Whither the art of translation?

Guardian scribe Richard Lea has written a longish piece about the dearth of translated works in the English book publishing market.

In any library or bookshop, the vast majority of books on the shelves are by authors writing in English. In stark contrast to publishing throughout the rest of the globe, translated fiction accounts for only a tiny fraction of the books published in the English-speaking world. In Germany 13% of books are translations. In France it’s 27%, in Spain 28%, in Turkey 40% and in Slovenia 70%, but in Britain and America the best estimates suggest that the fraction of books on the shelves which started off in another language is somewhere around two per cent.

Just to interrupt here for second, how much do these stats really mean? It may well be that smaller countries like Slovenia and Turkey just don’t have as extensive (or well-supported) a literary scene as Britain or the U.S., requiring the importation of more foreign authors. But back to the piece:

Translators also suffer from a lack of status [...] Translation is considered by many universities to be insufficiently significant or original to add lustre to an academic CV, while publishers routinely sweep evidence of translation off the covers of books. “It’s weird,” says Allen. “There’s no stigma attached to being an actor rather than a playwright, or a pianist rather than a composer, but there’s this horrible stigma attached to being a translator.”

Can we interrupt again? Is there really “a horrible stigma” attached to being a translator? They surely suffer from a general lack of recognition, but they’re not exactly the damned. And there’s something weird, too, about the attempt to liken the art of translation to the art of acting or playing the piano. Yes, all three jobs are “interpretive,” but theatre and music require actors and musicians to bring a work to life. A novel does not need such mediation; we value the art of writing specifically because it is a direct communion between author and reader. Consequently, translations are always going to fall just short of the ideal. Does that mean translations aren’t worth doing? Of course not. But to deny that there’s something just-slightly-less-than-desirable about them is pointless.

In any case, the most level-headed commentator in Lea’s piece is probably Bloomsbury’s Bill Swainson, an enthusiast for literature in translation who published W.G. Sebald and Javier Cercas, among others.

He’s “sceptical” of figures suggesting that only around two per cent of books in the U.K. are translations. “I think the way to look at it is: ‘Are the good books coming out in the rest of the world finding their way into English, and in good translations?’,” he suggests. “And I think the answer is, ‘Yes, a great many are’.”

Here in Canada, of course, there’s a whole other kettle of fish: are enough of our French-language authors translated into English? Thoughts, anyone?

Teenage Potter translator arrested

In today’s obligatory Harry Potter update, CNET News (via Reuters) is reporting that a 16-year-old in France has been arrested for posting three chapters of a French version of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows on the Internet more than two months before the official translation will be released. The French-language book will come out on Oct. 26; in the meantime, while French bookstores are free to sell the English version, this kid will be fighting the law.

The lesson: keep your hack translations to yourself; Harry Potter will have only one official French word for “hallows.” Bungling the translation of that term is definitely an arrest-worthy offense.

Magical Thinking not so magical onstage

The stage adaptation of Joan Didion’s memoir The Year of Magical Thinking has opened in New York, and several critics are using it as fodder to discuss the frequently problematic issues surrounding book-to-stage translations. The play is a one-woman show starring Vanessa Redgrave as Didion, and the script – which dramatizes Didion’s response to the recent deaths of her husband and daughter – was written by Didion herself. In The New York Times, critic Ben Brantley (who is an acquaintance of the author) argues that the play is unable to convey the essential qualities of Didion’s prose:

The dynamic in the book arises from the tension between [her polished], impenetrable style and the emotions that war with it, that mock its elegant self-containment. That Ms. Didion never abandons those careful, chiseled sentences paradoxically leads us straight to the feelings beneath them.

[...] That tension has not been translated to the stage. Ms. Redgrave sounds all the emotional notes in the play clearly and articulately in its first sequences, meaning there’s no further journey for her to take us on.

Meanwhile, in an article entitled “Didion v. Didion,” Slate contributor Amanda Fortini argues that the stage play lays bare the flaws that were only vaguely discernible on the page:

There are writers whose work would naturally lend itself to a one-woman show, but Didion is not among them [...] For all her invocation of I, she is never truly confessional. Her autobiographical writing might be described as a literary fan dance, in which she seduces the reader through revelatory feints but ultimately exposes very little.

And in The New Yorker, John Lahr claims that the play contains an unpleasant element of audience castigation not found in the book:

Didion establishes her stage character [...] as a sort of self-dramatizing doyenne of desolation. This whiff of condescension subverts the fetching frailty of Didion’s literary persona. What felt like curiosity in the book becomes grandiosity on the stage; her grief must be attended to. “Nobody gets out of life alive,” Tennessee Williams said. But Didion, in this misguided act of exhibitionism, seems to imply that she’s got a lock on loss.

The Secret and the SHAM

The Toronto Star has a lengthy article about the phenomenon (fauxnomenon?) that is The Secret, a volume of affirmative platitudes that is close to breaking the 2-million sales mark in English alone, and, with dozens of translations pending, is poised to make the entire world feel vaguely better about itself.

The Secret‘s secret? It swears by a simple core rule, “the law of attraction,” which states that nothing happens by accident: We attract everything into our lives simply by the energy we put forth – an idea summed up in its simple mantra: “Ask. Believe. Receive.”

The article also has some less positive things to say about the whole self-help book craze, which can be traced right back to the U.S.’s founding principle of the “pursuit of happiness.” The first problem is that, by definition, self-help books are only attractive to people who think they need help.

“That’s the most insidious part of self-help – the first thing you need to do before you cure people is convince them that they’re sick,” says Steve Salerno, the author of SHAM: How the Self-Help Movement Made America Helpless.”We’re so conditioned to take the pulse of our happiness from one moment to the next, and it’s self-help that’s encouraged this. And the reason it does this is to keep us convinced there’s something wrong with us, so they can sell the next book.”

This Secret stuff all sounds like bullshit to Quillblog, but then, we’re a bunch of self-loathing jerks who think “today is the first day of the rest of your life” sounds a lot like “this is the beginning of the end.”

What I meant to say…

Richard Warnica has posted an interview with author Edeet Ravel on The Tyee site discussing her reasons for significantly rewriting her second novel, Look for Me, after it was published. Ravel initially posted her revised version of the book on her website with this explanation:

When Ten Thousand Lovers and A Wall of Light were published, I had a sense of completion. I can’t imagine revisiting those novels.

Look for Me, on the other hand, felt unfinished — I wasn’t entirely happy with some aspects of the novel…When the time came to prepare Look For Me for its French translation, I returned to the novel, and I knew at once that I wanted to rewrite it.

The new version, which is the one readers will have access to in translations and future English editions, is now complete.

Ravel told Warnica that her first version of the novel had been rushed in order to keep up with the publication schedule, but time had provided the perspective she needed to improve the book. Initially, she had to be satisfied with posting the revised book online, but when French publishers wanted the manuscript, she took the opportunity to make the changes.

[I]t seemed important to make the changes, particularly because there were some political issues at stake. I was also dissatisfied with the ending and I was glad to have a chance to change it. Once you have a version you think is better, you naturally wish it was the only one people were reading.

The situation raises some intriguing questions. When is a book really finished? And when will the Internet make it possible to use that snappy comeback you think of the next day?

Justin Trudeau to host the Giller gala

CTV announced yesterday that Justin Trudeau would host this year’s Scotiabank Giller Prize awards night. “I’ve always been a fan of Canadian literature,” declared Trudeau. “I think it’s important that we celebrate and highlight the extraordinary achievements of our own cultures.”

Note the plural “cultures.” Both Gaétan Soucy’s The Immaculate Conception and Pascale Quiviger’s The Perfect Circle are translations of their original French editions. The opportunity to recognize French-Canadian writers in this year’s list may have been fortunate for Trudeau, who also walked into the Liberal leadership candidates’ minefield over whether Quebec should or should not be formally recognized as a nation within Canada yesterday.

If Ben Mulroney covers the Giller night for CTV’s eTalk, let’s hope nobody mentions Meech Lake.

Related links:
Click here for CTV’s Giller story

End games

To mark the centenary of what would have been Samuel Beckett’s 100th birthday on April 13 (he died in 1989), Bloomsbury Publishing will be releasing a book of remebrances of the notoriously morbid playwright and novelist. What’s interesting about the recollections — several of which are available on the Guardian‘s website — is how Beckett is consistently portrayed as thoughtful, loyal, and funny — hardly the craggy-faced and even craggier-hearted persona he projected. Novelist Paul Auster remembers a “moving speech [Beckett] delivered one afternoon in a Paris cafe about his love for France and how lucky he felt to have spent his adult life there, and the kind and encouraging letters he wrote whenever I sent him something I had published: books, translations, articles about his work.” Eileen O’Casey, singer, actress, and wife of playwright Seán O’Casey, describes Beckett patiently showing her around Paris to find the best bargains on the clothes she needed to buy, while actress Billie Whitelaw relates an incident in which the playwright lovingly attended to her after she passed out during a rehearsal.

Related links:
Read the Beckett remembrances on the Guardian site

Russia’s new literary crisis

Russia, the nation that spawned many of the world’s greatest books both thick and thin, is now experiencing some literary hardships. On a recent bestsellers list posted on the country’s online bookseller, Ozon.ru, “six of the top 10 and all of the top three [books] were translations of foreign authors,” reports Murdo Macleod of Scotland on Sunday. In a survey commissioned by Russia’s National Library, “37% of respondents said they never read books, only 23% considered themselves active readers, and 52% never bought books,” while further findings showed that a majority of readers preferred pulp fiction to the Russian classics. Especially disheartening is Russia’s reported return to the centuries-old subscription bookselling system, whereby an author, soliciting potential buyers, publishes his or her own book only when a sufficient number of people have signed up.

Thanks to BookNinja.com for the link.

Related links:
Click here for the full story from Scotland on Sunday

Dude, where’s my Vasily?

Vanessa Thorpe of The Observer reports on another potentially troubling trend: the modification and modernization of long and otherwise difficult books. Reworked titles include a serialized but otherwise unmodified version of Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell to be released in three volumes; a much-modified version of Steven Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, which has discarded the original’s more abstract discussions and expanded on the crowd-pleasing topics of relativity and quantum theory; and, last but not least, a new translation of Tolstoy’s War and Peace.

Anthony Briggs, the professor of Russian at Birmingham University responsible for the daunting task of translating Tolstoy, delivers the first major English-language rendition of the book in nearly 50 years. He felt it was long overdue. “I felt it needed refreshing and renewing,” he says. “When you read one of the older translations you feel as if you are being read to by the Queen or by Lady Antonia Fraser. I am very different to previous translators … and I hope I have made it more readable for today.” In light of the reported major discrepancies in dialogue between translated versions, one only hopes that Briggs has not gone too far.

Related links:
Click here for the full story from The Observer