Jeffery Zuckerman Lecture Post

 I loved the lecture given by Jeffery Zuckerman last Friday. The first thing I'd like to address relates to his  musings over the impossibility of a "transparent" translation. I found his comments to be quite relatable, as all translation is inevitably done through some sort of lens which distorts the original, even if only slightly. It is all too easy to forget that translators are people, and not machines. Each translator will inevitably impart their own biases on the works they are translating regardless of their attempts to remain "transparent". 

As a translator of Japanese, another thing which caught my attention was Zuckerman's comments on the difficulty of translating gendered languages into English. Japanese, like English, has no grammatical gender. It's not something I've really ever thought about, as it's not something I've ever had to wrestle with in my own translations. At first, I would have assumed that translators could simply insert gendered words like "she" and "he" into their translations in order to highlight sections of the text in which gender carries some kind of literary importance. However, Zuckerman made the point that inserting gendered words into English translations stands out in a way which they do not in French. In French, it is natural for gendered words to be scattered about a page; in English, it causes the reader to pause and pay attention. This attention, whether good or bad, creates a completely different effect in French than in English. He states, "grammatical gender isn't really a thing in English, so what can be subtle in French ends up being a lot more heavy-handed in English". And he's right. This is just another instance of how translators work to not only translate the words on the page, but the effect of those words on readers in two different languages. 

I also enjoyed Zuckerman's discussion on how he has had to lean into a "horizontal language" in his translations. Even within the same language, different pockets of people speak in different ways. It is the translator's job to become aware of as many of these "pockets" as possible in order to best emulate the effect of characters from foreign texts into English. As it happens, that is something I have been taking an interest to in the past several months. Horizontal language, as Zuckerman puts it, is constantly evolving. Learning how to keep up with the types of language used by different subgroups of people is crucial to producing a successful translation.

PS: I thought that Zuckerman's translation of the French "You're in the moon" as "Earth to Laurence" was genius. It's incredibly hard to translate idioms from one language to another, as their literal meaning is incomprehensible in the absence of context and prior knowledge. 


- Alexa

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Yasmine Seale

 Armaan Arif 04/07/2024 Professor Vincent Yasmine Seale presented the work not as a mere book, but as a living tradition of storytelling. She highlighted that the number "1001" is not just literal but symbolic, inviting endless contributions to this story. Seale discussed the challenges and innovations of translating such a classic. She plans to employ long, flowing sentences that span the course of a night, mimicking the storytelling technique of Shahrazad, who uses tales to stave off her fate until dawn. This choice aims to capture the original's poetic flair and emotional depth. Moreover, Seale intends to incorporate various manuscripts in her translation to reflect the historical depth and varied interpretations of The Nights . This method contrasts with traditional translations that typically cite a single source, aiming to portray the text as an evolving entity rather than a fixed work. Yasmine Seale’s lecture was a great portrayal of her translating style and ...
Read more

Yasmine Seale's lecture

 As part of the MFA in literary translation, this semester we are taking a class titled: "A Thousand and One Nights: A Translator's Playground" where we have learned the rich and complicated history surrounding the translation of The Nights . In this context, to have had the opportunity to listen to Yasmine Seale, the newest translator of this work,  was absolutely wonderful. One of the things she mentioned which I really liked was that The Nights  resists being called "a book" as it's more a tradition of storytelling.  This is very fitting since, as we have learned in this class, The Nights  is a compendium of stories that grew throughout time until eventually reaching 1001. Seale mentioned that she might be interested in adding her own stories to this ever-growing tradition since the number 1001 is less of a concrete number and more of an invitation to infinity. I also found it very interesting how the lack of a clear original or an author has provided dif...
Read more

Report on Megan McDowell

  Megan McDowell’s “FAQs: Highly Subjective Answers to All Your Questions about Latin American Contemporary Translation” Lia Galván Megan McDowell – a translator from Latin American literature into English – gave a lecture on Friday, February 2nd, 2024 as part of Boston University’s Literary Translation Series. She was introduced by the series curator Professor Keith Vincent who mentioned her impressive resume. McDowell’s translations have been featured in magazines such as The New Yorker and have won several prizes such as t he National Book Award for Translated Literature, the English PEN award, and the Premio Valle-Inclán. In her lecture, “FAQs: Highly Subjective Answers to All Your Questions about Latin American Contemporary Translation” McDowell discussed the questions she has been asked the most during her translation journey and shared her ongoing reflections about the most appropriate way to answer them.  The first question that McDowell addressed was “How long does it...
Read more