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.

"Lost Booker" will honor best work from missing year, 1970

In 1971, in an effort to increase the timeliness of the award, the Man Booker Prize rules committee adjusted its pool of eligible nominees to include contenders only from the current publication year. Since its inception only a few years prior, the award had recognized books published in the previous year.

As a result of the nomination shuffle, the books published in 1970 were never eligible for the prestigious prize. Almost forty years later, the Man Booker Prize will bestow a special "Lost Booker" upon one of six contenders who would have likely been nominated that year: Patrick White (Australia) for The Vivesector, Shirley Hazzard (GB/US/Australia) for The Bay of Noon, Muriel Spark (Scotland) for The Driver's Seat, Mary Renault (GB) for Fire From Heaven, Nina Bawden (GB) for The Birds on the Trees, and J.G. Farrell (GB) for Trouble. Only Bawden and Hazzard are still alive.

A popular vote through April 23 on the Man Booker website will determine the winner, who will be announced on May 19.

Carlos Fuentes receives doctorate, criticizes censorship

During a trip to Puerto Rico to receive an honorary doctorate, Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes, 81, spoke out against censorship.

Last fall, Puerto Rican education officials banned five books from high school curricula, including Aura by Fuentes. "Coarse language" was cited as the cause of the block. Fuentes announced that this censorship was "an arbitrary decision that amounted to an 'antidemocratic, anticultural' act," according to an article in The State.

Aura is a complex, dreamlike romance first published in 1962.

Fuentes continues to actively write and publish.

CK Stead wins Sunday Times literary prize

The newly established Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story award has bestowed its first prize on CK Stead of New Zealand for his story "Last Season's Man," a tale of intellectual ego in Croatia.

The award carries a cash prize of 25,000 pounds, and six shortlisted stories including the winner (taken from a pool of 1,152 submissions) will be published in The Sunday Times Magazine.

Judges for the award include Hanif Kureishi, A.S. Byatt, and Nick Hornby. Kureishi called "Last Season's Man" "a fine example of how a short story should be constructed and written," according to an interview on Stuff.

Christian Karlson Stead, who was born in 1932, has published over thirty books since 1964, works which include novels, poetry collections, and essays on literary criticism in addition to short stories. Stead was commended by the Commonwealth Writers Prize in 2005. In the same year he was a finalist for the Tasmania Pacific Fiction Prize for his novel Mansfield, a fictionalized account of New Zealand short story author Katherine Mansfield's struggles to become an established writer during the first World War.

Young novelists surge in Egypt

An increase of Barnes and Noble-style megabookstore/cafe/lounges in Egypt has engendered a new wave of young Egyptian authors, though, unlike their predecessors, whose literature was steeped in religion, social mores, and political controversy, these new Arabic writers are more interested in depicting the commonplace trials of life in twenty-first century Egypt, such as homelessness, unemployment, suicide, and rape, as well as the influx of European and American influences in the form of pop culture, the Internet, and technology.

Popular new authors and their books include

• Abu Golayyel, whose humorous, semi-autobiographical A Dog with No Tail recounts a Bedoin construction worker's experiences with prostitution, discrimination, and drug abuse;
• Hamed Abdel-Samad, whose Farewell to Heaven examines sexual abuse, childhood delusions and illusions, and self-imposed exile in Europe;
• Ahmed el-Aidy's Being Abbas el-Abd, the story of a video store clerk who experiences social connection only through the Internet and his cell phone; and
  
• Mazen al-Aqaad, whose Lost Anger unearths the transfixing, cult-like influence of the Internet while highlighting a group of young people whose miserable and boring lives have led them to form an online suicide cult.

Some view the rising popularity of fiction in socially conservative, authoritarian Egypt as a positive stimulant to progress and political freedom. From an Associated Press article by Hamza Hendawi:

"While not political, the intellectual stimulation created by all this fiction will one day bring about reform and help contain the dangers of religious extremism and sectarianism," said Mohammed Hashem, founder of Dar Merit, publisher of "Being Abbas al-Abd" and many of the more experimental new works.

James Kelman argues against Scottish genre fiction

Citing the bestselling Harry Potter novels of J.K. Rowling and detective pageturners of Ian Rankin, James Kelman has accused popular genre fiction writers of warping the world's perception of Scottish literature. Speaking at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, Kelman--who is Scotland's only Booker Prize winner--said that the success of "mediocre" writers has overshadowed the more talented output of literary authors and has turned Scotland into a factory that churns out conventional fiction for mass consumption.

Kelman's remarks have, of course, been met with much derision from both writers of such fiction--who question the ability of so-called "literary writers" to produce enjoyable stories--and readers, who often enjoy gripping yet "easy" tales. Neither is the divide restricted to Scotland fiction; the United States, for instance, has its own distinction between the Dan Browns and Clive Cusslers and the Philip Roths and Thomas Pynchons of the book universe.

Kelman's How Late it Was, How Late, which won the Booker in 1994, met its own share of scorn and criticism, with one judge threatening to resign and critics labeling it "crap" and "literary vandalism." The stream-of-consciousness novel is written in a working class dialect of Glasgow and follows a few days in the life of an uneducated ex-convict.

The Guardian offers an excellent examination of Kelman's remarks:

As a manifestation of the old 'genre v real literature' chestnut, the debate should be just as interesting to those outside of Scotland. Kelman, committed to experimental form and language, sees genre fiction as redundant, compromised by commerciality. Mina, while still calling Kelman a "beautiful writer", regards his stance as a mere "play for status"; a failure of the writer's duty to entertain.

There is another to level to this, however, about the ways in which any country's indigenous literature – especially those of smaller or post-colonial nations – is threatened by the commercial imperative to produce page-turning, airport-friendly thrillers. A third level concerns the collusion of the literary establishment in this. It's certainly the case that the books editors of broadsheet newspapers will bemoan the fact that we're not all reading Tolstoy, while providing acres of coverage to crime writers. Genre fiction doesn't need highbrow attention in order to sell by the bucketload, yet editors must cover it precisely because it is so visible. This crowds out more risk-taking writers, for whom a single review from a perceptive critic can provide a career breakthrough.

It is galling, then, that a country like Scotland, home to an enormous, bristling, experimental tradition which includes James Hogg, Alexander Trocchi, Hugh McDiarmid, Muriel Spark, Edwin Morgan, Tom Leonard, Alasdair Gray, Janice Galloway, Irvine Welsh, Alan Warner, Ali Smith, James Robertson and Kelman himself, is marketed to tourists as the home of Rebus and Potter.

West Texan novelist dies at 83

Elmer Kelton, a Plains novelist and writer of modern westerns, died on August 22 at age 83.

A survivor of the harsh droughts of the 1950s, which killed, defeated, or cast off many ranchers and farmers from West Texas, Kelton became an advocate of self-sufficiency and stoic resilience. The Time it Never Rained, published in 1973 and winner of both the Spur Award and the Western Heritage Award, is perhaps his greatest novel, an account of one rancher's battle against crippling elements.

Kelton won seven Spur Awards from 1957 to 2002. He also won three Western Heritage Awards, and in 1977 won the Owen Wister Award for lifetime contributions to Western literature, an honor he shares with Louis L'Amour, Dee Brown, and John Ford.

Bill Bishop of The Daily Yonder writes about his life and contributions:

Elmer Kelton died last week. He was 83 years old, and in his time he wrote the best books about the treeless land and the work that men and women faced when they moved beyond the 98th meridian.

Elmer Kelton was born at Horse Camp in Andrews County, Texas, to Mr. and Mrs. R. W. “Buck” Kelton. He grew up on the McElroy Ranch in Upton and Crane counties where he learned to do ranch work. Early on, Kelton realized he lacked cowboying talent. "I was the oldest of four boys and by far the worst cowboy," Kelton said. "I rode a horse like all the rest, just not as well, so I took a lot of refuge in reading. Westerns were my heritage. . . . By eight or nine, I decided if I couldn't be a cowboy, I would at least write about it."

...

Self-sufficiency was the recurring political theme in Kelton’s stories. Charlie Flagg warned about taking anything from government. Wes Hendrix, in The Man Who Rode Midnight, stood in the way of a lake planned by the town of Big River. The town saw a future in ski boats and vacation homes. Hendrix thought a life built on cattle and sheep was just fine, and the two, the rancher and the town, settled into a prolonged battle over the meaning of progress.

''When other people can ruin your life, it doesn't matter if it's big government or big business,'' Kelton told me once. ''Above all, I cherish freedom.”