Edith Grossman and the Importance of Translation

Renowned translator Edith Grossman, whose works have included Don Quixote, Love in the Time of Cholera, and The Feast of the Goat, is the subject of an interesting examination from thestar online. Her new book, Why Translation Matters, part of the Why X Matters series from Yale University Press, was published yesterday, March 30. The book details the artistic skill required to capture a writer's rhythm and style while remaining true to his or her words and intent, a talent that is often overlooked in a publishing and reading world where translators are poorly paid and largely ignored.

Translation can take as long, or longer, as writing the original book. The art, Grossman and others will say, is more than finding the appropriate word. Translation is about words and music, fidelity and feel, the balance between getting too caught up in the literal meaning and improvising so freely that the author’s voice is lost entirely.

In Why Translation Matters, Grossman writes of taking on the opening phrase of the first chapter of Don Quixote, among the most famous words in Spanish literature: “En un lugar de la Mancha, de cuyo nombre no quiero acordarme,” which in an earlier English-language edition was translated into, “In a village of La Mancha, the name of which I have no desire to call to mind.”

Grossman worked on the phrase by reciting the Spanish to herself, “mantralike.” She reached for the right mood and rhythm, to recapture how it struck those who read Quixote centuries ago. She pondered the word lugar, which can mean either village or place. The words came to her, like lyrics to a song: “Somewhere in La Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember.”

The article explores the pitiful status of literature in translation in the United States, where as little as 3% of books published come from international writers--a percentage drastically smaller than that in other nations. The article presents the cultural factors underlying this underrepresentation and examines the circumstances which have allowed foreign success stories to overcome the low demand.

Biography of an early Gaelic to English translator

Her inclusion in the latest edition of the Oxford Companion to English Literature is cause for the Irish Times to sketch a eulogy of Charlotte Brooke, an oft-overlooked woman who pioneered the translation of Gaelic poetry and folk songs into English in the eighteenth century.

Censorship in Iran

An interesting essay by Abbas Djavadi on rferl.org details forms of literary censorship in Iran, from the denial of publication of certain new works to the removal of old books from shelves to the excision and rewriting of precise offending phrases.

"Sometimes they reject the books and sometimes they refuse to publish specific passages, sentences, or even words," he continues. In a single history of Persian literature, they demanded 61 separate changes. One concerned a poem from the 11th century that was critical of men's beards. "They said the beard is something sacred and they can't approve anything making fun of it," the publisher says.

Djavadi also mentions two methods of circumventing these bawdlerizing efforts and censorial measures: publishing on the Internet and perusing the secret stashes of freethinking booksellers.

An Interview with Syl Cheney-Coker

On the eve of the publication of his latest poetry collection, Stone Child, Sierra Leonean Syl Cheney-Coker sat with Niyi Osundare of Newswatch Magazine to discuss his poetry, his country, and his experiences with the publishing industry.

Question: ‘Turkish Diptych’; ‘Iranian Diptych’; Toronto’s Harbourfront; Tupac Amaru of the Incas; Wole Soyinka, Amadu Diallo (‘an unarmed African immigrant shot 41 times by undercover New York Police Department men); The Gods of the G8 Summit; etc. Your poetry breathes with diverse persons and places. What would you say to readers who call you a ‘poet of the world’?

Answer: It is a description that I accept: something, I believe, that comes out of my make-up; the sense of being a cultural hybrid; interconnecting with the rest of the world, free of prejudices and, in reality, benefiting from all the subterranean currents of cultural history that went into making me who I am, and thus, trying to write about it. As human beings, we are the beneficiaries of so many narratives, so many fusions of blood, languages and cultures that we would be foolish to deny. And given that as a poet, I have travelled to and lived on four continents, my poetry is like a sponge that has soaked up all the infusions into that life.

Cheney-Coker, who has been publishing since 1973, is perhaps most well-known for his epic novel The Last Harmattan of Alusine Dunbar, a fantastical chronicle of nearly four centuries of Sierra Leonean history. Cheney-Coker has won the Commonwealth Writers Prize, the Fonlon/Nichols Award, and the Commonwealth Short Story Prize, and his work has been widely translated. He spends much of his time living, writing, and teaching in the United States.