a blog

Here's an interesting site. David Hahn, an award-winning translator of Portuguese fiction, is blogging here >> on the process of his translating Angolan novelist José Eduardo Agualusa's novel Estação das Chuvas (it's okay, I don't know what it means either). He says:

In this blog, I hope to examine the translation process, working through a novel from my own first launching into a first draft, right up to publication. It's not a blog about the life of a translator, but intimately about a single piece of translation work, which I hope will bring you closer to the experience, to the pleasures it brings and the questions it raises.

Since he's just got started, this should offer a rare opportunity for insight into the kinds of ongoing considerations that go towards making a (hopefully) succesful translation, even if your Portuguese, like mine, is slightly more rusty than your Serbo-Croatian.

nothing

If I had a calendar it would tell me that next week I'm back working on the English translation of Janne Teller's award-winning novel Intet [Nothing]. The first draft has been settling a while, and now I want to work on it again. The finished book will be published by Simon & Schuster in New York sometime in the spring of 2010 (!).

listmania

The British Society of Authors recently compiled a top-50 list of modern translation greats (here >>). Who knows what the criteria were, but as far as I can see, there are only two representatives of Scandinavian literature included, viz. Sweden's Per Olov Enquist and Norway's Per Petterson, translated by Joan Tate and Ann Born, respectively. The Guardian had something to say about it all here >>. Needless to say, I haven't read any of them.

analogy

As simple analogies go, I still like this one, from an English translation of the prologue to a recent Icelandic poetry translation anthology edited by Eiríkur Örn Norðdahl (here >>):

Just as you can not translate anything between two languages, nothing is untranslatable once you realize that nothing is translatable. A translation of literary work is never the same work, but a new work related to the former – the German philosopher Friedrich Schleiermacher (1763-1834) said that an artist could view a translation of his works by imagining what his child would look like, had his wife had it with another man (the gender roles of this example are from Schleiermacher – they can be reversed without getting sand in one’s vagina).

things to do instead of dying

So now I'm angling this differently. I read rule #1 and it said update the blog or it will die. Before, it was scraps of translation cast out whenever. Now I'm updating instead of dying. There'll be lots going on here from now on. Nobody wants to die. To start off, these are a couple of the things I'm doing right now:

Firstly, I've been working on two stories from Dorthe Nors' magnificent new collection Kantslag [we're calling it 'Karate Chop']. Not surprisingly, the one called Buddhisten has been turned into 'The Buddhist'. More unpredictably, Vadehavet has become 'The Wadden Sea'. This was news to me: that there is an English name for what I call Vadehavet, and that name is the Wadden Sea. I don't know if anyone has ever heard of it. But it doesn't matter: it's a wonderful name, especially in the context of Dorthe Nors' story, all Virginia Wolf-like. These stories are going off to journals in the US, maybe to Tin House magazine, maybe to McSweeney's Quarterly, maybe to the Boston Review.

Inspired by Jonathan Wichman's book Leth og kedsomheden, I recently did a selection of Jørgen Leth's poems around the theme of 'boredom'. These are still out being reviewed. In the meantime I've done another brief selection of seven 'poems and poetic fragments', as I've opted to collectively call them. There are two poems proper, both from Leth's 2000 collection Billedet forestiller [The Picture Represents]. These are supplemented by five 'fragments' which appeared in Banana Split #5 in 2005, having previously been published as parts of more expansive pieces in the aforementioned collection. The selection may become a chapbook for Calque, or they may come out elsewhere.

Thirdly, I'm working on two stories by David Foster Wallace from his 1999 collection Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. The first carries the portentous title 'Suicide as a kind of present' [Selvmord som en slags gave], the second, as yet untitled in Danish, is called 'Signifying nothing'. These are bound for Danish journals, or perhaps a Norwegian one if it can get its mail server sorted out and stop throwing things back at me. Wallace has only once before appeared in Danish translation, in 2001, when the journal Passage published another story from this same collection entitled 'Octet'.

So now this blog is not dead anymore.

Richard Brautigan / fra 'Revenge of the Lawn' (1971)

Richard Brautigan

(1935-1984)

fra samlingen 'Revenge of the Lawn: Stories 1962-1970' (1971)

Lommeuld

Jeg hjemsøges lidt i aften af følelser, som intet vokabularium har, og begivenheder, der burde beskrives i dimensioner af lommeuld frem for ord.
Jeg har undersøgt småstumper af min barndom. Det er dele af et fjernt liv, som ingen form eller mening har. Det er ting, der bare indtraf ligesom lommeuld.

Oversat fra amerikansk af Martin Aitken

© Richard Brautigan

Oversættelserne © Martin Aitken

Peter H. Olesen / three short excerpts from 'Korrekturlæseren' [The Proofreader], Gyldendal, 2008

Peter H. Olesen

from the novel Korrekturlæseren [The Proofreader], published by Gyldendal (2008)

I am a pedant. An important quality in a proofreader. Cantankerous. I find other people’s errors and descend on them. I thrive on it. I take pride in identifying and correcting mistakes. I have a fondness for the red marker breaking the sacred black type. I have an eye for inconsequence and irregularity. As the good proofreader must. Fussy, small-minded, incorruptible. I am a sadist, says my ex. Son of an accountant.

*

We’re both adults, after all, I say to my ex in an attempt to sound reasonable and reconciliatory amid yet another heated argument over the phone.
And that’s coming from you, she yells. From you!

*

I’ve stopped brushing my teeth entirely. Not by decision, it just happened gradually. What harm could it do missing just the once, I must have thought one late evening, tired and exhausted, and then I suppose it just went from there.
Other banal, though by no means insignificant signs: Unwashed dishes all over the place. Laundry piling up.
One final example: I’m now having problems with composite words. It’s a deeply shameful discovery. The lady at the publishers has made me aware. It seems I’ve overlooked a number of errors in the last couple of jobs. Had I been Japanese with a sword within reach, humiliation would have been short.
As long as you’re still smiling.

Translated from the Danish by Martin Aitken

© Peter H. Olesen and Gyldendal 2008
Translation © Martin Aitken 2008