The only literary translator in the village

[Eric]

The sketch on the comedy programme "Little Britain" makes an interesting point. Matt Lucas, the chubby baby-like comedian, plays a Welshman who dresses up in hideously camp, or fake leather, garb and keeps boasting to the barmaid Myfanwy, that he is "the only gay in the village".

The point is: he wants to remain the only one, in order to preserve his exclusivity. And there could be an analogy with translation. Some of us, ones that actively translate, could also play that r?le. But personally, I like to compare notes with other people that translate. We may translate from different languages, in different genres, etc., but it would be nice to discuss the activity, in general terms, with others.

So those of you here on the WLF that do translate, join the club.

[Mirabell]

just for clarification: how do you define "actively"?

[Eric]

Actively means: actively. In other words, if you actually translate things, either every day, or now and again. I cannot conceive of any way of "passively" translating a text.

It's like the question whether you "actively" play football, ride a bicycle, cook pasta dishes, write novels, play croquet, work in politics, play in the playground, spy on the enemy, play snooker, urinate, sing in a choir, play the viola, yodel, play silly buggers, have sex, play on words, drink alcohol, plant apple trees when you know the end of the world is nigh... Etc.

Or whether you watch such activities on TV instead, observing others doing it, and never participating yourself.

[Mirabell]

Ah, I was thinking you meant 'professionally', which is, btw., what Howard does.

[Eric]

Darren Pretzel defines passive translation rather well in his handbook: "A Handbook For Passive Translators", Hochstapler & Hochstapler, Milton Keynes, 1998, on page 361 of this definitive tome:

(...)

Beyond active translation, done by professionals and other ?bermenschleins, we must now consider passive translation. This is extraneously extant in the English-speaking world where after a life of television, people who once translated three poems between 1963 and 1964, have now given up the activity and read a significant amount of literature about translation, its essence, its rules, its scope, its breadth, its idiomaticity and idioticisms, its rhythm, rhyme and purport, its mellifluicity and pendulism, it structures and narraticity, its prandulism and syntactical space... but never, in the words of Arthur Smith, "do any fackin' translation themselves".

[Howard]

Do I detect your usual heavy irony, Eric?

Actually, when I saw the thread title "The only translator in the village", I thought you might be referring rather enviously to Natasha Wimmer, who seems to be getting profiled everywhere for her translation of Roberto Bolano's "2666". Not that I'm envious at all: good to see the practice of translation getting some attention in the media, and at least no one's trying to hide the fact that the book is a translation.

[Eric]

I was just taking the piss, as I fully control the life of the ubiquitous Darren Pretzel. I was not aware of the thunderous self-promoter Natty Wimmin, and I do not have a penchant for novels 1,100 pages long. I get the vibes that such authors have swallowed the verbal equivalent of a packet of laxative pills. So I'll leave Bola?o for the rest of you to fight over.

Literary translators must sail between the Scylla and Charybdis of, on the one hand, pathetic wimpery and sucking up to the publisher's every whim, and on the other, the hubris of pushing the author into the nether darkness, yelling "it's me, the translator, look at me, me, ME, ME, ME!". When that crafty Fleming Verhaeghen translated his own thick tome, he got the best of both worlds. (People have gone rather quiet about that book, too, of late.)

[Mirabell]

Do I detect your usual heavy irony, Eric?

Actually, when I saw the thread title "The only translator in the village", I thought you might be referring rather enviously to Natasha Wimmer, who seems to be getting profiled everywhere for her translation of Roberto Bolano's "2666". Not that I'm envious at all: good to see the practice of translation getting some attention in the media, and at least no one's trying to hide the fact that the book is a translation.

I always thought that Pevear & Volokhonsky were the big translator superstars in the US. Is that over now? Have their translation of Anna Karenina on the shelf yet have not managed to read it yet.