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!
Submitting Myself
Starting last year I began seriously working on my own poetry again, making it a priority. I had an idea, and wanted to see it through the same way I have with my translations. And I’ve been really satisfied with that. So now that it’s been through my editorial-brain wringer a few times, and I’m sure I’m not going to embarrass myself, I’m starting to think about places to send it. And that’s a hard question.
I’m thinking about starting with journals I read, which seems somehow scarier than sending it to journals that I respect but don’t read. Because reading a journal, I think, is an intimate process. You get to know not just the work in the journal, but the editors. I think about the editor/s a lot when I’m reading journals, possibly more than most people. Not in terms of “what can I write that they’ll like” but “oh, this issue fits together this way, isn’t that wonderful!”. Like each issue can be somehow read deeply enough, or broadly enough, or reverse-engineered in some way so that I feel at the end of it that I know something interesting and intimate about the editor. And so now I feel like a weird stalker, like “I know all this stuff about you, but we’ve never met.”
Submitting to a journal I read feels like seeing someone I have a crush on at a party, and trying to introduce myself. Like that. Of course, not at all like that since I’m married and don’t have to deal with that anymore, but like I remember that feeling.
Anyways, those of you who submit, do you tend to send your work to journals you read and like, because you read and like them, or to journals that you respect but don’t read? And why?
Antigone, Pride and Teaching
I have the class I’m teaching today, Literary Classics and Film Adaptations. I’m having several difficulties with the class. Not the students, the students are amazing – I’m so lucky to have such a wonderful, engaged, class. But, the syllabus. Haven’t had a single film adaptation, and don’t have one on the syllabus. The professor said to one of the students in my section that the only reason it has “film adaptations” in the title is to trick students into taking the class. She told me when I asked that she didn’t have any films in mind. So part of my class prep is trying to find films we can use as adaptations, but since the texts weren’t picked with that in mind, so far I’ve only managed to get one. We’re also doing a lot of “non-narrative” texts, which is difficult. Herodotus Histories, Augustine’s Confessions….these are not texts to breeze through in a week. And yet, that’s what we’re trying to do.
The syllabus also includes a number Christian texts. I’m an atheist, and already troubled by the seeming agenda in the reading selections and lecture framework. So from Exodus (and how it was presented in lecture: “the power of faith will keep you free, no matter how much oppression you experience”) to Confessions, which is what we’re doing today, we had Sophocles and The Aeneid. Why not the Oddessey, of which there are actual (great) film adaptations? Because “The Aeneid shows the glory of dying for your country.”
What’s especially troubling me today, though, is my students’ responses to Antigone, which we did the week before last and I just finished grading. Several students cited the lecture in defending Creon for “sticking to his word.” If you’re not familiar with Antigone, well, then you can’t see how absurd this is. But if you’ve read Antigone, then you know that one of Sophocles’s points was that stubborn, angry pride was Creon’s downfall, his fatal flaw if you will. That Sophocles pitted the will of the gods against the will of the state, and the gods came out triumphant. Creon “sticking to his word,” refusing to listen to the gods, the people, or his advisors and change an unjust law, is the sign of a bad leader. Bad! But of course, in lecture this was taught as a good thing, “at least he was strong and didn’t back down.” Which is terrifying to me, because apparently a few of the students who hadn’t thought so in our discussion had their interpretation changed by the lecture.
Should I mention also that our discussion on Antigone is the one the professor came to observe and that she taught Antigone after hearing our class discussion on it? That, according to the student responses, she said that this was the only understanding of the text?
So yeah, I’m going to have to try to address this again today. Any suggestions on how?
Collaborative Comics
This past weekend I had the joy of getting a crash-course in contemporary comics criticism during a conference at my home university – so I didn’t even have to travel! I was super excited, not only because I’m translating a comic series/graphic novel for my MFA thesis, but because I think comics have an interesting place in culture as sort of between high and low.
Because this was being sponsored by a lot of university programs and departments, the framing was seriously scholarly. These were not “fan” events, per se, but chances to talk about the place of comics inside (and as resistant to) academic institutions. There were a number of amazing comics scholars here, and some outsiders too, like Gary Groth of Fantagraphics who made some excellent points about why we should be skeptical of institutionalizing comics as a discipline.
But that wasn’t the only thing that came up. One subject that got bandied about a few times in a few different panels was collaborative comics (as opposed to individually-authored comics, where the illustrator and the author are one and the same). Collaborative art is something I’m always interested in thinking about, especially because translation produces inherently collaborative literary works. In the first panel it came up in, with James Strum, Jessica Abel and John Porcellino, Jessica made the statement that collaborative comics are more commercial than individually-authored comics. She was referring to the “assembly-line” kind of comics production that the major superhero publishers employed; a different person for each part of the process in order to churn out as many pages as possible. But not just this – she said that collaborative comics tend to be less personal and of lower quality than individually-authored comics.
I’m not enough embedded in comics culture to disagree with her yet, but it troubles me for a few reasons. One, I think we tend as a society to dismiss collaborative art making because it challenges our desire, our deeply embedded desire, to ascribe responsibility, authority, to a single creator. Some of this I blame on psychoanalytic analysis of arts; we try to understand the work by understanding the author’s motivations and intents. Of course, the problem with that as most artists will point out is that truly great artistic creations contain far more than the author could have possibly imagined, so it’s reductive to only try to understand them as though they were a mirror of the author’s subconscious. But another reason for our resistance to collaborative art is embedded in this exact commercialization that Jessica ascribed to collaborative projects. The idea of individual ownership of things (including, even especially, art) is infused in our cultural consciousness that we literally don’t know how to handle art except for as personal property. Which is why we have to ascribe, for example, The Oddessey and The Iliad to Homer, though we know historically it was not signally-authored.
As artists we’re taught, even without formal training, because of the way Western society values individual producers, to shy away from collaborative production. Yet many artists flourish when working together on projects. We’re taught that artists are solitary, isolated, reclusive, socially awkward, etc. But many writers at least rely on other writers for at least feedback on their work, if not outright collaboration through an editorial process.
In any case, James Strum argued that the potential for collaborative comics was high, and given the right project and right collaborators could produce very interesting, artistic, personal and culturally valuable works. And I think he’s right!
Anomalous & Translation at Molossus
David Shook over at the amazing Molossus interviewed me about Anomalous. It’s here.
I’m especially impressed by the range of translations on Anomalous, from Steve Bradbury’s translations of the Taiwanese poet Hsia Yü to Mani Rao’s Śankara. What brings them together? What do you look for when assessing translations?
What actually brings them together is me, and another editor Sara Gilmore, who is also a translator. Translators, we’ve found, have to be sought out and luckily we have read and met many wonderful ones. So almost all of our translation comes in by request—though I’d love to change that, of course! But it’s interesting that you point to Mani and Steve, because I think those two translations from this issue compliment each other amazingly. Mani is this great modern poet who approaches translation as a poet, as in, experimentally – she’s interested in breathing life into these ancient texts, resurrecting them in a way for a contemporary audience. Steve is translating a modern, and experimental poet, Hsia Yü, whose original work is radical in a way similar to Mani’s translation work. But Steve’s approach is very traditional, where he’s concerned with that demon of translation, fidelity, to the original. His work is incredibly poetic and creative, but in a more traditional way. The results though, are two very experimental pieces approaching the translation of poetry from almost wholly opposite places. I love that!
Permanence, Changability and Online Publishing
A few weeks ago I wrote about an editor asking me to change an author’s bio in Anomalous issue 2. I sort of didn’t follow up, at least here, because I was still thinking it through. Now I’ve got a guest-post about it over at WriteByNight where I think I deal with the issue in perhaps a more thought-out way:
So there are a couple of issues this raises. One is etiquette. But the other, perhaps more interesting, is about medium and changeability. Because the web is a medium in which information not only can but is expected to change, to keep up-to-date, does that mean that information in web-format publications should be changed when it becomes out of date?
Read the whole thing, and comment on it, over at WriteByNight.
My hard drive hates you and other things I learned
Things I learned doing production for Anomalous 3:
1. Back up.
My hard drive hates me. It might also hate you. I think they come pre-filled with hate, at least the replacement hard drives do. It’s in a 6 year old MacBook, which apparently they don’t even make anymore, which is bullshit. It’s also died three times in the past two years, and always right before a major deadline. The first time it was a paper for a class. Last time it was just before we launched Anomalous 2. And now, again, before we launched Anomalous 3. I lost the layout, all of it, for the pdf and ebook formats. Which take a LONG. ASS. TIME. to make.
2. Everything takes longer than you think it will, longer than you think it will, longer than you think it will.
This kernal of wisdom comes courtesy of the wonderous A. Kendra Greene, who taught me this as a little song while I was learning to letterpress print. But it’s equally true for the handmade digital book.
3. The work will surprise me.
Every time. There are pieces I love on the first read. There are pieces I gradually fall in love with, over several readings. And then there are the pieces I totally don’t get. One of the reasons I have such faith in my editors is that they can spot those pieces for me, and pull them out and shove them under my nose until I get it. And that happens when you read over and over and over as you must do in producing and editing and proofreading a journal. Putting out Anomalous, I read each piece at least half a dozen times, far more than any sane reader would ever. And I read them in order (which usually another editor arranges). And I start to notice threads that tie pieces together, and lines or phrases jump out and kick me in the face with their beauty. It’s an amazing process, and as painfully long and repetitive as it can be, I love it.
4. The audio changes everything.
Talk about work surprising you. One of the things I like best in production is editing the audio files, because I get to listen to each author present their work in their voice. By this point I’ve read most pieces a few times, and hear them a certain way. And then wham! The rhythms change, the sounds fill my brain, and I think “holy shit, I wouldn’t have gotten that if I hadn’t heard them read it.” For example, Mani Rao reading her Guru – hymn sounds badass in ways I hadn’t realized it could.
5. I forget things fast if I don’t do them often.
So for Anomalous 1 I taught myself how to do ebooks. And I’m still learning how to do it, and make it look the way I really truly want. I still feel happier with the PDF than the ebook. But I think the possibilities for ebooks as a medium are about to explode, and I want to learn how to do it. But I haven’t really done any ebooks since Anomalous, and it’s so much code, so much outside my comfort zone, that I’ve basically had to re-learn it each. freaking. time. Ugh.
6. At some point, I have to stop caring.
Not that I don’t want to create the best possible issue. But how much time is too much time to futz with how the code of the epub passes third-party validation checks? I’m not even sure how relevant this is to people being able to use them! At some point, so long as all the content looks good and is error free (well, so much as I can get it, I’m sure I always miss something…) it has to be done, and out there in the world to be read and loved. So there!
Speaking of which, the other versions of Anomalous 3 are finally done and ready to be downloaded in all their epub/Kindle/audiobook/PDF goodness.
