#translationquery: The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

Well what do you know, more random thoughts about form in translation...

This spring I read David Mitchell's The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet - absorbing, absolutely unputdownable book by a preposterously gifted writer - and as I laid into chapter 39, I found this:

Gulls wheel through spokes of sunlight over gracious roofs and dowdy thatch, snatching entrails at the marketplace and escaping over cloistered gardens, spike topped walls and treble-bolted doors. Gulls alight on whitewashed gables, creaking pagodas and dung-ripe stables; circle over towers and cavernous bells and over hidden squares where urns of urine sit by covered wells, watched by mule-drivers, mules and wolf-snouted dogs, ignored by hunchbacked makers of clogs; gather speed up the stoned-in Nakashima River and fly beneath the arches of its bridges, glimpsed from kitchen doors, watched by farmers walking high, stony ridges. Gulls fly through clouds of steam from laundries' vats; over kites unthreading corpses of cats; over scholars glimpsing truth in fragile patterns; over bath-house adulterers, heartbroken slatterns; fishwives dismembering lobsters and crabs; their husbands gutting mackerel on slabs; woodcutters' sons sharpening axes; candle-makers, rolling waxes; flint-eyed officials milking taxes; etiolated lacquerers; mottle-skinned dyers; imprecise soothsayers; unblinking liars; weavers of mats; cutters of rushes; ink-lipped calligraphers dipping brushes; booksellers ruined by unsold books; ladies-in-waiting; tasters; dressers; filching page-boys; runny-nosed cooks; sunless attic nooks where seamstresses prick calloused fingers; limping malingerers; swineherds; swindlers; lip-chewed debtors rich in excuses; heard-it-all creditors tightening nooses; prisoners haunted by happier lives and ageing rakes by other men's wives; skeletal tutors goaded to fits; firemen-turned-looters when occasion permits; tongue-tied witnesses; purchased judges; mothers-in-law nurturing briars and grudges; apothecaries grinding powders with mortars; palanquins carrying not-yet-wed daughters; silent nuns; nine-year-old whores; the once-were-beautiful gnawed by sores; statues of Jizo anointed with posies; syphilitics sneezing through rotted-off noses; potters; barbers; hawkers of oil; tanners; cutlers; carters of night-soil; gate-keepers; bee-keepers; blacksmiths and drapers; torturers; wet-nurses; perjurers; cut-purses; the newborn; the growing; the strong-willed and pliant; the ailing; the dying; the weak and defiant; over the roof of a painter withdrawn first from the world, then his family, and down into a masterpiece that has, in the end, withdrawn from its creator; and around again, where their flight began, over the balcony of the Room of the Last Chrysanthemum, where a puddle from last night's rain is evaporating; a puddle in which Magistrate Shiroyama observes the blurred reflections of gulls wheeling through spokes of sunlight. This world, he thinks, contains just one masterpiece, and that is itself. 

The rhyme sneaks in so sweetly that it was several lines before I realised what I was reading. And then it disappears again as seamlessly as it appeared. The use of rhyme in the passage doesn't seem structurally or thematically motivated, as far as I can see - it is not repeated elsewhere in the novel, it apparently just happens, because of reasons.

I am curious to know how the translators rendered this amazing passage.
If any well-disposed readers of this blog happen to have a copy to hand of the French translation by Manuel Berri (Éditions Alto, 2012)

or of the Italian translation by Maurizio Bartocci (Frassinelli, 2010) (not that I would know the translator's name from the publisher's website because it appears not to be listed, tsk)

or of the German translation by Volker Oldenburg (Rowohlt, 2012)

or of the Spanish translation by Víctor V. Úbeda (Duomo Ediciones, 2011) (not that I would know the translator's name from the publisher's website because, grrrrrrrrr, etc......)

please feel free to get in touch with a comment about it - or better yet, share it. Indeed, if you have access to any translation of this passage please do feel free to write in; although I would need a back-translation into English to make any sense at all of translations into other languages, I am still curious. 

The letter or the spirit: V

I am an admirer of Alan Moore's fantastic graphic novel V for Vendetta. I hear poor things of the 2005 film, and I haven't wanted to see it, but I have come across the opening scene where Evey meets V, and the script calls for a positive volley of alliteration in 'v' (there is alliteration in the graphic novel but not at this point in the narrative):

The speech goes as follows:

Voilà! In view, a humble vaudevillian veteran cast vicariously as both victim and villain by the vicissitudes of Fate. This visage, no mere veneer of vanity, is a vestige of the vox populi, now vacant, vanished. However, this valorous visitation of a bygone vexation stands vivified and has vowed to vanquish these venal and virulent vermin vanguarding vice and vouchsafing the violently vicious and voracious violation of volition! The only verdict is vengeance; a vendetta held as a votive, not in vain, for the value and veracity of such shall one day vindicate the vigilant and the virtuous. Verily, this vichyssoise of verbiage veers most verbose, so let me simply add that it's my very good honour to meet you and you may call me V.

I recently picked up an American DVD of the film, which has subtitles in Spanish and French, to see what the subtitlers did with this passage, and on the literal front, they seem to have done pretty well. The Spanish subtitles from the US disc (not necessarily the same as the subtitles on the DVD in Spain, I'd imagine?) can be seen here:

(sorry, I couldn't find a version without advertisements, and I couldn't find the French-subtitled clip online at all.)

So far, so straightforward. These are languages which share a lot of cognate words with English. But what would happen when the subtitles have to be done into Greek, or Russian, or any language with a different alphabet, or writing system? How would one account for the V, especially since presumably one can distinguish some kind of aural pattern even if one doesn't understand English?

Dubbed versions of the scene will need to grapple with a similar problem, though they won't be as vulnerable to odious comparisons with the English. Here you can see a French dubbed version (for our purposes please ignore the dubtitles):

and here you can see a version dubbed into French in Canada:

I make the count of initial 'V's in this speech 49 in English. Out of combined curiosity and insomnia, I took a look to see how the subtitled and dubbed versions measured up. The Spanish subtitles have 35 'V's; the French subtitles have 47. If we look at the two French dubbed versions, the 'Frenssh of Parys' has 52 and the Canadian dub has an impressive 60 (61, if we count 'vice-versa' as two). (Both the transcriptions can be found here). The Italian dub, which I won't even link to because four versions of this clip is plenty to sit through, lags behind at a mere 44.

Exceeding the alliterative tally of the source text is not the only criterion by which the quality of the translations can be judged, of course, but there's a pleasure in seeing a translator outdo the original, as Umberto Eco argued long ago about his translation of Raymond Queneau's Exercices de style.

Another criterion will of course be how natural and effortless the translations sound, or should sound. Any opinions out there on the relative quality of the French-French and the French-Canadian dub? Any other subtitles of this clip to compare with? [Anyone? Bueller? Anyone?]

CFP: Translation as a Tool for Inclusion/Exclusion in a Multicultural Society (deadline 28 Feb 2014)

A very interesting-looking conference on an important topic: 
 
CALL FOR PAPERS: Translating Cultures:
Translation as a Tool for Inclusion/Exclusion in a Multicultural Society
 
University of Westminster, London, 20 June 2014

‘Public service translation’ (also known as ‘Community translation’) is emerging as an important, distinct subfield in Translation Studies. Its focus on the translation of texts produced by public services for the benefit of speakers of less-established languages makes it a particularly relevant research area in today’s globalizing world. In a multicultural society decisions about what is translated and how the translation is done have far-reaching implications for the inclusion and exclusion of certain communities and/or community members.

This one-day conference aims to bring together researchers focusing on:

• Language policy and public service translation
• Translation and inclusivity
• Socio-cultural diversity and translation
• Training public service translators

Timeline:
28.02.2014- Deadline for abstract submission
14.03.2014- Invitations sent out to selected presenters
06.06.2014- Deadline for full article submission
20.06.2014- Conference
Post-conference – a selection of papers will be published as a thematic journal issue

Submissions are accepted for:
• Presentations (30 minutes +Q&A)
• Posters

Abstracts and inquiries to be sent to Dr Daniel Tomozeiu (d.tomozeiu at westminster.ac.uk) with “TC 2014” mentioned in the e-mail title.

Polish-English translation event, Dublin, 1 Feb 2014: Antonia Lloyd-Jones in Conversation

Just seen on Facebook: this looks like a lovely event. I wish I was going to be in Dublin that day! 

Antonia Lloyd-Jones in Conversation
Dom Polski, 20 Fitzwilliam Place, Dublin 2.
Saturday February 1st 2014, 7 pm.

The Irish Translators' and Interpreters' Association, in co-operation with the Polish Embassy in Dublin and the Irish Polish Society, invite you to a public interview with Antonia Lloyd-Jones, one of the leading translators of Polish literature into English. Lloyd-Jones has translated many of Poland’s most important writers, including Olga Tokarczuk, Paweł Huelle, Jacek Dehnel, Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, Zygmunt Miłoszewski, Tadeusz Dąbrowski, Wojciech Tochman, Mariusz Szczygieł, Wojciech Jagielski, Andrzej Szczeklik, and Janusz Korczak.

She was the recipient of Instytut Książki's 'Found in Translation’ award in 2008 for her translation of Paweł Huelle's The Last Supper, and in 2013 became the first translator to win the award twice, this time for the totality of her output in 2012, seven books in total. Her translations of Artur Domosławski’s Ryszard Kapuściński: A Life, Jacek Hugo-Bader’s Kołyma Diaries and Witold Szabłowski’s The Assassin from Apricot City received English PEN awards, and the last of these was included among World Literature Today’s most notable translations of 2013. She is a mentor for the British Centre for Literary Translation’s mentorship programme and occasionally leads translation workshops.

Admission free – wine reception – all welcome!

The ITIA are very grateful to the Polish Embassy and the Irish Polish Society for their co-operation with this event. For more information, please contact John Kearns: kearns at pro.onet.pl.

[I notice that Antonia Lloyd-Jones has shared some excellent translation tips on the English PEN website which may be of interest to readers]

Crowdfunding translations

I've been an admirer of crowdfunding, specifically Kickstarter, for the last couple of years. For readers who don't know Kickstarter, it's a US-based website where creators and entrepreneurs pitch ideas for projects, which readers then then decide whether or not to fund, in exchange for various kinds of material or immaterial rewards. It's been in the news in recent years for the large sums which some projects have raised and for the fact that very well-known figures like Spike Lee and Hal Hartley (twice) have funded projects on the site. There are other sites too like indiegogo and the Irish site fundit. (There seem to be intriguing differences in success rates - 75% on fundit, 43% on Kickstarter, reportedly 9.3% on indiegogo.)

I was originally a bit surprised by how few translation projects there were on Kickstarter, but that has changed. There are recent or current pitches for a translation of Christopher Okigbo's poetry into Spanish; the translation into English of a French graphic novel series by Benoît Peeters and François Schuiten, a games localisation project; a translation into English of the children's book Cuentos de la Selva by the Uruguayan writer Horacio Quiroga; the translation into Spanish of an Oxford University Press book about the Costa Rican cloud forest; and the translation into Vietnamese of a textbook on molecular biology, among others.

Words Without Borders have run no less than three successful funding campaigns on Kickstarter, one for a special issue translating Afghan writers in 2011, one to support a special issue on the Mexican drug war in 2012, and one to support Eduardo Halfón's The Polish Boxer later the same year.

Other crowdfunding platforms also had interesting translation projects like this translation by Artur Zapalowski of Foreign Bodies based on a script by the Polish playwright Julia Holewinska, produced at the Project Arts Centre in Dublin in summer 2013; a bilingual Irish and English adaptation of Collodi's Pinocchio staged at Smock Alley Theatre in Dublin in 2012; and a 2013 translation workshop in Toronto to finalise and present a French version by Nadine Desrochers of Heather Hermant's performance piece ribcage: this wide passage about 18th-century cross-dresser Esther Brandeau/Jacques La Fargue, "said to be the first Jewish person to set foot in what is now known as Canada". 

This is encouraging and it would be good to see more of it. 

There are lots of posts out there recommending how to put together a pitch (e.g. this one for fundit). I'm just an onlooker, but as someone who has translated and (once or twice) been translated, and someone who participates in a minnow-like capacity in sites like Kickstarter, here are some things I really like to see in translation project pitches.

I like projects that:

1) Tell readers where the money is going. What funding has been raised so far, from where, and for what exactly; what elements of the project remain to be funded.

2) Show that they have a sense of how translation works, by securing someone(s) with a track record to carry out the translation, specifying the size of the project (how many thousand words are involved?), providing a brief translation sample, showing an awareness of the challenges posed by the text, giving convincing costings. This last one is difficult, admittedly, because a lot of people aren't necessarily aware of the cost of professional translation (i.e. the time and expertise of a qualified person translating 2000-3000 words a day). Pro bono translation seems very often to be part of the mix, and is arguably better than translation at a rate which undercuts professional translators.

3) Give a compelling rationale for why the translation needs to be done (especially important if it's a text that has been translated into that language already).

4) Have a plan for disseminating the translation as widely as possible, e.g. on the web (though I am also very sympathetic to live performances and to beautiful book-objects).

5) Edit, polish and proofread their pitch very, very carefully. Maybe it's because I'm a part-time academic editor, but I really notice sloppy presentation and it puts me off. Most translation projects have a publication element, and if the pitch isn't executed to a professional standard, it doesn't help to convince potential supporters that the translation will be.

STAIRCASE THOUGHT: 6) Have all the copyright stuff sorted. V. imp.

Good luck to anyone pitching translation projects to crowdfunders in 2014!

Theatre Translation Forum 2014, London

Just got a reminder about these continuing seminars and workshops on theatre translation which look very interesting:

The UCL Theatre Translation Forum returns in 2014 with five seminars and workshops exploring interdisciplinary themes in drama/theatre translation research and practice. Places limited: early registration recommended.

·         14 January: Workshop of Caroline Bird’s version of The Trojan Women led by Christopher Haydon.
·         28 January: Contemporary Drama seminar with Emma Cole on Sarah Kane’s Phaedra’s Love, Tom Wilks on Wilhelm Genazino, Marta Niccolai on Dario Fo, with David Johnston as guest speaker.
·         11 February: Workshop on Contemporary Drama in translation organized by the Gate Theatre, Notting Hill.
·         4 March: Modernism seminar with Enza De Francisci on Pirandello, Mairéad Hanrahan on Genet, Gareth Wood on Lorca, with Kate Eaton as guest speaker.
·         18 March: Workshop on Kate Eaton’s translations of Piñera led by Gráinne Byrne.

Further details and registration are available on the Theatre Translation Forum website: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/translation-studies/theatre-translation-forum

The series is funded by the UCL Faculty of Arts & Humanities and run in partnership with the Gate Theatre, Notting Hill. Please contact the convenors, Geraldine Brodie, g.brodie at ucl.ac.uk, and Emma Cole, e.cole.11 at ucl.ac.uk, for additional information.