Reading the World Podcast 10: Edith Grossman
After a hiatus, the Reading the World Podcast is thrilled to be back with the support of the University of California Irvine’s International Center for Writing and Translation. In this new episode, translator Edith Grossman talks about her recent book Why Translation Matters, her translations of Luis de Gongora’s Soledades (The Solitudes) and her forthcoming translation, The Depths of Time by Antonio Muñoz Molina.
Last April during (but unrelated to) PEN World Voices, I (Erica Mena) had the great pleasure of meeting with Edith Grossman. Edith Grossman, in case anyone doesn’t know, is one of the most important translators of Spanish literature. If you google her, you’ll discover that she’s translated some of the best book of the twentieth century, over 60 at this point. She had spoken the week before at Boston University, and I had hoped she might be available then to talk about her new book Why Translation Matters_ but the timing didn’t quite work out. But I was to be in New York at least for the Best Translated Book Award, and she was available.
We met in her apartment in the city. If ever there were an environment which perfectly matched my impression of a person, this was it. We sat in at a table by the window in her living room, surrounded by books and art, the artifacts of a creative life. Some of the background noise you’ll hear is the city traffic, movers, people walking by, all part of what made this conversation so interesting.
Thanks, as always, to Matt Landry for providing technical expertise and to Open Letter for hosting and supporting us. Next month, we’ll be back with a conversation with translator Marian Schwartz and new co-host Anna Rosen Guercio.
Subscribe to the podcast in iTunes by clicking here. To subscribe with other podcast downloading software, such as Google’s Listen, use the following feed link. Or stream it from the Three Percent website.
Cats on the Internet
Currently, I’m supposed to be researching for my super-exciting thesis in literary translation, a portion of which was just published on Words Without Borders and which I wrote about for their blog. But instead, I’m thinking about cats on the internet. I’m not even really looking at cat videos, or LOLcat pictures, or even listening to “I Love Cats” the songified song (though now that’s stuck in my head). I started procrastinating, as I’m wont to do, by imagining what was going to be next for me. I applied to PhD programs in a bout of masochism, and now waiting to hear back I’m thinking about all the other possibilities open to me. Before I came back to school, I was working in a non-profit communications department, which I actually loved, and so that seems like a good possibility. And then I was on idealist.org before I knew it looking at jobs with the ASPCA.
Speaking of which, have you been on Amazon.com recently? Of course you have. So you’ve probably seen the heart-wrenching ASPCA add that makes me feel like a monster every time I buy something on Amazon instead of giving that money to sad homeless kittens. I’d insert it but I didn’t have the presence of mind to take a screen-shot of it. Anyway, as a grad student whose net worth is in the negatives by a lot, it’s hard for me to justify buying fresh fruit, much less giving money away. Still…that sad little kitten face makes me want to budget them in instead of food.
And so that’s what got me thinking about cats on the internet. Remember that Sprint commercial? “Now with 4G we can put even more cats on the internet.” Oh yeah.
Even people who aren’t necessarily defined as cat lovers in their everyday life likely spend a good amount of their internet time looking at cats. Pictures of cats doing weird things, with funny captions, videos of cats doing weird or cute or hilarious things. Think about it this way – how many dog videos/image macros/memes can you think of? A handful, sure. But how many cats? Dozens, easily. Nyan cat, surprised kitten, keyboard cat, LOLcats, ceiling cat, talking cats, Maru, and that’s just off the top of my head. And not including cats on the internet for genuine cat lovers, like The Itty Bitty Kitty Committee.
So why are there so many cats on the internet? This seems like a question for the good folks at the Internet Research Institute, home of Know Your Meme and possibly one of the greatest sites in existence. Is it because dogs all do more or less the same things, while cats have an infinite variety of quirks? Or is it because people with cats are more likely to post their cats to the internet, whereas people with dogs are busy doing things like taking a walk?
I’ve been thinking about how this has possibly precipitated a social change regarding cats, too. The preponderance of cats on the internet doing cute/interesting things may make people more likely to consider having a cat in their life, or at least lessens the social stigma that used to be associated with being a “cat person.” Or, in my case, the potential of being a “cat lady.” Maybe?
Well, whatever the case, here’s my own contribution to cats on the internet:
And that concludes my procrastination for the day.
On The Eternonaut
I have a blog post up at Words Without Borders on The Eternonaut.
The title is a portmanteau, combining “eter” and “astronauta.” I created a similarly constructed English portmanteau combining “eternal” and “astronaut,” changing the “a” in “eternal” for the “o” in “astro” to create the prefix “eterno,” reminiscent of “cosmonaut” also. Since the words are cognates, I could have left it as The Ethernaut, but the emphasis on the first syllable in this word seems uncomfortable in English. Naturalness in English was a goal for me in this choice, and throughout, since there is such a specific register and level of expectations for comics writing in both English and Spanish. But I wanted to achieve that naturalness without grinding away at the literariness of the original work, one of its defining and most important features.
Read more: http://wordswithoutborders.org/dispatches/article/from-the-translator-the-eternonaut#ixzz1jGCKNl7k
The Eternonaut
An excerpt from The Eternonaut (the graphic novel I’ve been translating for my thesis) was just published on Words Without Borders as part of their Apocalypse themed issue.
Here’s a little from my introduction to the work on the site:
The Eternonaut does what science fiction can do so well, asks hard questions about the world, and wonders what we can do to change things. At the end, the comic writer wonders, is telling the story enough? Perhaps not, but then again, it might be. Oesterheld uses the vehicle of the story to engage with many of the pressing global political issues of the time, but from a distinctly Argentinian point of view. There are references, overt and implicit, to the Cold War. But the perspective is unfamiliar to readers in the U.S. It isn’t the red-scare propaganda; neither is it anti-capitalism propaganda.
Read the rest of the excerpt here!
Actually, There are Two “Erica Mena”s
If you read this blog, or actually know me, you probably don’t know about my secret alter-ego. You see, by day, I’m a grad student, working hard to build a career in academics, teaching, writing, reading, translating, publishing. Oh, really, just buried in poetry in several languages, and that’s just the way I like it.
But by night, I’m an ass-model turned actress who lives in L.A. and gets into fistfights with other ass-models on VH1. Be amazed at how much I can fit in to just one life!
But seriously, since Erica Mena got into that fistfight, I’ve been getting called all sorts of names on Twitter, because my handle is @ericamena and my alter-ego’s is @erica_mena and the brilliant people who watch that show and think an appropriate reaction is to insult strangers by any means available can’t remember to use an underscore.
What’s interesting is we’re about the same age, as far as I can tell, and we’re both Puerto Rican. But I grew up in Boston, and she grew up in New York, and she has a child, and I do not, and she’s comfortable being naked in front of large groups of people and I’m not.
Of course we’re not the only “Erica Mena”s in the world, though some of her usernames are “Only1EricaMena” which strikes me as sort of silly. But according to Facebook there are dozens of other “Erica Mena”s out there, most of whom appear to be significantly younger than us. But for some reason, I’m getting a lot of the “ericamena” usernames: gmail, Twitter, MySpace (remember that?), Instagram. But not Facebook, or .com so y’know, its sort of even.
So, to conclude. Erica Mena (poet):
Erica Mena (model):
What Happened, Apple?
Usually I don’t write that much about technology here, that’s more of my husband’s area. But I just have to warn everyone against doing the Lion update to your OS. My husband did it when it was released, because he likes to be on the edge of new stuff. And it destroyed his machine, not once, not twice, but three times. This is someone who is a professional technology consultant, and his entire office, and the only solution they could come up with was totally reformatting and reinstalling everything.
So I waited a month, figuring that Apple would get their shit together, before doing the update on my brand-new-in-September MacBook Pro. Which I love. I did the update last weekend and have so far spent six hours on the phone with Apple tech support trying to resolve the half-dozen issues the update created on my computer.
First it broke my bluetooth, a huge problem for me because I rely on a smartmouse and mac bluetooth keyboard to not have excruciating back pain while I work. It took all of Sunday, the day I did the update, to fix.
In the meantime, while my husband was pulling out all the stops to fix it, it broke my Time Machine back-up. I tried to revert to the previous OS using my time machine backup to see if that would fix the bluetooth problem, and instead it stopped the restore half-way through, effectively losing me half my files. So Monday morning I tried to restore again, only to have it fail half-way through again, because two PDF read-mes that had come with a font I bought six years ago had been automatically locked. By Lion. And I couldn’t unlock them.
Another two hours on tech support (and an incredibly rude person who told me it was an Adobe problem and I should call them, then hung up on me) and I finally got that fixed. But then, the next time I tried to back up using Time Machine, it deleted my entire history of back-ups on the Time Machine drive, and then failed to back up. So yeah, that makes me feel great. I tried using another hard drive for the Time Machine, one twice as big, formatted so it’s totally clean to start. Still, back ups are failing. I’ve managed one successful back up since last Sunday.
In the meantime, my spotlight has been broken, re-indexing every few days and taking hours to do it, not finding files I can literally see on my desktop. And every time I go in to repair permissions in Disk Utility it finds dozens of system core permissions that need to be repaired, the same handful, and repairs them. Even if I do it twice in a row, without doing anything else on the machine in between.
This, of course, means that everything is running unbearably slow. Oh, and my wifi is cycling on and off, connecting sometimes, booting me, and then not detecting my home network. And I can no longer connect remotely to my other computer. And it is randomly ejecting my external hard drives. And automatically shutting down SugarSync, one of the programs I rely on to do work across computers.
So I’m reverting. Luckily my old computer, the one this MacBook Pro was bought to replace, is still running 10.6 and I’m going to use its time machine to restore this computer to how it was in September, when I got it. I just hope I don’t lose all my files in the process. And sadly, we don’t live within 4 hours of an Apple store, so we’re on our own, with the dodgy phone tech support.
What happened, Apple, Steve Jobs died and quality control went to hell?
I recently talked to my mother about replacing her old Toshiba laptop with a MacBook Air. I’m a big fan of Apple in general, and think they make better systems than anyone else. But she could never in a million years handle all this. So if this is the future of Apple…it’s looking pretty bleak.
Don Quixote Makes Me Feel Guilty
This week my class and I are beginning the last book we’ll read together this semester, Don Quixote. The professor who designed the syllabus selected Edith Grossman’s translation, and since I hadn’t read it before (or any translation of the Quixote, if you can believe it) I was thrilled. I had the chance a few months ago to record a conversation for Reading the World with Edith Grossman, which will be going live in the next few weeks, and though we didn’t really talk about Quixote in any great detail, it whetted my appetite to read it.
But now I’m wracked with guilt. I’m totally bored by the book! I went into it expecting to love it, because of what I knew about it. I knew it to be a parody, a comedy, an action-adventure, full of witticisms, puns, and jokes. I’d watched, just a few weeks ago, Man of La Mancha and loved it! I’d expected the book to be an equally passionate defense of the imagination in world without hope.
And I’m extremely hesitant to criticize the translation, because Edith Grossman is an incredible translator. I’ll buy and read books just because she translated them. I’ve always deeply admired her work. But I find myself wondering about some of her choices in this text.
It struck me at points that the translation was aiming to produce a scholarly edition, replete with historical notes, rather than something one might read for pure pleasure. Rather than translating jokes, in many cases, or even (shock!) creating in English jokes that would carry the rhythm of the dialoge, she footnotes them. Same for the puns. Same for the names of the imaginary knights Don Quixote describes to Pancho as they gaze over the two flocks of sheep. That was the moment I was most saddened by this overarching strategy. Because Sir Esparragrass of the Forest is hilarious. And Espartafilardo del Bosque footnoted is not.
I think the story is engaging. I think it is funny. I’m just so disappointed that reading it in English feels like plodding through knee-deep mud – you get there but it takes much longer than if you were on solid ground. Has anyone else read this translation (or others)? Does it feel like this?
The ignored island(s)
Puerto Rico has a special place in world literature: none. Or almost none. No one knows how to talk about it. It’s part of the U.S., but predominately Spanish-speaking. It’s part of Latin America, but significantly separate because of the U.S. government and economic control. Puerto Rico has been called “the oldest colony in the world.” And what happens in centuries-old colonies is a kind of hybridity and resistance that makes culture hard to categorize, and therefore harder to talk about. Puerto Rico epitomizes this: neither independent nor incorporated; neither Spanish- nor English-speaking; neither black nor white nor native but all of the above.
And of course, try mentioning to someone that you translate Puerto Rican literature. The response might be “oh, I didn’t know they had literature.” And if all this is true for Puerto Rico, it’s even more so for the Dominican Republic. Look, for example, at the selection made for the FSG book of Twentieth-Century Latin American Poetry ed. Ilan Stavens. Cuba has seven authors included, to Puerto Rico’s three and the Dominican Republic’s startling one. Startling, because one could expect the Dominican not to be included at all, is it was not in the earlier Twentieth-Century Latin American Poetry ed. Stephen Tapscott. And, the impetus for this post, is that in the fabulous November Caribbean-writing issue of Words Without Borders out of 9 words from Spanish, half are Cuban. It’s not an editorial conspiracy, I’m sure. And it’s not because there’s “no literature” coming from Puerto Rico or the Dominican Republic.
Part of the challenge of translating under-represented literatures in an over-represented language is the aesthetic stereotypes immediately tied up in the work. People think of Spanish as passionate, intense, romantic (it is a romance language, after all). All this borders on what we English-speakers shy away from as sentimental, emotional – writing that relies on pathos rather than logos or irony. But Caribbean writing often vaults that border directly into the intensely emotional, and this makes it harder to find an audience willing to take that leap with no hint of condescention.
This is not to say, of course, that all Caribbean writing, or all Hispanic-Caribbean writing, or even all Puerto Rican or Dominican writing shares a common aesthetic. But perhaps we can say that there is a higher tolerance for emotion in Spanish, and in the Spanish-speaking Caribbean. And even in poetry like that of José Marmól, which is celebrated as groundbreaking in its cool philosophical remove, there are traces of what one might call sentimentality.
Strangeness, or at least challenging aesthetics, is not the least of the problems facing translators of Puerto Rican and Dominican literature. Familiarity might be more of a problem. Most estadounidense (United Statesians) have a clear image of the Dominican and Puerto Rico: palm trees on white-sand beaches, hardly rippling clear-teal bathwater-warm seas, and rum. Vacationland. And it’s hard to imagine how compelling literature can come out of a resort.
It is not our willful ignorance of the complexities of Caribbean culture that is wholly to blame for this flattened vacation-scape. This carefully constructed elision of poverty, race and class conflict, gender issues, and history is a boon to the islands’ tourism industries. And, unsurprisingly, since there is currently no U.S. tourism market in Cuba, we’re more aware of the complex political landscape there.
I’m not sure I can answer the implied questions here, but I think it’s worth pointing out the imbalance. Part of what I think about as a translator is how I can work against the dominant, so often deadening, aesthetic norms that inform the kinds of literature we translate and read. I think a good way to do this is to think about what doesn’t get translated, and why. And then to try to translate it.
Caribbean Poetry
Did I fail to mention that the new Words Without Borders (and it’s not so new anymore, but still awesome) features writing from the Caribbean and I have four poems that I translated in it? Oh, Erica…
Well, it does, and I’m pretty happy with them. Two by the Dominican poet José Mármol, one by the Dominican poet Aurora Arias, and one by the Puerto Rican poet José María Lima. You can read them here.
Nathalie Handal’s Poet in Andalucia
A few weeks ago the exceptional poet Nathalie Handal contacted me about a project of hers, Poet in Andalucía, which is an interesting reversal of Federico Garcia Lorca’s Poet in New York. The book is being translated into Spanish, and she asked me to look over a few of the translations and give some feedback. It was a pleasure to do, and now I’m even more excited about the book.
I first met Nathalie Handal in Chile in 2004 during the week-long celebration of Pablo Neruda’s birth. The extraordinary poet Martín Espada introduced us. Though we didn’t have much time then to talk, I’ve since seen her name come up in some of my favorite publications, and read her poetry and translations with interest.
So yes, Poet in Andalucía, of which I’ve seen a few poems, continues her exploration of her mixed ethnic roots. I’ve really liked what I saw of it in manuscript, and just got these great videos of her reading from the forthcoming book. Check them out, and enjoy!
