Turn Your Love-Hate Relationship with Literary Translation into a Love-Love-Love Relationship
By Stacy McKenna, Intralingo Contributor
“You would never know it, but I hate translation more than I hate anything in this world. I am constantly afraid while doing it, afraid that I won’t get it good enough…either not close enough or not strong enough. Or either too close. It is a miserable business, at best always a failure, at worst a disaster” (1).
That dark and desperate quote can be found in Jeremy Munday’s textbook, Evaluation in Translation: Critical Points of Translator Decision-making. The place was Los Angeles, California. The year was 1966. Literary translator Sam Hileman wrote those lines in a letter to his friend, Carlos Fuentes, as he struggled to meet the deadline for translating Fuentes’ novel, Cambio de piel.
Munday points out that Hileman had a young family and was in such a dire economic situation that he didn’t have enough money to mail the final translation to the publisher. Munday also makes the following keen observation about Hileman’s letter:
This haunting fear, driving from uncertainty and lack of confidence, almost paralyses Hileman, as he anguishes over the choices he must make in the text. Hileman, a highly creative translator, agonized over ‘closeness’ and ‘strength’, which are conflicting, or at least distinct, objectives. The question revolves around what a ‘strong’ translation is meant to be and how much a translator may intervene in order to achieve it. (1)
All literary translators have felt the same anguish as Hileman at times while working on a project, so how does a translator overcome trepidation and make not just accurate translations, but artful sentences? Intralingo’s new class for professional translators who work from Spanish into English, Lessons in the Art of Literary Translation: Spanish Literature (ES-EN), offers skill-building exercises, myriad resources and opportunities to connect and share ideas and experiences with other translators to answer just these questions. We will learn from some of the greats, analyzing and comparing multiple published translations of four well-known Spanish literary texts. The skills and approaches learned in this class can be applied to non-literary work as well, ensuring your translation reads like an original.
New online course from @Intralingo: Lessons in the Art of Literary Translation: Spanish Literature.
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Hopefully at the end of the course, you will feel less like Sam Hileman and more like Willis Barnstone who provides us with a much more positive perspective on translation in his essay “An ABC of Translating Poetry”:
Translation is the art of revelation. It makes the unknown known. The translator artist has the fever and craft to recognize, re-create, and reveal the work of the other artist. But even when famous at home, the work comes into an alien city as an orphan with no past to its readers. In rags, hand-me-downs, or dramatic black capes of glory, it is surprise, morning, a distinctive stranger. The orphan is Don Quijote de la Mancha in Chicago.
What does Don Quijote sound like to an English-speaking reader in Chicago? In Lessons in the Art of Literary Translation, we will examine what Don Quijote sounded like to A.J. Duffield in 1881, Samuel Putnam in 1949, John Michael Cohen in 1950 and Edith Grossman in 2003. We will examine and compare these translations and discuss translation issues such as tone/register, modern vs. archaic language and to use or not to use footnotes. We’ll discuss questions related to these issues and give you an opportunity to translate excerpts, to apply what you’ve learned and to use new resources we provide.
‘Translation is the art of revelation.’ – Willis Barnstone #xl8
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One thing we won’t be doing is deciding which translation is perfect because as Barnstone states, “A translation dwells in imperfection…” He goes on to add, “And because there are no perfect word equivalents between languages, or even within the same language (as Borges proves in his story of the mad Menard), perfection in translation is inconceivable.”
Speaking of Jorge Luis Borges, we will travel through an excerpt of “La forma de la espada” (“The Shape of the Sword”) on the words of Donald A. Yates and Andrew Hurley. We will complete exercises that examine active vs. passive voice, word order, tone/register, punctuation and translating an author’s invented or semi-invented words.
We will also journey to Ángeles Mastretta’s post-revolution Mexico and down Juan Rulfo’s barrancas to The Burning Plain. We will listen to what some of the greats like Gregory Rabassa and Edith Grossman have to say about their experience translating works from the Latin American literary canon, and soon enough you’ll be feeling less like the frantic and distraught Sam Hileman and more like a professional who loves the art of translation and is ready for the next project.
Class begins online on September 8, 2015. Register now to reserve your space. I’ll be teaching this class and look forward to sharing thoughts and approaches with you via the forum, building professional connections and shaking off those feelings of self-doubt that can creep into any translator’s mind. See you soon!
Stacy McKenna received her MFA in English and Creative Writing from Mills College in Oakland, California. Her translations have appeared in The Other Poetry of Barcelona, Códols in New York, 580 Split, Cerise Press and Río Grande Review. She has taught English and ESL throughout the Bay Area and worked at several nonprofit organizations including the Center for the Art of Translation. She has recently returned to the Bay Area after teaching literary translation and English at the Universidad Autónoma de Querétaro in Querétaro, Mexico.
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