all people. All of a sudden this novel was front-page news. It was extremely important for the translation to come out as fast as it possibly could because the publishers wanted to cash in on the publicity. Apparently what they did was lock Max Hayward in a hotel room with his collaborator, and they wouldn’t let them out. Literally, they would not let them out until the entire translation was done. That’s how important it was. But that certainly is reactive.

A few years later a similar work came out of the Soviet Union. This one was actually published officially, but it was published only once and then disappeared: Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, a work that mentioned the labor camps for the first time. Until that point, nobody was allowed to mention the fact that these camps existed. Millions of people who had been affected by the camps saw their lives justified for the first time because of this book. It was a big sensation and it was published as fast as it could be published in all the languages of the world, and in English—three times in three different translations. This is 1963. And, yes, best-seller lists again, but this time it’s even more interesting because there were three translations, which meant the reviewers did have to deal with the translation. So all of a sudden we’re getting a little bit closer to the next category that I’m talking about—the active period. All of a sudden, people began having to read about translation in the daily press, and that made a big difference. Three translations came out at the time and later two more came out, so it was an ongoing kind of thing.

Now let’s move on to the active period. Once again we’re still political, but now semi-political. This next category I want to talk about is also connected with the Cold War, but the Cold War is now at a different stage. In 1974, Philip Roth inaugurated a series with Penguin Books called “Writers from the Other Europe.” He edited it and he gave his name to it; he gave his cachet to it. I laughed and said that his name was bigger than the author’s name on each book. But maybe that wasn’t so bad because people trusted his name, and that would make them trust a name they couldn’t pronounce, these foreign names, Central European names, like Kundera and Schulz, Tadeusz Borowski, and Danilo Kiš, and so on. These works introduced a whole new kind of mentality to the West, and Roth’s name made them perfectly acceptable. This went on from 1974 to—well, you can imagine what year: 1989. After that things moved into a different vein and we’ll be talking about that.

But first I wanted to move onto the next phase of this period; now we’re getting a little bit closer to proactive. There was a movement away from political reasons to be translating, and that was the Latin American Boom, which took place at more or less the same time, except that it wasn’t political. Or rather, I’m sure it was very political for the Latin Americans, but we didn’t view it that way. We viewed it simply as fine literature. Not only that, but we started to have what I would call, though I hate to use the word, “superstar” translators. You had writers from various countries, and that was important, too, not just one country, but various countries: Cortázar from Argentina, García Márquez from Colombia, Fuentes from Mexico, Vargas Llosa from Peru. And enter star translator Gregory Rabassa. He translated most of these authors, not all of each one, of course. And he also made a kind of headline news. García Márquez made a very big push in his favor, saying that Rabassa’s translation was better than the original. And what does that mean? You can interpret it however you like. On the other hand, it did bring visibility to the translator.

I’d like to include in this active category something that is, let’s say, an anomaly, something completely sui generis, and that is a single author who became a worldwide best-seller: Umberto Eco. And he also had his Rabassa, who was William Weaver. His Name of the Rose was an absolute sensation. It came out in Italian in 1980 and was translated in 1983.5 Notice that there is a gap there, but it finally did come out.

There’s a wonderful writer—I’ve translated several of her novels—a very literary, clever, brilliant Croatian writer named Dubravka Ugrešić, and she once said that when she went to the nude beaches on the Dalmatian coast she could always tell the nationality of every person, even though they didn’t have a stitch of clothes on, because she could see what translation they were reading The Name of the Rose in. It was really something.

At about that time, or maybe a little later than that, I was asked to be on an Australian cultural program called Friday Night Live—I don’t know if they were playing on Saturday Night Live or if the title had anything to do with that. I had to stay up until three o’clock in the morning to talk to the presenter, who was interviewing me in Los Angeles and Weaver in Italy, where he was living. The interviewer asked me where I was sitting, and I said in my kitchen. Then he asked Weaver where he was, and he said, “In the echo chamber.” And what was the “echo chamber”? The Eco Chamber was the building he had built, a separate building, from the profits he had made basically from that one book (though of course he translated many other books as well). That’s how important that phenomenon was at the time. [. . .]

Want to read the rest? . (Or buy it from your favorite bookseller.)

This match was judged by Hannah Chute, recent recipient of her MA in literary translation from the URochester.

For more information on the Women’s World Cup of Literature, click here or here. Also, be sure to follow our and like our And check back here daily!

Oryx & Crake vs. The Ministry of Pain winds up being one of the stranger match-ups in terms of national identities. On the one hand, we have a novel set in a dystopian, post-Canadian future, while on the other we have an ostensibly Dutch novel about exiles that is really more Yugoslavian than anything.

I’ll start with Dubravka Ugrešić’s strange and lovely tale of Tanja Lucić, a Croatian teacher of a “servo-kroatisch” course at a university in Amsterdam, and of her complex relationships with her students, her homeland, and her language.

One of the most memorable sections is when Tanja has her students—all of whom speak Serbo-Croatian perfectly well, and who have almost exclusively come to Amsterdam from the former Yugoslavia—bring in memories of that country. Until this point it can be difficult as a reader to keep track of which student is which, but here each character’s way of speaking and choice of subject matter emerge as so distinctive that their various personalities leap off the page. The most memorable presentation is Igor’s, which details his friend Mikac’s reaction to an anthology of Yugoslav poetry. Mikac appears to be channeling Holden Caulfield in his goofy but acerbic commentary: “They’re a bunch of sickos, our poets,” he says, and “‘I know not what thou art: art thou woman or hyena?’ Shit! Did that guy get my goat!”

The narration moves smoothly between moments of syrupy intimacy between Lucić and her students (when they meet they exchange “sweet verbal saliva” and engage in “aural fondling”) and biting, bitter anger over what has become of the former Yugoslavia (Lucić expresses her disdain for “the prepacked retrofuture of the newly minted states”). This constant shifting makes the characters’ shaky and ever-changing position as exiles and émigrés all the more poignant.

Ugrešić also inserts into her narrative moments of reflection on the role of language, especially in times of war and turmoil. As she describes the breaking up of Serbo-Croatian into various regional languages: “It was a divorce full of sound and fury . . . Croats would eat their kruh, while Serbs would eat their hleb, Bosnians their hljeb: the word for bread in the three languages was different. Smrt, the word for death, was the same.” Lucić has a love-hate relationship with her native tongue; she treasures it but wonders if it is real, she loses her grip on it even as she tries to cling tighter and tighter.

Overall, Ugrešić’s novel is everything it should be: funny, tragic, strange, and thought-provoking.

Oryx & Crake is remarkable in very different ways. It is a thrilling mystery, a work of speculative fiction set in the not-so-distant future, when humanity has been all but wiped out by terrible events that gradually come to light as Snowman, the novel’s protagonist, digs back through his dark past.

Breathtaking in its scope, frightening in its ever-more-looming feasibility, Oryx & Crake is, however, no mere cautionary fable. Atwood does not just show us a frightening future in which corporate greed and the heady lure of consequence-free living have brought humanity to the brink of extinction; I can think of any number of writers who could accomplish that much. But Atwood skillfully walks the fine line between making her point effectively and hammering it into her reader’s head so hard that she forgets to write a story. Luckily for her readers, she is far too talented to make such an error.

The plot is structured with sublime pacing that compels you to keep turning the pages. Atwood moves effortlessly between Snowman’s ruined, miserable present and the past that seemed so full of promise, even if cracks were starting to show around the edges. One thing I particularly appreciated was that Atwood has not felt the need to overexplain her world. Snowman’s past is set at some point in our near-ish future, when the world as we know it has been divided into small Compounds of the intellectual and economic elite surrounded by vast “pleeblands” where anything goes. How did humanity get here? Atwood leaves it to your imagination, which I think it quite refreshing.

The beauty of Oryx & Crake’s language is particularly striking because of its contrast with the bleak realities of the novel. “A breeze riffles the leaves overhead; insects rasp and trill; red light from the setting sun hits the tower blocks in the water, illuminating an unbroken pane here and there, as if a scattering of lamps has been turned on;” Snowman’s seaside lair would almost sound paradisiacal, were it not for the devastated shell of a city strewn with bodies that surrounds him. The beauty of language becomes crucial to Snowman; he has not had human contact for some time now, and holding onto obsolete words (“wheelwright, lodestone, saturnine, adamant”) becomes a way to keep himself whole, if not quite sane.

This is a challenging match to judge, simply because it seems to me that Atwood and Ugrešić are playing two different games. If Ugrešić is playing at something vaguely resembling soccer—down and dirty, though perhaps without enough flashiness to attract a large American audience—Atwood is more likely working through a round of chess: she is precise, prescient, and highly imaginative. Also, while the scope and inventiveness of Oryx & Crake are unparalleled, The Ministry of Pain decidedly takes home the award for humor. Both novels are, in a sense, about important current events, but Atwood is painting a picture of a looming and oft-discussed future while Ugrešić is shedding light on the lives of people who have already suffered, but who have generally been shoved out of sight.

Another point in Ugrešić’s favor is that Michael Henry Heim’s translation is just about flawless. Who else would have thought to describe a bathroom remodel as “transfiguring the looscape”? And have it sound perfectly natural in context? Though with nothing to compare it with on Atwood’s end, I’m once again left feeling a little unbalanced.

It’s a rough choice, but ultimately it comes down to this: one point each for gorgeous language. Ugrešić’s humor and delightful strangeness earn her another goal. But Oryx & Crake is so provocative, so downright thrilling, that it scores two final goals, bringing it a victory over The Ministry of Pain, 3-2.

Next up, Canada’s Oryx & Crake will face off against New Zealand’s The Luminaries on Monday, June 22nd in what promises to be a huge second-round match.

Tomorrow’s match will be judged by Rhea Lyons, and features England’s Life after Life by Kate Atkinson up against Colombia’s Delirium by Laura Restrepo.

While C. K. Scott Moncrieff’s work has shaped our understanding of Proust’s seven-volume masterpiece—published as Remembrance of Things Past—he has remained hidden behind the genius of the man whose reputation he helped build. In this biography, Jean Findlay—Scott Moncrieff’s great-great-niece—reveals a fascinating, tangled life.

Michael Henry Heim—one of the most respected translators of his generation—translated two-dozen works from eight different languages, including books by Milan Kundera, Dubravka Ugresic, Hugo Claus, and Anton Chekov. But Mike, as he was known to his legion of friends, was much more than that. His classes at UCLA on translation inspired a new generation of translators, and his work altering the way translation is viewed will impact the livelihood of translators for decades to come. is both a homage to Mike and a useful book for anyone interested in translation.

The discussion is free and open to all, and no RSVP is necessary. For more information, see the

In honor of the three editors of this volume—Esther Allen, Sean Cotter, and Russell Scott Valentino—are coming to town to talk about Heim and his lasting influence on a variety of aspects of the field of literary translation.

Esther, Sean, and Russell (all of whom are greatly respected for their own personal translations) did an amazing job putting this book together, creating a volume that’s both a homage to one of the most important literary figures of the twentieth century and a book that adds a lot to translation studies. The essays in this book—from a variety of contributors, including Dubrakva Ugresic, Celia Hawkesworth, Rosanna Warren, Maureen Freely, Alex Zucker, Breon Mitchell, and more—are by turns engaging, heartbreaking, brilliant, and intellectually stimulating.

I’ll be moderating this panel, and there will be a reception to follow.

So, if you’re in the area,

RTWCS: Michael Henry Heim & A Life in Translation
Thursday, April 2nd at 5:00pm
Welles-Brown Room in Rush Rhees Library (755 Library Road at the U of R)

Hope to see you there!

The official deadline for submissions is now January 30th. And if you need the details on how to apply, or read below:

The PEN/Heim Translation Fund was established in the summer of 2003 by a gift of $730,000 from Priscilla and Michael Henry Heim in response to the dismayingly low number of literary translations currently appearing in English. Its purpose is to promote the publication and reception of translated world literature in English. [. . .]

Who is eligible

The PEN/Heim Translation Fund provides grants to support the translation of book-length works of fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, or drama that have not previously appeared in English in print or have appeared only in an outdated or otherwise flawed translation.

There are no restrictions on the nationality or citizenship of the translator, but the works must be translated into English.

The Fund seeks to encourage translators to undertake projects they might not otherwise have had the means to attempt.

Anthologies with multiple translators, works of literary criticism, and scholarly or technical texts do not qualify.

As of 2008, translators who have previously been awarded grants by the Fund are ineligible to reapply for three years after the year in which they receive a grant. 

In addition, projects that have already been submitted and have not received a grant are unlikely to be reconsidered in a subsequent year.

Translators may only submit one project per year.

I’m not sure why I didn’t think of this sooner, but starting with this year’s grants, Open Letter is going to donate a copy of to all the recipients. It’s only appropriate that they have a copy of the book about the man who made the grant possible . . .

On a tangential note, we recently signed on Guillermo Saccomanno’s Gesell Dome, which we found out about when Andrea Labinger According to the PEN website, 78% of the winning books from the first five years of the Fund have found publishers. So even if you don’t have a publisher lined up for your work, you should definitely apply—you might just find one!

This week’s music is “Waste Your Time” from Ex Hex. (Mary Timony’s new band!)

As always, you can write to us at threepercentpodcast@gmail.com with complaints, suggestions, ideas for future episodes, or your own rants and raves.

As always you can subscribe to the podcast in iTunes by clicking . To subscribe with other podcast downloading software, such as Google’s , copy the following link. And you can email us with complaints and comments at threepercentpodcast@gmail.com

First off, just look at this incomplete list of authors that Mike translated: Milan Kundera, Bohumil Hrabal, Danilo Kis, Karel Capek, Peter Esterhazy, Dubravka Ugresic, George Konrad, Bertold Brecht, Gunter Grass, and Anton Chekhov. Yes. All of them.

He also translated Hugo Claus’s Wonder, for which he received a great deal of praise and an award that led to this video filmed at the Flanders House:

I don’t have a complete list of awards here in front of me, but I know Mike also received the Helen and Kurt Wolff Prize, the PEN Translation Award, and definitely some NEA fellowships at some point in time. I’m not at all exaggerating when I say that Mike’s translations are among the best ever written. He was a true master.

And part of the reason he was so, so good, was he natural affinity for learning languages, and the curiosity that kept him motivated to continue exploring words and languages and literatures right up to the end. According to in which Mike explains his system for learning languages, he claims to know ten.

CWL: I’m here with Michael Heim, who is a professor of Slavic languages and literatures at UCLA, and is a well known literary translator and an exemplary language learner. So, I guess I’d like to start by asking you, could you tell us how many languages you know?

Michael Heim: The answer is no and I’m not trying to be coy. It’s just that the concept of what is a language changes with the historical situation. I started learning a language about 25 years ago – a language that was then called Serbo-Croatian, and it’s now called Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, and Montenegrin. So did I learn four for the price of one, or is it still only one? That’s an ideological question; a more linguistic question is whether you can consider the three Scandinavian languages as one. I studied Danish but I went the extra mile to learn how to read Norwegian and Swedish as well, but I can’t speak Norwegian and Swedish. I don’t know if there is anybody who can speak all three of them, because they are very very close, so it’s not actually clear. I say that I work actively with about ten languages, and when I mean actively, I mean that I use them professionally.

I think he’s actually hiding the truth behind the word “professionally” and that he “knew” at least 16. One of the last times I spent a lot of time with Mike was on a flight to Salzburg for a seminar on translation. At the time he was learning Chinese by translating a book. Seriously, one of the most amazing men I’ve ever met.

I loved being on panels with MHH. For a moderator, there’s a comfort in knowing that you’re sitting beside someone who loves to share what he/she knows, and can do so in a way that’s entertaining and engaging. Mike was very much that type of person. And one who was always extremely well prepared and could blow your mind with the his most passing of comments.

Once we were on a panel together at the Goethe Institut in Chicago to talk about Gunter Grass. I had mentioned ahead of time that I loved his translation of My Century because of the way each section of the book—one for each year in the century—was written in its own distinct voice, which shifted in dialect and vocab throughout the novel. At the event itself (which sadly is not available online), Michael presented a whole speech on how a translator can invent dialects for translation and thus avoid the trap of relying on Southern or black speech patterns—the two most “obvious” dialects in America. I remember sitting there stunned at how effortlessly he explained solutions to a seemingly insolvable problem, and honored by the fact that I was sharing a table with this genius.

There’s so much more to say about him . . . The first time I met Mike was in Los Angeles at a reading at the now defunct Dutton’s Books. He had told me to “look for the guy who looks like Abraham Lincoln.” So I spent a few minutes searching for a man in a stovetop hat until this person walked in, smiling . . . He always seemed to be smiling:

After the reading, Michael and Priscilla took me back to their house for a lovely dinner, and hours of fantastic conversation. I loved looking through his bookshelves, talking about how he came to be a translator, looking at his office, which was overrun with projects and paper . . .

If you’re ever around a group of translators, you should mention MHH’s name just to see everyone’s face light up and hear all the gushing praise. During his time at UCLA—and his time as an active member of the translation community—he mentored and worked with everyone. I feel like the list of translators indebted to him could take up a post by itself. Translators AND publishers. This ALTA is going to be one massive love fest, which, undoubtedly, would make Mike nervous, since he was such a humble person.

For example—and this is the lede I intentionally buried because I wanted to wax rhapsodic about MHH and his life, works, etc., and didn’t want you jumping past all that—Michael Henry Heim is the secret donor behind the In 2003, Michael set up a meeting with Esther Allen, and donated $734,000 to establish the Translation Fund—a fund that provides approx. 12 translators a year with $3,000+ grants to work on their projects. (So add all of these recipients, applicants, editors, and the like to the growing list of people whose lives were touched by Mike.)

Until today, the source of this money has been kept a secret, but upon his passing, his wife agreed that this is the right time to share the information with the world. It MUST be noted though that there was no rich uncle, or stock market killing that made this gift possible. Michael’s Hungarian father was a soldier for the U.S. in WWII and the money the family received when he died was set aside untouched for 60 years. During that time, Priscilla and Michael lived a simple, frugal life, adding to the fund when they could, and then giving the whole gift to help future generations of translators share their gifts and passions with the world. And to help prod publishers into doing more to recognize and celebrate literature in translation.

[I’m literally crying right now. I’ve been working on this on-and-off all day, arguing at ALTA people, stressing about the conference, and repressing the fact that Michael’s death is extremely sad and that I may never meet anyone this amazing, this giving, this selfless again my life.]

One last note: Sometime next year, Open Letter will be publishing The Man Between, a book about Michael Henry Heim. It will contain bits of his autobiography, which was published in Romania, along with texts he used in teaching his translation classes, bits of correspondence with famous authors he translated, and essays from some of his literary admirers.

You can read a bit of the “autobiography” section online at And please feel free to share your own thoughts, comments, and stories about Mike there at TIR or in the comments below. For everyone who ever came in contact with him, this is a terrible loss, and I’m sure most all of us will want to reminisce. And we’ll definitely raise a toast to him at ALTA. This week, translation lost one of its all-time greats.

Overall, this is a pretty interesting document, both because it helps establish some guidelines for assessing translations in “personnel decisions related to hiring, retention, merit awards, promotion, and tenure.” Seeing that the general line for the past XX years has been that translation could hurt your chances at getting tenure, this is a pretty significant sea change.

Not that it’s my place to speak on such matters, but seriously, it’s about time. I would say more, but I feel like all comments coming to mind are inflammatory, so I’ll let the MLA take over and explain the reasons why translations “should count” as academic practice:

Translation has been an indispensable component of intellectual exchange and development throughout recorded history. Today, the ever-accelerating interaction among cultures and economies in our globalized world is exponentially increasing the need for translation. As more and more postsecondary institutions incorporate translation studies and translator training into their curricula, there is a growing need for faculty members who are scholars and practitioners of translation. Moreover, the translation of a work of literature or scholarship—indeed, of any major cultural document—can have a significant impact on the intellectual community, while the absence of translations impedes the circulation of ideas.

More and more academics are therefore undertaking translation as a component of their professional activity and as a natural extension of their teaching. Whether they translate literary or scholarly works or other cultural documents, they are engaging in an exacting practice, at once critical and creative, that demands lexical precision; detailed knowledge of historical, political, social, and literary contexts; and a nuanced sense of style in both the source language and the target language. It goes without saying that the machine-translation programs available online are woefully inadequate to cope with such demanding texts.

Every translation is an interpretation; each one begins with a critical reading, then expands and ultimately embodies that reading. Given the importance of the endeavor and the expertise required to do it justice, a translation of a literary or scholarly work or another cultural document should be judged as an integral part of the dossiers submitted by candidates for academic positions and by faculty members facing personnel decisions. Institutions thus need to ensure that translations are subject to peer review on the same basis as monographs and other recognized instances of scholarly activity.

Preach it!

What’s really interesting to me is the part “for reviewers.” This is a really complicated situation for most people: if they don’t know the source language, they freak out and believe that it’s impossible to judge the translation; and if they do know the source language, they tend to hone in on nitpicky word choices and freak out. I’m tempted to quote the whole section, but anyone who’s interested can read it for themselves, so instead, here’s the highlights:

All reviewers can to some extent assess the translation’s readability, stylistic qualities, scholarly value, and overall interest to its target audience. In principle (the qualifier is necessary because editors sometimes intervene), every sentence, every word, every punctuation mark represents a deliberate choice by the translator in the attempt to capture not only meaning but also structure, idiom, diction, rhythm, tone, voice, and nuance. A translation must occasionally violate the norms of Standard English in order to convey the characteristics and idiosyncrasies of the source text. Reviewers who are not in a position to compare the translation with the source text can nevertheless consider questions such as the following:

Do the translator’s supporting materials and the introduction and critical apparatus accompanying the published work, if any, shed light on the translation challenges involved and on the solutions adopted?

In a work of fiction, does the discursive register correspond to the context? For example, in dialogue, does the tone shift to represent different characters’ voices?

In a work of nonfiction, is there evidence that the translator has appropriately adapted the work to the frame of reference of its new audience? Has the translator sought out and referred to existing English editions of foreign works cited in the source text?

If the work has been translated before, how does the new translation compare with the earlier one(s)? Does it offer new insights or emphases? [. . .]

Reviewers who read both the source language and the target language can address the complex question of the translation’s “faithfulness” to the source text. A good translation will contain few outright misreadings. Yet success or failure in translation ultimately depends not so much on the literal transposition of discrete meanings as on an interpretation of the myriad traits and dimensions of the source text. Reviewers need to recognize that readability and argumentative comparability at the level of large-scale discursive structures (paragraphs, chapters, entire books) are legitimate objectives that may create the appearance of a departure at the level of words and sentences. Translators use a wide variety of techniques to compensate for structural differences between languages and to minimize loss: expansion, condensation, displacement, borrowing, exegesis, generalizing, particularizing, transposition, and so on. An apparent error or deviation may turn out to be an apt rendering of a provocative or anomalous passage in the source text; just as significantly, it may be an artifact of the translator’s decision to rephrase, reorder, condense, or expand in order to convey meaning more clearly or more idiomatically in the target language.

Now hopefully universities across the country will adopt these guidelines and translation work will be integrated into more personnel evaluations . . .

¹ “Acknowledgment. Sections of this document have been adapted with permission from the following sources: a statement prepared in February 2009 by Michael Heim and the academic working group of Salzburg Global Seminar 461; a statement by the American Literary Translators Association, titled “Translation and Academic Promotion and Tenure”; guidelines for book reviewers prepared by Michael Moore and the PEN American Center Translation Committee.”²

² I was at the Salzburg Global Seminar when Michael Henry Heim presented this. Catherine Porter, the MLA President who decided that 2009 would be translation-centric and the person who e-mailed me about this statement, was also there. As always, he greatly impressed me with his professionalism and dedication to actually “getting something done.” Also very cool that the PEN Translation Committee is getting some props.

The only this that sucks is that, thanks to their Random House distribution agreement, their catalog lists titles that aren’t coming out for another year. (These titles aren’t even on the NYRB website yet.) This is anguish-making . . . yet, the new list is pretty phenomenal, so as an interlude in my ongoing series of forthcoming fall translations, here’s a list of titles not coming out until spring/summer 2011.

Act of Passion by Georges Simenon, translated from the French by Louise Varese. (June 14, 2011)

Originally published in English in the ’50s, this has been out-of-print forever, and sounds like a great addition to the ongoing Simenon renaissance that NYRB has been undertaking the past few years. By the time this comes out, I think NYRB will have reissued 11 Simenon novels, including Dirty Snow, Red Lights, Three Bedrooms in Manhattan, and The Engagement. (Back some time ago, Mark Binelli and I co-hosted a a That was a lot of fun, especially since we disagreed about the book—I thought it was pretty cool, Mark found the writing pretty annoying. Anyway.) This novel is about Charles Alavoine—an upstanding, bourgeois citizen haunted by a sense of loneliness—and his meeting with Martine, a “young woman helplessly adrift in the world” who both awakens Alavoine and “sets the stage for his tragic disintegration.”

Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age by Bohumil Hrabal, translated from the Czech by Michael Henry Heim. (April 12, 2011)

Another excellent reprint. I read this years ago and absolutely loved it. The novel is a monologue from an aged man who tells a group of sunbathing women about his lovers, scandals, adventures. “As the book tumbles restlessly forward, and the comic tone takes on darker shadings, we realize we are listening to a man talking as much out of desperation as from exuberance.” All of Hrabal’s books are worth checking out, especially I Served the King of England, Too Loud a Solitude, and Closely Watched Trains. But this is really one of the best, and I’m glad that eight months from now it will finally be available again.

The Doll by Boleslaw Prus, translated from the Polish by David Welsh. (February 8, 2011)

I feel like this is a book that’s been recommended to me over and over again . . . And finally, come next February, I’ll finally have a chance to read it. From the catalog copy: “The Doll is a classic of Polish literature, a novel that takes in the whole nineteenth century and looks ahead to modern questions of empire, revolution, anti-Semitism, and socialism. [. . .] The rich cast includes the old clerk Rzecki, nostalgic for the revolutions of 1848; the young scientist Ochocki, dreaming of flying machines; the deranged adn manipulative Baroness Krzeszowska; the angelic widow Stawska; the wise dowager duchess; and many more.”

The Ice Trilogy by Vladimir Sorokin, translated from the Russian by Jamey Gambrell. (February 8, 2011)

This is an interesting publishing story and situation. Back some years ago, there was a great article about Vladimir Sorokin in either the New York Review of Books or the New Yorker. (Thinking it’s the former, but my memory . . . blah.) Anyway, his work sounded really interesting and super-offensive. For example, his novel Blue Lard includes a gay sex scene involving clones of Khrushchev and Stalin. In fact, his work was so offensive that the Pro-Putin Youth dumped copies in a fake toilet bowl. (I can’t believe that I can’t find a picture of this on the Internet. Events like this are why YouTube exists!) Anyway, NYRB scooped up rights to a few of his books, including Ice, which came out in hardcover back in 2007ish. Ice got mixed reviews (memory serves, again, disclaimer), wasn’t quite as crazy/funny at The Queue (also available from NYRB, and which I would whole-heartedly recommend), etc. Now NYRB is bringing out The Ice Trilogy, of which, Ice is the middle volume. “Bro, the first section of Sorokin’s chef d’oeuvre, relates the mysterious emergence of the brotherhood in the aftermath of a massive meteroite striking Siberia (a historical occurrence known as the Tungus event.)” (I’m personally fascinated by the Tungus event.) “23,000 bring the trilogy to a wildly suspenseful close. All 23,000 members of the brotherhood have at last been brought together and they are preparing to stage the global destruction that will return them to their origins in pure light.” I read Ice when it came out, and although I didn’t love it, I found myself compelled, reading it in just a couple sittings, sucked in for inexplicable reasons. Very curious to see how it reads surrounded by the other two parts . . . .

UPDATE: Special thanks to Lisa Hayden Espenschade for to a story (in Russian) about the whole Sorokin controversy. And for these photos:

(Nate and E.J. go away for a day, and I start posting toilet pictures. Suppose it could be worse . . . )

The recent MLA convention—where the focus was translation—is the starting point for Jen’s article, with the main thrust being about how translation is shunned in the academy. For people outside of academia, it seems to come as a surprise that translation doesn’t play well at tenure meetings. But seriously, I’ve heard some awful stories, especially from young professors.

One of the most famously shocking tenure denials is that of Susan Bernofsky. Granted, I don’t know all the details, and everyone knows how fraught university politics are, but for Susan not to be tenured somewhere? That’s effing unthinkable. Just for her translations of Walser . . . A university would gain so much in terms of expertise, knowledge, and nationwide attention. (Can’t find it now, but I believe there was even a feature on Susan in the New Yorker some time back.)

But there are other stories, such as this one:

Mark Anderson, who is on leave from the Germanic-languages department at Columbia University, has experienced the vicissitudes that beset academic translators. In graduate school, he did a translation of poetry by the Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann. Princeton University Press published the book, which won a prize from the American Academy of Poets.

After Mr. Anderson, a Kafka scholar, got a job as an assistant professor at Columbia, he recalls in an e-mail message, “I was offered the chance to translate Kafka’s The Trial and was about to submit a sample when my chair got word of it and advised me, rightly, I think, not to do this until I finished my book and got tenure. Which I did.” He published a translation of Thomas Bernhard’s novel The Loser­ while still untenured—but under a pseudonym (“Jack Dawson,” which according to Mr. Anderson is a pun on Kafka’s Czech name and means “son of Kafka”). “We had a celebratory lunch after I got tenure at Columbia, and I told the story and got a good laugh,” Mr. Anderson says. “But it’s a real issue, and I think my chair gave me excellent advice.”

So, just to get this straight, universities—which exist to educate and enlighten the world—are indirectly (or occasionally directly) for preventing certain great works of literature (Kafka! Bernhard!) from being accessible to the monolingual, English reader? That’s brilliant.

It seems that the main problem is in getting people to accept the idea of translation as scholarship. Which is weird to anyone actually involved in the production or promotion of literature in translation. (And by “weird” I mean “fucking incomprehensible.”) But I’ve heard from a number of people about how hard it is to justify this activity in a system that favors the production of slender monographs that are read by a couple hundred scholars. Not that readers of this blog need any justification, but here’s Catherine Porter’s explanation of the scholarly activity inherent in translation:

Ms. Porter talked on the subject of “Translation as Scholarship” at a seminar organized at Brown University last summer by the Association of Departments of English and the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. In the talk, which will be published as an essay in a forthcoming ADFL Bulletin, she discussed the complex analyses and decisions that a serious translator must go through to bring a text from its native language into the target language. It sounds at least as rigorous as much of the critical work recognized as scholarship.

For instance, Ms. Porter notes, a translator must ask, “In what contexts—literary, rhetorical, social, historical, political, economic, religious, cultural—was the source text embedded, and what adjustments will have to be made to transmit those contexts or produce comparable ones in the translation?” Complicated questions of genre, literary tradition, and target audience must be dealt with. “Once these initial determinations are made—subject to revision and refinement as the translation progresses—the translator can begin to engage with the text itself: word by word, phrase by phrase, sentence by sentence.”

Or, as translation superstar Edith Grossman puts it:

In a forthcoming book, Why Translation Matters (Yale University Press, to be released this March), Edith Grossman describes the process this way: “What we do is not an act of magic, like altering base metals into precious ones, but the result of a series of creative decisions and imaginative acts of criticism.” The celebrated translator of Cervantes and many Latin American authors, she calls translation “a kind of reading as deep as any encounter with a literary text can be.”

I’m often overly optimistic when it comes to the possibility of world change, but I do get the sense that things are evolving . . . Just look at the number of translation and translation studies programs that are starting up (like, well, at the URochester) or becoming more and more prominent. Attitudes are changing . . . I hope. Nevertheless, I like Michael Henry Heim’s idea:

“It’s not only the deans that need to have their consciousness raised,” Mr. Heim says, remembering a call from a fellow professor who had to do a bit of translation and was surprised to discover how hard it was. “It is something that we’re still battling with, not only on the administrative level but also on the level of our own colleagues.”

He describes himself as a “silent partner” in a plan to put the official weight of the MLA behind translation as scholarship. He’s working to help draft an MLA-approved letter, to be signed by Ms. Porter, Ms. Perloff, and Mr. Holquist, that could be sent to administrators and evaluators. “It’s not a matter of a few translators speaking in their own interest, it’s a matter of the MLA, a national organization, coming up with a position paper,” Mr. Heim explains. “What we hope is that people—like deans who may be microbiologists, say, and have really little idea of what translation is—will accept what the MLA says.”

And although ALTA isn’t necessarily focused on the academic side of a life in translation, they could should probably help with this as well. If we’re going to have a vibrant book culture that incorporates works and voices from other cultures, we’re going to need a system by which all players—publishers and translators—can exist. And teaching at a university (or, yeah, having a press located at a university) is one fantastic option . . . Especially considering the normal terms of translation contracts and the general sales level of books in translation . . .