The man behind the PEN Translation Fund revealed →

…and how did this generous benefactor come by his cash reserves? Frugal living and careful saving. Be sure to read Chad Post’s post at the Three Percent blog (linked to in the article above) for more on this.

The dictator novel in the age of the Arab Spring

Translator Peter Bush discusses translating Ramón del Valle-Inclán’s Tryant Banderas, a work often considered untranslatable.

Thursday, October 11th – 12:30PM
Modern Language Conference Room; 6-210 Baruch Vertical Campus
55 Lexington Ave. (25th and Lex.)

So you think you can translate? Prove It This summer in London

Robert Chandler, the crack translator who may be familiar to you from his work with Andrey Platonov and Vasily Grossman, writes to tell us about a translation summer school program that he’s involved with, happening this summer in London. There are a few different elements to the program, including some free online courses. Robert will be teaching the Russian-language classes, and he will be joined by such esteemed translators as Ros Schwartz and Margaret Jull Costa. And what’s more, the tuition is surprisingly low.

What: Translation Summer School
Hone your translating skills from languages including Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish

When: 9-13 July 2012

Where: Birkbeck College, London

Online registration is available through the end of February.

In the Electric Tram

Riding the ‘electric’ is an inexpensive pleasure. When the car arrives, you climb aboard, possibly after first politely ceding the right of way to an imposing gentlewoman, and then the car continues on. At once you notice that you have a rather musical disposition. The most delicate melodies are parading through your head. In no time you’ve elevated yourself to the position of a leading conductor or even composer. Yes, it’s really true: the human brain involuntarily starts composing songs in the electric tram, songs that in their involuntary nature and their rhythmic regularity are so very striking that it’s hard to resist thinking oneself a second Mozart.

The New York Review blog published the second in a series of excerpts from the recently published Berlin Stories by Robert Walser, translated and with an introduction by Susan Bernofsky. Bernofsky, who is currently chair of the PEN Translation Committee and author of Foreign Words: Translator-Authors in the Age of Goethe, was interviewed for the blog Daily PEN America about the place of translation in America today.

The Ten Most Difficult Words to Translate →

HMH Literature in Translation: Congrats to Damion Searls for winning the 2011 Translation Award from... →

hmhlit:

Congrats to Damion Searls for winning the 2011 Translation Award from PEN Center USA.

TRANSLATION WINNER: DAMION SEARLS
Jon Fosse’s Aliss at the Fire (Dalkey Archive Press)

Damion Searls is a translator from German, Norwegian, French, and Dutch and a writer in English. He has translated…

“At Menzeldjemil, Tunisia, Mme Chassoux, an officer’s wife, would have been murdered had her corset not stopped the blade.”

— 

-Felix Feneon, Novels in Three Lines

Translated and with an Introduction by Luc Sante, NYRB

(via soczgowchz)

“As I tell you the following story, you’ll have to permit me to mention myself now and then, because its hero and central character is inextricably bound to our—that is to say, my and my siblings’—childhood. By the same token, it would be impossible to sift out the people who told me about these contexts and connections, and my storytelling would suffer if you were to insist I keep myself entirely out of the tale like a good narrator. Besides, please bear in mind that no one with anything to say ever said anything about anybody but himself.”

— Gregor von Rezzori, from An Ermine in Czernopol, translated by Philip Boehm

Félix Fénéon and Jane Austen

Ever wonder what art critic, anarchist, and feuilletonist Félix Fénéon was getting up to while he was in prison under suspicion of having been involved in a terrorist bombing? Well, as it turns out, he was busy translating Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey into French. Some thoughts from Ellen and Jim Have a Blog:

…we owe the existence of what is arguably the best translation of Austen into French [to the belief at the time that Austen was] utterly oblivious to anything political [and] that it was safe to allow someone who people inclined to terminology would call a terrorist to read and translate her. Felix Feneon translated Northanger Abbey into delightful witty and deeply felt French while he was in prison for the crime of blowing a Paris restaurant up with a bomb where a number of people were either killed or seriously maimed. A friend bought him a good dictionary and he was allowed to work undisturbed though.

More: An 1899 review of Feneon’s translation from The Nation, which observes that the translator takes “few liberties” and one from 2009 which begs to differ.

Vladimir Sorokin: Taking Eloquence and Wringing Its Neck

Nicole Rudnick at the Paris Review blog interviewed Jamey Gambrell about translating Vladimir Sorokin. Here is a bit of that interview:

Some in Russia have campaigned against the violence and obscenity in his work. The government even tried to prosecute him for it. Did that aspect of his writing bother you?

Not all of his books are quite like that, but the majority are. If I hadn’t already known him, in a general social context among artists, I might not have agreed to it, but he’s so unlike his books. He’s a very soft-spoken and mild-mannered individual. Otherwise, it would have been scary to translate them. Even something like “A Month in Dachau”—after a while it was a matter of what to do with the language, because the language was torture, too. It’s like Verlaine said about what he wanted to do with the French language: “Take eloquence and wring its neck”—break the language, which is particularly pertinent in French, because French is so pretty. Tsvetaeva wrote about some of Rilke’s last poems that French is the most ungrateful of languages for a poet, meaning that the language—its sounds, its nature—overwhelms in poetry. It’s a force, in and of itself, that the poet probably has little traction against. I really think she was right; it’s very overwhelming.

Russian, on the other hand, isn’t. Like English, it’s very difficult to find something that distorts or changes. It’s very difficult to shock in English with language. Not that that was Sorokin’s intention, just to shock. If you look at him in a sense as an abstract painter, where the paint on the canvas is what the painting is about—how the paint is applied, how the strokes are used—there’s no message in a way. Painting is about painting. Words on a page are about words on a page. I think that dehumanizing, really extreme violence that takes place in some of the novels is partly an attempt to do the same thing. At a certain point the brotherhood of the twenty-three thousand stop being able to read letters on a page; it just becomes black ink moving around, and words don’t have any meaning. They also can’t see faces; there’s no individuality. So I think, in an American context, you might call him a modernist, plain and simple.

The Caterpillar by Jules Renard

Nature Stories at Anthropologie in Rockefeller Center

He comes out of a tuft of grass where he’d taken refuge from the heat. He’s rippling over the sandy path, taking care not to stop and, for a moment, thinks he’s got lost: he’s landed in a footmark made by the gardener’s clogs. When he reaches the strawberry bed, he takes a rest, raises his nose, and sniffs right and left; he then sets off again, over the leaves, under the leaves, he now knows where to go. What a lovely caterpillar he is, plump, hairy, well-filled out, brown with tiny golden spots. And what lovely black eyes!

Following his nose, he wiggles and knits his brows. What beautifully thick eyebrows he’s got! He stops at the foot of a rosebush. He’s delicately feeling its rough bark with his hooks, waves his puppy-dog head around, and decides to climb up. And now you’d think he’s painfully swallowing every inch of the way. At the very top of the rosebush, there’s an open rose, the color of a guileless little girl: she’s intoxicated by her own luxuriant scent; she’s completely unsuspicious and lets the first caterpillar that comes along climb up her stalk. She welcomes him as a gift. And feeling that it might be a cold night, she’s delighted to have a feather scarf round her neck …

—Jules Renard, from Nature Stories, translated by Douglas Parmée, illustrated by Pierre Bonnard

Russian Translator Marian Schwartz

Marian Schwartz, who translated our edition of Yuri Olesha’s Envy, will be in discussion with Russian Booker–Prize winner Olga Slavnikova in New York next week.

Date and Time: Wednesday, 25 May 2011, at 6:45pm
Jerry Orbach Theater
1627 Broadway, New York, 3rd floor
(entrance on the south side of West 50th Street)