This blog is pretty much dormant these days, but if you're interested in the kinds of things I discussed here you will probably be interested in the upcoming Future of Reading conference at RIT. I'll be there, so please say hi!
For other news and updates, I recommend the blogs listed under "Essential Reading," to the right.
25 May 2010
17 March 2010
Yes, really
E-book typography sucks, which is the main reason I don't read them. Joe Clark explains why, and offers some solutions:
Why would publishers scan hardcopies? Aren’t all books produced on computers these days? Yes, but do publishers own those files, or do various freelance designers? Can anybody even find the files? What if they were saved in an old version of Quark Xpress or Ventura Publisher? Instead of rooting around in files resident on computers they don’t really understand anyway (these are book people), publishers find it easier to just send print books out to low bidders for scanning.
01 March 2010
A Note on the Type
The first thing I learned to love about a book was its colophon. As the son of a librarian mother and a father as committed to the life of books as only a largely self-educated son of a Kentucky coal miner (the model of Lincoln was hazily present, though my father is anything but tall) could be, I grew up surrounded by books, ranked most impressively on the shelves built into the wall of the den. There I came to know titles and authors' names, cover and spine designs, long before I was ready to read the books themselves. Many of those books I still have not read; my parents divorced and their library is no more. But when, at six or seven, I would pull over a chair from the kitchen table to reach down a book with a particularly intriguing design on the spine and a title that didn't seem too forbiddingly foreign—I am sure it was one of Camus' novels, The Fall or The Plague or The Stranger—there was only one short section of the book whose challenge I felt equal to: the very last one, the colophon at the end which described the typeface and the design of the book. Wondrous people with odd names like Bembo, Dwiggins, and Garamond, adjectives generous with descriptive power, a whiff of impressive industrial technology, and dates that stretched back into the realm of Important History: for me, growing up in the shadow of those shelves, those short-short stories were fairy tales.
18 February 2010
Collaborative publishing, and other stories
Borrowing some inspiration from Richard Nash's Cursor project and Hol Art Books, the bizarre Bite-Size Edits wiki, and two of my favorite bookstores (Left Bank Books in Seattle and Boxcar Books in Bloomington, both run by anarchist collectives), after ALTA last fall I started thinking about applying the collective idea to publishing translations. It's really just the next step combining the non-profit community orientation of small publishing with the peer networking of Web 2.0. I did some research and made some notes and talked to some people informally at MLA, but without active social contact with the kind of people who might be able to help make it happen, I never went any further.
Well, turns out I wasn't the only one thinking along those lines: according to Words Without Borders, Stefan Tobler and Jamie Searle in England are starting up And Other Stories, a collaborative publishing venture that sounds like it will proceed along very similar lines to what I was thinking. (I'm really just going on Stefan's blog posts, particularly this one.) Of course, they're in London and I'm in Port Townsend, so face-to-face collaboration won't be possible, but this might be a good test for the magic of the web—or at least LibraryThing.
Well, turns out I wasn't the only one thinking along those lines: according to Words Without Borders, Stefan Tobler and Jamie Searle in England are starting up And Other Stories, a collaborative publishing venture that sounds like it will proceed along very similar lines to what I was thinking. (I'm really just going on Stefan's blog posts, particularly this one.) Of course, they're in London and I'm in Port Townsend, so face-to-face collaboration won't be possible, but this might be a good test for the magic of the web—or at least LibraryThing.
07 February 2010
The Game of the Goose
I'm reading Margaret Drabble's The Pattern in the Carpet: A Personal History with Jigsaws (for the subject matter—I've never tried one of her novels) and her brief description of the Game of the Goose is fascinating. As some quick googling will confirm, it's the original race-themed board game, an ancestor of Chutes and Ladders (a.k.a. Snakes and Ladders), invented (at least apocryphally) by Francesco de' Medici. I was peripherally aware of the game in Italian (and French and Spanish) culture, but I hadn't realized it had such a long history, probably as rich in cultural meaning as Lotería. While Jules Verne wrote a novel structured around it, it has been the basis for Italian and Spanish game shows, and there's a museum of the game in France, it appears no one has yet written a book about it—in any of the relevant languages! I call dibs.
But for now, I'm going to use it as lead-in to that other great parlor game, amateur etymology.
Square 58, just five spaces from the goal, is the unluckiest spot to land on: it sends your marker all the way back to the start. Though it's usually marked with a (human) death's-head, many of the rules and descriptions (including Drabble's) casually use the phrase "your goose is cooked" to describe what happens. But really, if you imagine a goose dying, wouldn't you assume it's because someone is going to cook it? I'm sure some scientists study goose mortality in other contexts, but for most of us, whether we eat them or not, the ideas of death and cooking are culturally linked when it comes to geese. Considering that there is no clear origin of the phrase—among the prominent theories is the notion that it refers to the burning at the stake of pre-Lutheran reformer Jan Hus!—I'm going to speculate that, when the game hit England in the 1590s (it was entered in the Stationers' Register in 1597) one popular edition may have turned the obvious connection into a joke by printing the legend "Your Goose Is Cooked" around an image of a fowl dinner in square 58. The proof, if it exists, lies buried somewhere in a historical archive.
That's also the period when Shakespeare's career was taking off; the game may have been well-known when Mercutio (in Romeo and Juliet, Act II, scene iv) compared Romeo's jokes to a "wild-goose chase." (Romeo and Juliet was also published in 1597, though when exactly it was written is unclear. But Shakespeare used plenty of Italian sources, so why not a board game?) The standard explanation is that Mercutio is referring to a horse-racing game (with actual horses and riders) popular at the time—but why would a horse-chase use another animal as a metaphor? Perhaps the horse race game was devised from the board game, or perhaps the board game (back in Florence) was patterned after the horse race. In any case, since Mercutio is complaining that Romeo is leading him on an impossible chase of wits—more like a parlor game than a hunt or a horse race—I think it's possible that Shakespeare was alluding to the board game as well.
My last unwarranted speculation is about the verb "to goose." When a goose (or anyone or anything else) bites you on the ass, it's natural to jump forward a few feet; using the verb for the physical act doesn't require any detours through the history of games. But the verb also has a metaphorical use, as a (rudely or at least unexpectedly delivered) prompt to motion and action, and that could be related to the game. In Sports and Pastimes of the People of England by Joseph Strutt (2nd ed., 1903) we read: "It is called the game of the goose, because at every fourth and fifth compartment in succession a goose is depicted, and if the cast thrown by the player falls upon a goose, he moves forward double the number of his throw." In other words, a "goose" was something unexpected that made your piece jump ahead. The choice of imagery for the board game may well have derived from the physical experience, but there probably came a time when the game was more familiar than the goose itself, and if this use of the word comes from that time, then the game's to blame. An OED would probably answer this one yea or nay, but I don't have one handy.
I'll probably have more to say about The Pattern in the Carpet; I'm enjoying it, though more as memoir than for what it has to say about jigsaws, at least so far.
But for now, I'm going to use it as lead-in to that other great parlor game, amateur etymology.
Square 58, just five spaces from the goal, is the unluckiest spot to land on: it sends your marker all the way back to the start. Though it's usually marked with a (human) death's-head, many of the rules and descriptions (including Drabble's) casually use the phrase "your goose is cooked" to describe what happens. But really, if you imagine a goose dying, wouldn't you assume it's because someone is going to cook it? I'm sure some scientists study goose mortality in other contexts, but for most of us, whether we eat them or not, the ideas of death and cooking are culturally linked when it comes to geese. Considering that there is no clear origin of the phrase—among the prominent theories is the notion that it refers to the burning at the stake of pre-Lutheran reformer Jan Hus!—I'm going to speculate that, when the game hit England in the 1590s (it was entered in the Stationers' Register in 1597) one popular edition may have turned the obvious connection into a joke by printing the legend "Your Goose Is Cooked" around an image of a fowl dinner in square 58. The proof, if it exists, lies buried somewhere in a historical archive.
That's also the period when Shakespeare's career was taking off; the game may have been well-known when Mercutio (in Romeo and Juliet, Act II, scene iv) compared Romeo's jokes to a "wild-goose chase." (Romeo and Juliet was also published in 1597, though when exactly it was written is unclear. But Shakespeare used plenty of Italian sources, so why not a board game?) The standard explanation is that Mercutio is referring to a horse-racing game (with actual horses and riders) popular at the time—but why would a horse-chase use another animal as a metaphor? Perhaps the horse race game was devised from the board game, or perhaps the board game (back in Florence) was patterned after the horse race. In any case, since Mercutio is complaining that Romeo is leading him on an impossible chase of wits—more like a parlor game than a hunt or a horse race—I think it's possible that Shakespeare was alluding to the board game as well.
My last unwarranted speculation is about the verb "to goose." When a goose (or anyone or anything else) bites you on the ass, it's natural to jump forward a few feet; using the verb for the physical act doesn't require any detours through the history of games. But the verb also has a metaphorical use, as a (rudely or at least unexpectedly delivered) prompt to motion and action, and that could be related to the game. In Sports and Pastimes of the People of England by Joseph Strutt (2nd ed., 1903) we read: "It is called the game of the goose, because at every fourth and fifth compartment in succession a goose is depicted, and if the cast thrown by the player falls upon a goose, he moves forward double the number of his throw." In other words, a "goose" was something unexpected that made your piece jump ahead. The choice of imagery for the board game may well have derived from the physical experience, but there probably came a time when the game was more familiar than the goose itself, and if this use of the word comes from that time, then the game's to blame. An OED would probably answer this one yea or nay, but I don't have one handy.
I'll probably have more to say about The Pattern in the Carpet; I'm enjoying it, though more as memoir than for what it has to say about jigsaws, at least so far.
06 February 2010
Abstractions and essences, types and stereotypes
Jonah Lehrer, author of Proust Was a Neuroscientist, wrote a blog post yesterday titled "Borges was a neuroscientist." It may sound equally unlikely, but Lehrer makes a case (himself building on another writer's appreciation) for the connection between Borges' fiction and recent neuroscience work on the formation of abstract concepts. Even a concept as comfortable as personal identity contains an element of abstraction: after ten years or after even a day, you or I may look very different, but most people have no trouble identifying both present and past person as instances of the same abstract concept. And it's that "most people" that's key: much neuroscience work depends on studying the exceptions, the people who lack a certain ability, to see what's different about them.
But even assuming that the ability is general, we still have to be careful about which specific instances we choose to study. Whether or not we are able to form abstract categories or identify some "essence" common to a set of phenomena depends a lot on our cultural background. Personal identity, for instance, seems safe—but some cultures treat what Western medicine calls schizophrenia as a revered and mystical state of access to other minds. And we are regularly expected to suppress our personal-identity-meters, whenever we watch a movie star on the big screen. (I find that I can usually quite easily see through a role to identify an actor—but that I often fail to do it for actresses. Perhaps my identity-abstraction-detector neurons are more tuned to male faces because I'm male?)
We're all like George Clooney's character in Up in the Air: "I'm like my grandmother, I stereotype; it saves time." (Clooney's easy to recognize on screen, because he's in everything: we have a larger sample size.) But we each stereotype in the domains that are most relevant to us, the ones where stereotyping saves us the most time.
Somebody saves time by stereotyping translated fiction as difficult or unsellable. Others save time choosing what to read by taking the publisher's deliberate design and marketing choices as a cue to shortcut via a stereotype: see my post on judging books by their covers.
The surest way to dismantle a stereotype (alas, not guaranteed) is to have direct experience of individuals who don't fit it. One of the ways that can happen is to bring multiple stereotypes into conflict—though it's unclear which one will emerge the stronger, or whether we'll simply muddle through with our "ability to hold two contradictory ideas at the same time" (as Fitzgerald put it).
So maybe a way to undo the stereotype about translated fiction is to undermine it by exposure to positively-stereotyped fiction that happens to be translated—like, say, mysteries (Henning Mankell, Stieg Larsson, Andrea Camilleri)? If it works for mysteries, why shouldn't it work for pirate and vampire stories? Curate and present them as equivalent to familiar models, and their original language becomes irrelevant to the reader.
From a different angle: our ability to identify abstractions from real-world instances is also key to the act of reading itself. We can recognize thousands of different shapes, with gross or subtle variations, all as the letter a. For most people, the type designer's painstaking work might as well be invisible—and yet book designers carefully choose one typeface over another, as part of the set of subtle cues they assemble to trigger readers to stereotype a book one way or another. The publisher depends on this stereotyping to help sell the book.
Translators, like type designers, labor in obscurity, but that is not the same as invisibility. They can be handy scapegoats for what we dislike, and poor work by either can certainly spoil our appreciation of the author's achievement. But there should be no reason for most readers to stereotype based on the fact of translation, or the language of origin, or the translator's identity—any more than there should be reason for most readers to stereotype based on the cover designer, or the typeface chosen, or the type of binding.
And yet we do. It saves time. It's all very well-intentioned to ask publishers or readers to learn more or choose better, to move beyond their simplistic stereotypes. But it'll only happen if it'll save them time.
But even assuming that the ability is general, we still have to be careful about which specific instances we choose to study. Whether or not we are able to form abstract categories or identify some "essence" common to a set of phenomena depends a lot on our cultural background. Personal identity, for instance, seems safe—but some cultures treat what Western medicine calls schizophrenia as a revered and mystical state of access to other minds. And we are regularly expected to suppress our personal-identity-meters, whenever we watch a movie star on the big screen. (I find that I can usually quite easily see through a role to identify an actor—but that I often fail to do it for actresses. Perhaps my identity-abstraction-detector neurons are more tuned to male faces because I'm male?)
We're all like George Clooney's character in Up in the Air: "I'm like my grandmother, I stereotype; it saves time." (Clooney's easy to recognize on screen, because he's in everything: we have a larger sample size.) But we each stereotype in the domains that are most relevant to us, the ones where stereotyping saves us the most time.
Somebody saves time by stereotyping translated fiction as difficult or unsellable. Others save time choosing what to read by taking the publisher's deliberate design and marketing choices as a cue to shortcut via a stereotype: see my post on judging books by their covers.
The surest way to dismantle a stereotype (alas, not guaranteed) is to have direct experience of individuals who don't fit it. One of the ways that can happen is to bring multiple stereotypes into conflict—though it's unclear which one will emerge the stronger, or whether we'll simply muddle through with our "ability to hold two contradictory ideas at the same time" (as Fitzgerald put it).
So maybe a way to undo the stereotype about translated fiction is to undermine it by exposure to positively-stereotyped fiction that happens to be translated—like, say, mysteries (Henning Mankell, Stieg Larsson, Andrea Camilleri)? If it works for mysteries, why shouldn't it work for pirate and vampire stories? Curate and present them as equivalent to familiar models, and their original language becomes irrelevant to the reader.
From a different angle: our ability to identify abstractions from real-world instances is also key to the act of reading itself. We can recognize thousands of different shapes, with gross or subtle variations, all as the letter a. For most people, the type designer's painstaking work might as well be invisible—and yet book designers carefully choose one typeface over another, as part of the set of subtle cues they assemble to trigger readers to stereotype a book one way or another. The publisher depends on this stereotyping to help sell the book.
Translators, like type designers, labor in obscurity, but that is not the same as invisibility. They can be handy scapegoats for what we dislike, and poor work by either can certainly spoil our appreciation of the author's achievement. But there should be no reason for most readers to stereotype based on the fact of translation, or the language of origin, or the translator's identity—any more than there should be reason for most readers to stereotype based on the cover designer, or the typeface chosen, or the type of binding.
And yet we do. It saves time. It's all very well-intentioned to ask publishers or readers to learn more or choose better, to move beyond their simplistic stereotypes. But it'll only happen if it'll save them time.
03 February 2010
Paying for what you get; or, Pirates, vampires, sex, and literary translators
Publishing Perspectives this morning covers a German case which resulted in the establishment of legal minimum pay levels for literary translators. The article and comments discuss the many ways publishers are finding around the rules as well as the vagueness of some of the terms used, but let's just take some rough guesses to get an idea. €15/page for a short 200-page novel = €3000, $4200 at today's exchange rates. I know that's three or four times what friends have been paid for equivalent work by US publishers. The pay rate which the German translator found so insultingly low she felt compelled to sue would be seen as generous in this country. And that's not even counting the royalty and sub-rights participation German translators are guaranteed by this court ruling.
Converting to the standard unit of measure for translation in the US, assuming 300 words/page, the Germans are getting 7¢/word, while my American friends get something like 2¢/word. For non-specialized commercial translation, market rates start at 8¢ or 10¢/word for beginners, up to 15¢ or so for experienced professionals, and then to 18-20¢/word and higher for specialized (legal, medical, technical) translation work. Many of these rates are pushed down by the now-dominant online marketplaces which, while they do provide the valuable service of hosting the exchange forum and dealing with the business details, also often promote a race to the bottom in the form of translators underbidding projects just to get the work. So you might see prices like 5¢ and even 3¢/word: those clients get what they pay for. In any case, literary translation is surely on the more specialized end (at least to the extent that the original work was written by a competent author with attention to the nuances of language)—and yet it gets compensated worse than an unqualified hack job.
Oh, sure, there are presses that pay $3-5000 for a book-length translation, and some even give the translator royalty participation. But a lot of small non-profit presses see no problem with paying $1000 or $1500, and a lot of translators sell their work at that rate because otherwise it won't get published at all. The press might sell only 1500 copies, so that's $1/copy sunk cost as far as they're concerned, and while the trade paperback may list for $15 it actually wholesales for about $8—and don't forget, the press also has to pay the original author, not to mention editors, designers, proofreaders, printers, distributors, PR and sales, and all their operations support.
For that 200-page book, let's assume our literary translator is skilled and experienced and can bash out a rough draft at 500 words/hour, or 120 hours for the 60K-word book. Three weeks of full-time work, and double that to allow time for editing and revision. $1500 for six weeks of work is $6.25/hour, less than minimum wage.
So why do people do it? To get the work out there. To build a reputation and a publication list that will get them the $5K jobs. Because it's how they study texts. And that, I think, is where this whole dysfunctional system really breaks down, because most literary translators in this country are (necessarily) not professional literary translators: they're professional academics. They have a day job, and they can do translation on the side. The day job covers their major financial needs, so they can afford to pursue their translation hobby at less than minimum wage. They choose translation projects based on what they study and teach, so they pick tedious and obscure writing and translate it in a tedious and obscure manner. They are rightly incensed that their translation work is not counted for (sometimes in fact is counted against) their scholarly credentials, because (as many have said) translation is the closest possible form of reading, and literary academics love nothing more than close reading.
At the MLA in Philadelphia, I saw ALTA—the American Literary Translators Association, the only organization for the profession in this country—bend over backwards to win the favor of the assembled scholars and academics. Most of the people in ALTA are themselves scholars and academics and they want their work to be accepted and respected by their peers: that makes sense. But scholars and academics already have a professional organization: the MLA. ALTA doesn't need to become more like the MLA; it needs to go in precisely the opposite direction.
Literary translation needs to be accepted and respected as a stand-alone profession. That means translators must pick projects based not on what they like to study and teach (because professional translators are not scholars or teachers) but based on what they like to read and write. Maybe the reason only small presses publish literary translations in this country—and they can get away with paying the pittance they can afford—is because the vast majority of what professional academics are interested in translating is tedious, obscure, academically-oriented writing?
I like the idea of formal experimentation—300-page sentences and all that—but usually I can't be bothered to actually read it. It's not a discrete choice, it's a continuum, but (like, I think, most people) I'd much rather read books about pirates, vampires, and sex.
And I'd rather translate books about pirates, vampires, and sex. And such books should sell well enough to attract reasonable professional pay rates, and the fact that someone could make a living at it should be the definition of a profession. That's the situation our professional organization should be concerned with building, and the people we have to please in order to bring it about are not academic peers and tenure committees, but publishers, editors, reviewers—and, above all, readers.
Converting to the standard unit of measure for translation in the US, assuming 300 words/page, the Germans are getting 7¢/word, while my American friends get something like 2¢/word. For non-specialized commercial translation, market rates start at 8¢ or 10¢/word for beginners, up to 15¢ or so for experienced professionals, and then to 18-20¢/word and higher for specialized (legal, medical, technical) translation work. Many of these rates are pushed down by the now-dominant online marketplaces which, while they do provide the valuable service of hosting the exchange forum and dealing with the business details, also often promote a race to the bottom in the form of translators underbidding projects just to get the work. So you might see prices like 5¢ and even 3¢/word: those clients get what they pay for. In any case, literary translation is surely on the more specialized end (at least to the extent that the original work was written by a competent author with attention to the nuances of language)—and yet it gets compensated worse than an unqualified hack job.
Oh, sure, there are presses that pay $3-5000 for a book-length translation, and some even give the translator royalty participation. But a lot of small non-profit presses see no problem with paying $1000 or $1500, and a lot of translators sell their work at that rate because otherwise it won't get published at all. The press might sell only 1500 copies, so that's $1/copy sunk cost as far as they're concerned, and while the trade paperback may list for $15 it actually wholesales for about $8—and don't forget, the press also has to pay the original author, not to mention editors, designers, proofreaders, printers, distributors, PR and sales, and all their operations support.
For that 200-page book, let's assume our literary translator is skilled and experienced and can bash out a rough draft at 500 words/hour, or 120 hours for the 60K-word book. Three weeks of full-time work, and double that to allow time for editing and revision. $1500 for six weeks of work is $6.25/hour, less than minimum wage.
So why do people do it? To get the work out there. To build a reputation and a publication list that will get them the $5K jobs. Because it's how they study texts. And that, I think, is where this whole dysfunctional system really breaks down, because most literary translators in this country are (necessarily) not professional literary translators: they're professional academics. They have a day job, and they can do translation on the side. The day job covers their major financial needs, so they can afford to pursue their translation hobby at less than minimum wage. They choose translation projects based on what they study and teach, so they pick tedious and obscure writing and translate it in a tedious and obscure manner. They are rightly incensed that their translation work is not counted for (sometimes in fact is counted against) their scholarly credentials, because (as many have said) translation is the closest possible form of reading, and literary academics love nothing more than close reading.
At the MLA in Philadelphia, I saw ALTA—the American Literary Translators Association, the only organization for the profession in this country—bend over backwards to win the favor of the assembled scholars and academics. Most of the people in ALTA are themselves scholars and academics and they want their work to be accepted and respected by their peers: that makes sense. But scholars and academics already have a professional organization: the MLA. ALTA doesn't need to become more like the MLA; it needs to go in precisely the opposite direction.
Literary translation needs to be accepted and respected as a stand-alone profession. That means translators must pick projects based not on what they like to study and teach (because professional translators are not scholars or teachers) but based on what they like to read and write. Maybe the reason only small presses publish literary translations in this country—and they can get away with paying the pittance they can afford—is because the vast majority of what professional academics are interested in translating is tedious, obscure, academically-oriented writing?
I like the idea of formal experimentation—300-page sentences and all that—but usually I can't be bothered to actually read it. It's not a discrete choice, it's a continuum, but (like, I think, most people) I'd much rather read books about pirates, vampires, and sex.
And I'd rather translate books about pirates, vampires, and sex. And such books should sell well enough to attract reasonable professional pay rates, and the fact that someone could make a living at it should be the definition of a profession. That's the situation our professional organization should be concerned with building, and the people we have to please in order to bring it about are not academic peers and tenure committees, but publishers, editors, reviewers—and, above all, readers.
02 February 2010
Futures and presents of reading
In a fuzzy half-awake flurry of link-clicking, somehow I ended up at India Amos' blog; I don't remember how I got there, but whoever did it, thank you. India seems to cover a whole swath of topics I didn't realize I was missing in my daily feed. She's a book technologist—or at least that's what I'll call her, since she designs books (the paper kind) and is now studying ways to bring her knowledge and experience into the impending gee-whiz electromagical future—but, unlike most people who flog e-books and e-book platforms, she's coming from a perspective of actually caring about type, writing, and non-conglomerate models of publishing.
I also read (on only one espresso!) Bill Hill's latest blog post, where the former Microsoft Typography manager (and my boss, 14 years ago) admits that Apple makes better music players, phones, tablet devices, e-book readers, and hell, even Windows PCs than Microsoft does. (No, of course Microsoft doesn't make PCs. Or e-book readers. But Bill prefers his MacBook Pro to anything made by HP et al. and seems to think the iPad is clearly better than the Kindle.)
But Bill's wrong, at least in one detail, pointed out by India in one of her posts: the iPad's H&J sucks donkey lincolns (and in that respect it is certainly no better than the Kindle, which sucks slightly less). That shot is an iPad screen from the iPad announcement, showing Ted Kennedy's memoir with inter-word spacing you could drive a Delta 88 through. H&J means "hyphenation and justification": the code which figures out where to break lines and words and how to adjust inter-word and inter-letter spacing so that the eye can move smoothly along a line of text. To do it right, you really need a trained human—a typographer—to look at and potentially adjust every single line. But Donald Knuth and others figured out how to automate the basics decades ago, so Apple has no excuse.
(Also, Steve: Cochin is a lovely typeface, but it's best for display, not body text. Its sharp-pointed serifs and subtly modulated curves are not the best way to show off the iPad's screen which, let's face it, still isn't quite high-enough resolution. Really, the only typeface on that menu which has a hope of looking decent on an iPad is Verdana—but that's a whole 'nother rant.)
All this book-technology noodling makes this a good opportunity to point out that the website and registration for RIT's Future of Reading conference are now live. I hope to be there, and I expect India and Bill will be too.
I also read (on only one espresso!) Bill Hill's latest blog post, where the former Microsoft Typography manager (and my boss, 14 years ago) admits that Apple makes better music players, phones, tablet devices, e-book readers, and hell, even Windows PCs than Microsoft does. (No, of course Microsoft doesn't make PCs. Or e-book readers. But Bill prefers his MacBook Pro to anything made by HP et al. and seems to think the iPad is clearly better than the Kindle.)
But Bill's wrong, at least in one detail, pointed out by India in one of her posts: the iPad's H&J sucks donkey lincolns (and in that respect it is certainly no better than the Kindle, which sucks slightly less). That shot is an iPad screen from the iPad announcement, showing Ted Kennedy's memoir with inter-word spacing you could drive a Delta 88 through. H&J means "hyphenation and justification": the code which figures out where to break lines and words and how to adjust inter-word and inter-letter spacing so that the eye can move smoothly along a line of text. To do it right, you really need a trained human—a typographer—to look at and potentially adjust every single line. But Donald Knuth and others figured out how to automate the basics decades ago, so Apple has no excuse.
(Also, Steve: Cochin is a lovely typeface, but it's best for display, not body text. Its sharp-pointed serifs and subtly modulated curves are not the best way to show off the iPad's screen which, let's face it, still isn't quite high-enough resolution. Really, the only typeface on that menu which has a hope of looking decent on an iPad is Verdana—but that's a whole 'nother rant.)
All this book-technology noodling makes this a good opportunity to point out that the website and registration for RIT's Future of Reading conference are now live. I hope to be there, and I expect India and Bill will be too.
30 January 2010
Amazon vs. Macmillan
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.
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.
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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