Translation Today Spring 2024

Ruoyi  The lecture on Friday was given by two translators. (So did they both establish their collaboration within the National Poetry Society?) For surrealistic poetry, it's not about whether it's difficult to go wrong, but whether the translator can thoroughly understand the author's meaning and convey it accurately to the reader. So, I think it's essential to establish a long-term connection with the author in any type of writing translation.  I used to think that translation was really just "direct translation,"but this idea has gradually been overturned. "Direct translation" rarely exists; a better way to put it is to maintain the form and wording of the original text. However, due to language, not every word can be translated completely and retain its original meaning. As she said, the initial fear of "breaking" the original text leading to what they perceive as "mistakes" is common among translators, but what's important...

Fisher and Braslavsky: Translation Affinities Dina Famin   Echoing many of our other speakers, C. Francis Fisher views translation as “interpretive work that foregrounds close reading.” “If someone wants to learn French and read Mansour, they can,” she says of close-minded readers who dismiss translators’ subjective choices (both the obvious and the hidden teeth marks), because “the translation doesn’t alter the original.” While I disagree with the idea that a translation has no effect on the original’s afterlife, and think that a multitude of translations should triangulate to a three-dimensional sense of the original, I appreciate this statement because Fisher is correct: the original text (or a text of the original) is almost always present and welcoming to another reader or translator. This emphasis on celebration of translation was very enheartening. Translation is such a closed world: both Fisher and Braslavsky are published by World Poetry Books, which was founded by Pe...

I'm really appreciating the variety of speakers we have the pleasure of hearing from week after week, with each guest providing a unique perspective and wealth of knowledge and experience. Hearing from this week’s speakers was extremely beneficial to me as a young translator. I was grateful for their candidness about their experiences in translating their respective poets. It was clear that both translators came to know their poets very well, and translating them appeared to be a transformative experience while also sharing their doubts and fears. Fisher's first encounter with Joyce Mansour was during her MFA studies at Columbia. Describing Mansour's work as autofiction, “without the drag of the biographical,” Fisher noted its often overlooked humor and the darker lens through which Mansour chose to explore equality. Despite not identifying as a feminist, Mansour portrayed women as capable of violence and terribleness equal to men. Fisher also noted that Mansour's stanc...

Fisher worked to translate Joyce Mansour’s poetry, a female surrealist, even recognized by Breton, the founder of surrealist. People categorize her poem to be “Erotic-Macabre poems”, which is extremely fitting. Her tone is rustic and painful, with an almost horrific and obsessive sadistic tendency. The frenzied consumption of sex and death is depicted with intense and passionate imagery of shock and violence. There is the touch of feminism to her poems that showcase women can be violent, destructive and terrible just as man. However, when other people mentioned feminist to Mansour, she asked, what’s that? Her response totally shocked me, because I thought Mansour was definitely a feminist. During the translation process, Fisher encountered a word that could mean either "girl" or "daughter." With Surrealists, translators cannot rely on the context of their work to understand the controversial meanings. Therefore, instead of making decisions based on one poem, Fisher ...

 I would first like to say that as an aspiring translator, listening to Alex Braslavsky and Catherine Fisher's talk I felt hopeful that one can actually publish even if you are young and unknown, and I really appreciated that. In both their talks there were some shared ideals that I found very interesting. First of all, as other speakers have mentioned, I could see the relationship that was established between these translators and their authors. As Dennis Wuerthner mentioned in his talk, it looks like both Mansour and Ginczanka became part of Braslavsky and Fisher's families. There was a clear "translationship" established between them which changed the way both Braslavsky and Fisher produce their work now. I really like to see how translation can affect someone's life and work in such a profound manner. I also really appreciated the non-competitive view between them and the other translators working on Mansour and Ginczanka. This contrasts with the relationship ...

 Alexander Pfau 03/29/24     Once again, it was a pleasure to have the speakers here today. Fisher and Braslavsky were analyzing the former poet Mansour, a formerly Jewish woman whose family moved to Cairo later. A radical poet, her goal was to create a vision where women are just as awful as men rather than better, in order to create equal footing between the genders. I personally think this is the best way to go about this, as opposed to so called "corporate feminism", which is generally too publicized and unrealistic. However, her poet's constant reference to explicit content was not something I would read, sort of similar to the poems in snow at 5pm. Another important mention by Fisher was that there is a general panic created by translators where there is a hyperfocus on analysis. She argues that this should not be the case, since while analyzing the text is important, It can often distract from the initial purpose of the text, and in doing so hurts the translation...

  Alexander Pfau Amelia Glaser Keith Vincent 02/05/2024 Ukraine and Russia, two countries that have been at war for years, and at odds for centuries. One cannot hope to understand Ukrainian literature without taking into account the effect of war. Such is the case with the poems Amelia Glaser translates. A translator of Yiddish and Russian as well as Ukrainian, Glaser is a professor at UC San Diego. With a special interest in poetry, Glaser has published a number of books. Her own works, like Songs in Dark Times: Yiddish Poetry of Struggle from Scottsboro to Palestine , and translated works, such as A Crash Course in Molotov Cocktails . Glaser’s critically acclaimed translational skills coupled with an extensive knowledge and background in slavic culture have led to her consistent success in the last decade. These laurels have made Glaser a recognized scholar, leading to her invite to BU this past month. The people of Ukraine have banded together through the realm of social media...

ruoyi I still can't believe the entire talk used the same format, without even a different PowerPoint slide... During the nearly two-hour "word choice" talk, I realized, wow, isn't this exactly what I originally envisioned for my final project? But I was later "corrected" to focus on translated literature divorced from its cultural context. What followed wasn't included in her speech but I found it on the website myself. From her decision to retain the original titles of works like "Kokoro" and "Sei Shonagon," I understood that she wanted her English-speaking readers to embark on a journey to unfamiliar worlds, to " taste its and other languages' strangeness." I remember being amazed by the descriptions of the four seasons at the beginning of the translated Chinese"Sei Shonagon" piece, but as I progressed, perhaps due to its diary format, it became dull and uninteresting. Now, looking at the English translation...

McKinney is an experienced and talented translator who listens to the passage she wants to translate instead of approaching the text with tactics. She started off her lecture by pointing out the concept of identifying a text from a distance, bringing herself to listen to the text and what it's trying to express. Translation is speaking through another voice while remaining passionately dispassionate. One has to control the urge to project their voice onto the original text. When talking about how to approach Japanese to English translation, McKinney mentioned that ambiguity plays a crucial role. The meaning of one word can span a spectrum of meanings, and the translator has to make the call. McKinney listed numerous examples of how previous translators, Brazell and Whitehouse, approached specific translation cases. I was completely shocked to see how different translators handled the same text, especially in interpreting meanings totally differently or adding new meanings. Anothe...

Meredith McKinney: More Close Reading Dina Famin   One thing I admired about Meredith McKinney’s talk was her demonstration of just how aware a (good) translator is of every decision they make, and not just that the decision is made, but the reason that it is. McKinney’s translation philosophy is that we, as translators, must “bring ourselves to the text without imposing ourselves” upon it. We must remain “passionately dispassionate.” But this position is not the one the translator starts with—as several audience members back up when McKinney called her own highly subjective first draft into question. The first draft is an exercise in active reading. McKinney says that you must always “listen, listen, listen” to what the text is saying; in this case, you are listening to what the text is saying to you . In this draft, she says, “I felt what I felt and I said what I thought she felt.” During the second draft, the translator clears up confusions and returns to their first assum...