Literary Translation in the News

Diary of a Short-Sighted Adolescent, the first novel of Mircea Eliade, the Romanian author and historian of religions, is being released in a first-time English translation on April 12 in the UK. The book is published by Istros Books, in the translation of Christopher Moncrieff

The great books you read in translation—from classics like Madame Bovary and Don Quixote to contemporary sensations like Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle (the fifth volume is out this month)—are not only the work of their famous authors. They are also the creation of the multilingual wordsmiths who bring them to you in English. Here, six of the world’s most esteemed translators take center stage.

Today, “Cré na Cille” is considered Joycean in a less euphemistic sense. A dust-jacket blurb from Colm Tóibín declares it “the greatest novel to be written in the Irish language, and among the best books to come out of Ireland in the twentieth century.” Scholars of Irish writing have hailed it as “a masterpiece” and “one of the most outstanding works in contemporary European literature.” “No superlatives can exaggerate its importance,” one early reviewer declared. Ó Cadhain, the critic Seán Ó Tuama wrote in 1972, produced “the most consciously-patterned and richly-textured prose that any Irishman has written in this century, except Beckett and Joyce.”

Recently, an audience of “disadvantaged” 16-year-olds listened with rapt attention when I read from my translation of Lucretius’ On the Nature of the Universe. In my translation, Lucretius’ Latin hexameters play out in the rhythms of rap; the Roman goddess of love morphs into Richard Dawkins’ “selfish gene”; birds rain down from the sky like satellite debris; and the catastrophic collapse of the structures of the universe leaves us stumbling around the ground zero of our exploded certainties.

El escritor y traductor Javier Calvo da visibilidad al papel del traductor en su último ensayo, "El fantasma en el libro", en el que reivindica, "sin que se note", esta figura esencial, y al mismo tiempo da a conocer su trabajo a un público general.

Glory, for the translator, is borrowed glory. There is no way around this. Translators are celebrated when they translate celebrated books. The best translations from the Italian I have seen in recent years are Geoffrey Brock’s rendering of Pavese’s collected poems, Disaffections, and Frederika Randall’s enormous achievement in bringing Ippolito Nievo’s great novel Confessions of an Italian into English. Brock, who has also given us an excellent version of Pinocchio, finds an entirely convincing English voice for the troubled Pavese. Randall turns Nievo’s lively, idiosyncratic pre-Risorgimento prose into something sparklingly credible in English. However, neither of these fine books became the talk of the town and their translators remain in the shadows.

Seamus Heaney’s rendering of Virgil brings the ancient world to life with plain language and striking juxtapositions

A campus doctoral graduate Katrina Dodson has unanimously won the 2016 PEN Translation Prize for her translation of Brazilian author Clarice Lispector’s “The Complete Stories.”

The Complete Stories are diverse in tone, mood, perspective, subject matter, and quirk, and Dodson's dexterity in navigating these differences, while simultaneously lending Lispector a singular English voice all her own, is a thoroughly impressive feat of literary translation. Benjamin Moser’s insightful introduction and Dodson’s translator’s afterword situate the book within the contemporary resurgence of Lispector translations and accentuate the radical imagination of Dodson’s work.

Out of over 3,000 contestants from across the continent, the EC announced 28 winners on February 3, 2016. The students were allowed to choose any of 552 possible combinations between any two of the EU’s 24 official languages, although they had no hand in choosing the exact text they were given, all one-page long.

"NOT EVERYTHING can survive translation,” said Shira Greene, when confronted for the first time since graduate school with an Italian manuscript and a blank page. “Hence the age-old notion that she who translates is both translator and traitor to the text: traduttore e traditore.” Translation is the guiding metaphor through which Rachel Cantor explores themes of love, loyalty, and transformation in her second novel, Good on Paper. Drawing parallels between literary translation and romantic partnership, Cantor dives head first into the “chasm between languages” and the chasm between people, to ask: Can one ever bridge the gap?

Julie Rose was born on December 2, the date Napoleon Bonaparte became emperor, a good start for a world-renowned Australian translator of French literature. This week she became a Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et Lettres (Knight of Arts and Letters). Presenting the handsome medal at his Bellevue Hill residence, the French Consul-General, Nicolas Croizer, praised her work as a translator, author and "one of the most dedicated spokespersons France is lucky enough to have". Rose's many translations include the huge challenge of Victor Hugo's Les Miserables, Jean Genet's play The Maids for the Sydney Theatre Company's 2013 production with Cate Blanchett and Isabelle Huppert, and works by Dumas, Moliere, Racine, Zola and Marguerite Duras. 

En una carta de 1866, Lewis Carroll decía que, según sus amigos, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland era intraducible. Siglo y medio después es la novela inglesa más traducida, disponible en 174 lenguas y 7.600 ediciones (la segunda parte, A través del espejo, tiene 1.530 ediciones en 65 lenguas). A celebrarlas y estudiarlas está dedicada esta monumental obra, de imposible compilación antes de Internet, pero cuyos editores han elegido publicarla en forma clásica: tres gruesos volúmenes, que pesan en total más de nueve kilos.

In Other Words marks a fundamental shift in Jhumpa Lahiri’s career. The memoir is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author’s first nonfiction book—and her first published work since her decision to read and write exclusively in Italian. She became enamored of the language during a visit to Florence in 1994: “What I feel is something physical, inexplicable,” Lahiri recalls of her early encounter with Italian. “It stirs an indiscreet, absurd longing. An exquisite tension. Love at first sight.”

A Chinese publisher has recalled the latest Chinese-language translation of a work by the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore after criticism in India that it was too vulgar and strayed too far from the original text.

Feng has stood by his translation. He has shared some of the poems on social media, which appear to be faithful and poetic translations of Tagore’s words, a fact his critics have acknowledged, but they still argue Feng has overstepped as a translator by sexing up Tagore’s soft-toned poems.

La primera edición de Bajo el volcán tiene fecha de 1947, pero pasaron dos décadas para que existiera una traducción, tarea de la cual se encargó Raúl Ortiz y Ortiz, quien en 1964 presentó la versión en español. La novela, que en algún sentido es autobiográfica, narra un día en la tortuosa vida del ex cónsul británico alcohólico Geoffrey Firmin, quién aparece acompañado de su ex esposa Yvonne y su hermanastro Hugh.

"Rage – Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus' son Achilles." With this call to the epic muse The Iliad, and Western literature, begins. Composed around the mid-8th century BC by a reputedly blind bard named Homer, the tale of Troy's 10-year siege by a Greek alliance – enraged, improbably, by the kidnap of an adulterous Spartan queen – has endured the chaos of the ages. But it's done more than merely survive. The granddaddy of all classics is on heavy rotation.

Profiles a unique Bay Area writing program based on literary translation. Coming from families where English may be the second or even third language, Carmen, Ke’Shae, Gentail, Caroline, Ricardo and their friends create imaginative worlds of dragons, space aliens, love, and death. Directed by Joyce Lee.

Although many Russian masterpieces have won a place in the catalogue of classics thanks to their literary merit and the quality of their translations, they don’t tell the whole story.

Each of these well-known works is only a small part of a vast, complex canon that has been largely inaccessible to Westerners, who have struggled to understand Russian literature without a view of the larger narrative – until now.

Five Irish authors feature on the 70-strong longlist for the Guardian’s popular Not the Booker Prize annual award. Now in its seventh year, nominations are made by public vote, with criteria for eligibility matching that of the Man Booker Prize, whose longlist is also announced this week.

When I'm asked to write something – an article, a review, or something about myself or my work – the first reaction, at least in my head, is a big loud no. Because I am a translator, I prefer being a host. My job is to make somebody's words comfortable in my own language. To write is a completely different act, and yet, so similar, nearly identical.

Such is the power of Mia Couto’s fiction that, after reading his chilling novelConfession of the Lioness, sculpted lions seem to be everywhere in Rome, where I meet him – from the crouching beast lapping at Bernini’s fountain in the Piazza Navona, to the stone heads guarding the Sant’Angelo bridge. Yet for Couto, a Mozambican novelist and environmental biologist who has recently finished a writer’s residency outside the city, “seeing a lion in the bush walking is the only time you really see a lion – the full dimensions of the animal. The way they face you is hypnotic.”

It is perhaps the most important word in one of the greatest and most famous sentences in the history of the English language. Yet for more than two centuries “hwæt” has been misrepresented as an attention-grabbing latter-day “yo!” designed to capture the interest of its intended Anglo-Saxon audience urging them to sit down and listen up to the exploits of the heroic monster-slayer Beowulf.

Award-winning translator Sarah Ardizzone explains the complex art of translating books through this gallery of her latest book translation April the Red Goldfish, originally written by Marjolaine Leray in French, and the particular challenges involved with rendering a Shakespeare quoting, pun-spouting, trans-gender goldfish with suicidal tendencies.

"Estrada do esquecimento e outros contos", que reúne cerca de duas dezenas de contos inéditos de Fernando Pessoa, vai ser publicado na quinta-feira. "Reúne-se nesta edição um conjunto de narrativas de Fernando Pessoa, das quais 20 se encontravam ainda inéditas", afirma a editora Assírio & Alvim em comunicado, acrescentando que esta obra surge na continuidade de "O mendigo e outros contos", publicada em 2012.

In the anniversary year of the outbreak of the first world war, it is apt to look at Proust's A la Recherche du Temps Perdu. It was written before, during and after the war, its volumes appearing from 1913 to 1927. Its first translator was CK Scott Moncrieff, a man who was in many ways similar to Proust; a cultivated, literary, closet homosexual who had witnessed and appreciated the high point of the fin-de-siecle civilisation that fell headlong into war.

Antes que Santayana, lo hicieron a su manera Antonio Martínez Sarrión, Luis Martínez de Merlo, Pedro Provencio y Enrique López Castellón. Ellos saben lo que es, de verdad, entrar en ese jardín literario dionisiaco y apolíneo a la vez, para sacarlo del francés al insuflarle nueva vida en español. Conocen senderos-latidos de Baudelaire como:

Now in its sixth year, the Harvill Secker Young Translators' Prize aims to recognise the achievements of young translators at the start of their careers. It is an annual prize, which focuses on a different language each year and is open to anyone between the ages of 18 and 34, with no restriction on country of residence.

Cavanagh's latest work is her final translation of Nobel Prize-winning Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska (1923-2012), Map: Collected and Last Poems (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015). It was translating Szymborska that figuratively put Cavanagh on the map, though she is quick to credit the collaborators who helped her-her longtime editor, Drenka Willen, and her cotranslator, the late Stanislaw Baranczak, who died late last December.

The Art of Flight (or El Arte de la Fuga), Pitol's first book to make it into English, is far from his freshman novel. A recipient of the prestigious Cervantes Prize in 2005, Pitol is one of the country's greatest living authors. This a series of essays that serves as a sort of experimental memoir. (It's the first in a trilogy, all of which Deep Vellum is committed to publishing with Henson as translator.) An author known for questioning the limitations of language, Pitol uses The Art of Flight to chronicle his young life, offering critical analysis along the way of the books that have affected his life. He swirls together memories with poetic reflection, in a way that feels at home in America's memoir culture, but without this obsession with nonfiction. Pitol seems far more interested in playing with language and metaphor, the boundaries of fiction and nonfiction, which is where Henson's role becomes pivotal. We chatted with Henson about translation, language and Pitol.

The wisdom of the Sage Valmiki in his rendition of the deeds and life of the Hindu God Rama, the seventh avatar of Vishnu, has been read and deciphered by generations of devoted Hindus who have been imbibed by his verses full of kernels of knowledge and lessons that lie waiting those who grasp them. For centuries, these verses complied in the Ramacharitasmanas and played out as the Rama Leela during theDiwali season have framed the mindsets and code of conduct for millions of Hindus the world over. Translations have been available in many Indian languages and a few other foreign ones, most notably English.

I recently stumbled upon a post that describes the process of literary translation as "soul-crushing." That's news to me, and I've been engaged in literary translation for the better part of four decades now. How would I describe it? "Humbling," yes. "All-consuming," definitely. But above all, "the most fun imaginable."

But the truth is that excellent translations of his greatest books are nearly as numerous as his characters, and many readers have come to love "Anna Karenina" by way of Constance Garnett (whose 1901 translation is enshrined in the Modern Library), Rosemary Edmonds (1954 and until a decade ago the Penguin Classics edition) or David Magarshack (1961 and still the Signet Classic). A 2000 translation by another husband-and-wife team, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, introduced thousands of newcomers to the novel after it was chosen for Oprah's Book Club. Now two attractive new translations, by Marian Schwartz (Yale, 754 pages, $35) and Rosamund Bartlett (Oxford, 847 pages, $29.95), arrive and will gain their own adherents.

An Iranian poet who translated the prize-winning French graphic novel Blue Is the Warmest Colourinto Persian has claimed she is the target of a smear campaign in Iran for supporting homosexuality, punishable in the country by 100 lashes or even death.

The work of translators is often overlooked, with their names often discreetly hidden away in the books that they painstakingly recreate in new languages. In the first of a new series, presented in partnership with literature and human rights organisation English PEN, we present an interview with Sam Garrett, who translated Tommy Wieringa's These Are the Names, a haunting epic set on the distant Eurasian steppe and one of the latest additions to the English PEN World Bookshelf.

Some people know Professor Naòmi Morgan as the head of the French section at the University of the Free State. Others know her as the artist behind the play Oskar en die Pienk Tannie. Yet others know her as a woman who can speak Afrikaans, English and French without a trace of an accent. Most recently, though, people might know Morgan as being knighted by the French Ministry of Culture. She received the French Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres earlier this year from French Ambassador to South Africa, Elisabeth Barbier. She joins only three other South Africans to receive the award.

Some people know Professor Naòmi Morgan as the head of the French section at the University of the Free State. Others know her as the artist behind the play Oskar en die Pienk Tannie. Yet others know her as a woman who can speak Afrikaans, English and French without a trace of an accent. Most recently, though, people might know Morgan as being knighted by the French Ministry of Culture. She received the French Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres earlier this year from French Ambassador to South Africa, Elisabeth Barbier. She joins only three other South Africans to receive the award.

"It is amazing to see how Verne's written predictions have become today's reality," said Kim. "He was able to do that because Verne weaved the stories around scientific calculation, such as the distance between Earth and the moon, and the speed of Earth's rotation." That is why Verne's books are still relevant to today's readers, says the translator. "People who are used to making decisions based on emotion can learn something from his stories derived from well-thought-out scientific calculation.

Willis Barnstone is a polymath author of more than 70 books — a poet, translator and scholar of Gnosticism and the New Testament. But the 87-year-old also has had a long and colorful relationship with China, translating Mao Zedong's poetry and befriending numerous Chinese artists and political leaders in the 1980s.

Two state prizes were awarded for literature in 2014: one to Chinese-Finnish translator Riina Vuokko and the other to the poetry publishing collective of Poesia. Riina Vuokko is best known for her work translating Nobel Prize winner Mo Yan's novels from Chinese into Finnish. Her Finnish version of his Nobel Prize-winning novel Life and Death are Wearing Me Out (Seitsemän elämääni) was published last year.

All good translators are alike, each meticulous translator is meticulous in her own way. In her new translation of "Anna Karenina," Rosamund Bartlett — a scholar of Russian literature and music history, translator of 19th century Russian texts, and biographer of Tolstoy — attempts to bridge the divide between two forms of translation that have generally remained irreconcilable. In her introduction, Bartlett claims that her object is to remain literally "faithful" to the novel, "preserv(ing) all the idiosyncrasies of Tolstoy's inimitable style," while simultaneously striving for an "idiomatic" reproduction. In attempting to fulfill such a contradictory aim, Bartlett, a talented stylist, succeeds in crafting an aesthetically pleasing translation that reads naturally in English; however, she has not met the considerable challenge of simultaneously retaining Tolstoy's style.

Rather than attempt to explain what translation is, or what a translator should or should not do, Bellos expounded on what a translator can do. He elucidated the role of the translator by recounting pivotal and very personal experiences he has had with problematic translations. All the while, he stressed the guiding influence of a translator's individual style.

[A]fter over 150 years of being "lost" in an archive, Schönwerth's fairy tales have been translated and curated by folklore expert Maria Tatar into The Turnip Princess and Other Newly Discovered Fairy Tales.

 "To me, translation is not merely restricted to changing words into another language and observing the grammatical rules; it is a culture to culture transfer. To make it clear I refer to the word ‘snow' in Eskimo culture which reflects the most significant concept in their life. They have the equivalent of some twenty words including ‘snowing', ‘settled snow', ‘dancing snow', ‘snow ball', ‘deep snow' and other concepts as such."

For professor Naomi Seidman, a native speaker of the language of translation, the space between languages can be a matter of life and death. Take the story she tells about her father in her most recent book, "Faithful Renderings: Jewish-Christian Difference and the Politics of Translation." Recently liberated from the death camps, and finding himself in Paris, Hillel Seidman — by virtue of speaking French and Yiddish — is negotiating the fate of a group of Jewish refugees with the French police. To calm the terrified Jews he tells them, in Yiddish, that the French police are goyim but not Nazis. They will not be mistreated.

Dr. Gabor Barabas has loved poetry since he was a child, growing up in post-Holocaust Hungary. He listened to his elderly relatives read grand, resounding verses, and he dreamed of becoming a poet himself.  He did just that, writing his own poetry, but he also pursued another dream — to become a doctor. It wasn't until Barabas, who lives in Long Branch, retired from his career as a pediatric neurologist that he turned that passion for poetry into the most challenging writing task of his life — translating the complete works of the revered Hungarian poet Miklos Radnoti. It took him seven years.

A Boston College symposium will mark the translation and publication of the new book Dinner with Stalin and Other Stories, edited and co-translated by Professor of Russian, English, and Jewish Studies Maxim D. Shrayer, and written by his father David Shrayer-Petrov, a prolific and celebrated author of contemporary Russian-American fiction.

His [Peter Fedstein's] most recent work has earned Feldstein the prestigious 2014 Governor General's Literary Award in the translation category French to English for his translation of Francois-Marc Gagnon's comprehensive biography of Paul-Émile Borduas, a Quebec cultural figure renowned for both his art and his thought.

This month's column swings the focus to the unsung hero – the literary translator – but just as much on contemporary Swedish literature and inventive ways of publishing literature in translation. When you're a reader, a text can endlessly expand in your mind, that after-life of a book. I've just finished Miranda July's new novel and I find myself muttering the name of one of the characters Kubelko Bondy like an incantation as the scenes and characters are freshly drifting through my mind. I think I had been overwhelmed by the magnitude of what books mean to me. Translation gives me perspective and reminds me that writing is a human act. It's a privilege to get to sit with another person's work, to think about their choices, style, meaning so deeply. And it helps me with the decisions I make on the page.

Fan of Asterix? Tintin? The Moomins? Pippi Longstocking? Cornelia Funke? Fairy tales? Then you are a fan of translated fiction – that is books that were originally written in another language – even if you might not even know it! Join our discussion on brilliant books that were originally written in a language other than English

names are familiar to the amateur reader—we know about Chapman's Homer, through Keats, and Richard Wilbur's Molière is part of the modern American theatre—but mostly translators struggle with sentences for even less moment (and money) than other writers do.

TEN NOVELS HAVE been shortlisted for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. The list includes one Irish author, former winner Colum McCann, three novels in translation from Brazil, France and Morocco and novels from Australia, Nigeria, the UK and the USA.