View Full Version : Credit where credit's due
A good letter in today's Observer Review section:
"Stephanie Merritt's review of Javier Marias's Your Face Tomorrow ("Through the moral maze to a breathtaking finale", 3 January) is most interesting; too few translations get reviewed nowadays. However, when they do, the least one expects is that the translator's name will be mentioned and some comment offered on the quality of his work. Ms Merritt provides neither; she doesn't even tell us Marias's nationality or what language he writes in - though one guesses he is Spanish."
William Dorrell, London.
Harry
duygutekgul
09-Mar-2010, 23:09
Yes, that is something sad about translation; it's invisible.
I found these very useful guidelines on how to write an effective review of a translated novel.
PEN American Center - Book Reviewers Guide (http://www.pen.org/page.php/prmID/269)
If you look at the Wikipedia article on Javier Marais, it is rather ironic to note in this context that Marais himself is a prodigious literary translator of Sterne, Shakespeare, Faulkner, James, Nabokov, etc. Also to be noted is that he spent part of his childhood in the USA.
It is a permanent fault of nearly all the reviewers in the British quality dailies that they do not even think about the fact that they can only read the book they are reviewing on account of the large amount of labour performed by the translator. Most journalists' attitudes to translation are pretty ignorant and primitive. There are laudable exceptions, but not many.
I too am a fan of American PEN because of the fact that it takes literary translation seriously. When is English PEN going to reciprocate? English PEN does indeed have a section of their website called "Writers in Translation" but it seems to consist of random lists of books plus a list of book fairs and prizes. There seems to be no discussion of the role (or lack of it) of literary translation in British publishing and reviewing. It does not seem as if that part of the English PEN website is there for purposes other than making it look good in a general climate of apathy in the literary institutions of Britain to literary translation.
But do have a look at the American PEN pages on translation:
PEN American Center - Translation (http://www.pen.org/page.php/prmID/154)
Read the PEN Charter and notice how it stresses the free movement of literary artefacts:
PEN charter - English Pen (http://www.englishpen.org/membership/charter/)
All this stuff about the "unhampered transmission" and "common currency" internationally is a huge joke when Britain in effect censors out most of what is written in non-English by ignoring it. Supporting a random list of novels is hardly much of an effort to stick to the spirit of the Charter. A sea change is needed in the attitude to literary translation as a whole.
duygutekgul
15-Mar-2010, 18:41
Oh yes, translation is usually euphemised as "international literature." But no one discusses the translation itself.
"International Literature", "World Literature" and "European Literature" are curiously vague and bland terms that blur the fact that each country on every continent has a literature of its own, mostly written in the local language (as opposed to a kind of translatlantic English).
The terms can, on occasions, be handy shorthand. But they don't stand up to scrutiny. They mean nothing really, except that an author or book is being pulled out of a bag of varying size.
Books are translated from specific languages with specific hinterland cultures, not from "international".
MultilingualMania
28-Mar-2010, 04:03
I know this sounds ridiculous, but I would have never thought to include the translator info in a book review. As I am reading through this, I now realize my mistake. I guess that I was just so caught up in the original author, and just took the translation for granted. I'll be sure to include the info in the future.
It is a permanent fault of nearly all the reviewers in the British quality dailies that they do not even think about the fact that they can only read the book they are reviewing on account of the large amount of labour performed by the translator. Most journalists' attitudes to translation are pretty ignorant and primitive. There are laudable exceptions, but not many.
I too am a fan of American PEN because of the fact that it takes literary translation seriously. When is English PEN going to reciprocate? English PEN does indeed have a section of their website called "Writers in Translation" but it seems to consist of random lists of books plus a list of book fairs and prizes. There seems to be no discussion of the role (or lack of it) of literary translation in British publishing and reviewing. It does not seem as if that part of the English PEN website is there for purposes other than making it look good in a general climate of apathy in the literary institutions of Britain to literary translation.
But do have a look at the American PEN pages on translation:
PEN American Center - Translation (http://www.pen.org/page.php/prmID/154)
Read the PEN Charter and notice how it stresses the free movement of literary artefacts:
PEN charter - English Pen (http://www.englishpen.org/membership/charter/)
All this stuff about the "unhampered transmission" and "common currency" internationally is a huge joke when Britain in effect censors out most of what is written in non-English by ignoring it. Supporting a random list of novels is hardly much of an effort to stick to the spirit of the Charter. A sea change is needed in the attitude to literary translation as a whole.
Hi Eric,
I asked English Pen about this problem and got this interesting reply:
Thank you for your email and for your comments ? we value feedback and do our best to act on it. I appreciate that the website does not adequately reflect the work that PEN?s Writers in Translation programme does ? and in fact we are currently in the process of redesigning the site to rectify this. We hope to unveil a much improved version later this year.
The English PEN Writers in Translation programme is unique in that we focus on supporting the marketing and promotion of literature in translation; we focus on using our grants to bring writers and translators to the UK to promote their work and further our aim of building audiences for translated literature.
We are, however, actively involved in promoting both translated literature and translation as a profession in itself. One example of this is our partnership in the new Literary Translation Centre at this year?s London Book Fair, which will bring publishing and translation communities together to raise the profile and increase the quantity of literary translation in the UK and abroad. We will be actively raising the profile of professional translators, with displays featuring award-winning translators in the Centre itself. The Centre will also host a series of seminars covering all aspects of translation. If you are attending the Book Fair, please do come and visit the LTC. I?m attaching some more information about it to this email.
Another project that we are currently working on is the Global Translation Initiative, a joint venture of Dalkey Archive Press, English PEN (http://www.englishpen.org/), the Free Word Centre (http://www.freewordonline.com/), and Arts Council England (http://www.artscouncil.org.uk/), in partnership with organizations throughout the global translation community as well as national arts councils in Canada, US, England, Scotland, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand. The Initiative was born out of the recognition that the translation crisis is a global crisis, and yet efforts to advocate for greater support for the translation community have up to now been contained mostly within each national community, with the result that the primary international relevance of the issue has not yet been fully established. The goals of the GTI are to share information from the various sectors of English-language translation communities throughout the world (including funders, booksellers, writers, translators, media, and academic translation programs); to identify specific obstacles and sites of opportunity; to document the current state of translation into English globally and widely disseminate the results; and to create a multi-year campaign for change.
One aspect of the GTI project will be to collate a series of written articles exploring the value of literary translations from as many thoughtful perspectives as possible, to draw attention to the breadth of influence that translation has on the culture, and to identify the historical conditions and contemporary obstacles that have resulted in the cultural stagnation we are currently experiencing. Our intention is for the pieces to push the conversation of translation?s value beyond the insular dialogue that has been going on for some time among translators, publishers, and other participants in the field itself, into a wider public sphere. I would be very interested to hear from you if you know of individuals who might provide valuable contributions to this aspect of the project.
I hope that these examples of our work ? by no means a summary ? reassure you that English PEN does take literary translation ? and translation as a profession ? very seriously. Once again, thank you for contacting us.
Best wishes, Sophie
Sophie Hoult | Writers in Translation Acting Programme Manager | English PEN
t. 020 7324 2535 | d. 020 7324 2542
Free Word Centre, 60 Farringdon Road, London EC1R 3GA
Yes Lenz, you're doing a good job. The more people that try to raise the awareness of my fellow Britons (Brits, in common parlance) of the importance of literary and academic translation, the better,
The reply to your e-mail was certainly enlightening. Comments:
Thank you for your email and for your comments – we value feedback and do our best to act on it. I appreciate that the website does not adequately reflect the work that PEN’s Writers in Translation programme does – and in fact we are currently in the process of redesigning the site to rectify this. We hope to unveil a much improved version later this year.
The admission that the website does not adequately reflect the PEN Translation Programme is welcome.
The English PEN Writers in Translation programme is unique in that we focus on supporting the marketing and promotion of literature in translation; we focus on using our grants to bring writers and translators to the UK to promote their work and further our aim of building audiences for translated literature.I'm not how unique they are, and would love to hear details about how precisely they use their grants.
We are, however, actively involved in promoting both translated literature and translation as a profession in itself. One example of this is our partnership in the new Literary Translation Centre at this year’s London Book Fair, which will bring publishing and translation communities together to raise the profile and increase the quantity of literary translation in the UK and abroad. We will be actively raising the profile of professional translators, with displays featuring award-winning translators in the Centre itself. The Centre will also host a series of seminars covering all aspects of translation. If you are attending the Book Fair, please do come and visit the LTC. I’m attaching some more information about it to this email.The Literary Translation Centre at the London Book Fair is a welcome improvement, but it only exists for about three days of the year as far as I can see and is largely an attempt to promote various individuals and literatures. Raising the profile of literature in translation in order to make it as available in the UK as in other equivalent European countries will need a great deal more than panels and talks at the book fair each year.
Another project that we are currently working on is the Global Translation Initiative, a joint venture of Dalkey Archive Press, English PEN (http://www.englishpen.org/), the Free Word Centre (http://www.freewordonline.com/), and Arts Council England (http://www.artscouncil.org.uk/), in partnership with organizations throughout the global translation community as well as national arts councils in Canada, US, England, Scotland, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand. The Initiative was born out of the recognition that the translation crisis is a global crisis, and yet efforts to advocate for greater support for the translation community have up to now been contained mostly within each national community, with the result that the primary international relevance of the issue has not yet been fully established. The goals of the GTI are to share information from the various sectors of English-language translation communities throughout the world (including funders, booksellers, writers, translators, media, and academic translation programs); to identify specific obstacles and sites of opportunity; to document the current state of translation into English globally and widely disseminate the results; and to create a multi-year campaign for change. Thanks to the fact that Dalkey (a U.S. publishing house I have translated two novels for) is very active in the promotion of translation, and has a representative in London, I have every faith in anything that Dalkey is involved in. The Arts Council of England could be more active in its promotion of literary translation, but will no doubt be jollied along by Dalkey and this new Free Word Centre, about which I know nothing.
There is really no "global translation crisis". It is just that the English-speaking countries, jointly and severally, have shut out literary and academic translations. This process has not obviously been a conscious effort to keep out things written in other languages. It is, however, the result of a good deal of hubris about English literature being "the best in the world" and similar such nonsense. I hope they get on with identifying the obstacles, as they have been patently obvious to us translators for decades.
We don't need any more costly surveys and questionnaires, talking-shops and seminars. We need action on the part of publishers and reviewers to bring more translated literature into the UK. I and others have been writing about this to all and sundry over the years, and now they are suddenly re-inventing the wheel.
One aspect of the GTI project will be to collate a series of written articles exploring the value of literary translations from as many thoughtful perspectives as possible, to draw attention to the breadth of influence that translation has on the culture, and to identify the historical conditions and contemporary obstacles that have resulted in the cultural stagnation we are currently experiencing. Our intention is for the pieces to push the conversation of translation’s value beyond the insular dialogue that has been going on for some time among translators, publishers, and other participants in the field itself, into a wider public sphere. I would be very interested to hear from you if you know of individuals who might provide valuable contributions to this aspect of the project.
The Global Translation Initiative must under no circumstances become another bureaucratic exercise in collecting a lot of reports, questionnaires and other sheets of paper together, producing a definitive global end-report and then... doing nothing. This last paragraph above smacks sadly of rhetoric. The stagnation is, I repeat, in the English-speaking world, not globally. Walk into any bookshop in Germany, France, Sweden, Finland, the Netherlands, anywhere in Europe, and you will always (I'm betting, but I think I'd win my bet) see more translations per metre of bookshelf space than in Britain and the other English-speaking countries. The word "insular" is used, but unless a lot of serious comparison is done with the way things work in the rest of the EU and Europe - and the findings are acted upon - nothing new will happen.
*
PEN, of course, does a marvellous job with its Writers in Prison Committee. But I really hope that they can do as many active things in this inititative as well.
The Global Translation Initiative must under no circumstances become another bureaucratic exercise in collecting a lot of reports, questionnaires and other sheets of paper together, producing a definitive global end-report and then... doing nothing. This last paragraph above smacks sadly of rhetoric. The stagnation is, I repeat, in the English-speaking world, not globally. Walk into any bookshop in Germany,France, Sweden, Finland, the Netherlands, anywhere in Europe, and you will always (I'm betting, but I think I'd win my bet) see more translations per metre of bookshelf space than in Britain and the other English-speaking countries. The word "insular" is used, but unless a lot of serious comparison is done with the way things work in the rest of the EU and Europe - and the findings are acted upon - nothing new will happen.
Have you contacted them yourself? Don't be shy, Eric. Send them and other useful organisations your thoughts.
I thought of that, Lenz, when I was writing that rather long-winded reply. I am a member of English PEN, so I can write to Sophie Hoult. I hope, nevertheless, that these great planners and talkers will themselves scour the internet for interesting debates about translation - and in several languages - and in so doing avoid being insular. Because I find it pretty perverse that there is talk of "cultural stagnation", when this disease has only affected Britain. That attitude is in itself insular.
Well, Lenz, I've done my bit now. I wrote to English PEN, principally to Sophie Hoult, but also CC-ing my letter to all the officers there. Three of them are out of office as it's Easter, I suppose. Cat Lucas till 6th April, Sarah Hesketh till 8th April, and Jonathan Heawood on his annual leave until 13th April. That does leave a few others in the office though. I covered a number of issues, in a somewhat more polite form than here.
Looking at this new initiative, the Free Word Centre, I found that if you use their own search facility and type in the word "translation" there are only two entries. I don't think they have really thought anything through regarding translations. But it may be a handy place to organise the introduction of authors writing in other languages to a British audience. Their events up to now are a combination of mostly insular Brit-only ones and the odd initiative involving Beirut and Iran. European literature, despite its being enormously sophisticated and varied, does not really feature, leading me to suspect that Free Word is the old politically correct gang doing all the right poco things somewhere near the Guardian offices. So far, I am not encouraged that this will be anything new and allow European literature to break through the barrier dividing it from Britain.
Powered by vBulletin® Version 4.2.0 Copyright © 2013 vBulletin Solutions, Inc. All rights reserved.