One of my favorite aspects of ALTA is hearing other
translators speak about techniques for solving stubborn problems. I’ve heard Bill Johnston speak two or three
times now about his translations from the Polish. This year, in a panel on translating
point of view, Johnston offered examples from his translation of Wiesław
Myśliwski’s A Treatise on Shelling Beans, another
NTA finalist. Johnston’s introduction on his hand-out describes the book as “a
first-person narrative with a concrete yet mysterious addressee/imagined
interlocutor.” (Variations on this point of view seem to be surprisingly
common.) Many of the (translated) sentences Johnston bolded in his examples
involved, in some way, “you,” and his comments on little things—like
translating the Polish “pan” as “sir” in the beginning of the book, to
establish a sense of the second person plural/formal “you” that exists in
Polish but not in English—offer great models for Russian, too. Johnston’s
reading from the book, during a lunchtime event, was equally instructive: he’s
a master at creating and maintaining voices.
A panel called “Translation
in Particular Genres” focused solely on translation to and from Russian and
English: Boris
Dralyuk, Sibelan
Forrester, and Olga Bukhina spoke
about specific challenges of specific works. Dralyuk discussed his translation
of Dmitry
Usov’s “Переводчик” (“The Translator”), a poem
discovered by Mikhail
Gasparov that offers a translation within a translation. Forrester talked
about her work on poet Maria
Stepanova’s prose, “Conversations in the Realm of the Dead,” noting the
challenge of translating a poet’s prose; Forrester mentioned her use of Marina
Tsvetaeva and Susan Sontag as models, too. It was also fun to hear from Olga
Bukhina, who translates from English to Russian, about the difficulties she
faced with Jacqueline Kelly’s The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate,
a book set in nineteenth-century Texas that features a cotton gin and lots of
vetch, neither of which translates easily into Russian. Bukhina also looked at
issues of noun gender that apparently (and logically!) vex the English-to-Russian translator as
much as the Russian-to-English translator.
There was, as usual, a good Russian presence at the
conference so lots of translators read from their Russian-to-English
translations during Bilingual Reading
sessions. There were so many fun and beautiful readings that it’s not fair to
pick out highlights but, well, I’ll pick a few anyway: Danuta Borchardt’s
soft voice and soft humor in her reading from her translation of Witold Gombrowicz’s Trans-Atlantyk; Tanya Paperny’s rendition of the bull’s speech
from Nikolai
Kostomarov’s story “Скотский бунт,” thought by some
to have been appropriated by George Orwell for Animal Farm (FMI: John Reed on
the subject; Paperny’s translation will be included in an e-book Reed is
working on); Marian Schwartz’s crystalline new beginning to Lev Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina; and Jane Bugaeva’s
delightful (no other word will do!) translations of poems by Oleg Grigoriev. I read
from my translation of Evgeny Vodolzakin’s Laurus.
I’ll also use this opportunity to mention that one of my favorite performances
during the ¡Declamacion! readings, which must be memorized, was Sibelan
Forrester and Christina Kramer’s rendition of Pushkin’s “Я вас любил,” sung to the tune
of “Danny Boy.” I have no idea how that worked out so perfectly but it was
lovely. I recited two poems: Vyacheslav
Kupriyanov’s “Русский вопрос” (“A/The Russian Question”), which consists
solely of lines with two names, Kalashnikov and Baryshnikov, and a poem by
Grigorii Petukhov that begins by referencing “The Internationale.”
I could go on and on, listing more readings and fun(ny)
comments and useful ideas from panels and roundtables—editing, translation as
betrayal, and marketing were especially lively topics—but I’ll stop there. I
should add that we Russian translators are already talking about having a
Russian translation workshop next year: this wouldn’t be a workshop in the
traditional sense but more a forum for sharing ways we’ve (re)solved sticky
translation problems. If you’re a Russian translator who missed ALTA this year
but want to come next year or didn’t talk with me in Milwaukee about this potential
workshop, please send me a note. The 2015 conference will be in Tucson, which
ought to be a bit warmer than ear-freezing but (otherwise) hospitable Milwaukee.
The Annunciation, c. 1490-95 Sandro Botticelli (with assistance?) |
Also, on a cultural note: I spent part of my last day in Milwaukee
at the Milwaukee Art Museum, where I thoroughly enjoyed
a real coffee and “Of Heaven and Earth,” a visiting exhibit of Italian painting
from Glasgow museums. I went specifically to see the pieces from the Middle
Ages…
P.S. I hope I didn’t spell any names incorrectly... there are so many in this post and I’m still so tired!
P.P.S. I spent this afternoon at my local library for a screening of the documentary Russia’s Open Book: Writing in the Age of Putin, with the film’s co-directors, Sarah Wallis and Paul Mitchell. You can watch it, too, on YouTube. Even if you won’t be able to ask the directors questions, you’ll still get Stephen Fry’s readings of excerpts from several novels—set to wonderful animated segments—as well as interviews with writers including Zakhar Prilepin and Lyudmila Ulitskaya. The very last minute or two, with Vladimir Sorokin, jolted me yet again, even on my third or fourth viewing.
P.P.S. I spent this afternoon at my local library for a screening of the documentary Russia’s Open Book: Writing in the Age of Putin, with the film’s co-directors, Sarah Wallis and Paul Mitchell. You can watch it, too, on YouTube. Even if you won’t be able to ask the directors questions, you’ll still get Stephen Fry’s readings of excerpts from several novels—set to wonderful animated segments—as well as interviews with writers including Zakhar Prilepin and Lyudmila Ulitskaya. The very last minute or two, with Vladimir Sorokin, jolted me yet again, even on my third or fourth viewing.
Other pieces about the conference:
Tanya Paperny about Politics and Transaltion, on Words Without Borders
Susan Bernofsky/Translationista on What I Learned at ALTA 2014
Up Next: Big Book
Award winners on Tuesday. And then books galore, probably starting with Viktor
Remizov’s Ashes and Dust, a very
worthy Big Book finalist about poachers and corruption in the taiga.
Disclaimers: The usual.
I collaborated on a story that will appear in an upcoming NYRB book.
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