It took a few weeks, well, a month, but here, finally, is a
trip report on the
American Literary
Translators Association conference, held this year at Indiana University in
Bloomington. Indiana.
Not Illinois. Here’s
some of what I enjoyed most…
First off,
ALTA
awards news: I was very excited that
Philip
Boehm won the 2013 National Translation Award for his translation of Herta
Müller’s
The Hunger Angel, which
I
read last year and recommend highly. Müller wrote the book in German but there
are bits of Russian, too, with lots of wordplay.
Lucas Klein won the Lucien Stryk Prize for translating, from the
Chinese,
Notes on the Mosquito: Selected Poems,
by Xi Chuan.
The first time slot of the conference after the first
plenary session—in which Maureen Freely, chair of the
Translators
Association in the UK, spoke
about
translating Orhan Pamuk, noting, among other things, Pamuk’s intentionally trance-inducing
long sentences, something I relate to oh-so-well—included a section of readings
of translations from the Russian. ALTA’s bilingual readings are always fun,
thanks to
Alexis
Levitin who serves as organizer and emcee; this year’s attendees included
second-year Russian students from IU. Katherine Young read her
translations of
poetry by
Inna Kabysh
and
Tanya Paperny read her translation of a
story (“
Иллюзион”) from Andrei
Krasnyashykh’s cycle of stories
Парк культыры и отдыха
(
The Park of Culture and Relaxation);
another of Tanya’s translations from the cycle is
here. I participated
in this section, too, reading the beginning of my translation of Vladislav
Otroshenko’s
Приложение
к фотоальбому (
Addendum to a Photo Album), which I’m
working on for Dalkey Archive Press.
And then there were panels and roundtables…
- “Translating Voice in Russian Literature,”
which focused on poetry, was fun, with Alyssa
Dinega Gillespie speaking about Zinaida Gippius’s “Она” (literally “She”), a poem I vividly remember
from grad school (!!!), Anna
Barker looking at Lev Tolstoy’s stories for children, and Jim
Kates focusing on Alexander Pushkin’s “Ворон к
ворону летит” (“Raven to raven on the wing”) and offering multiple
translations, including his own, Yevgeny
Bonver’s, and Google
Translator’s. I thought Google’s work was particularly funny for these
lines, which seem to invoke both Poe and an executive assistant: “The Raven,
where we used to have dinner? / How can we check on that?”
- “Translating Fiction IV: Characters and Voice” was fun, too: Alex Zucker’s discussion of
translating Petra Hůlová’s Paměť mojí
babičce (translated as All This Belongs
to Me) was particularly useful for ideas on colloquial speech and mixed
language since Hůlová tosses in Mongolian and Russian. Marian Schwartz spoke about working
on novels by Andrei Gelasimov, noting differences in registers (e.g. veterans
tend to swear) and mentioning the presence of Yuri Levitan, a real-life Soviet
radio announcer during World War 2, in Gods
of the Steppe. Levitan appears fairly regularly in contemporary fiction and
names like his, which are pretty obvious to Russian readers, are unknown to
most non-Russian readers. The two other speakers were Sean
Cotter, who spoke about Romanian writer Mateiu Caragiale’s Rakes of the Old Court, whose wonderfully
“extravagant diction” (I think that’s a quote!) presented challenges, and Susan Bernofsky, whose talk
about her work on Kafka’s Metamorphosis
made the “IV” in the panel’s title feel less like a Roman numeral than an invigorating
IV of adrenalin because her advice about exaggerating characteristic “things”
in a translation to sharpen style, starting in early drafts, hit me at the
perfect time. Honestly, I think it’s worth heeding the advice of anyone who calls Gregor Samsa a drama
queen.
- I also moderated a roundtable discussion, “When
Two Multilingual Heads Are Better Than One,” in which Olga Bukhina, Sibelan Forrester,
and Alyssa
Dinega Gillespie discussed close collaborations with their authors. Olga
talked about working with Eugene
Yelchin on translating Breaking Stalin’s Nose into Russian
(and she gave me a copy, which I’m looking forward to reading!), Sibelan noted
lots of useful procedural aspects of collaboration, such as clarifying what’s
unclear and handling writers with “some English,” and Alyssa, who has written
about Marina Tsvetaeva and won awards
for translating her, spoke about working
“with” dead writers through scholarship and writing original poetry.
I’ll stop there since several other bloggers have already
written great pieces about the conference. Here are some links:
Will Kirkland/All In One Boat:
Leaping
Linguals! Everything is Understood! Will mentions lots of wonderful details
from the conference, including highlights of ¡Declamacion! readings (BTW, I
recited a poem by Evgeny Kropivnitsky about bedbugs, lice, and mice, in commemoration
of finding a bedbug in my room after last year’s ¡Declamacion! event),
keynotes, and a closing night talk at a special Founders’ Dinner, at which
Willis
Barnstone spoke about ALTA, translation, and many other things, culminating
with readings that then culminated with Apocalypse via “Seven seals,” from Barnstone’s
The Restored New Testament: A New
Translation Including the Gnostic Gospels of Thomas, Mary, and Judas. A
personal note: The Apocalypse is quite a way to end a conference. It sent me
for a final ice cream at
Hartzell’s, my very
favorite place in Bloomington.
Yardenne Greenspan/Words Without Borders:
Dispatch
from the 2013 ALTA Conference. Another nice summary, one I particularly enjoyed
for mentioning the informal aspect of ALTA that I love so much.
Bonus Links!
Martin Cruz Smith’s “Five Best” column
on
Russian humorists in last Saturday’s
Wall
Street Journal. Yet another reminder that I never ever seem to get back to
Zoshchenko…
Sara
Paretsky’s “Five Best” column in today’s
Wall Street Journal focuses on “bearing witness to the unspeakable”
and also includes two Russian books.
|
The Lilly Library, a darn hard place to find if you don't really know where
you're going. It houses rare books and manuscripts, including
translators' papers. |
Up Next: Vadim
Levental’s
Masha Regina, which I’ve
been promising forever!
Image Credit: Vmenkov, via
Wikipedia/Creative Commons.