Illustration from the page of the Carmina Burana that includes "O Fortuna" / Image courtesy of Wikipedia
Each fall, a town somewhere in North America gets overrun
with literary translators, writers, editors, and (small) publishers. That’s
when our little mob of littérateurs gets together for the annual conference of
the American Literary Translators Association, and this year the place was
Rochester, New York — home to Open Letter Books, the online literary resource
Three Percent, and the University of Rochester’s program in Literary
Translation Studies. (Next up: Bloomington, Indiana!) Any ALTA conference is a
rich, varied, and intense experience, making it difficult to sum up neatly and
comprehensively, but that’s why the gods of typography invented bullet points. With bullets, I don’t actually have to connect my thoughts. How nice! So here are a few of the moments (excluding bar scenes) that stood out to me from our
gathering in Rochester earlier this month:
·
The plenary lecture on humor by David Bellos,
whose hilarious example on shit and samogon
from Vladimir Voinovich’s Life and
Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin has got me determined to
read that novel at the soonest possible moment. (I’m a sucker for the
scatological.) Bellos also showed us how our ears could fool us into thinking
that the beautiful lyrics of “O Fortuna” had morphed into a “piece of lovely cake.”
·
The roundtable on reviewing translations, which happens
to have become a pet topic of mine lately. My interest owes partly to my own recent
forays into reviewing and partly to the book reviews I now ask my students to
write. The panelists generally gave lots of advice for new reviewers, and they also formulated
what a proper review ought to look like. (“Ably translated by X” just doesn’t
cut it anymore.) Katherine Silver talked a lot about a certain “good” review
that panned her recent translation of Daniel Sada’s Almost Never: sure, the reviewer didn’t like the translation, but
at least she didn’t make Silver invisible. On the contrary, it was exactly
Silver’s use of language that she objected to (e.g., “the translation fails
spectacularly to deliver anything like Sada’s wonderfully wacky prose”). But
not all “good” reviews are bad reviews. Silver also mentioned one in The New York Times, for instance, that
exulted in her language. And where else can readers find decent reviews of
translations? The panelists suggested Bookforum,
The Nation, Full Stop, The Quarterly Conversation, and The Coffin Factory, not to mention two individual critics: Tim Parks and Ruth Franklin.
