I just got around to organizing my notes on the PEN Worlds Voices Literary festival, which took place last week in NYC. It's an amazing gathering of writers, publishers, translators and readers. The only drawback: there was just too much to do and so many good things overlapped! Here are my notes from the panels and readings that I attended--my notes on the panel "Short Stories" will appear in a separate post:
Wednesday, April 30
Rewriting Family
Housing Works Bookstore Café
Participants: P.F. Thomése, György Dragomán, Yael Hedaya (Moderator: Stacey D'Erasmo)
Dragomán is a Hungarian novelist and translator who was born in Marosvásárhely/Târgu Mureş, Romania in 1973. As a literary translator, he's aware of the limits of translation but doesn't let them become an excuse for not translating. So let's say you can only get 90%, he said, that's something! He also conceded that the kinds of limits or problems that one translator faces may be entirely different for another. If you can't find the solution, someone else will. This is a very generous and optimistic approach to translation and I thank Dragomán for it. An audience member asked about the different between translating poetry and prose and remarked that poetry, in particular, tends to be untranslatable. Dragomán smiled and told us that his wife is a poet and frequently works with translators. "First, the rhyme goes, second, some of the meter....but it's ok! Something stays and that's what's important." I really wish more readers and critics would focus on how much remains in translation rather than fixating on "losses," which I put in quotes becomes often those who assert that something has been lost in translation 1) haven't read the original or 2) haven't/won't read the translation.
He has a fantastic author website (authors, take note!), where he's posted excerpts from and links to a number of interviews. I recommend highly his interview with James Smith in which he discusses at length his relationship with his translators and how he approaches the task of translation.
Thursday, May 1
Burma: A Land at a Crossroads
Instituto Cervantes New York
Participants: Thant Myint-U and Ian Buruma (Moderator: Dedi Felman)
Dedi Felman, who is a founding editor of Words Without Borders, did a tremendous job moderating this panel. Thant Myint-U is the grandson of a former U.N. Secretary-General U Thant and author of The River of Lost Footsteps: A Personal History of Burma and The Making of Modern Burma. Buruma is the author of God's Dust: A Modern Asian Journey (1989), in which he discussed Burma. Felman asked wonderful questions--there is no way to cram a hundred years of history into a one hour talk but Felman, Buruma and Thant Myint-U impressively contextualized Burma's current political climate through a discussion of key events that have shaped modern Burmese history.
Thant Myint-U's 2007 article "What to do about Burma" is a more expansive summary of the points he raised in this talk.
A Few Notes:
1885--British India occupies and annexes "what was left of Burma"--gentry, aristocracy fall apart
--the occupiers were not prepared for a long term occupation--the Burmese response was swift, intense and violent
--mass displacement
1920s/30s--a lot of economic growth
WWII causes a new upheaval, crisis
January 4, 1948--the British leave
Aung San's coalition falls apart
ethnic groups rise up demanding territorial independence
Burmese army grows--"huge army machine develops"
"The solutions create their own problems"--Ian Buruma
Since this a literature festival, I wish that there had been some discussion of the kind of literary culture that currently exists in Burma. My understanding is that much of it is heavily censored. In 1993, PEN American published Anna J. Allott's monograph Inked Over, Ripped Out: Burmese Storytellers and the Censors but I've had trouble locating more recent information on Burmese literature. I'm particularly interested in poetry, which was very popular in Burma until the 1960s (shorts stories are easier to censor?). I've come across English translations of poems by Tin Moe, a Burmese poet who was imprisoned in the 1990s for his support of the pro-democracy movement. He left Burma after his release and died in Los Angeles in 2007 at the age of 73. Allott wrote a tribute to him and included a couple of her translations of his work. Norton's Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia, and Beyond, edited by Tina Chang, Ravi Shankar and Nathalie Handal, apparently includes some work from Burma.
(Update: Since I started transcribing these notes, Cyclone Nargis has devastated much of Burma, particularly the areas along the Irrawaddy Delta.)
Kyi May Kaung's poem "Mother Rape"
Thursday, May 1
Publishers Weekly: On Translation
Elebash Recital Hall, CUNY Graduate Center
Participants: Morgan Entrekin (Grove, NY), Michael Krüger (Hanser Verlag, Germany), Edwin Frank (NYRB, US), Halfdan Freihow (Font, Norway) (Moderator: Sarah Nelson, Publishers Weekly)
In this panel, four publishers discussed the status and marketability of translation and the place of translation in their respective publishing houses.
Krüger: Martin Luther's translation of the Bible inaugurated modern literature in German--we are going on almost 250 years of translation copyright--asserting the authorship of the translator
Entrekin: publishing literature in translation generates "psychic equity"--continues a conversation across cultures and languages that draws in readers, critics and authors
There was a lot of discussion about the fact that translation only makes up 3% of U.S. publications, a number that is much, much higher in other countries.
Freihow: Your (meaning the U.S.) homegrown writers are writing about the same subjects generally (as in other places)--what if you didn't tell the reader that it was a translation--would they notice?
Freihow also noted that despite the large number of translations that his publishing house brings out, the number of translations of U.S. literature has gone down. One reason is that English has become almost a second language for many Europeans, so many readers have access to the English original well before the translation comes out. Another factor is that U.S. agents charge very hight rates--this and the lack of translation support from the U.S. means that it makes more financial sense to publish an unknown European writer than a well-known U.S. writer.
Krüger: in our generation things are happening at the same time--so translation has to happen at the same time
Nelson pointed out that about 300, 000 books in English are published every year (the number is higher, I think). In Germany, for example, the number is between 70-100,000, of which 10-20, 000 are works of fiction. (not sure if I understood that correctly--I think the point was that the U.S. publishes a smaller percentage of works of fiction)
"How Many Books are Too Many" (a 2004 NYT article)
"The Non English Patient" (a 2006 panel at the Frankfurt Book Fair, scroll down for a discussion on the number of books published)
Wikipedia tries to keep track.
Krüger: "trash novels" come out very quickly, "non trash" is slow--in a world with so much trash "it is not so bad to have some things that are slow"
Frank: In France, many bookstores categorize books by country--in Italy, by publisher, which means that readers are attracted to a curatorial edge/taste
The panel came to a close with the observation (made by Frank and supported by Entrekin) that U.S. translators are not able to make a living on translation alone. In Norway and Germany, on the other hand, the government and publishing houses offer subsidies to translators and in support of translation.
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