Why translation matters edith grossman

Clive James. An Anthology of Contemporary Italian Fiction. Edited by Massimo Riva. Carlos Rojas; Translated by Edith Grossman. Why X Matters Series. Elisabeth Young-Bruehl. Jay Parini. Louis Begley. Unfortunately, all that really comes across for me is page after page of rant. She seems to take a rather lofty approach, which is a bit preachy, and I understand her frustrations, but batting people around the head with them is not going to get them on your side. I kept getting riled up rather than motivated to read translations.

Mar 21, Mark rated it really liked it. Having read Ms. Grossman's translation of Don Quixote, and several translations of Gabriel Garcia Marquez i wished to understand more deeply her take on the art of translation. This short book, based partially on past lectures, more than adequately answered my concerns. And, sparked different questions on the nature of language and literature. A text i am sure to return in future.

Mar 09, Sten Leinasaar rated it liked it. Interesting take on the translation by Edith Grossman. I never thought that translation is such a lonely pursuit and that it is a constant battle between the original text and the translator's understanding.

How deeply can you understand? Jul 01, Pily Castillo rated it it was amazing. I really like the way an expert in literary translation like Edith Grossman explains so clearly the importance of translation to the Universal literature. I am a translator and I was able to relate on many examples explained by the author.

A must read, for all translators, no matter the languages. Nov 23, Pat rated it it was amazing. This opened my eyes about translators and the importance of reading translated works. It is an important title. Sep 06, Arisai rated it really liked it. I've read the same arguments by other authors.

I like her writing and the edge that she brings to her words. Oct 05, librarianka rated it really liked it Shelves: translation. The sad statistics indicate that in the United States and the United Kingdom, for example, only two to three percent of books published each year are literary translations. This is not the universal nature of the translating beast: in western Europe, in countries like France or Germany, Italy or Spain, and in Latin America, the number is anywhere from twenty-five to forty percent.

And as Grossman points out this ignorance result of lack of curiosity and a sense of superiority can only lead to misunderstanding, lack of compassion, labelling and antagonism that has disastrous effects. On the other hand it seems that a lot more American authors who come from other lands either as immigrants or are born to immigrant parents and who have great mastery of the English language, no longer hesitate to write literature that embraces those cultures and whose work makes those cultures available to English speaking readers.

As I read Edith Grossman's passionate defence of translators and translation, and yes she does not hide her dislike of critics and publishers, I especially related to those parts that emphasise the bridging role of translation and one that facilitates our personal experience through exposure to exotic landscapes, outrageous characters, incredible situations, we encounter in literature from other countries, none of which would be possible in our existence.

I certainly owe a lot to literature in translation, am passionate about it, and often very grateful that I know more than one language which definitely widens my access to works of literature that often aren't available in English but I can read in translation in one of two other languages I know well enough to do that.

As I pondered the sad state of affairs that Grossman refers to naming the U. Isn't cuisine an expression of culture? Surely it is, and being most accessible one it has become a great link, at least in big cities around the world including United States and Great Britain. Perhaps through food and cooking we can do some of the work needed to overcome our prejudices and judgement of other, unfamiliar peoples and cultures.

I wonder if somebody who has tasted a great food from some previously unknown culture would be more inclined to reach for a book from that culture? Aug 14, Darryl rated it it was amazing. This book was based on a series of lectures that she recently gave at Yale, as part of the university's "Why X Matters" series. The book is divided into four sections: an introduction, in which Grossman convincingly makes the case for the importance of translation for authors, readers, and modern societies; an insightful discussion of the life of a translator, including interactions with writers, readers and publishing companies; a description of the joys and difficulties she faced in translating Don Quixote ; and the challenges of translating modern and Renaissance poetry.

According to Grossman, a good translator must not simply transcribe the text word by word from one language to the other; she must understand the prose or poem as fully as possible, and rewrite the work in the second language, while maintaining its rhythm and the intent of the writer. The book includes quotes from influential writers and translators about the importance of this underappreciated craft, and ends with a list of translated books recommended by Grossman.

I found Why Translation Matters to be very well written and most insightful, which gave me a much better understanding and appreciation of the art of translation, in a conversational style that was easy to digest. She skewers publishers and reviewers in the UK and US for their narrow minded attitudes and ignorance about translated literature and the process of translation, which at times seemed overly personal, but this is a minor critique of an otherwise brilliant and highly recommended work.

Grossman provides a good argument for the importance of translation and an overview of some of the problems with the literary translation industry, such as how few books get translated into English and how little reviewers know about translation.

I do wish she had provided a possible solution to the latter problem. How exactly are reviewers supposed to judge or review a translation?

The last half or so is an excellent explication of how she goes about translation and of some of the problems ass Grossman provides a good argument for the importance of translation and an overview of some of the problems with the literary translation industry, such as how few books get translated into English and how little reviewers know about translation.

The last half or so is an excellent explication of how she goes about translation and of some of the problems associated with and techniques used in translating both prose and poetry. The book is worth reading for that alone I would actually love to read a whole book where she does nothing but do this same kind of analysis.

My only complaint here is that she didn't go into the same kind of in-depth analysis of translating prose that she did for poetry she only discussed the beginning sentence of Don Quixote; I think including a longer excerpt of the book and how she went about translating that specific passage would have been extremely enlightening. I think this part of the book is especially relevant to those of us who are students of Spanish. There are no discussion topics on this book yet.

Be the first to start one ». Readers also enjoyed. About Edith Grossman. Edith Grossman. Her translation of Don Quixote is widely considered a masterpiece. Other books in the series. Why X Matters Series 1 - 10 of 15 books. Books by Edith Grossman. Related Articles. Read more Trivia About Why Translation M No trivia or quizzes yet. Add some now ». Quotes from Why Translation M A good translator's devotion to that goal is unwavering. Of equal significance is the possible transfer of the book into other media like film and television.

Powerful filmmakers and television producers whose work is distributed worldwide are all apt to read English. In brief, then, there seems to be. All these considerations mean that the impact on writers around the world of the current reluctance of English-language publishers to bring out translations can be dire, especially for younger authors.

I do not expect. But here we are in a world whose shrinking store. I do not believe I am overstating the case if I say that translation can be, for readers as well as writers, one of the ways past a menacing babble of incomprehensible tongues and closed frontiers into the possibility of mutual comprehension.

It is not a possibility we can safely turn our backs on. It is an occupation that many critics agree is impossible at best, a betrayal at worst, and on the average probably not much more than the accumulated result of a diligent, even slavish familiarity with dictionaries, although bringing a text over into another language has a long and glorious history.

It can boast of illustrious practitioners ranging from Saint Jerome to the translators at the court of King James to Charles Baudelaire to Ezra Pound, and as I indicated earlier, it is undeniably one of.

Translation in Renaissance Europe was not a palliative for the disease of monoglotism, as it is today; it was a part of literature, a part of the passing of literary traditions and creations from language to language, and a part of the often conscious creation of modern.

If one disavows the proposition that professional translators are acutely and. Certainly, for most of us who do, neither fame nor fortune is a serious motivation for so underpaid and undersung an enterprise. Something joyous and remarkable and intrinsically valuable in the work must move us to undertake it, for I can think of no other profession whose practitioners find themselves endlessly challenged to prove to the world that what they do is decent, honorable, and, most of all, possible.

Over and over again, at. As Clifford Landers of the American Translators Association once said, many reviewers write as if the English text had somehow sprung into existence independently. What these same reviewers do would be iniquitous if it did not have its own kind of lunatic humor: they are fond of quoting from the. Let me give you an admittedly acerbic translation of the. One must always take the work seriously, never oneself, but that kind of humility smacks of a superficially subservient Uriah Heep insisting far too often on the unassuming servility of his character as he rubs his hands, rounds his shoulders, and formulates his criminal, devious plans.

How, then, are we to speak with intelligence, insight, and discernment of translation and its practitioners? Gasset called translation a utopian enterprise, but, he said, so too is any human undertaking, even the effort to communicate with another human being in the same language.

The destiny of Man—his privilege and honor—is never to achieve what he proposes, and to remain merely an intention, a living utopia. But fidelity should never be confused with literalness. Literalism is a clumsy, unhelpful concept that radically skews and oversimplifies the complicated relationship between a translation and an original.

The languages we speak and write are too sprawling and too unruly to be successfully contained. Despite the best efforts of prescriptive entities ranging from teachers of developmental composition insisting on proper style, good grammar, and correct punctuation, to the French government resolutely attempting to control and ultimately. They overflow even the most modern and allegedly complete dictionaries, which on publication are usually at least twenty years out of date; they sneer at restriction and correction and the imposition of appropriate or tasteful usage, and they revel in local slang, ambiguous meaning, and faddish variation.

Like surly adolescents, they push against limits imposed by an academic or sociopolitical world they never made, and are in a state of perpetual rebellion. They are clearly more than accumulations of discrete. A single language, then, is slippery, paradoxical, ambivalent, explosive.

When one tries to grasp it long enough to create a translation, the Byzantine complexity of the enterprise is heightened and intensified to an alarming, almost schizophrenic degree, for the second language is just as elusive, just as dynamic, and just as recalcitrant as the first. The experience. Languages, even first cousins like Spanish and Italian, trail immense, individual histories behind them, and with all their volatile accretions of tradition, culture, and forms and levels of discourse, no two ever dovetail perfectly or occupy the same space at the same time.

They can be linked by translation, as a photograph can link movement and stasis, but it is. Fidelity is the noble purpose, the utopian ideal, of the literary translator, but let me repeat: faithfulness has little to do with what is called literal meaning. If translators do not match up a series of individual elements and simply bring over words from one language to another, using that legendary linguistic tracing paper, then what do translators translate, and what exactly are they faithful to?

Before I continue, I want to underscore a self-evident point: of course translators scour the dictionary,. But this kind of lexical search and research, accompanied by many consultations with infinitely patient friends who are native speakers of the first language, and preferably are from the same region as the first author, is a preliminary activity associated with the rough draft, the initial step in a long series of revisions. Completing this preliminary stage is surely a sign of basic competence, but it is not central to the most important and challenging purposes of translation.

One need only consider the plodding opening to his version of the novel in verse that is a monument of. Russian literature: My uncle has most honest principles: when taken ill in earnest, he has made one respect him and nothing better could invent.

To others his example is a lesson; but, good God, what a bore to sit by a sick man both day and night, without moving a step away! Good translations are good because they are faithful to this contextual significance. They are not necessarily faithful to words or syntax, which are peculiar to specific languages and can rarely be brought over directly in any misguided and inevitably muddled effort to somehow replicate the original.

This is the literalist trap, because words do not mean in isolation. Words mean as indispensable parts of a contextual whole that includes the emotional tone and impact, the literary antecedents, the connotative nimbus as well as the denotations of each statement. Translators translate context. We use analogy to recreate significance, searching for the phrasing and style in the second language which mean in the same way and sound in the same way to the reader of that second language.

And this requires all our sensibility and as much sensitivity as we can summon to the workings and nuances of the language we translate into. He ought to possess himself entirely and perfectly comprehend the genius and sense of his author, the nature of the subject, and the terms of the art or subject treated of. And then he will express.

The real question, he said, was whether he knew enough English to do justice to that extraordinary book. I am not sure how the benighted interviewer replied: one. People concerned about the legitimacy of the literal might well be scandalized by his mania for. Modify me. Make me stark. My language often embarrasses me. I want the power of Cynewulf, Beowulf, Bede. Make me macho and gaucho and skinny. How can any translator ever accomplish what Borges requested?

By now it is a commonplace, at least in translating circles, to assert that. The very nature of what we do requires that kind of deep involvement in the text. Our efforts to translate both denotation and connotation, to transfer significance as well as context, means that we must engage in extensive textual excavation and bring to bear everything we know, feel, and intuit about the two languages and their literatures.

Translating by analogy means we have to probe into layers of purpose and implication, weigh and consider each element within its literary milieu and stylistic environment, then make the great leap of faith into the inventive rewriting of both text and. And this kind of close critical reading is sheer pleasure for shameless literature addicts like me, who believe that the sum of a fine piece of writing is more than its parts and larger than the individual words that constitute it.

I have spent much of my professional life, not to mention all those years in graduate school, committed to the dual proposition that in literature, as in other forms of artistic expression, something more lurks behind mere surface, and that my purpose and role in life was to try to discover and interpret it, even if the goal turned out to be utopian in the sense suggested by Ortega y Gasset. I think this kind of longing to. It surely is the essence of interpretation, of exegesis, of criticism, and of translation.

Yet now I feel obliged to confess that I am still mystified by the process of dealing with the same text in two languages, and have searched in vain for a way to express the bewildering relationship between translation and original, a paradoxical connection that probably can be evoked only metaphorically.

The question that lurks in the corners of my mind as I work and revise and mutter curses at any fool who thinks the second version of a text is not an original, too, is this: what exactly am. I writing when I write a translation?

Is it an imitation, a reflection, a transposition, or something else entirely? In what language does the text really exist, and what is my connection to it? I do not have a grand, revelatory solution to the puzzle, even though essays like this one make an attempt to resolve the conundrum, but I think.

The figure of the muse as an inspiring presence is ubiquitous and universal, testifying to the truth of the metaphor. And here I mean translation not as the weary journeyman of the publishing world but as a living. He states that children translate the unknown into a language that slowly becomes familiar to them, and that all of us are continually engaged in the translation of thoughts into language.

As many observers, including. In short, as they move from the workings of the imagination to the written word, authors engage in a process that is parallel to what translators do as we move from one language to another. If writing literature is a transfer or transcription of internal experience and imaginative states into the external world, then even when authors and readers speak the same language, writers.

And if this is so, the doubts and paradoxical questions that pursue translators must also arise for authors: Is their text an inevitable betrayal of the imagination and the creative impulse? Is what they do even possible?

Can the written work ever be a perfect fit with that imaginative, creative original when two different languages, two realms of experience, can only approximate each other? To follow and expand on the terms.

These kinds of considerations and speculations and problematic questions are always in my mind whenever I think about translation, especially when I am. They certainly occupied a vast amount of mental space when I agreed to take on the immense task of translating Don Quixote, but only after I had repeatedly asked the publisher whether he was certain he had called the right Grossman, because my work as a translator had been focused on contemporary Latin American writers, not giants of the Renaissance in Spain.

Much to my joy, he assured me that in fact I was the Grossman he wanted, and so my intimate, translatorial connection to the great novel began. But there was more: hovering over. You can probably imagine what they were just think what it would mean to an English-Spanish translator to take on the work of Shakespeare , but I will try to clarify a few of them for you. There were the centuries of Cervantean scholarship, the specialized studies, the meticulous research, the untold numbers of books, monographs, articles, and scholarly editions devoted to this fiction-defining novel and its groundbreaking creator.

Was it my obligation to read and reread all of these publications before embarking on the. A lifetime would not be enough time to do this scholarly tradition justice, I was no longer a young woman, and I had a two-year contract with the publisher.

Was it my professional duty to study all of them? I had read no other translations since then. Was I willing to delay the work by years to give myself time to read each Englishlanguage version with care? To what end? Then there was the question of temporal distance, a chasm of four centuries separating me from Cervantes and the world in which he composed his extraordinary novel.

I had translated complex and difficult texts before, some of them exceptionally obscure and challenging, in fact, but they were all modern works by living writers. Would I. Would my efforts—my incursions into the. What was I to do about the inevitable lexical difficulties and obscure passages? These occur in prodigious numbers in contemporary works and were bound to reach astronomical proportions in a work that is four hundred years old.

As a last step. But Don Quixote clearly was a different matter: none of my friends came from the Spain of the early seventeenth century, and short of channeling, I had no way to consult with Cervantes. I was, I told myself in a tremulous voice, fervently wishing it were otherwise, completely on my own. Tell the Tale I worked on immediately after Don Quixote, that Cervantes was easier to translate than he was because at least in a text by Cervantes there were notes at the bottom of the page.

The second piece of invaluable assistance came from an old friend, the Mexican writer Homero Aridjis, who sent me a photocopy of a dictionary he had found in Holland when he was a diplomat there: a seventeenthcentury Spanish-English dictionary first published by a certain gentleman named Percivale, then enlarged by a professor of languages named Minsheu, and printed in London in I do not mean to.

I wondered, too, if the novel would open to me as contemporary works sometimes do, and permit me to immerse myself in the intricacies of its language and intention. The experience is exhilarating, symbiotic, certainly metaphorical, and absolutely. A difficult role, and arduous enough with contemporary writers. Despite all my years of study, I am not a Golden Age specialist: would I be able to play the Cervantean part and speak those memorable lines, or would the entire quixotic enterprise close down on its first night out of town, before it ever got to Broadway?

Would I, in short, be able to write passages that would afford English-language readers access to this marvelous novel, allow them to experience the text in a way that approaches how readers in Spanish experience it now, and how readers experienced it four hundred years ago? These were some of the fears that. The idea of working on Don Quixote was one of the most exciting things that had happened to me as a translator.

It was a privilege, an honor, and a glorious opportunity—thrilling, overwhelming, and terrifying. Another major consideration was the question of which edition of Don Quixote to use for the translation. Based on. I have always loved the errors in the first printing and been charmed by the companionable feeling toward Cervantes that they create in me. I am not suggesting, by the way, that Cervantes was a primitive savant or a man not fully conscious of the ramifications and implications of his art.

He was, however, harried, financially hardpressed, and overworked. Conventional wisdom informs us that even Homer nodded, and as every writer knows, in the urgency of getting a book into print, the strangest mistakes appear in the oddest places. I decided, too, that I was not creating a scholarly work or an academic book, and therefore I would. There was no reason I could think of for an intelligent modern reader to be put off by difficulties in the text that were not intended by the author.

For instance, the ballads or romances cited so frequently in Don Quixote by the characters and by Cervantes himself in the guise of the narrator were common knowledge at the time, familiar to everyone in Spain,. For a modern reader, however, especially one who reads the book in translation or is not conversant with the rich Spanish ballad tradition, the romances are unfamiliar, perhaps exotic, even though they are utterly unproblematic in the intention and structure of the novel.

For instance, in the course of the novel, Cervantes mentions well-known underworld haunts, famous battle sites and fortresses in North Africa and. Europe, popular authors and major military figures of the sixteenth century. These were the kinds of references that I did my best to explain in the notes.

Cervantistas have always loved to disagree and argue, often with venom and vehemence, but I concluded that my primary task was not to become involved in academic disputation or to take sides in any scholarly polemic but to create a translation that could be read with pleasure by as many people as possible.

I wanted English-language readers to savor its humor, its melancholy, its originality, its intellectual and esthetic complexity; I wanted them to know why the entire. In the end, my primary consideration was this: Don Quixote is not essentially a puzzle for academics, a repository of Renaissance usage, a historical monument, or a text for the classroom. It is a work of literature, and my concern as a literary translator was to create a piece of writing in English that perhaps could be called literature too.

Finally, my formal apology. Even so, I hope you find it deeply amusing and truly compelling. If not, you can be certain the fault is mine. Get the letter and you miss the spirit, which is everything in poetry; or get the spirit and you miss the letter, which is everything in poetry. But these are false dilemmas. He not only has translated the poetry of Pablo Neruda and Paul Celan but has written incisively and compellingly, in two brilliant books—Translating Neruda: The Way to Macchu Picchu, and Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew— about the process of bringing the work of those poets over into English.

Felstiner consistently affirms the intrinsic,. The attribution of extreme value to the translation is a concept that has brought me extraordinary aid and comfort at those times when I have been engaged in the overwhelmingly difficult and exceptionally rewarding act of rendering Spanish-language verse in English. I have always derived immense pleasure from the translation of poetry. My first forays into the work when I was a student at the University of Pennsylvania were well-intended,.

And yet, in spite of that youthful enthusiasm, the main focus of my activity in translation has been prose fiction. What I learned in the early days of my career may help to explain why I did not follow my poetic bliss. When I was starting out as a translator, in the s, the generally accepted rate in New York for the translation of poetry was fifty cents a line.

This meant that if you devoted serious, sometimes excruciating amounts of effort, time, and emotional energy to the translation of a sonnet into English, your total fee was seven dollars. No wonder the siren song of prose grew louder, sweeter, and increasingly irresistible as I devoted more and more time to translating, until it finally became my. But over the years I have been fascinated to discover that the translation of artful prose and the translation of poetry are comparable in several significant ways.

They both presuppose in the original writing an exquisitely thoughtful use of language to create the many effects that the literary arts are capable of: emotional resonance, conceptual engagement, rhythmic pattern, esthetic tension, and sheer gorgeousness of expression.

The specific experience of translating. In spite of these undeniable intergenre connections, I do not believe anyone could, or would even want to, dispute the notion that poetry is the most intense, most highly charged, most artful and complex form of language we have. In many ways it is the essential literary. And yet, although it may be universally human, the inescapable truth is that poetry can seem completely localized, thoroughly contextualized, and absolutely inseparable from the language in which it is written in ways that prose is not.

The textures of a language, its musicality, its own specific tradition of forms and meters and imagery, the intrinsic modalities and characteristic linguistic structures that make it possible to express certain concepts, emotions, and responses in a specific manner but.

Still, we who make that injudicious attempt are the heirs to a long tradition of verse translation. Merwin, Richard Wilbur, and Charles Simic, to name only a handful, have proclaimed the value of translating poetry by engaging in it themselves, and there is no doubt that by means of translation, poets have had a profound and long-lived influence on. It is almost impossible to imagine what the course of Western poetry would have been without these and many similar cultural and linguistic convergences of poetic form and sensibility.

We are much more imagedriven as a result. Neruda is the great image-maker. The greatest colorist. Share the post. You might also like Annelise Finegan Wasmoen— Across interviews and essays, the experimental writer… Continue reading On the heels of our publication of Nobel Prize winner… Continue reading Leave A Comment Cancel reply Your email address will not be published.