My favorites so far are:

1. translate something you love

2. Don’t just read the text, listen to the voice in your head.

3. Be faithful in the first draft. Reproduce the surface. Don’t be an editor.

4. Don’t always translate every last word: leaving some untranslatable words or expressions that can add to the “local colour” of the piece but are comprehensible in context can actually enhance the text.

5. Always respect the author’s intention, even if you don’t always respect the vocabulary, syntax, rhythm, etc.

And these great questions from Elliott Colla:

1. Do you really have time to donate weeks or months of unremunerated labor, even if the cause is a good one?

2. Does this particular book really deserve a second life in another language? Why?

3. How would you compare the work to five other similar works in other languages?

4. Who is the English audience for the translation, and why would they be interested now? Do you have any evidence for believing this?

5. Are you doing this because of your love of Arabic literary culture, or your love of English?

6. Do you have a fool-proof system for knowing when you’ve gotten something wrong and when you’ve gotten it right? Would you share it with me?

the seduction of translating

In this sense, translation takes translators far beyond the genre of their own recognizable styles and idiosyncrasies as poets. One of the disintegrative benefits of translation is that it compels or seduces one into writing poetry other than one’s own…

translation as pleasure

I would say I stumbled on translation simply in the process of trying to find something that was cognate with my experience of having thought about a poet, read him word for word and word by word, and found it hostile or hateful to paraphrase. Let us say I invoked a “pleasure principle” rather than a homiletic one, that my approach was hedonistic rather than Aristotelian, much as Coleridge’s is when he says the “immediate aim of poetry is pleasure not truth.” I would be quite ready to say that the immediate aim of translation is pleasure, not truth.

the sweaty labor of mediation

It’s the Platonism, the Idea of the Perfect Poem, or the Perfect Word, that I think interferes with the sweaty labor of translation, the sweaty empiricism in which everything is an action, a commitment, a deed, a choice, and refuses to exist abstractly in the realm of the Potential [...] One has to intrude upon possibility; even the poem speaks in its own right, at its most expressive pitch, as a pure tissue of possibility. The translator provides the possibles, probables, utterances, and then tries to anchor the whole floating realm of epistemological possibility. I insist it’s an epistemological, rather than a semantic or linguistic: What kind of knowledge does poetry involve? What is the thing that translators can know, and how can their language know it? What is the syntax for its survival as either immediate pleasure or eventual truth? The knowledge must never be falsified: it is a confidence, a trust—but there is a human need to take a stand and mediate knowledge. All translation, at its best, is mediation rather than definition.

how does one judge a translation upon reading it?

What is the test [...]? There is nothing as blue and red as litmus paper. There are signs, faits accomplis, reassurances: for one thing, volatility; responsibility, for another the certainity that all the elements have been subjected to atomic scrutiny—all the words as they pass from their moorings in the (original language) into the ink of the translation, with no leaps of convenience or deletions such as you might find in the Imitations of Lowell.

Imagination: the most dangerous faculty

Imagination isn’t a phenomenon that can be limited to the poem in its original state. As a translator, it is legitimate, it is imperative, to work imaginatively, joyfully, energetically, ingeniously, patiently, inventively, yourself. Imagination cannot be present in the original only, and absent from the equivalence. [Imagination is the most] risky and most daring, the most desired and mistrusted faculty: the most dangerous. We mistrust it but we can’t renounce it. How can we afford to renounce imagination in the midst of a process we know to be absurd and inimitable? Or avoid saying to ourselves, in the awful solitude of translation, with an upbeat of nausea and wonder: “Well, I don’t know for a fact what the poet knew, but I believe I can imagine how this might sound in my language.” That’s an honest and poignant transaction.

Is translation as self-transcendence still another version of the paradox: to know yourself, lose yourself in the other other? If voice is the instrument making it possible for poets to continue writing by giving immediacy and validity to whatever gifts they possess, it also exists in the constant collaboration between the language of the living and the language of the dead. Poets come to know that voice is both one’s own and not one’s own. As Antonio Machado observes, the poet, perceiving all the unbidden echoes in his personal language, realizes that his voice is not “mine” but “ours.” He senses that it resounds, as a collaborative instrument, and that the collaborators are the literary masters of many human languages, including many he does not know, as well as the special languages of trees, waters, and illiterate grandmothers.

Hexalogue or Code of Good Practice

The Six Commandments of ‘fair-play’ in literary translation, adopted by CEATL’s General Assembly on 14 May, 2011. [pdf download]

1. Licensing of rights
The licensing of rights for the use of the translation shall be limited in time to a maximum of five years. It shall be subject to the restrictions and duration of the licensed rights of the original work. Each licensed right shall be mentioned in the contract.

2. Fees
The fee for the commissioned work shall be equitable, enabling the translator to make a decent living and to produce a translation of good literary quality.

3. Payment terms
On signature of the contract, the translator shall receive an advance payment of at least one third of the fee. The remainder shall be paid on delivery of the translation at the latest.

4. Obligation to publish
The publisher shall publish the translation within the period stipulated in the contract, and no later than two years after the delivery of the manuscript.

5. Share in profit
The translator shall receive a fair share of the profits from the exploitation of his/her work, in whatsoever form it may take, starting from the first copy.

6. Translator’s name
As author of the translation, the translator shall be named wherever the original author is named.

The first clips up are from my reading at Women’s Spoken Word series at Moonstone Arts Center in Philadelphia on November 16th.

Enjoy!

Adanna Literary Journal Featured Poets Page

New this month are two Poem Cards – beautiful, glossy, 8 1/2 by 5 1/2 double-sided post cards, each with one of my poems set against a striking image. They would look great on your desk, your wall, framed, or as gifts. They are $5.00, with special pricing for buying 3 or more.

More coming soon!

"Bound, I descend" Poem Card

Cicada Poem Card

You’re an asshole, Nancy Grace
I flinch when I see your accusatory face
or even your right breast, hanging out.
About your character I have no doubt,
for you called for the lynching of a disturbed young mother.
So I’d be afraid now, too, if I were your choreographer.

     Translating, and reading about translation, has made me hyper-aware of dictionaries. There are, in turns out, many different kinds, each with its own purpose and usefulness.

     The “dictionary” most of us know is a book that is a collection of words with information about those words. It is monolingual (or intralingual), and it exists to explain words to people who already understand the language. While most pretend to be neutral, they are not – to explore the editorial policy of a dictionary, look up any controversial cultural term – lesbian, abortion, sex, or any racial or sexual insults. Does the definition satisfy you or just make you angry? One linguist I know, the radical lesbian feminist writer Julia Penelope, once had a job as the “offensive usage” editor for a dictionary, deciding and marking which words were sexist, racist, age-ist, etc. Imagine using THAT dictionary, what values it would express! I only wish I could remember what dictionary it was….

     And, of course, we all know how dictionary definitions can be infuriatingly obtuse or self-referential. Look up a word like “afraid,” for example, and you might find “the state of being in fear.” All fine and well, IF you know what “fear” means. If you don’t, you’ve learned nothing. There is an amazing dictionary for adults learning English, the Oxford American Dictionary for learners of English, which defines words clearly and simply, and never uses a word in the definition of itself. It has photos, illustrations, and guides to types of language, such as which kinds of words are used in a resume vs a casual email. I had one, once, and spent hours leafing through, delighted with what I was learning about my own language, but gave it away to someone trying to refine his English enough to look for a better job. (I really wish I could find a similar dictionary for modern Hebrew, for I need the information about the qualities and contexts of words, not just their “definitions.”)

     Dictionaries also define only one word at a time, or at most a short phrase that carries a single unit of meaning. They are, in this way, like looking through a microscope, trying to get a sense of an animal by searching a single cell at a time.

     Bilingual (interlingual) dictionaries are a beast of a completely different nature. They are actually more a lexicon than a dictionary, in that they exist to map one word to another and not really to define words. They are based, in the words of Jorge Luis Borges, “on the hypothesis – obviously an unproven one – that languages are made of equivalent synonyms.” And of course languages aren’t, which is why using a bilingual dictionary is only barely related to understanding or translating a language. If I look up the word “run,” for example, it will list several Hebrew words, nouns and verbs. If I look up each of those, it may say only “run.” (With a pronunciation guide, and, for Hebrew words, the gender of the nouns and class of the verbs.) But what do I then know? Does the word mean to run, to jog, to sprint, to flee for one’s life, to give someone the run around, to run for cover?

     And, within those limitations, bilingual dictionaries, like monolingual dictionaries, have editorial policies. My Hebrew/English dictionary doesn’t have the word “fuck” in English or Hebrew, and that’s a word my poet uses, as well as related concepts also missing. I probably need a Hebrew slang dictionary, if such a thing exists, as well as a Hebrew for speakers of other languages dictionary. Online interlingual translation sites help fill some of those gaps for me, although I’ve not yet found a Hebrew equivalent of an “urban” dictionary with all the pop culture references and slang terms and usages.

     Contemplating all of this is only the background to actually translating! Some days, staring at a word that ought to make sense and doesn’t, and being unable to figure out why, I do wonder what I’ve gotten myself into. Translating is incredibly hard. It is also incredibly rewarding, the same “ahhh” as dropping the right piece of a jigsaw puzzle into place and having a whole section become clear. Well, it’s like that if what you have is a pile of puzzle pieces but no picture of  what you are building, only a title that gives you a general sense and lots of shapes that look familiar.

A few more thoughts on dictionaries, from the translator’s best friend, Willis Barnstone, in his The Poetics of Translation:

•A dictionary is monolingual or bilingual in format and intralingual or interlingual in purpose. With it one confronts the unknown.

•An interlingual dictionary is a bible for the translator, containing official law for transferring meaning between languages. Laws, however, even holy ones, are not always perfect. An interlingual dictionary enlightens and deceives.

•An interlingual dictionary provides a mirror image of the unknown in a known language, but for there to be a meaning, to be semiosis, the translator must intervene with her interpreting mind, actively choosing what amid the new data provides equivalence.

•A monolingual (or intralingual) dictionary defines by explanation and synonymity. A bilingual (or interlingual) dictionary seeks equivalence and does not primarily define. It tries to translate. It tries to do so faithfully and literally, but leaves the decision of the right choice to the translator.

•A bilingual dictionary is not prepared to handle sentences, since it has no memory of syntax and cares nothing about grammar. A dictionary has a multitude of cyclopses looking out from its pages. When a lexical cyclops takes on a second or third eye right in the middle of its brow, the hybrid monster is so cross-eyed it cannot see or be seen unless one focuses in one eye alone.