Stingy Kids

On Translators: Edith Grossman

En un lugar de la Mancha, de cuyo nombre no quiero acordarme, no ha mucho tiempo que vivía un hidalgo de los de lanza en astillero, adarga antigua, rocín flaco y galgo corrredor.--Miguel de Cervantes

Somewhere in La Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember, a gentleman lived not long ago, one of those who has a lance and ancient shield on a shelf and keeps a skinny nag and a greyhound for racing.--trans. Edith Grossman

Today's Writer's Almanac features a brief biography of the translator Edith Grossman (you'll need to scroll down for 5/22).  Grossman, you may recall, followed Gregory Rabassa as Gabriel García Márquez's primary English translator and in 2003 she published a new English translation of Don Quixote.   In a talk she gave at the Queen Sofía Spanish Institute in May 2005, Grossman related that once she rendered the first (and the most famous) line of DQ she was able to proceeded sentence by sentence, page by page.  She gave herself a break between Parts I and II and translated an erotic novel.  Here are a few quotes from that talk:

• "Translators are expected to self-destruct as if they were personally responsible for the Tower of Babel."
• "Living languages will not be regulated."
• "Faithfulness has little do with literal meaning."
• "Translators translate context."
• "Somebody once asked (Gregory) Rabassa: 'Do you have enough Spanish to translate?' and he replied, 'The question is, Do I have enough English?'"  (SK: This is one of my favorite translation quotes!)
• "Literary language may be a form of translation."  (SK: Octavio Paz makes this argument in a fine article on translation which Grossman referenced. Others have also made this claim.)
• Quoting Flaubert: "Language is a cracked kettle."

Russian Poets at StAnza 2007

I wish this festival were taking place next door or, at the very least, within two-hour commuting distance. Five full days of poetry events, both local and international, in St. Andrews, Scotland. The line-up includes three Russian poets: Elena Fanailova, Maria Galina and Aleksandra Petrova. I came across the work of Fainalova and Petrova in the outstanding anthology Crossing Centuries: The New Russian Poetry, published in 2000 by Talisman House. It is one of the best anthologies of any kind that I have come across. If it had been a bilingual edition it would have been perfect--but, at almost 1000 pgs, a little too bulky. The range of translations is impressive--ninety poets, fifty translators--and it also includes several insightful essays that provide historical and cultural context. These essays are interspersed throughout to give a sense of the shifts and changes in Russian poetry and its emerging diaspora in the twentieth century.

The StAnza site also provides sample poems and brief biographies for many of the poets. You can read Petrova's "Jerusalem" poem "Tarantino's languor and dreaming back" (translated by Dennis Silk), Fanailova "Better this way: it's you with nothing to hold onto" (trans. Stephanie Sandler), and Galina's "I said to him--don't throw me into this prickly bush" (also translated by Sandler). Now if they post podcasts of the readings it almost will feel like I had been there.

*Fanailova will be reading with three other Russian poets at The Bowery Poetry Club on April 1 (free to the public)

In print

My translations of three short stories by the Israeli author Reuven Miran are now on line.  I'm very proud to be part of Zeek's commitment to promoting Modern Hebrew writing through translation.  Miran's texts, which were more like prose poems, were such a pleasure to work with.  From my Translator's Note:

The idea, expressed in the story "Meteor," that a meteor is only fully perceived at the moment of its death – when it bursts into flames through the Earth's atmosphere – could apply to the work of translation. The meaning and spirit of a text are most vulnerable when the original and target language come into contact, but this instant also offers a tremendous opportunity for understanding the text in new and productive ways.

Translation is often spoken of in terms of metaphor and simile, and often personified.  Translations are traitors, assassins, les belles infidèles.  (For more on this topic, I recommend Lori Chamberlain's "Gender and the Metaphorics of Translation" [reprinted in Venuti, The Translation Studies Reader, 2000, 2004].)  While thinking about the process of translating Miran's stories, I found myself reaching for analogies, all of them unsuitable, until I realized that the metaphor I needed was in the very story I had translated. "...if it had not fallen through space and – thanks to that unavoidable friction – burned against the atmosphere, the meteor would have continued to spin through endless space for tens of thousands of years more, perhaps even forever" ("Meteor").

The Marionette

My friend Lovemoss made the animated banner that now graces the newly redesigned Stingy Kids.  I still can't believe how perfect it is.  Since the beginning, the patron saint of Stingy Kids has been the marionette.  We're all pulled by strings of one kind or another.  Stingy Kids, with its preoccupation with translation and literary ties, is particularly prone to entanglement and interweaving.

I shared with L. an early sketch for a banner: a marionette hovers in the air and, slowly, a heart-shaped flower stretches upward, reaching for its hand.   I imagined that at the moment of contact, the marionette would do a little dance.  I was thinking of this story:

Un cronopio encuentra una flor solitaria en medio de los campos. Primero la va a arrancar, pero piensa que es una crueldad inútil y se pone de rodillas a su lado y juega alegremente con la flor, a saber: le acaricia los pétalos, la sopla para que baile, zumba como una abeja, huele su perfume, y finalmente se acuesta debajo de la flor y se duerme envuelto en una gran paz.

La flor piensa: Es como una flor.

(Julio Cortázar, Historias de cronopios y de famas)

A cronopio comes across a solitary flower in the middle of a field.  First, he tries to pull her out, but thinking it unnecessarily cruel, he kneels by the flower's side and gleefully plays with her, just so: he caresses her petals, gently blows on her until she dances, buzzes about like a bee, smells her perfume and finally, lies down beneath her and falls asleep wrapped in a feeling of peace.

The flower says to herself: He is like a flower.

(my translation)

L. added a key element that I hadn't even considered: a burst of blushing all around when the marionette and heart-flower come into contact.  Refresh the page and see how the other flowers are brightened by the encounter. Thank you, Lovemoss, for giving Stingy Kids a much needed visual burst of poetry, play and color and for so evocatively capturing the spirit of the site.  Thank you!