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.

The Revenge of Print

Publisher Eric Obenauf, writing for The Brooklyn Rail, muses on the possible near death and hopeful rebirth of the book and print media market in the modern United States:

Such efforts expose a key fundamental flaw within the mindset of modern corporate publishing: the perceived role of the book in today’s society. In the past, because of the necessary evolution required to actually create one, coupled with an ambition to deliver a valuable artifact to the world, a book was imagined by publishers as a means to both inspire and inform culture. Now the opposite is occurring. In a flagrant attempt to compete with Internet culture, to crash books into the marketplace on hot button topics from steroids to celebrities, from political scandal to political ascension, corporate publishers aim now to meet immediate demand. If a book about teenage vampires becomes a bestseller, then the hustle is on to find and market a series about pre-teen vampires. And because of this constant rush to the market with books that have the shelf-life of a bruised tomato—in hardcover, with supplemental cardboard cut-outs that stand in chain store windows and usher customers down narrow sales aisles—this ideology has influenced the ebb and flow of the industry. A worthy book that has been crafted over several steps and patiently delivered with care is outshined by a gossip memoir by a B-list celebrity’s cat-sitter.

Chris Eaton launches microfiction program on Twitter

In part inspired by Roch Carrier's short excerpt from the short-short story "The Hockey Sweater" on the Canadian five dollar bill, novelist Chris Eaton will begin a microfiction exercise on Twitter on July 4. He will publish twenty-one stories of 140 characters or less, and subscribers are asked to submit story responses to each one, which need not follow the same theme or plot but must contain at least one third of the same words as the original.

The twenty-one stories and the best of the responses will be published in a literary journal anthology entitled GULCH: An Assemblage of Poetry and Prose.

Chris Eaton, author of The Grammar Architect and The Inactivist, is also the frontman of the alt-folk band Rock Plaza Central.

"In Defense of Google Books"

Google is the one juggernaut corporation of the digital age which stands for many of the things I hate and yet which I don't hate at all. I don't know what I'd do without Google Maps, Gmail, Blogspot, Google Sites, and Google Books. I know it's monolithic, a monopoly, a triumph of technology over tradition... and yet, I love everything about it.

But apparently many people are up in arms against Google Books, and for probably all the wrong reasons.

Mark Gimein of Reuters lists some common arguments against Google Books and defuses them in his "Defense of Google Books."

There are a hundred other gems like the story of the Mahdi's peppered fingertips in Gen. Gordon's diary alone, and hundreds of millions of facts are now being uncovered and made accessible by Google's extraordinary project of digitizing millions of books. But these days, when you read about Google Books, you hardly ever-well, never-get to read anything as lively as those kinds of facts and insights. No, what you get, over and over again if you've followed the saga of Google Books, is the story of all the folks fighting The Coming Google Monopoly.

Literary journals are the bellwether of literature

John Freedman, editor of Granta, comments on the literary journal's vibrant and innovative role in the community and blasts a directive made by the Canadian heritage minister last February stating that journals must sell a lofty five thousand copies in order to receive government assistance.

Calling the literary journal a daring and diverse object in the world of literature, Freedman accuses the publishing industry of underestimating the tastes of readers and overvaluing profits.

From The Independent:

Literary journals are the antidote to this wrong-headed attempt to try and engineer sales. Their primary function, after all, is to undermine this economy of prestige, to promote gross miscegenation, messiness, conflict and disorder; to subvert the market; and to place writers in unexpected places, where they can create their own unlikely community of readers.

Nadine Gordimer had her first publication in the Johannesburg magazine, Forum, but her career as an international writer began with an acceptance from the good ol' boys at the Virginia Quarterly Review. The illustrious – and sadly defunct – Story magazine was founded in Austria in 1931, before moving back to New York, where it introduced everyone from JD Salinger to Charles Bukowski. Arundhati Roy would not have been an unfamiliar name to anyone looking closely at television credits in India; but her fictional voice was launched first in Granta magazine, which circulates primarily in Britain and America, and where her name was indeed new.

It is presumptuous of any literary journal to claim that it has discovered any writers – novelists and poets are hardly nickel deposits, after all – yet a good journal can make it far easier to readers to discover a new writer's work. It can take a piece of writing regardless of where it comes from and what unusual shape its story takes, and ask readers to smash into it. For these reasons the ideal reader of a literary journal is one who yearns for the lash of the new, the way a boxer needs to be hit.

South Florida public schools expand curricula to encompass world literature

In an effort to include more diverse voices, many Florida public high school teachers now assign more works by contemporary writers from around the world, including bestsellers such as The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini from Afghanistan and the 2008 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Dominican-born Junot Diaz.

While the classics of English and American literature--Shakespeare, Milton, Hawthorne, and so on--still receive their due, more teachers are giving attention to other, often overlooked voices on this vast planet.

Patricia Mazzei of the Miami Herald writes:

[A] 1993 national study, the most recent survey of its kind, found that the most frequently taught works in high schools in 1988 were remarkably similar to those taught in 1963.

Newer novels that make it into the classroom tend to be coming-of-age stories and works from other cultures, Applebee said. There has also been a notable influx of books by women and minority writers, particularly in literary anthologies.

Toni Morrison and Maya Angelou are widely read, as are Alice Walker's The Color Purple, Sandra Cisneros's The House on Mango Street, and novels by Amy Tan, who told the story of a Chinese family's immigrant experience in The Joy Luck Club and also wrote The Bonesetter's Daughter.

Sci-Fi Settings on Earth

The Shared Worlds summer writing program at Wofford College in South Carolina asked five best-selling and award-winning science fiction and fantasy novelists to select the five most fantastical, futuristic, and strange locations on today's earth. Elizabeth Hand, Nalo Hopkinson, Ursula K. LeGuin, China Miéville, and Michael Moorcock respectively chose Reykavik, Iceland; Kingston, Jamaica; Venice, Italy; London, England; and Marrakesh, Morocco.

To quote LeGuin:

It isn't hard to imagine a city that's built on a marsh in a lagoon, and is slowly but inevitably sinking back into the marsh, but it's the details that count; and some of the details require an active fantasy. For instance, that all the main streets are water. Sidestreets are narrow and the bridges arched, so no horses, no motorized vehicles. For centuries and centuries all traffic is on foot and by boat; and the boats are special, long, narrow, driven not by oars but by poling, for the canal-streets aren't very deep. Then they allow motorized boats on the canals, and all of sudden there's pollution, noise instead of quiet, and also wakes, waves, swamping the streets and plazas, which are already going under water in storms. Long ago the city was a powerful community, wealthy, full of artists, and built beautiful palaces and churches along the canals and on the islands –high buildings that look as delicate and colorful as the creations of glass the city is famous for. Now these buildings are as battered and threatened by floods of tourists as they are by floods of water, and the city is forced to live as a sort of museum of itself, populated more and more not by its own citizens but by foreigners. What is it like, now, to be a Venetian in Venice?

Common enemies and common ground

Jamil Zaki of The Huffington Post wrote a fascinating article about our psychological, instinctual habit of arranging ourselves into competitive, usually arbitrary groups and offers solutions for encompassing everyone into broader, more compassionate "human" groups.

Like other flavors of categorization, imagining that other groups lack complex feelings can be necessary to our survival, and - more darkly - to our ability to harm others during conflict. Fully processing the emotional states of everyone we see would make commuting in New York even more exhausting than it already is, and our natural aversion to suffering would prevent us from killing in war if we allowed ourselves to think about the other side's fear. By denying strangers, foreigners, and enemies human qualities, we can justify the extraordinary pain we may cause those people in conflict.

This isn't specifically about literature, but I thought it was relevant to this newsfeed since Bibliotrekking is about finding the universal human voice while paradoxically dividing voices into nations, cultures, regions, and languages.

"Joyce and the Art of City Bus Dependence"

Colin McEnroe of the Hartford Courant tries--and hilariously fails--to bridge the gap of human connection using Irish literature as a stepping stone:

I was trying to think of something to say to her that would, you know, celebrate some kind of kinship between us, some kind of acknowledgment of what we had in common: each having paid $1.25 to travel from east to west and each having been willing (or commanded) to tackle certain difficult Irish novels.

And the only thing I could think of was, "Give my regards to Stephen Dedalus" (the protagonist of the book), and I was just NOT going to say that because it was stupid and weird.