{"id":286426,"date":"2011-08-02T16:48:19","date_gmt":"2011-08-02T16:48:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2011\/08\/02\/interview-with-bill-johnson\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T16:17:03","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T16:17:03","slug":"interview-with-bill-johnson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2011\/08\/02\/interview-with-bill-johnson\/","title":{"rendered":"Interview with Bill Johnson"},"content":{"rendered":"

Following up on the Read This Next feature of Magdalena Tulli’s In Red<\/em>,<\/a> we now have now posted an interview with Polish translator Bill Johnston<\/a> about this novel.<\/p>\n

Bill is an amazing translator and reader, and this interview is filthy with interesting insights into both the translation process and Tulli’s work as a whole. HIGHLY<\/span> RECOMMEND<\/span>. Here’s an excerpt:<\/p>\n

\n

LY:<\/b> So do you think in her progression towards a more traditional narrative style, she\u2019s losing something, or do you think that this is actually highlighting the unusualness of her writing?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

BJ:<\/b> Well, to me Flaw<\/em> is the first overtly personal book that she\u2019s written. It\u2019s about a square in a bourgeois area of an unnamed city where a streetcar runs around the square in a circle. Over the course of the single day, refugees start to emerge from the streetcar and gather in the square. The people living around the square don\u2019t know what to do with them and end up herding the refugees onto the little lawn at the center of the square and telling them they have to stay there. And at one point, one pregnant woman gives birth on the square. The baby\u2019s delivered, but in the confusion the baby goes missing. It just disappears. One of the recurring devices in the book is that Tulli says of a particular character, \u201cit could be you, it could be me,\u201d and basically says about this baby: \u201cit could be me.\u201d It was at that point that I realized how personal the book is for Tulli. Her mother was a Holocaust survivor, and I think there\u2019s a degree of trauma that can be read into all of her writings, but especially Flaw. This is a book about how one deals with \u201cthe unwanted,\u201d what Mike Davis calls \u201csurplus humanity,\u201d but it\u2019s also a book about Tulli herself. This was the first time I had seen her overtly present in one of her own books, not hiding behind the mask of a rather sort of pedantic narrator, which she often draws on. I see that very much as a progression.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

And has she lost anything? I think Dreams and Stones<\/em> is a really beautiful book. It\u2019s very much a book of ideas, but it\u2019s also a book of poetry for me, a book of images of extraordinary vividness. But I don\u2019t think she loses that. Her style is always incredibly precise. When you sit down and start to translate something, you really quickly start to see whether the prose has been put together carefully, and in Tulli\u2019s case there\u2019s an extraordinary precision in her choice of words, in the choice of sentence structure, in the exact positioning of perspective mediating between the writer and the narrator, in the characters and so on. And I think that follows through all of the books. When I\u2019ve shown Tulli drafts of the translations, we\u2019ve had very long discussions about very precise phrasing. In fact, she\u2019s even changed some of the original phrases for the English translation. I\u2019m always a little worried that somebody\u2019s going to sit down and compare the two versions and say this is a bad translation. There are some differences between the Polish and the English, but that\u2019s because Tulli decided she should have written it differently. She\u2019s known for revising her own work a great deal, so with each of her books I\u2019ve had to make sure that the version that I\u2019m working with is in fact the most recent version. It\u2019s a little scary when you\u2019re getting into a translation and somebody says, \u201cOh by the way, this new revised version just came out . . .\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

So she\u2019s very much a stylist in the mode of Flaubert, very concerned about word choice, and punctuation and sentence structure and so on, and I think that\u2019s something that remains throughout all four books.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

LY:<\/b> Do you think this makes the process of translating her more difficult, or more enjoyable?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

BJ:<\/b> Both, definitely. For me, as a translator, difficult is enjoyable. Usually. When it\u2019s a good challenge. As a translator I love writers who are very precise and creative with language. Who are not just telling a story in a kind of workmanlike fashion, but really revel in the material with which they\u2019re making their stories. Tulli is very much in that mode. She\u2019s extremely difficult, so it\u2019s a slow process, but a very rewarding one when it finally comes out. It helps to have translated her other three books, because even though each book has a particular narrative voice, there\u2019s still kind of an authorial\u2014I hesitate to use the word \u201cspirit\u201d because of Douglas Robinson\u2014there\u2019s an authorial kind of underlying voice or discourse that can be traced from one book to another. Not that it goes any faster, but maybe I feel a little more confidence. Also, having corresponded so much with Tulli, as I\u2019m working I can hear her comments, saying It\u2019s not that word it\u2019s this word<\/em> and Could we not do it this way?<\/em> or Do we have to have to have this syntax?<\/em> and I think that helps.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Read the whole thing here.<\/a><\/p>\n

\n<\/a>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Following up on the Read This Next feature of Magdalena Tulli’s In Red, we now have now posted an interview with Polish translator Bill Johnston about this novel. Bill is an amazing translator and reader, and this interview is filthy with interesting insights into both the translation process and Tulli’s work as a whole. HIGHLY […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":292,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67486],"tags":[9306,41426,41416,11796,2376,40786],"class_list":["post-286426","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","tag-bill-johnston","tag-in-red","tag-lily-ye","tag-magdalena-tulli","tag-polish-literature","tag-read-this-next"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/286426","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/292"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=286426"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/286426\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":343326,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/286426\/revisions\/343326"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=286426"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=286426"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=286426"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}