A friend, on her blog, compared Amazon's decision to Safeway or Kroger deciding not to carry Hershey products.
No, it's more like Safeway or Kroger not carrying any meat, or any dairy products, or any fruit and veg—or maybe all Kraft products, since we're talking about giant conglomerates. And neither Safeway nor Kroger nor the two of them together gets at the dominance of Amazon in the American book market: Walmart is, in fact, the largest grocery chain in the U.S. (as well as the largest retail chain overall). Imagine Walmart decided to stop selling Kraft. Well, OK, other giant conglomerates sell similar products, right?
But that argument takes books as interchangeable products and recognizes no difference between them. Imagine your library decided that, to save money, they would stop buying any book whose author's name started with letters A through E.
Amazon's entire premise as a business is that they carry everything and can ship it to you anywhere. That universal access is how they've stolen business from brick and mortar stores, both chain and independent. And now they've reneged on that deal, for the sole purpose of ensuring future profit.
I've got no problem with either side taking extreme positions about the pricing of ebooks, restricting access, whatever: I ain't got no dog in that fight. But Amazon has also removed all print books published by Macmillan and all its subsidiaries, which represents about 15% of the books published in the U.S. (depending on how you measure). Amazon in turn probably represents a third to a half of Macmillan's sales, and they're counting on that pressure to force Macmillan's hand. Amazon expects consumers to follow blindly in the ruts it has trained them to, not give a fuck about the actual product, and only care about getting it delivered to them at home as cheaply as possible.
Readers are not the target of Amazon's attack. Readers are their armies and their ammunition. If you choose to participate by remaining an Amazon customer, you are signing up to serve in their army—and, either now or later, you will be sacrificed to their profit goals.
Update 31 Jan: Amazon has caved.
30 January 2010
29 January 2010
Salinger in Italian
For most readers, what defined Salinger as an author was his voice, the way he used language—so it might be surprising that he had huge fame in other languages, too. In Italy, there's an entire school of creative writing called "Scuola Holden" (literally a school, with classes and everything) which takes its inspiration from Salinger; the school is supported by some of the biggest names in contemporary Italian writing, including Alessandro Baricco (its president), Niccolò Ammaniti, Carlo Lucarelli, and Sandro Veronesi. It gets its name from the Italian translation of The Catcher in the Rye, Il giovane Holden ("The young Holden"): the title and the character are famous enough in Italy that further explanation is really unnecessary.
But the voice of Holden in Italian was the work of translator Adriana Motti—who said "I didn't take him seriously at all." She had been working as a translator for Einaudi in the '50s, but when Einaudi ran into money troubles she took a job in the press office of the highway department. When Einaudi got back on its feet and offered her The Catcher in the Rye she quit her day job—but she called that "the stupidest decision of my life."
She was happy not to have contact with Salinger—if translators spent all that time getting to know authors, read all their works, get inside their heads, when would there be time to translate? She didn't even read a book before sitting down to translate it: "Come on, if I read it first I can't translate it: I get nauseated and it becomes a terrible bore." (Of course, that's only possible when translators get their work via requests or assignments from publishers; when translators have to function as literary scouts as well, as is generally the case in the U.S., they have to read not only the books they work on but many more as well, in order to select possible projects, prepare samples, and pitch them to publishers.)
As for the translation itself, Motti had to reinvent Holden's slang in Italian with the help of young friends and family members. It was a pain, she said, starting from the title; Calvino (her editor at Einaudi) wrote a note included in the Italian edition to explain the untranslatability of the original title. Holden's trademark phrase "and all," which turns up (it seems) three times a page in the English, would not do in Italian, where there is a very strong stylistic objection to such repetition, so she came up with a list of equivalents and rotated them all through—and now all are Holden's stylistic trademarks in Italian.
She was proudest of her translations of Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen), but out of the forty books she translated—also including E.M. Forster, P.G. Wodehouse, Laurence Durrell—only Il giovane Holden brought her any recognition. "It's an atrociously underpaid job (and I made top money), I understand how translators can be sloppy: you need to translate thrillers, they're less demanding."
The voice of Holden Caulfield in Italian, Adriana Motti died in January 2009.
But the voice of Holden in Italian was the work of translator Adriana Motti—who said "I didn't take him seriously at all." She had been working as a translator for Einaudi in the '50s, but when Einaudi ran into money troubles she took a job in the press office of the highway department. When Einaudi got back on its feet and offered her The Catcher in the Rye she quit her day job—but she called that "the stupidest decision of my life."
She was happy not to have contact with Salinger—if translators spent all that time getting to know authors, read all their works, get inside their heads, when would there be time to translate? She didn't even read a book before sitting down to translate it: "Come on, if I read it first I can't translate it: I get nauseated and it becomes a terrible bore." (Of course, that's only possible when translators get their work via requests or assignments from publishers; when translators have to function as literary scouts as well, as is generally the case in the U.S., they have to read not only the books they work on but many more as well, in order to select possible projects, prepare samples, and pitch them to publishers.)
As for the translation itself, Motti had to reinvent Holden's slang in Italian with the help of young friends and family members. It was a pain, she said, starting from the title; Calvino (her editor at Einaudi) wrote a note included in the Italian edition to explain the untranslatability of the original title. Holden's trademark phrase "and all," which turns up (it seems) three times a page in the English, would not do in Italian, where there is a very strong stylistic objection to such repetition, so she came up with a list of equivalents and rotated them all through—and now all are Holden's stylistic trademarks in Italian.
She was proudest of her translations of Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen), but out of the forty books she translated—also including E.M. Forster, P.G. Wodehouse, Laurence Durrell—only Il giovane Holden brought her any recognition. "It's an atrociously underpaid job (and I made top money), I understand how translators can be sloppy: you need to translate thrillers, they're less demanding."
The voice of Holden Caulfield in Italian, Adriana Motti died in January 2009.
28 January 2010
A stone raft on the way to Haiti
José Saramago has announced on his blog something beyond "a mere symbolic gesture" to help Haiti: a new edition of his novel A Jangada de Pedra (The Stone Raft), for which all proceeds—€15 per copy—will go to the Red Cross. Saramago, his publisher, the printers, the distributors: everybody along the way donated their efforts and materials.
(The "stone raft" of the title is the Iberian peninsula, which breaks off from Europe and goes walkabout a bit. It's a good read—though the English translation isn't part of this relief effort.)
(The "stone raft" of the title is the Iberian peninsula, which breaks off from Europe and goes walkabout a bit. It's a good read—though the English translation isn't part of this relief effort.)
25 January 2010
Technologies and cultures
On Publishing Perspectives this morning, there's a great piece by Kassia Kroszer about getting the "fundamentals" of e-books right. What she means by "fundamentals" is essentially the design and function of an e-book as a way of providing access to its content: its technology, in a word.
For all the fretting and daydreaming about the changes afoot in publishing these days, clear thinking about technology is rare. Well, duh: nobody knows what the technology will "do" next, right? Nobody even has the slightest idea what Apple's iUnicorn will be, because it won't be announced until tomorrow!
But that question doesn't make sense anyway, because technologies don't do anything. Technologies may permit certain actions or capabilities, but they don't do anything themselves. So if publishers think that e-books are going to save their asses, they're going to be disappointed. The publishers need to save their own asses; e-books won't do it for 'em.
A lot of the talk and blog traffic I see about "the future of publishing" or "the future of reading" or "the future of translation" conflates or confuses the role of cultures and technologies. Technologies can be invented, but they don't do anything. Cultures do things, but they cannot be invented: they have to grow (or fail and die) on their own. Debates over Kindles and e-books and iUnicorns are using technology as a proxy and gateway for cultural change: new technologies have exposed the possibility of different commercial relationships among authors, publishers, and readers. It may end up that our entire culture of writing, publishing, and reading will change as a result—but controlling the technology will not in the slightest mean controlling the culture.
So I think we need to make a distinction between "technologies of reading" (or publishing or whatever) and "cultures of reading" (and, yes, there are technologies of culture and cultures of technology), and make it clear which one we're talking about in our future speculations. But pretty much everyone in publishing, whether writers, editors, or readers, is powerless to actually affect either kind of future: not the technological future, because they're not engineers, and not the cultural future, because culture can't be engineered. The only thing we can do is try to understand the changes—both technological and cultural—as they happen and position our work for the role we want it to have in the future world. Over the long term, our support (or lack thereof) for cultural changes may lead to their success (or failure), but we can't force the issue.
I think I'll have a lot more to say about this, but I suspect this summer's conference on The Future of Reading at RIT will mark a major advance in the discussion. I hope so, anyway.
For all the fretting and daydreaming about the changes afoot in publishing these days, clear thinking about technology is rare. Well, duh: nobody knows what the technology will "do" next, right? Nobody even has the slightest idea what Apple's iUnicorn will be, because it won't be announced until tomorrow!
But that question doesn't make sense anyway, because technologies don't do anything. Technologies may permit certain actions or capabilities, but they don't do anything themselves. So if publishers think that e-books are going to save their asses, they're going to be disappointed. The publishers need to save their own asses; e-books won't do it for 'em.
A lot of the talk and blog traffic I see about "the future of publishing" or "the future of reading" or "the future of translation" conflates or confuses the role of cultures and technologies. Technologies can be invented, but they don't do anything. Cultures do things, but they cannot be invented: they have to grow (or fail and die) on their own. Debates over Kindles and e-books and iUnicorns are using technology as a proxy and gateway for cultural change: new technologies have exposed the possibility of different commercial relationships among authors, publishers, and readers. It may end up that our entire culture of writing, publishing, and reading will change as a result—but controlling the technology will not in the slightest mean controlling the culture.
So I think we need to make a distinction between "technologies of reading" (or publishing or whatever) and "cultures of reading" (and, yes, there are technologies of culture and cultures of technology), and make it clear which one we're talking about in our future speculations. But pretty much everyone in publishing, whether writers, editors, or readers, is powerless to actually affect either kind of future: not the technological future, because they're not engineers, and not the cultural future, because culture can't be engineered. The only thing we can do is try to understand the changes—both technological and cultural—as they happen and position our work for the role we want it to have in the future world. Over the long term, our support (or lack thereof) for cultural changes may lead to their success (or failure), but we can't force the issue.
I think I'll have a lot more to say about this, but I suspect this summer's conference on The Future of Reading at RIT will mark a major advance in the discussion. I hope so, anyway.
20 January 2010
Trends
First the Book Design Review closed up shop...
...then Cognitive Daily called it quits...
...meanwhile the bookstore closings continue, with the latest victims including Duthie Books in Vancouver...
...now the University of Iowa wants to eliminate the Department of Cinema and Comparative Literature. (That's a link to a Facebook group protesting the proposed elimination, but I can't find anything more official on the web.)
At this rate, soon there won't be anything left out there to blog about!
...then Cognitive Daily called it quits...
...meanwhile the bookstore closings continue, with the latest victims including Duthie Books in Vancouver...
...now the University of Iowa wants to eliminate the Department of Cinema and Comparative Literature. (That's a link to a Facebook group protesting the proposed elimination, but I can't find anything more official on the web.)
At this rate, soon there won't be anything left out there to blog about!
12 January 2010
A note on sources
As I noted when I began this blog, Local Character is intended to complement, not replace, the fantastic work others are already doing elsewhere on the web. I've added links to five such sites in the sidebar. (As long as I had the hood up, I picked a new template too. Before too long, I'll probably migrate to a different platform entirely, one that's more powerful and customizable—recommendations are welcome!)
I'll add more to the list in the future, maybe with sub-categories—for blogs and sites covering cognition, puzzles, foreign-language sites, and fun stuff like that. As soon as I find more hours in the day, that is, or more days in the week.
- Three Percent has become, since Chad Post started it just a couple years ago, the central source of news and information on translation and translation publishing in the U.S. Although Chad is the director of Open Letter, a press based at the University of Rochester, Three Percent covers news about publishing worldwide, reviews (by many different contributors) of new releases from presses large and small, and profiles of translators and others across the profession. An upcoming addition will be a podcast; it looks like I'll be involved with that myself. Chad also maintains a database of new translations published in the U.S. each year and last year began the Best Translated Book Awards, selected by a panel of publishers, critics, booksellers, and translators. The blog post where Chad announced the 2010 BTBA fiction longlist is a great example of how straightforward Three Percent is: not stuffy or esoteric at all.
- the Literary Saloon (at the site The Complete Review) is, astoundingly, a one-man effort. Michael Orthofer reads seemingly every English-language book review and website from around the world—as well as some in other languages—to collect literary and publishing news. Although there's a lot about U.S. publishing which has some overlap with Three Percent (and Chad and Michael sometimes link to each other's posts), the Literary Saloon covers a much broader geography, and often includes news about hot books in other countries that haven't been translated yet. Michael also writes all the reviews on the main Complete Review site, summarizing and linking to others available on the web—and we're talking thee, four, five or more books every week. He recently pointed out the Times Literary Supplement's translation prizes, completely separate from the BTBAs: just the kind of worldwide recognition for translation that makes this business feel a little less lonely.
- Conversational Reading is the blog of Scott Esposito, and since its launch about six years ago it has spawned a more formal web-based literary review, Quarterly Conversation, with a wide range of stellar writers contributing reviews, essays, interviews, and occasional excerpts from works under discussion. In addition to news and commentary, Conversational Reading provides a guide through each new issue of Quarterly Conversation and hosts the discussions and debates that sometimes ensue. Neither the blog nor the review is strictly limited to works in translation, though that tends to be their major focus. Scott's posts usually offer a critical response, rather than just information; since it's a blog, you can see him thinking out loud, as when he turns an idea from José Manuel Prieto's novel Rex into a broad descriptive schema for kinds of writers.
- Publishing Perspectives is a newsletter focusing on the international publishing world. The website/blog form features just one main post, written as a fairly formal journalistic feature, covering a regular rotation of topics. Guest columnists are common, though editor Edward Nawotka writes many of the features. What makes this essential reading is its business perspective, covering not just the big U.S. and multinational corporations which print the majority of the books on the planet but all those companies that publish the original-language editions of the books that (sometimes) get translated and published here. This is the industry context for where translation actually happens (though there are people who see translation as an essentially academic activity), and there's no better example of why it's important to read Publishing Perspectives than yesterday's feature by Emily Williams on "The Translation Gap: Why More Foreign Writers Aren't Published in America." (Note that she's talking about the big New York publishing model, not the small presses where a lot of the action is.)
- Words Without Borders is a web-based magazine which publishes not (primarily) news or reviews or commentary, but actual translated fiction, poetry, and essays from around the world. Each monthly issue has a theme—a region, an issue, a type of writing—and features about a dozen pieces, some quite long, selected by the staff along with guest editors and expert translators. A recent redesign of the site has given more prominence to book reviews and introduced a new section "For Educators": both will be worth watching. But for now, the main reason to read WWB each month is for its unparalleled sampling of current writing around the world. Pene Cabreira's story "The Platform," from this month's issue on flash fiction, is a great example not only of what WWB does, but why we need translation in the first place: it's a universal story that just happened to be written in Portuguese, not English.
I'll add more to the list in the future, maybe with sub-categories—for blogs and sites covering cognition, puzzles, foreign-language sites, and fun stuff like that. As soon as I find more hours in the day, that is, or more days in the week.
07 January 2010
Translation at the MLA
I'm finally back from my post-MLA travels and visits in NYC and environs. I'm a bit jet-lagged, but I've got LCD Soundsystem playing on Spotify and I've just had an espresso, so I think I can do this!
"The Tasks of Translation in the Global Context" was the "Presidential Theme" at this year's meeting of the Modern Language Association in Philadelphia. The MLA is the main American scholarly society for the study of modern languages and literatures, so although there were about 100 sessions which addressed translation in some way, the "issues" under debate all more or less boiled down to What is the position of translation in the academy? The answers depended on who was asking, and in what context.
The speakers on the panel "The Disciplinary Challenges of Translation Studies" suggested that translation has a central, even iconic role in the study of the (famously hard-to-define) liberal arts. Reading works in translation and considering the process and products of translation is a great way to lead students (and ourselves) to reconsider assumptions about cultural context and what we identify as the foreign. The catch is, as a process of (re-)creation translation fundamentally disrupts any comfortable notions of distance and disinterest: the act of translation inevitably intervenes in the global literary system, the very object we are attempting to study. But even awareness of that paradox won't necessarily help us resolve it in practical terms: as one panelist's cautionary tale demonstrated, the system works to preserve its existing conceptions of itself, and work that is marginalized in the source culture may be that much harder to bring into even a well-disposed central target language and culture. The same caution applies to interdisciplinary considerations: translation may allow an effective critique of cultural and knowledge structures, but those structures will keep it from making too many waves. So, yes, translation is a great match for liberal arts: salutary to study, as long as you don't succumb to the illusion that it represents any practical power to intervene in the world. (I exaggerate this conclusion for clarity.)
The morning panel on "The Translator's Visibility: Bridging the Gap between Translation and Translation Studies" invited a number of practicing literary translators to consider the relation between their practice and what they teach in translation classes at their institutions. David Bellos launched things with the assertion that there is no theory of translation, just centuries of anecdotes and analogies—and that, if it's a theory we want, we need to pay much more attention to linguistics, cognitive science, sociology, etc., and above all we need to study the huge corpus of existing translations to see what has actually happened: the more variety, both in examples and in exercises, the better. Bobbi Harshav, president of the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA), skipped the critique of theory but described a wide range of practical exercises. Michael Henry Heim said that his translation courses function as a professional prospectus rather than practical training—for the rest, you have to put in the hours yourself—but suggested that everyone's habits of reading and study could benefit from an awareness of what translators do. Suzanne Jill Levine pointed out that many academics (and organizations like the MLA) are suspicious of translation as a creative act—it is that, but it is also the closest possible kind of reading. Good points all, but I didn't feel that any gaps were conclusively bridged; indeed, Bellos' talk suggested just what a huge undertaking that would be.
A panel on "World Literature in the Classroom" offered much more practical advice for those teaching: how to introduce translated work into syllabi, how to help students recognize the problematic situation of translation, how to find new works in translation to teach. The room was packed, suggesting that conference attendees were already sold on the pedagogical value (and/or uninterested in theoretical debates) and were looking for practical tips. Karen Emmerich—the only educator on the panel who was also a translator—introduced the idea that professors should consider how their choices intervene in the economics of translation and translation publishing (i.e., keep translators and publishers in business), but no one really picked up on that. Not surprising, since the respondent for the panel was Susan Harris, the editor of Words Without Borders, a fantastic non-profit which publishes a free monthly web magazine of new work in translation: using WWB is free to educators, and yet they do pay translators and authors for their work. (With the January issue, WWB launched a new site design which is much easier to navigate and more pleasant to read, and also added top-level features targeted to educators; this may well became the preferred forum for continuing the kinds of discussions featured at this panel.)
The panel on "Developing a New Generation of Translators" was fantastic, probably the best I attended, and its chair, Martin Riker of Dalkey Archive, has already written a thorough summary. One thing I took away that's a little buried in Martin's summary—not an absolute consensus, but something that came up a few times—is that the idea of teaching translation as some sort of freestanding skill, separable from literary and cultural contexts, is basically nonsense. Since that idea correlates with the "creative" approach which scholars disdain (sorry, MFA-ers), maybe we'll start to see some changes in the way the academy creates new translators. As other panels made clear, translators working outside the academy have just as much scholarly responsibility as those within, so there's no escaping this one.
Unfortunately... the next panel I went to, "Literary Translation and Literary Studies," was the closest thing at the MLA to an official ALTA panel, and it was disappointing. (Fortunately, it was also sparsely attended.) The chair was Gary Racz, the current VP (and next president) of ALTA, and Bobbi Harshav was one of the panelists; the others were all ALTA members. But the panel's topic wasn't clear (was it the creation or the study of translations?), some panelists seemed to be phoning it in (Bobbi repeated a lot of her talk from the morning session), and there was an anti-scholarly undercurrent that didn't seem like it would win many friends.
The last translation-related panel I went to was on using translation in teaching comparative literature—which, though it may seem like an obvious necessity, turns out to be somewhat controversial due to the historically constrained Western European origins of the discipline. (Those dead white European males didn't need translations to read their canon.) Well, three of the biggest names around—Sandra Bermann, Jonathan Culler, and Marjorie Perloff—blew that controversy away. Bermann focused on the central role of translation in the formation of canons and disciplines, Culler showed how translations are themselves readings of a text, and Perloff demonstrated how translation brings us closer to even the most seemingly unapproachable texts (such as Mayakovsky).
I went to a few other panels—on contemporary Latin American fiction, on cognitive approaches—and to good parties thrown by two of my favorite translation publishers (Dalkey Archive and Open Letter); I also had some great chats with friends on the book exhibit floor (hi, NYRB Classics!) and enjoyed wild conversation with Erica and Chad over lunch at a retro-hip lounge. The highlight of the conference, though, was probably something that wasn't even officially related: seeing the Pig Iron Theatre Company do a staged reading of Bill Johnston's new translation of the classic Polish play Balladina by Juliusz Słowacki, an amazing mishmash of pseudo-Shakespearean comedy, history, and tragedy, right up there with Max Beerbohm's in "'Savonarola' Brown" (included in Seven Men). The authentic Polish munchies were also great—as were the raspberries!
Overall, I was impressed with the attention paid to translation as a valid professional, creative, and scholarly task. I was disappointed, though, in the way ALTA presented itself—with no booth in the book exhibit, no official events either on or off the program, just scattered brochures and random mentions here and there. Many of the panelists who announced their affiliation with ALTA emphasized the creative aspects of their practice—precisely what wouldn't endear them to this professional scholarly audience. So while translation as an object of study probably got a great boost from all the exposure at MLA, I'm not sure the same can be said for translation as a profession or for the organization that represents that profession, ALTA.
Fortunately, we get a do-over: ALTA's own next conference will be held this October, in the very same Marriott in Philly that was HQ for the MLA conference.
"The Tasks of Translation in the Global Context" was the "Presidential Theme" at this year's meeting of the Modern Language Association in Philadelphia. The MLA is the main American scholarly society for the study of modern languages and literatures, so although there were about 100 sessions which addressed translation in some way, the "issues" under debate all more or less boiled down to What is the position of translation in the academy? The answers depended on who was asking, and in what context.
The speakers on the panel "The Disciplinary Challenges of Translation Studies" suggested that translation has a central, even iconic role in the study of the (famously hard-to-define) liberal arts. Reading works in translation and considering the process and products of translation is a great way to lead students (and ourselves) to reconsider assumptions about cultural context and what we identify as the foreign. The catch is, as a process of (re-)creation translation fundamentally disrupts any comfortable notions of distance and disinterest: the act of translation inevitably intervenes in the global literary system, the very object we are attempting to study. But even awareness of that paradox won't necessarily help us resolve it in practical terms: as one panelist's cautionary tale demonstrated, the system works to preserve its existing conceptions of itself, and work that is marginalized in the source culture may be that much harder to bring into even a well-disposed central target language and culture. The same caution applies to interdisciplinary considerations: translation may allow an effective critique of cultural and knowledge structures, but those structures will keep it from making too many waves. So, yes, translation is a great match for liberal arts: salutary to study, as long as you don't succumb to the illusion that it represents any practical power to intervene in the world. (I exaggerate this conclusion for clarity.)
The morning panel on "The Translator's Visibility: Bridging the Gap between Translation and Translation Studies" invited a number of practicing literary translators to consider the relation between their practice and what they teach in translation classes at their institutions. David Bellos launched things with the assertion that there is no theory of translation, just centuries of anecdotes and analogies—and that, if it's a theory we want, we need to pay much more attention to linguistics, cognitive science, sociology, etc., and above all we need to study the huge corpus of existing translations to see what has actually happened: the more variety, both in examples and in exercises, the better. Bobbi Harshav, president of the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA), skipped the critique of theory but described a wide range of practical exercises. Michael Henry Heim said that his translation courses function as a professional prospectus rather than practical training—for the rest, you have to put in the hours yourself—but suggested that everyone's habits of reading and study could benefit from an awareness of what translators do. Suzanne Jill Levine pointed out that many academics (and organizations like the MLA) are suspicious of translation as a creative act—it is that, but it is also the closest possible kind of reading. Good points all, but I didn't feel that any gaps were conclusively bridged; indeed, Bellos' talk suggested just what a huge undertaking that would be.
A panel on "World Literature in the Classroom" offered much more practical advice for those teaching: how to introduce translated work into syllabi, how to help students recognize the problematic situation of translation, how to find new works in translation to teach. The room was packed, suggesting that conference attendees were already sold on the pedagogical value (and/or uninterested in theoretical debates) and were looking for practical tips. Karen Emmerich—the only educator on the panel who was also a translator—introduced the idea that professors should consider how their choices intervene in the economics of translation and translation publishing (i.e., keep translators and publishers in business), but no one really picked up on that. Not surprising, since the respondent for the panel was Susan Harris, the editor of Words Without Borders, a fantastic non-profit which publishes a free monthly web magazine of new work in translation: using WWB is free to educators, and yet they do pay translators and authors for their work. (With the January issue, WWB launched a new site design which is much easier to navigate and more pleasant to read, and also added top-level features targeted to educators; this may well became the preferred forum for continuing the kinds of discussions featured at this panel.)
The panel on "Developing a New Generation of Translators" was fantastic, probably the best I attended, and its chair, Martin Riker of Dalkey Archive, has already written a thorough summary. One thing I took away that's a little buried in Martin's summary—not an absolute consensus, but something that came up a few times—is that the idea of teaching translation as some sort of freestanding skill, separable from literary and cultural contexts, is basically nonsense. Since that idea correlates with the "creative" approach which scholars disdain (sorry, MFA-ers), maybe we'll start to see some changes in the way the academy creates new translators. As other panels made clear, translators working outside the academy have just as much scholarly responsibility as those within, so there's no escaping this one.
Unfortunately... the next panel I went to, "Literary Translation and Literary Studies," was the closest thing at the MLA to an official ALTA panel, and it was disappointing. (Fortunately, it was also sparsely attended.) The chair was Gary Racz, the current VP (and next president) of ALTA, and Bobbi Harshav was one of the panelists; the others were all ALTA members. But the panel's topic wasn't clear (was it the creation or the study of translations?), some panelists seemed to be phoning it in (Bobbi repeated a lot of her talk from the morning session), and there was an anti-scholarly undercurrent that didn't seem like it would win many friends.
The last translation-related panel I went to was on using translation in teaching comparative literature—which, though it may seem like an obvious necessity, turns out to be somewhat controversial due to the historically constrained Western European origins of the discipline. (Those dead white European males didn't need translations to read their canon.) Well, three of the biggest names around—Sandra Bermann, Jonathan Culler, and Marjorie Perloff—blew that controversy away. Bermann focused on the central role of translation in the formation of canons and disciplines, Culler showed how translations are themselves readings of a text, and Perloff demonstrated how translation brings us closer to even the most seemingly unapproachable texts (such as Mayakovsky).
I went to a few other panels—on contemporary Latin American fiction, on cognitive approaches—and to good parties thrown by two of my favorite translation publishers (Dalkey Archive and Open Letter); I also had some great chats with friends on the book exhibit floor (hi, NYRB Classics!) and enjoyed wild conversation with Erica and Chad over lunch at a retro-hip lounge. The highlight of the conference, though, was probably something that wasn't even officially related: seeing the Pig Iron Theatre Company do a staged reading of Bill Johnston's new translation of the classic Polish play Balladina by Juliusz Słowacki, an amazing mishmash of pseudo-Shakespearean comedy, history, and tragedy, right up there with Max Beerbohm's in "'Savonarola' Brown" (included in Seven Men). The authentic Polish munchies were also great—as were the raspberries!
Overall, I was impressed with the attention paid to translation as a valid professional, creative, and scholarly task. I was disappointed, though, in the way ALTA presented itself—with no booth in the book exhibit, no official events either on or off the program, just scattered brochures and random mentions here and there. Many of the panelists who announced their affiliation with ALTA emphasized the creative aspects of their practice—precisely what wouldn't endear them to this professional scholarly audience. So while translation as an object of study probably got a great boost from all the exposure at MLA, I'm not sure the same can be said for translation as a profession or for the organization that represents that profession, ALTA.
Fortunately, we get a do-over: ALTA's own next conference will be held this October, in the very same Marriott in Philly that was HQ for the MLA conference.
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