Andrea Applebee
Three Questions on Translation with Lydia Davis
ARA: How does the practice of translation relate, for you, to the practice of performing another's music? Ashbery compared English and French to the piano and violin, respectively--an unusual pair difficult to reconcile but worthy of the challenge. Sieburth compared the writer who chooses to translate to the musician who chooses to be a concert pianist rather than a composer.
LD: I've often thought of this analogy for translation--one is performing another writer's music, rather than composing one's own-- and yet for me it doesn't quite hold up. And the ways in which it doesn't hold up are interesting to explore. For one thing, it is hard to speak of "translation" per se when different sorts of translations require different approaches. Some translations demand considerable reinvention along with translation. That would be true of a novel written in street slang or certain kinds of poems, or even poems in general. Or Queneau's Exercises in Style, for which Barbara Wright in her translation was extremely inventive in devising new stylistic versions of the original story. So you could compare what she did to a performer of the Goldberg Variations adding more variations to the originals, or performing the piece on an instrument that would require a radical reinterpretation of the original, such as an African drum.
In certain types of literary translations of a more straightforward kind that I was hired to do. earlier in my translating career, I was expected to rewrite the text a little in order to make it more readable This would be quite shocking in a performance of a musical piece. I would not do this with a text by Blanchot, Leiris, Flaubert, Proust. And especially in the case of the latter two, my aim was to follow the original as closely as possible, rather than stray into unnecessary interpretation or reinvention. The challenge was to follow their texts closely while still writing good, or even eloquent, English. Glenn Gould, on the other hand, would sometimes play a movement of a Beethoven sonata much faster than the composer had (clearly) indicated, or the Goldberg Variations much slower.
ARA: How does translation relate to place for you, or more specifically, to place-making?
This could go many directions. I'm thinking of the translator as anything from the landscapist and surveyor to the traveler who 'collects' places, to the Dantean guide. I'm also interested in that other sense of 'land'--how a translation can form the ground for a community, relationships and people that belong there. I'm also curious about how a translation can be autobiographical, like a place.
LD: I can think of place-making--at the moment, anyway--only in terms of creating culture, culture as environment. I'm thinking historically, now--how the Muirs' early translations of Kafka, for instance, faulty and somewhat misrepresentative though they were, introduced a whole new sensibility and approach to writing fiction into the culture of Anglophone places. And how this influence produced fiction in the U.S., for instance, that then in turn influenced (often in translation) the fiction of other cultures. Readers of Kafka in translation inhabit his world--are allowed access to it through the translation. His world, his place, is then assimilated, incorporated, and becomes part of our own cultural environment.
ARA: How is translation an act of intimacy, in your experience?
Sieberth ends an interview I read by saying "I can't imagine love in one tongue." In Henry James' "The Sacred Fount" the narrator theorizes that lovers draw off each other's life--one lover waxes while the other wanes, one 'pays' for the other's vitality. The theory becomes more and more complex before descending into chaos. (It's my sense that theory about translation and influence could do the same…Steiner's aggressive model comes to mind.) Like Kafka's description of letter-writing as and "intercourse with ghosts", translation seems to have much of the metamorphic potential, exchange, intrigue, and impossibility of love.
LD: Well, at the moment, again, I'm viewing translation much more positively--not as an act of betrayal, not as "drawing off" the life of the other. I see it as, really, doubling the other--which, in fact, literally, it is--increasing the other by almost the same amount again. Where, for instance, one version of a story in Dutch by A.L. Snijders existed before--he is the author I am translating at the moment--there are now two versions, his original and my translation. Mine does not replace his--treasonably--but supplements his. And of course, there is the oldest (positive) argument in favor of translation--my translation makes his work available to all those who don't read Dutch but do read English, even if my version (treasonably) does not give a reader absolutely everything given by the original.
As for intimacy, in my experience of translating both Proust and Flaubert, I found myself identifying very closely with them. I developed, imperceptibly, gradually, a tremendous loyalty to Proust, for instance, and felt that in order to compose a truly good translation, I had to become him, in a sense--this would perhaps be your idea of metamorphosis. I was composing his sentences, though without quite the struggle, doubt, and revision that he experienced. I was certainly in a very intimate relationship. The same was true in my experience of translating Flaubert, though to a somewhat less intense degree, partly because the project was not as extended and partly because Flaubert is a more difficult--crotchety, scornful--character. I think part of the pleasure I still find in translating is this possibility of metamorphosing into another writer and writing prose quite unlike the prose I write myself.
***
Lydia Davis was awarded the Man Booker International Prize in 2013. In addition to her well-acclaimed work as a writer of fiction, she has published many valuable French translations. These include Maurice Blanchot’s The Gaze of Orpheus and Other Literary Essays (1981), Michel Leiris’s Brisees: Broken Branches (1990), Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way (2004), Vivant Denon’s No Tomorrow (2009), and Gustave Flauber’s Madame Bovary (2010). Davis’s writing and translations have earned her the title of Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters in France. She is presently translating stories by A.L. Snijders from the Dutch. Her most recent book of short stories, Can’t and Won’t, is available from FSG as of April 2014.
Three Questions on Translation with Lydia Davis
ARA: How does the practice of translation relate, for you, to the practice of performing another's music? Ashbery compared English and French to the piano and violin, respectively--an unusual pair difficult to reconcile but worthy of the challenge. Sieburth compared the writer who chooses to translate to the musician who chooses to be a concert pianist rather than a composer.
LD: I've often thought of this analogy for translation--one is performing another writer's music, rather than composing one's own-- and yet for me it doesn't quite hold up. And the ways in which it doesn't hold up are interesting to explore. For one thing, it is hard to speak of "translation" per se when different sorts of translations require different approaches. Some translations demand considerable reinvention along with translation. That would be true of a novel written in street slang or certain kinds of poems, or even poems in general. Or Queneau's Exercises in Style, for which Barbara Wright in her translation was extremely inventive in devising new stylistic versions of the original story. So you could compare what she did to a performer of the Goldberg Variations adding more variations to the originals, or performing the piece on an instrument that would require a radical reinterpretation of the original, such as an African drum.
In certain types of literary translations of a more straightforward kind that I was hired to do. earlier in my translating career, I was expected to rewrite the text a little in order to make it more readable This would be quite shocking in a performance of a musical piece. I would not do this with a text by Blanchot, Leiris, Flaubert, Proust. And especially in the case of the latter two, my aim was to follow the original as closely as possible, rather than stray into unnecessary interpretation or reinvention. The challenge was to follow their texts closely while still writing good, or even eloquent, English. Glenn Gould, on the other hand, would sometimes play a movement of a Beethoven sonata much faster than the composer had (clearly) indicated, or the Goldberg Variations much slower.
ARA: How does translation relate to place for you, or more specifically, to place-making?
This could go many directions. I'm thinking of the translator as anything from the landscapist and surveyor to the traveler who 'collects' places, to the Dantean guide. I'm also interested in that other sense of 'land'--how a translation can form the ground for a community, relationships and people that belong there. I'm also curious about how a translation can be autobiographical, like a place.
LD: I can think of place-making--at the moment, anyway--only in terms of creating culture, culture as environment. I'm thinking historically, now--how the Muirs' early translations of Kafka, for instance, faulty and somewhat misrepresentative though they were, introduced a whole new sensibility and approach to writing fiction into the culture of Anglophone places. And how this influence produced fiction in the U.S., for instance, that then in turn influenced (often in translation) the fiction of other cultures. Readers of Kafka in translation inhabit his world--are allowed access to it through the translation. His world, his place, is then assimilated, incorporated, and becomes part of our own cultural environment.
ARA: How is translation an act of intimacy, in your experience?
Sieberth ends an interview I read by saying "I can't imagine love in one tongue." In Henry James' "The Sacred Fount" the narrator theorizes that lovers draw off each other's life--one lover waxes while the other wanes, one 'pays' for the other's vitality. The theory becomes more and more complex before descending into chaos. (It's my sense that theory about translation and influence could do the same…Steiner's aggressive model comes to mind.) Like Kafka's description of letter-writing as and "intercourse with ghosts", translation seems to have much of the metamorphic potential, exchange, intrigue, and impossibility of love.
LD: Well, at the moment, again, I'm viewing translation much more positively--not as an act of betrayal, not as "drawing off" the life of the other. I see it as, really, doubling the other--which, in fact, literally, it is--increasing the other by almost the same amount again. Where, for instance, one version of a story in Dutch by A.L. Snijders existed before--he is the author I am translating at the moment--there are now two versions, his original and my translation. Mine does not replace his--treasonably--but supplements his. And of course, there is the oldest (positive) argument in favor of translation--my translation makes his work available to all those who don't read Dutch but do read English, even if my version (treasonably) does not give a reader absolutely everything given by the original.
As for intimacy, in my experience of translating both Proust and Flaubert, I found myself identifying very closely with them. I developed, imperceptibly, gradually, a tremendous loyalty to Proust, for instance, and felt that in order to compose a truly good translation, I had to become him, in a sense--this would perhaps be your idea of metamorphosis. I was composing his sentences, though without quite the struggle, doubt, and revision that he experienced. I was certainly in a very intimate relationship. The same was true in my experience of translating Flaubert, though to a somewhat less intense degree, partly because the project was not as extended and partly because Flaubert is a more difficult--crotchety, scornful--character. I think part of the pleasure I still find in translating is this possibility of metamorphosing into another writer and writing prose quite unlike the prose I write myself.
***
Lydia Davis was awarded the Man Booker International Prize in 2013. In addition to her well-acclaimed work as a writer of fiction, she has published many valuable French translations. These include Maurice Blanchot’s The Gaze of Orpheus and Other Literary Essays (1981), Michel Leiris’s Brisees: Broken Branches (1990), Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way (2004), Vivant Denon’s No Tomorrow (2009), and Gustave Flauber’s Madame Bovary (2010). Davis’s writing and translations have earned her the title of Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters in France. She is presently translating stories by A.L. Snijders from the Dutch. Her most recent book of short stories, Can’t and Won’t, is available from FSG as of April 2014.