Context N°22
The following exchange between Publisher John O’Brien and Editor Jeremy M. Davies of Dalkey Archive Press was conducted via email in the weeks leading up to the publication of this issue of CONTEXT. It is our hope that this “off the cuff” conversation, which was neither scripted in advance nor edited for content, might offer translators, writers, and readers some practical information about what goes on “behind the scenes” at Dalkey, and by extension about the world of literary translation publishing in general.
John O’Brien: You’ve now edited a number of translations at Dalkey, and I want your take on what you think, as an editor, the biggest problems are in working with translations or translators over the years.
Jeremy M. Davies: There are a number of problems that come up, again and again, and even with talented and erudite translators, from the perspective of an editor. Here are two of the biggest (most of the others stem in some way from these):
1) Translators see themselves as the protectors and advocates of a text. This is certainly noble and not entirely untrue. The problem here is that, as concerns contemporary literary fiction, a translator must also be the protector and advocate of an author—a collaborator after the fact, in other words. They must be the advocate of their author—whom we may presume is read and enjoyed and comprehended (however abstrusely) in his or her original tongue—and therefore the advocate of that author’s writing process, the advocate of his or her talent, the advocate of their particular procedure of turning intent into language. Not, then, a defender of what, in the world of translation, must be seen as the calcified remnants of this procedure: the original text. The bottom line is this: if the author reads as being brilliant in the original, then he or she must at the very least read as being pretty damn good in English. What kind of a favor are we doing the book or the author if we provide them with anything less?
Of course, most translators find their own syntax, idiom, and style to be perfectly readable representations of a text—but this is because they have access to something their readers do not: an understanding of the original; and, better, all the unspoken/unwritten assumptions that aid native speakers in reading any kind of fiction. But translators must be capable of developing that “third ear” which gives one at least a (partial, subjective) understanding of how a poor, monophone, but intelligent and fiction-savvy reader is going to see their prose: stripped now of its form and context both. The difference, finally, between translators and authors is that the latter (no matter what they say) do actually worry about being read, and about how they’re read, and if what they transmit (however difficult) can be received or appreciated. Thus, translators need to see themselves as more, not less, a part of the “art” of the novel (say) that they’ve taken on. Authors don’t fight over every sentence because they see their work as being in flux, and can’t really ignore the possibility that they might be doing their work a disservice. Translators need this same flexibility, this same ability to “care” about their texts (rather than just “protect” them): care not about fidelity, or not only fidelity, but about how they will be read.
The editor is, ideally, a stand-in for that “poor, monophone” fiction-reader. Not (or certainly not at Dalkey) a philistine with a machete who wants to dumb knotty prose down. If we can’t make head or tail of a sentence without going back to the French or Spanish or Dutch, something isn’t right—even if, and this is usually the case, the English version is “accurate.”
2) Further, while I’d hate to imply that I believe literature is always “paraphraseable,” translators should never feel that they have the luxury (as do readers, and even writers) of not understanding what they see in the original text. That is, they have no business submitting a single sentence that they themselves can’t explain or unpack . . . or else no business submitting a single sentence that they aren’t willing to admit is causing them trouble by flagging the sentence/section in question and wanting to work with us to make it at least semantically/syntactically expressive. Good books are often difficult to untwist, but surely the author knew what they were up to, and thus the sentence must always be written from an (at least) minimally informed perspective, in order to convey the same level of “being in control” that the original had for its first readers. I have come to the conclusion, recently, that much of the art of translation (and translation editing) lies simply in “making a text sound like it was actually meant to sound the way it sounds.”
JOB: Well, you didn’t ask me a question in return, and so I’ll just take off on what you have said. My working principle is that a translation should create a “parallel experience” for the reader, in the new language, to what the original reader would have had (I know I am here talking in Platonic terms as though there is one ideal reader, but this is similar to what an author envisions in writing a book: who is the reader?).
I agree that the “text” is not somehow sacred. We already know that it’s being violated by virtue of the fact that it’s in a new language, and so the issue of “fidelity” is already wrought with problems. Even the original work was a work-in-progress of sorts, oftentimes a negotiation between author and editor, or even a negotiation between the author and herself. So, if we are looking for something sacred, what is it? The first draft? The third? What the author submitted to the publisher? What the editor and author agreed to?
So, again, I agree with you, it is the “spirit” of the original that has to be captured, and captured in such a way that if a reader in the original met a reader in the new language, they could converse in such a way that they felt they were talking about the same book. If one of them winds up talking about how weird the language is and the other doesn’t have a clue, then something has gone haywire. What gets said in one language must find its equivalent in another, but not its duplication. In other words, what was the intent? The most obvious example of this occurs with wordplay and jokes. Some wordplay simply will not translate, oftentimes because it depends upon both meaning and sound, and even visual appearance. The best translators I know will drop the wordplay or will pick it up somewhere else in the text. I know that Barbara Wright, the great French translator, had to do this with Queneau’s work, and did it with the author’s approval. And I believe she got the approval because Queneau, like every author I’ve known who is being translated, want the work to “work” in the new language. I know this because I usually have to deal with the author, and this has always been the message. And if the author has this view, then what is the basis for deciding otherwise?
But this leads to another question, Jeremy, and one that I don’t think you and I have ever talked about. Is literary translation an art, and what are the implications if it is indeed an art?
JMD: I guess my question should have been: How does all this strike you?
Whenever I hear the word “art,” I reach for my thesaurus. But if writing is an art—and I’m guessing we’re both agreed on that score—how could translation not be an art as well? There is, if we apply only a little bit of myopia, very little difference between the two activities. Translation, as Harry Mathews implies in the title essay of his collection The Case of the Persevering Maltese (a piece that should be required reading for any prospective translator), can itself be seen as a form of writing under constraint: using an original text as a model, the translator generates a sentence-by-sentence linguistic (and cultural) “parallel,” to use your terminology, to the construction of the original. We might even call it a kind of intra-artform ekphrasis, if that isn’t stretching the definition too far. It’s not at all surprising that the best translators have often been great poets or writers themselves: they have the bigger “word-hoards,” are better ventriloquists, etc. I’ve often said (and often been pilloried for saying so) that I’d much rather work with a translator who is an excellent writer of English prose with only a beginner’s understanding of a source language than a fluent speaker of both languages with no experience using English aesthetically (bathos has a billion faces).
As Martin Riker, our Associate Director, recently pointed out to me, when an Anglophone says that Georges Perec is his or her favorite writer, they are, in a sense, saying that they are David Bellos fans—or William Weaver if Calvino, the Waldrops if Roubaud, etc. (to keep it in the family). Translators aren’t authors, of course: they are writing in the service of someone else’s words, of their reading (one of many) of a source text. They can’t change the ending of a novel, can’t omit what they like, can’t violate the feel of the book in its original language—but within these and similar constraints, and notwithstanding the presumption we all bring to translations that they are standing-in for an otherwise inaccessible work, translators are adding something (hopefully something beautiful) to the world, just as an author does—not simply copying or aping an extant work, since, in these terms, translation is simply, literally impossible. We want the book “as though” it had been written in English, with all the author’s intelligence and talent brought to bear on our language—and this implies that we are asking the translator to stand, if only for the length of his or her work, in the same position as an author . . . and an author worth translating.
That’s a very long answer to the first part of your question, but I think the implications follow very directly: if a translator is an artist, a “sur-author,” as it were, then he or she must produce “art.” Their job is considerably easier than an author’s, in some senses—as one of Breughel’s many workshop assistants and duplicators could be said to have had an easier job than P.B. himself. But this means taking on the same responsibility for the work in English as the author did in the original—and then the added responsibility of representing the author and his or her work accurately (that is, to make them look good). A translator cannot produce work that requires the original as a crib. They must produce a work that is whole, coherent in and to itself, and controlled—the same as an author must (regardless of how fragmentary, incoherent, or anarchic their prose is meant to be).
But you’ve been working with translators longer than me—both experienced ones and ones who’ve done their first work for Dalkey. I’d be interested to hear your answer to the same question; and are there pitfalls to the notion of encouraging literary translators to see themselves as artists?
JOB: The best translators are, I think, artists: they are “making” something new. And they are indeed “making,” to invoke Gilson’s view (via Aristotle) that “art is making.” Are they good at what they do, or not? That’s another issue. But their work should be evaluated on its artistic merit, in a way that works in the original language are. The accomplishments of the translator are rarely mentioned in book reviews (to some greater or lesser degree, this requires that the original be looked at and that the reviewer knows the language), but they should be, even if only by way of a gesture at—while admitting that the reviewers don’t know the original—the fact that they can see the translator at work, and know whether they had that dreadful sense of “this is a translation” because of various clunkers, or whether the language soars, the rhythm is right, the style keeps hitting the same mark that is expected of a work in its original language.
But I am really asking this question, not only because the translator is usually overlooked as anything more than a kind of messenger, but because of how they are viewed within academia. Many translators have academic positions because, God knows, they won’t easily make a living on their translation work alone. But academia has historically not recognized translation as the basis for merit increases, promotions, or tenure. As we know from our own experience, many of our own translators have to take time out from translation to publish the articles or books that will actually count at the time of promotion or tenure. I think that, within academia, their work is viewed as a kind of hobby that’s unrelated to artistic production and, just as importantly, scholarly production, as though in their spare time they were pursuing a butterfly collection.
As we who edit their work know, a good translator must be both an artist and a scholar, and this scholarship is evident throughout what they produce. This used to be a problem in academia with creative writers until every school in the country developed creative-writing programs (even though many academics look at creative writers with some skepticism: “What does it take to write a novel, I think I could do one myself”).
So, as far as I’m concerned, universities have completely failed in the arena of translation when they should be leading the way and creating the means by which to encourage translation work by faculty. There is no point in beating this dead horse much more except to say that universities in the United States could have an enormous influence on the state of translation if they would accept literary translation as either an art or an act of scholarship, or both. But this would require “change,” and I won’t go into my views about the possibility of change in the academic world.
So, another question for you. If someone is hell-bent on being a translator (just as many people are hell-bent on being writers and there’s not much one can do to discourage them), what would be the best means of pursuing their work? By this I mean, what would be the ideal “next step” for a young translator who has the skills, necessary background in the language and culture, and also, as you say, the writing abilities? So, imagine someone who is 23 to 27 or so years of age, has done some translation work (most of which winds up in a drawer), and doesn’t know quite where to go next. Since you are also a novelist, I am assuming that your own experience with writing is somewhat parallel to what happens with a translator.
JMD: As far as that dead horse: it should be obvious to just about anyone that the current state of affairs—where academics are in no way rewarded or encouraged for work that both enriches the culture and makes further scholarship possible—is farcical. It’s a grim world where publishing a peer-reviewed paper on an untranslated Thomas Bernhard text is a better career move than rolling up your sleeves and translating it, making it available to readers and colleagues alike.
But: what your hypothetical young, unproven translator has in his corner—and that beginning novelists/writers do not—is this very fact of being able to stand on the shoulders of someone like Bernhard, or any of the writers mentioned above. As an editor, if an original manuscript submission lands on my desk with a cover letter comparing the attached work to Perec, I am as likely to hold it against them (i.e., “Where did this person get the idea they could write like Perec?”) as have my interest piqued. Whereas the monumental advantage translators have is that they can actually get their hands on primary texts: if a submission lands on desk purporting to be a sample from an untranslated book by Perec, or Bernhard, or whomever, you better believe I’m going to pay close attention.
Of course, translation isn’t restricted to excavations of already-established oeuvres, and it’s often languages outside those with “recognition-value” in Anglophone countries (French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Russian, Japanese; sometimes extending to Danish, Dutch, Polish, etc.) that need the most attention from nascent translators. Something else that’s eye-catching for an editor (or this editor) is if a submission comes from a part of the world that represents a blind spot in our culture: if someone were to dig up the Ethiopian Joyce, the Icelandic Borges, the Iranian Stein (of course: all reductive descriptors based on canonical and well-represented western writers . . . but that’s precisely part of the problem), then I damn well want to hear about it. Translators can bridge these gaps for me, for us.
So, yes, translators need to be scholars: they can track down texts of great value that have been ignored for whatever reason by the English-speaking world. Translation, among other things, is itself an act of criticism: not just on the sentence level, where what’s being translated is necessarily a reaction and analysis of an original text, but simply in the decision to engage with your writer in the first place. Translators need to say (implicitly and explicitly): This is worth my time, and by extension yours. (And then, of course, they need to be able to prove it.)
So—my answer does indeed boil down to something very similar to what I’d tell a beginning writer: read as much as possible, always; have good taste (easy!); read some Shklovsky; and, critically, know the tastes of the presses you’d like to approach before approaching them. Secondarily, it never hurts to actually learn a little something about the rights situation for your author’s original texts—you can make sure they’re available, at the very least, and present this info along with your submission. Part of what a translator is “selling” to a publisher is trustworthiness, so why not ante up on this score by being a little bit responsible for the property you’re attempting to get taken on.
Of course, all this is assuming a translator already has a text or texts in mind that they’d like to get into print. Another advantage a translator has over an author is that they can offer a publisher a service without having to get their attention as to the merits of a particular book. In which case, most of the odious elements of self-promotion first-time writers have to indulge are entirely unnecessary: just step forward, please, and show us you’ve got what it takes. Obviously the competition will be a little fiercer for French than Estonian, but this will help you pick your poison.
I’m willing to bet I’m leaving something out, so I’d be curious how you’d amend or elaborate on all that. But everything we’ve discussed raises another question as well: Is it a contradiction to ask that translators consider themselves and be considered artists, but still be able to relinquish a degree of their “vision” at an editor’s behest? Why should an artist whose work we’d like to lavish such attention on be willing to accommodate what could, and not without reason, simply be characterized as “just another opinion,” and by someone generally unable to read the original work?
JOB: Last things first, concerning whether the translator-as-artist can or should “relinquish” something to an editor, especially if the editor does not know the original language. First, most writers in English we work with pay careful attention to what we tell them works or doesn’t work, something you have said earlier. Second, knowing the language or not, the editor knows (or should know!) whether this is working in English, in the same way that he or she knows whether something is working that is submitted in English. If this is simply a matter of “control,” then, just as with writers in English, translators should be told to take the translation down the road to another publisher, and it’s obviously theirs to decide. So, I will go on insisting (and I don’t think we are disagreeing about this) that the translator is an artist. And as with any artist interested in reaching a public, the search begins for a “venue” for the work, whether it be music, painting, or literary fiction in translation.
I agree with all of the advice you give to translators about approaching a publisher and what kind of background they need to have, but I think their task is just as difficult as that of a writer, but with different kinds of difficulties.
So, in this country, for instance, how many works in literary translation are published each year as compared to how many by English-writing authors? My point is that there is not a very large market, even if the translator knows a great deal about who the publishers are (something which they need to know). And at most publishing houses, unlike at Dalkey, there isn’t an overriding aesthetic at work, and so it becomes more difficult determining where to send a translation. I am just using this as an example of the challenges that translators face in getting their work looked at, never mind published. I could go on and on about the differences, but this still would not be quite the point.
Let me try this one on you, but not for the sake of arguing about whether writer or translator has the greatest difficulty. Aspiring writers have a rather obvious path to follow in terms of “where do they go next?” Namely, the country is riddled with creative writing programs that are intended for simply this, to bring them to “the next level” of experience. Not only can they take courses as undergraduates in writing, but they even have MAs or MFAs available to them. So, a place to go, if you will, for “training,” and training presumably with people (the faculty) who know “the business” and who can provide advice about sundry things related, not just to writing, but to how to get published, and to more or less become part of “the conversation.” But what is this “next step” for translators? Where do they go? What’s available? Or, for them, is it a matter of learning by trial-and-error?
JMD: Actually, I’m not disagreeing on any point (it’s too nice a day)—my last question was only to head off a possible objection, and I think you hit the nail on the head: No artist presenting their work through the conduit of a publisher (or producer, or distributor) is operating in a wholly dictatorial and free-handed manner with their material (for better or for worse). You can be, at best, an auteur, as in film: someone who puts their stamp on what, particularly in the sphere of translation, must be seen as a collaboration: between source text/author, translator, editor, publisher (and designer, publicist), and reader. I would actually go on to posit, as a means of reconciling whatever superficial contradiction might be apparent here, that it is a necessary part of a translator’s art to be able to efface him or herself in this manner: to be, in a sense, a “vanishing author,” for whom the final victory is not self-expression but service to a new reading of another person’s voice. Translators’ names go on their books, and rightly so—but their function, the elegance of their art, is to disappear (or “hit it and quit,” to quote James Brown).
Then, as to the authors vs. translators comparison, I certainly didn’t mean to imply that either camp is particularly to be envied (actually, what I’d most like to see is more people taking on both vocations simultaneously: a tradition that sorely needs reviving). I pointed out a couple of advantages, at least in terms of dealing with a certain kind of press, to being a translator, but everything you say is absolutely correct concerning the absence of clear-cut venues or guidance for beginning translators. I could point out a half-dozen small presses, each with differing interests and focuses, who do indeed publish translations, and often brilliantly, but this (nor half-a-dozen more) can hardly ameliorate the fact that, in a culture which does not value it, translation is a discipline even more despised than fiction itself.
Leaving aside for the moment the efficacy and usefulness and validity of MFA programs, which I’m sure varies school to school, you’re right that fiction writers do at least have somewhere to go and address their vice—and, best-case scenario, get to immerse themselves in their work and learn a thing or two about the practical side of publishing fiction. Translators are entirely out in the cold. Where can they go to learn translation theory as well as practice? And where get connected to publishers (who, despite all these discouraging words, do in fact need them)? Where learn which editors are likely to want them to drop them a line? I have no good response to this.
Practically speaking, in the current climate, my only answer to “what is the next step” can only be to self-educate as to what venues for their work do exist, to speak to other translators, to research the (let’s face it, not overwhelmingly large) market for literary translations in the U.S. and UK. And then a variation on the Beckettian answer one is always giving to all creative writers, including oneself (and translators are certainly creative writers): recognize the impossibility of what you want to do, and then do it anyway. (And I’d say this is a good motto for the act of translation as well.)
But I know you’ve addressed some of these issues—the necessity for the institution of academic translation programs, for one—in the past. The natural next question, as Mr. Lenin (or Mr. Brown?) put it, is: What is to be done?
JOB: Let me come back to my side of this issue (what is the next step) a bit later. What I want to ask now—and this may or may not fit in with what we are trying to do (namely, try to talk about translations and translators based upon our experience in the hope that this will be of some help to translators)—is coming at translations from the particular point of view of Dalkey.
Over the years, I have been asked more times than I can remember to describe Dalkey’s “aesthetic” to critics, writers, journalists, and translators. Perhaps it’s time to revisit this subject, with a special emphasis on translations: that is, what do translators need to know about Dalkey’s tastes and how do we go about making decisions concerning what to publish and what not to.
So, I will put it to you: what causes us to say “yes” to a manuscript? And what is the process of determining whether we will say yes. What I am trying to get at here is that I think there is a view out their on the part of many that we somehow have a predetermined “Dalkey measuring stick” and, when a manuscript arrives, we pull out the stick and say: Yes (or no), this is (or is not) a “Dalkey” book. You know as well as I that we receive all kinds of proposals or manuscripts from translators, but many of them, in a cover letter, will say that they think this is a “Dalkey” book.
What, therefore, is your practice in deciding to recommend publication or not? I fear to say “what are you looking for?” because, I think, this suggest the “measuring stick,” but I am asking, without having much idea what your response will be, what does cause you to say “this is something that we should publish”?
JMD: This is always a sticky question, because while there is a kind of network of intuitions regarding what is and is not a Dalkey book, it’s something that we ourselves have the luxury of not having to articulate, on a day-to-day basis, to and between ourselves. Naturally, this “understanding” is constantly evolving, and is as much a product of our disagreements over particular books as it is the result of some kind of institutional consensus. And, just as naturally, even if I could define “our thing,” there would still be any number of books out there that would probably fit this definition point for point, and which we, or I, wouldn’t touch for love or money. Still, I’ll do my (long-winded) best.
It’s very hard to boil down what makes me, or us, say “yes” to a translation submission, since the judgments are as much personal—carrying with them a host of one’s own trivial prejudices (just the other day I realized I am virtually incapable of developing a positive reaction to a novel that finds it necessary to replicate, down to the TO and FROM fields, e-mail or text messages . . . now, I ask you, is that fair?)—as they are institutional (i.e., “Why should Dalkey take this on when it’s obvious that the author/translator is really just looking for a more approachable version of a big commercial publisher, and is producing text (and shouldering assumptions) to match?”). (But, now, having said this, can I imagine a book that violates both the above precepts and that I would fall over myself to recommend? Absolutely.)
One of the projects I’m working on right now is Jeff Fort’s wonderful translation of Jacques Roubaud’s The Loop, which is (to oversimplify) a “sequel” to The Great Fire of London—one of first Dalkey books I read, and one of my favorites. There’s a passage that I just came across (and that I will reproduce here in its “pre-publication” form, subject to change), which comes very close to the primary issue at stake for me—and, I think, for Dalkey—when reading a submission, translation or otherwise. Roubaud’s Great Fire books are not quite memoirs and not quite novels—though the subject is almost exclusively his own life, he is extraordinarily discomfited by the methods and assumptions involved in the standard means of “getting at” such material, usually indistinguishable from realist fiction. The following quotation comes from a section in which he’s just finished elucidating some of his distaste for writing wherein an omniscient, external narrator is able, at will, to present the “unlikely” thoughts of her characters; but then, too, its “almost worse” cousin, “penetrating” psychological prose:
But I don’t mean to claim, [Roubaud goes on to say] that the novelist shouldn’t do this sort of thing. He can do what he wants. But it might be nice if sometimes the narration revealed just the tiniest bit of underlying disquiet, a vague sense of the problem of adequation between the methods of the story, its modes and strategies of narration (on the one hand), and (on the other) the possibility (however minimal) of the other worlds that it might be inviting us to consider at the same time.
So, in a pinch, I would say that this “tiniest bit of underlying disquiet” is the grounding on which any real relationship with a book (as an editor, as a reader—and regardless of whether a MS is a translation or original) begins, for me. Not every submission is likely to be on the order of Geometric Regional Novel or The Queen of The Prisons of Greece, to take two very different Dalkey books as examples; but each of them, and most books we love and/or publish, harbor a fundamental “suspicion” towards the assumptions of narrative, and this suspicion is shared by as many great novelists considered “traditional” as by the ones grouped in that “other tradition.” Perhaps the word I’m looking for is “skeptic,” in the classical sense more than the colloquial. The means of expressing this skepticism are innumerable (it helps, of course, if you can write like William Gass), but it’s always obvious when it isn’t there, when an author and/or style is leaning on a presumed “consensus reality” (which includes a presumed consensus as to what constitutes good writing) so heavily that it might as well, for me, originate on another planet.
Curious loopholes in the above include MSs that are just too funny, filthy, or harrowing to ignore. (Perhaps because these modes are by nature skeptical elements in a novel. They push up against the boundaries of what can be comfortably said.)
I’m not sure if that’s of any help to a prospective translator, but it should at least be useful as a statement of what they’re up against when their work comes onto my desk. I didn’t make any mention here of the quality of the translation itself: at the acquisitions stage, this tends to be secondary. If a translator seems willing to work with us to improve their work, then much can be forgiven in the service of a good book. What matters, initially, is the presentation, conceptually, of what the work is trying to do (in a cover letter), and then a rendering of the book (in whole or in part) demonstrating, with some measure of control, one hopes, how the book goes about this.
Does that more or less answer your question? Perhaps a blinkered view, but I am (and I think I need to be) selfishly concerned with finding translations that please or challenge me more than simply bridging cultural gaps (with the hope that these two things will end up working in concert). I know you’ve mentioned in the past that, speaking to foreign publishers, it can often be difficult to convince them to show you the novels Dalkey is actually after, since they assume no American would be interested . . .
JOB: You didn’t ask, but here goes, in what I’m sure will be a near incomprehensible way, my attempt (once again) to answer the same question, though no doubt less articulately than you have, and less so not just because I have to be up in three hours to embark on yet another trip to Europe in search of these elusive books.
That said, I agree with your description and explanation. And you have managed to avoid disclaiming the tags that are frequently put on us: experimental, unconventional, and avant-garde. That is, you simply bypass the issue in a rhetorical flourish.
I will go back to what I have said in the past, in referencing Henry James: “The first responsibility of a novel is to be interesting.” He did not of course say to whom, or under what conditions. But, for me, I make judgments based upon this: I find a manuscript very interesting, but I am hard-pressed to say what does this for me. It’s often said that we publish “dark” books, and I suppose that this, in a very general sense, is true. Complex and dark. And quite often, funny, though I am aware that there is a peculiar sense of “funny” in these offices. “Extreme” and “over the top” also get used to describe many of our books.
But I insist that I approach each book on its own, and not asking myself whether this is “wild enough” for Dalkey.
There is also a strange intellectual (and it sounds so damn strange these days to use such a word) strain in what we publish, in that our writers are quite conscious of the traditions from which they write and/or they are reacting to.
This is starting to become a kind of laundry list, but so be it. I react well when I hear a voice in the prose that I haven’t heard before, something that is quite distinctive and cannot be confused with any other writer’s voice. With a great deal of what gets published elsewhere and taken very seriously, I have a sense that it could have been written by several different people, that there is nothing singular about it.
And, as you know, I hate plot-driven books in which the role of the reader is to sit in the backseat and go along for the ride. Many of our books are challenges to the reader, and by being such, they demonstrate a kind of respect for the reader.
I think I will wrap this up by saying that I don’t know how many times over the years people, even quite smart people in other ways, will say, “Why don’t you publish something that more people can relate to?” Inevitably Raymond Carver is hauled out as the example, something that isn’t too difficult, something with a message of sorts attached to it, something that, to my mind at least, feels “comfortable.” But that is precisely what I have a very bad reaction to, being made to be comfortable, knowing from almost the first sentence how the entire novel will unfold, and the waiting for the neat wrap up at the end where a character comes to some kind of complete understanding of himself or herself. This is what passes for realistic fiction, as though this is what humans do, that is, reach a point where they understand themselves and can more or less summarize who they are, and be right! Who in the hell can do this with conviction to any degree? Only the delusional, I think, and yet this strikes many such well-educated people as realistic and worth their time. I don’t really have a problem with this kind of fiction: let people read whatever they want to, God bless them. What I do object to is the supercilious attitude that they adopt towards fiction that does not follow the codes I am describing here. These people can get very upset and self-righteous about such things, and have no sense of irony in saying such things as: “I didn’t understand a word of that book!” One would think you would want to keep such sentiments to yourself.
Next question for you: Do you ever pass on a book, or rather a manuscript, because of the quality of the translation and the fear of what it will be like working with the translator to get the book into English?
JMD: I didn’t ask, because I figured of all people you must be sick unto death with the question. But I think there are many readers out there with much the same problem—succinct definition of tastes (and the larger issue of hierarchy of tastes!)—not to mention writers, translators, etc., so perhaps there can never be enough public brainstorming to find a nonpejorative word for what it is we’re after. The problem as ever is that the mainstream notion of fiction can fit on a bumper sticker (and really doesn’t need defending: against what slavering hoards are these centralist redoubts still being built?), while ours—if I may for a moment indulge in the undeniable pleasure of oppositional thinking—still needs 3,000 words or more. (There may be a political allegory to be mined from all this.)
Short answer to your question is yes. But, then, there are gradations of rejection for a translation, much as with an original work—though the waters are muddier, as befits so muddy a métier. Just as it’s possible to say, “I liked this, but it’s wrong for us,” when someone submits an English-language novel, or, equally, “I don’t like this it all, which is a shame, because under other circumstances it would be perfect for us,” one can, with a translation, feel that the original—or what remains of it in a given sample—is doing something interesting, even if the translation is betraying this something, or misinterpreting it, or mangling it, or even (as can be the case with “weirder” fiction) suppressing it. So, ugly though the practice may seem, it’s quite possible with a translation submission to want the book itself (or an editor’s apprehension of it) and not want whomever it was that submitted it. That is, sometimes a translator is rejected, out of a disinclination to cut my way through their vines, without the book itself being discarded. And yes, sometimes this happens immediately and intuitively, based on poor quality of English—if a translator can’t write a sentence, then this is a serious strike against them, no matter how well they know or appreciate the original. But even this can be forgiven if—I’m repeating myself—the translator wants to work to make a text better (and, again, by “better,” I basically mean “controlled”).
Certainly there have been instances when I’ve despaired of salvaging certain texts, but if you believe there’s something worth saving, it really is remarkable what can be accomplished. (And we all know stories of translations that have improved upon a work in its language of composition; and extrapolating from this, we can imagine a version of Carver in Finnish that reads like Sarraute, or a version, alternatively, of Pynchon in Japanese that reads like Trollope, because some translator, and/or some editor, saw this side of their work and was able to emphasize it—and who’s to say whether we readers of the originals aren’t the losers in this transaction?)
But, then, to bring this full circle, and give an idea of just how muddy these waters are—it’s also quite possible that a book I’d find banal in the original might be made interesting via what by all standards we’d have to call a bad (unrepresentative) translation . . . and then send us off on a wild-goose chase for some chimerical stylistic quirk that a translator (accidentally) included in their sample, but is nowhere to be found in the book itself. It’s all a little dizzying.
So, my question(s) for you: Where do you draw the line, with a translator, prospective or already contracted? Is there a point beyond which it sits better to drop a book entirely rather than dicker over edits? And then, are you comfortable publishing a book that bears little resemblance, stylistically, to the original, if we consider our version an “improvement”? To what extent, given the mise en abyme implied above, are publishers and translators responsible for the public’s demand (such as it is) that they be provided with “the original, only in a different language”?
JOB: Now you’ve asked me too many questions! And we are here putting ourselves on rather thin ice, especially when trying to answer the question of whether a translation can “improve” the original. I will revert to what I said before: a novel in translation needs to “parallel” the experience that the original reader may have had. The emphasis is on the word “parallel,” which I think leaves a fair amount of room for tackling problems with both language/cultural issues and with what might have been sloppy editing in the original.
I just got back from my trip to Europe, and while there spent an hour or two talking to a writer whose novel I want to do. Along the way, I asked him what the editing procedures were for his novels. He said that they no longer get edited, that he gets no feedback from his editor, that editors now function more as marketing people rather than as editors. We have heard this same story from writers around the world. And more and more we hear this story from editors in the U.S.: that their publishers do not want them spending time editing a book in any substantive way.
In the case of this writer, we went over parts of the translation that I had in hand, and I pointed out to him what I thought didn’t work and how I thought the translation violated what he was after. He agreed. I was rather specific in describing what I thought were his intentions in terms of style and tone, and then could show him where the translator had failed and how. It was not a matter of whether this was a “faithful” translation, which it was: the problem was that the art of the writing had disappeared. I also told him that I thought his final chapter, which was only a page long, didn’t work and tended to undermine the novel. After some back-and-forth speculations, we agreed that the “problem” probably resided in cultural differences: that his original reader would “get it” but that readers in English would not get it. So, we are going to be working on that last chapter so that his intentions can be realized in the new language.
Unfortunately, this was a rare opportunity of being able to work directly with an author in this way. The translator is usually the one who serves as the intermediary, and it’s the translator who must or should figure out these matters with the author or text.
This is a case, by the way, in which, despite how extraordinary the novel was in all other respects, I would have turned down the book because of this last chapter had this problem not been resolved. So, yes, there have been several instances over the years when I or other editors have felt that the book would be right for our list, but the translation was standing in the way, and some few instances in which the translator refused to present the problems to the author because of the assumption that the original text was somehow sacred and could not be altered, even by the author!
And perhaps now it is time for you to ask what I think should be the ideal training for young translators.
JMD: One thing I can do is run on, so I will try to be brief (besides, we’ve got a deadline!)—I guess what my too-many questions were trying to get at is some kind of (further?) erosion of the idea that a text is ever pure, that there’s any kind of safe, high-ground essentialism that can be clung to in the world of literature, and certainly of literary publishing—and thus translation. Every text is provisional, contingent, certainly during the process of its composition and publication, and thus all the more so to a translator and editor; and this despite our need (primarily as customers, I suspect) to believe that what we are buying/reading/referencing is somehow the Thing Itself, somehow valid in itself (and that it thereby validates us for having essayed it!). Every book is as much a failure to communicate, as much a series of compromises between a writer and editor, writer and translator, writer and herself, as it is a successful (that is, completed) construction. Gass has said the book is a container for consciousness—and something we are all likely to agree on is that consciousness is always under revision.
So, yes: what is the ideal training for a young or beginning translator? Is there more that can be done besides wading right in?
JOB: I will say that I’ll try to be brief, but . . .
My view is that there needs to be a program (most likely at a university) that provides translators with experience (I am here avoiding the word “training” only because of predictable academic reaction to the idea that universities have a responsibility to “train” people).
The ideal program would last one to two years and would provide the following: full-time work at a publishing house during which the translator would see the issues of translation from the publisher’s point of view because it is ultimately the publisher who decides whether a work will see the light of day.
The “experience” would include the following: 1) helping to edit translations that are submitted to the publisher (my view is that a translator learns a great deal about translation when having to edit other people’s translations); 2) do sample translations and reader’s reports for books that the publishing house is considering; 3) learn how to work with foreign publishing houses and agents to find potential works to be translated; 4) do their first book-length translation that will then be published by this publishing house so that they will then have a work to show other publishers; 5) have the opportunity to work closely with the editors at the publishing house on this translation; 6) become familiar with and introduced to a range of people in the “business” (editors, funders, agents, reviewers, bookstores) with whom they will have to work in the future (this would best be done through a kind of ongoing seminar that would consist of bringing such people in throughout the year and allowing the translators to hear about translations from their point of view).
At the end of a year or two, the translators would be well-grounded in both translation work and publishing, a process that now takes many years for a translator to come to understand and becomes a major obstacle to getting on with their careers.
Is such a program realistic? As you know, we have unofficially done such a program over the years. So, we have hard evidence that it works.
The big problem, however, is that no university in the United States or abroad offers such a program, whether it be a degree program or a certificate. Need I say here that universities are slow to change, or tend to resist new ideas? My view is that universities should be responsive to the needs of the people they exist to serve. But I have been in academia too long not to know that universities are usually much more responsive to their own needs, one of which is to doggedly create programs that are modeled after pre-existing programs, which in this case means programs that are overloaded with coursework and allow little time or opportunity for “experience.”
Or let me put this another way: medical schools recognize that their students must have actual experience in the practice of medicine, not just the knowledge of medicine. I think the same applies to translators. They indeed need coursework in their lives as students, but I am imagining post-MAs or post-BAs who already have their theory and literature courses, and are now ready for the next step. But right now, there is no “next step” in academia. If universities want to play a major role in cultivating a new generation of translators, then this is the kind of program that needs to be made available, not yet-another program that emphasizes theory and offers (if anything) only the opportunity to do a thesis that includes a short translation that then is evaluated by professors.
I can imagine academics shuddering at this suggestion because it immediately raises questions about credit hours (the bread and butter of universities) and then evaluation. Publishers, of course, are ultimately the ones who judge whether someone can translate or not, and have little concern about what degrees a translator has (which in many cases is no degree at all). The two worlds are presently far apart and don’t communicate with one another about translation work, and this has to change. Unless academia is finally only concerned with turning out people with degrees who will then go on to teach in translation studies programs, then the academic and publishing worlds must somehow come together for the sake of translators.
This is precisely the change that Dalkey is making with our new fellowship program at the University of Illinois, along with the Center for Translation Studies, placing emphasis on experience in translation and publishing.
