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Tag Archives: literature
My article in Words Without Borders, Happy July 4th, and Congratulations to the US Women’s Soccer Team!
By Jenny McPhee
I am old enough to remember when creative writing was something you “couldn’t teach” and was considered by the academy to be a less than legitimate area of study. (Journalism didn’t even merit a raised eyebrow.) In my youth, there were only a handful of MFAs in creative writing on offer throughout the US. Now creative writing departments and graduate degrees in writing and journalism are like porcini in a forest after a rainy spell. Although translation is certainly one of the world’s oldest professions, when I was an undergraduate at Williams College, there were no classes in Italian language, much less in translation. Today, however, academic programs in translation, like the creative writing programs of yore, are on the cusp of mushrooming throughout the world of higher education in the US.
Translation was not something I set out to do, but rather fell into (I owe it all to Pope John Paul II, but that’s another story), and, given the lack of available formal training and the field’s invisibility, most seasoned translators will tell you something similar. And so it is that after a long apprenticeship in the art and craft, I now have the great honor and privilege of teaching translation. I did so this past spring in two contexts: to graduate students at NYU who are enrolled in an online, asynchronous master of science degree in professional translation and to undergraduates at Princeton.
The majority of the NYU students intend to have careers in specializations such as legal, patent, medical, commercial, financial, or government translation, and so on. Literary is not generally part of their wheelhouse for two main reasons: first, because there is little money in it; second, because many of the students find literary translation intimidating. But the tools and skills of literary translation—grammar, syntax, rhythm, word choice, revision, editing, and proofreading—are fundamental to a successful career in translation, no matter what the specialization.
The graduate students in my class quickly overcame their intimidation, and most were intrigued by the discovery that inherent to literary translation is the concept that there is no such thing as a “literal” translation, and that not only is such a thing impossible, it’s undesirable. A literary translator seeks to transcreate the source text into something new, something that is not only culturally and linguistically and rhythmically felicitous in relation to the spirit of the original, but something that is a work of art in its own right. This necessitates risk-taking and confidence in yourself as a writer, the prerequisite for which is a mastery of language and writing skills. In professional translation “faithfulness” to the source text is at a premium, but being “faithful” to the sense of the text can also mean having the courage to abandon “word for word” and to “recreate.”
The students also learned the importance of revising, editing, and proofreading to the success of a translation. These practices they immediately recognized as a real benefit to their translation practice in other areas, and with the rapid rise of machine and neural translation as well as artificial speech technologies, the demand for post-editing is booming. Post-editing is the process of taking machine-generated translations and making them sound grammatically, syntactically, historically, and culturally human in any given context. And extraordinary new humanitarian machine translation initiatives from organizations such as Translators Without Borders are enabling crisis-affected people from marginalized languages to have a voice and get much needed help. They, too, rely on post-editors.
Literary translation skills are essential to post-editing since this is precisely the work a literary translator does, machine or no machine, day in and day out. We are predominantly editors, ironing, sculpting, kneading texts until they sing and shine, surprise and amaze. To do so, we must have highly developed instincts for what sounds authentic as well as enough informed hubris to take leaps of faith in formulating language equivalencies. (In the fall, I will, in fact, be teaching a course at NYU entitled “Editing for Translators.”)
Though certainly unripe, the Princeton undergraduates I taught weren’t, apparently, intimidated by anything, and their writing and literary preparation was remarkable. What came as a complete surprise to me, however, was to discover that only one of the students was an English major—the other majors ranged from economics and computer science to East Asian studies, history, and classics. Their languages included Korean, Spanish, Russian, Japanese, Latin, and French, the majority having acquired their fluency through study. (Though I am fluent in only three languages, I feel equipped to teach in a polylingual classroom because I know that although deep knowledge of one’s source language and culture are paramount, an even more profound and nuanced knowledge of your target language, in this case English, is the crux of the matter.)
The Princeton students were taking the course because they were curious about the field of translation, since the discipline has now risen out of the shadows and into the sunny ranks of what is considered by the academy a legitimate area of study (Princeton has an impressive program and certificate in translation and intercultural communication). These students recognized their language skills and their experiences abroad as an asset to their overall development and were motivated to increase their global exposure and communication skills.
Both my Princeton and NYU classes were structured as workshops and the students translated selections from various genres—fiction, creative nonfiction, journalism, poetry, and plays—texts they were tasked with finding from their source languages and which had to be either previously untranslated into English or not translated within the past twenty years. The students, in finding these texts, introduced themselves, each other, and me to a wide range of classic, modern, and contemporary literature from their source languages–for example an excerpt from a contemporary South Korean sci-fi satire that sold more than 400 million copies; the last speech of Salvador Allende; Soviet journalist Ilya Ehrenburg’s frontline reporting during WW II; poems by Shuntaro Tanigawa describing the aftermath of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in northeastern Japan; a hilarious drunken scene taken from a comedy written by Plautus in the second century BC; a classic Puerto Rican tragedy set in the sugarcane fields of Aguadilla, to name just a few of the selections that came into our classroom. The students regularly read aloud from both the original and the translation (in the online class they made videos of themselves), a practice I insist upon, as translation is as much about sound as it is about language.
Our discussions involved deep dives into questions of comparative syntax, use of pronouns, adverbs, idioms, the role of prosody, sound, and accent; we examined issues of language idiosyncrasies, as well as cultural and historical context, thus making each of the students an expert in their source language. Our deliberations dramatically revealed how language difference shapes cultural difference across time, texts, and geography. We became acutely aware that the rest of the world does not speak, think, and feel homogeneously, but in an infinite variety of ways. As Octavio Paz put it: “The sun praised in an Aztec poem is not the sun of the Egyptian hymn, although both speak of the same star.”
The study of translation is key to human understanding as it promotes genuine intercultural exchange, increases global literacy, and mines the gold of all existence: empathy. As these new crops of shiitake- and chanterelle-grade translation students traipse through the hallowed halls (virtual or otherwise) of higher ed, pursuing their particular field of study, and then on into their careers, they will each be ambassadors for translation spreading the idea that literature by its very nature is global literature, that translation empowers communication and connection as nothing else can.
Funghi, I read the other day, are an antidote to dementia, stimulators of increased cognitive function, and generally help improve quality of life. They also make a great risotto, enhance an escabèche, perfect a khao phat, and complement a doro wat. The same could be said of translation.
Published Jul 1, 2019 Copyright 2019 Jenny McPhee
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In Praise of Asparagus by Marcel Proust
“…but what most enraptured me were the asparagus, tinged with ultramarine and pink which shaded off from their heads, finely stippled in mauve and azure, through a series of imperceptible gradations to their white feet–still stained a little by the soil of their garden-bed–with an iridescence that was not of this world. 
I felt that these celestial hues indicated the presence of exquisite creatures who had been pleased to assume vegetable form 
and who, through the disguise of their firm comestible flesh, allowed me to discern in this radiance of earliest dawn, these hinted rainbows, these blue evening shades, that precious quality which I should recognise again when all night long after a dinner at which I had partaken of them, they played (lyrical and coarse in their jesting as the fairies in Shakespeare’s Dream) at transforming my chamber pot into a vase of aromatic perfume.”
(From Remembrance of Things Past, Swann’s Way, Combray, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin)
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UNDERSTANDING THE OTHER: ELIF SHAFAK’S HONOR: My January “bombshell” column at Bookslut:
On the front and back covers of the Turkish edition of Elif Shafak’s novel İskender (to be published in the U.S. as Honor
Asked why she opted to appear so disguised on her book, Shafak explained that one of the most difficult aspects of writing the novel had been to put herself in the murderer’s shoes, “to see the world the way he sees it, without judging him from above.” Shafak wanted to emphasize to her readers that one aim of her fiction is to inhabit her characters’ otherness to the point where she is able to understand each of them as part of herself. 
In Shafak’s inspiring TED talk, “The Politics of Fiction,” she furthers this idea by discussing the restrictiveness of identity politics, challenging the notion that fiction writers should necessarily “write what they know.” She quotes James Baldwin, who recoiled at the “homosexual writer” label constantly pinned on him by critics: “There’s nothing in me that’s not in everybody else, and there’s nothing in everybody else that’s not in me.”
Shafak is disturbed by the tendency among critics, especially in the West, to insist writers — particularly “ethnic” women authors — stick to subjects that describe their own direct experience (or what the critics hold to be their experience). Shafak believes it is the fiction writer’s prerogative to use his or her imagination to go as deeply as possible into characters who are different in order to gain — and pass on to one’s readers — an understanding that goes beyond our own. She finds deep parallels between mystical traditions such as Sufism and the creative writing endeavor: both attempt through empathy to transcend the limits of the self in order to find universal truths. In her talk, she tells of when the poet and mystic Rumi met his spiritual companion Shams of Tabriz: “One of the first things the latter did was to toss Rumi’s books into the water and watch the letters dissolve. The Sufis say knowledge that takes you not beyond yourself is far worse than ignorance.”
Born in France in 1971 to Turkish parents, Shafak returned to Istanbul with her mother as a young girl and was partly brought up by her grandmother, a healer. Her mother became a diplomat and Elif’s teenage years were spent in Madrid, Cologne, Amman, Ankara, and Boston. She has a degree in international relations, a master’s in gender and women’s studies, and a PhD in political science. Described by her publisher as “postfeminist, cosmopolitan, commuter, mystic, and human rights defender,” Elif Shafak is, after Orhan Pamuk, the most renowned Turkish writer in and out of Turkey. She has written eight novels and three works of nonfiction including a memoir about suffering from postpartum depression entitled Black Milk: On Writing, Motherhood, and the Harem Within
When I asked Shafak about the “postfeminist” tag she told me, “There’s no such thing. As long as one woman is oppressed anywhere in the world due to her sex, feminism is needed, and I am a feminist.” She said, however, that she felt feminism so far hadn’t found a broadly effective way to include men and make them understand that the subjugation of women results ultimately in their own misery. By conforming to misogynistic practices, they end up harming those they love and becoming alien to themselves. Shafak also thinks women willingly collaborate in their own enslavement by not questioning their beliefs and practices. “For example, we bring up our sons as ‘little sultans.’ It’s unfair to our daughters but to our sons as well. We all suffer because of it, and we must take responsibility for that and change it.”
At the heart of Shafak’s novel is an honor killing, a concept Westerners find difficult to fathom in this day and age. We wonder how a man’s self worth can be so rigidly linked to his control of female family members that he would be driven to commit murder over the loss of it. Yet for every Gul Meena, Gastina, and Shafilea Ahmed, victims of recent honor killings that have featured prominently in the Western press as evidence of barbaric “Muslim tribal practices,” we pay little attention to our own barbaric crimes which we call “domestic violence” and shove under the rug. As the Violence Against Women Act languishes in Congress, the number of women murdered at the hands of men they knew intimately continues to rise. In the past decade, according to the FBI domestic violence statistics, 11,766 women have been killed by men close to them.
Read the rest of the column at Bookslut
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ÉMILIE DU CHÂTELET: THE LADY WHO WAS A GREAT MAN, My December post at Bookslut
In a 1740 letter to an English friend, Voltaire expressed his regret at being unable to visit him, as he could not live without, even for a short period, “that lady whom I look upon as a great man and as a most solid and respectable friend. She understands Newton; she despises superstition and in short she makes me happy.” The famous French poet, playwright, and polemicist was then midway through his extraordinary fifteen-year love affair with the Marquise du Châtelet, a liaison that would produce works of genius from both their pens.
Émilie du Châtelet was a mathematician, physicist, and philosopher who loved to bedeck herself in diamonds, attend salons and soirées, show off at court, and indulge in amorous adventures. Émilie was born into French aristocracy and showed an early aptitude for learning. Her father hired the best Parisian tutors to educate her. When she was nineteen, he arranged her marriage to the Marquis du Châtelet, a man who adored his young wife, appreciated her talents, and never interfered with her indefatigable pursuit of intellectual excellence.
At twenty-six Émilie resolved, after giving birth to her third child, to turn to the serious study of mathematics. At a dinner party in Paris, she encountered Voltaire. He was thirty-nine and after an exile in England — his controversial compositions frequently forced him to flee France — he had returned steeped in Newton’s scientific discoveries and the philosophy of Locke. He couldn’t, however, arouse in French academics — devoted Cartesians — any intellectual curiosity, much less enthusiasm, for these new ideas from across the Channel. Émilie became ignited mind and body by Voltaire and his ability to clearly express complex notions about the natural world. For his part, Voltaire found in the Marquise someone whose scientific intelligence enhanced, challenged, and eventually surpassed his own.
Their uncommon relationship drives Nancy Mitford’s remarkable 1957 book Voltaire in Love
Adam Gopnik, in his introduction to the new edition of Mitford’s book, calls it “a small-scale masterpiece of antiheroic history.” Mitford’s work is an amuse-bouche for at least three subsequent full-scale biographies of the Marquise: The Divine Mistress
Read on at Bookslut
Also new from my theater blog Addison Dewitt Says: All-Female Julius Caesar and All-Male Twelfth Night: The Most Revelatory Theater of 2012
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ZELDA: THE MADWOMAN IN THE FLAPPER DRESS My November Column at Bookslut
“Is a pen a metaphorical penis?” Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar asked in their seminal study of women writers and the literary imagination The Madwoman in the Attic
“In patriarchal Western culture,” they wrote, “the text’s author is a father, a progenitor, a procreator, an aesthetic patriarch whose pen is an instrument of generative power like his penis. More, his pen’s power, like his penis’s power, is not just the ability to generate life but the power to create a posterity to which he lays claim.” This power further implies “ownership” over all his “brain children” — characters, scenes, and events. “As a creation ‘penned’ by man, moreover, woman has been ‘penned up’ or ‘penned in,'” radically reduced to stereotypes (angel or monster) that seriously conflict with her own sense of self, liberty, and creativity.
They show how the pen — indeed mightier than the sword — has for millennia excluded and silenced half the human race. Paradoxically, the author “silences [his characters] by depriving them of autonomy (that is, of the power of independent speech) even as he gives them life.” The authors quote the literary scholar Albert Gelpi: “The artist kills experience into art, for temporal experience can only escape death by dying into the ‘immortality’ of artistic form. The fixity of ‘life’ in art and the fluidity of ‘life’ in nature are incompatible.”
Gilbert’s and Gubar’s book explored how women, increasingly becoming authors themselves in the nineteenth century, coped with ubiquitous literary paternity. A distinctively female literary tradition emerged: “images of enclosure and escape, fantasies in which maddened doubles functioned as asocial surrogates for docile selves, metaphors of physical discomfort manifested in frozen landscapes and fiery interiors — such patterns recurred throughout this tradition, along with obsessive depictions of diseases like anorexia, agoraphobia, and claustrophobia.” In response to being both locked up in, and out of, language, “female art has a hidden but crucial tradition of uncontrollable madness.”
Nancy Milford’s fascinating and disturbing biography Zelda 
Born in 1900, Zelda was the cleverest, prettiest, wildest, and most talented girl in town. Scott Fitzgerald, with whom she fell in love at seventeen and married at twenty, began his immortalization of her as the quintessential “Jazz-age” flapper in his first novel This Side of Paradise 
Much later Scott told Malcolm Cowley, “Sometimes I don’t know whether Zelda isn’t a character I created myself.” To create that character, however, Scott made a regular practice of using his wife’s persona, experience, diaries, and letters, often verbatim, for his work.
Early in the Fitzgerald’s marriage, George Jean Nathan, editor of the magazine The Smart Set, read Zelda’s diaries. “They interested me so greatly,” he said, “that… I later made her an offer for them. When I informed her husband, he said that he could not permit me to publish them since he had gained a lot of inspiration from them and wanted to use parts of them in his own novels and short stories.” Zelda didn’t object. Scott was the Great Male Writer, the chronicler and prophet of the age. She was his helpmate.
Asked to review Scott’s The Beautiful and Damned
Continue reading the column at Bookslut
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THE (IMAGINED) WOMAN READER AND MALE ANXIETY: My September Column at Bookslut
Recently, in The New York Review of Books, Elaine Blair wrote, “Our American male novelists, I suspect, are worried about being unloved as writers — specifically by the female reader. This is the larger humiliation looming behind the many smaller fictional humiliations of their heroes, and we can see it in the way the characters’ rituals of self-loathing are tacitly performed for the benefit of an imagined female audience.” The novelists she uses to illustrate her trenchant and entertaining theory are Michel Houellebecq, Gary Shteyngart, Sam Lipsyte, Richard Price, Jonathan Franzen, and David Foster Wallace. She sees their fiction as a reaction to their immediate predecessors — John Updike, Norman Mailer, and Philip Roth — dubbed by Wallace as the “Great Male Narcissists.” The Contemporary Male Novelists, asserts Blair, are neurotically conscious that the contemporary Female Reader — who, the statistics prove, keeps publishing economically afloat — finds the near-total self-absorption of the GMNs repugnant: for the FR, Wallace imagines, Updike is “just a penis with a thesaurus.” The CMNs fear the FR is no longer willing to interpret rampant misogyny as searing self-portraits of mangled masculinity, but rather as just more misogyny and who needs it? Their livelihoods threatened, the CMNs are doing the utmost in their narratives to tell the imagined female reader that they are at least hyperaware of their own utter self-absorption. So nowadays “female characters get to remind the hero that he’s a navel-gazing jerk, but most of the good lines, and certainly the brilliant social and psychological observations, still go to the hero.”
Male anxiety about the woman reader is as old as reading itself. In Belinda Jack’s new book The Woman Reader
In our time, the complex anxiety the male author feels vis-à-vis his female reader reentered popular consciousness with Jonathan Franzen’s Oprah fiasco when Franzen, upon the publication of The Corrections
Continue reading at Bookslut
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