A book reviewers lament

Bookslut - August 29, 2014

Image: "Saint Jerome" (1606) by Caravaggio.

Weekend Recommended Reading

-A couple of weeks ago, I had a conversation about the apparently emerging "books in translation" genre with EJ Van Lanen, who founded the eBooks-in-translation company Frisch & Co. (which is great/I've written about before), basically about how ridiculous it is that having originally been published in a language other than English relegates a contemporary book to a genre, the overarching problems of which I do not need to explain, and it's ridiculous not only because technically people like, you know, Proust should fall into it. It seems like this is changing, thanks partially to bestselling Scandinavians, partially to Murakami, and partially to everyone wanting to seem interesting and worldly. Thank God for the fall of the American empire. There's a great little profile of two Spanish->English translators, Edith Grossman and Natasha Wimmer, in Newsweek.

As I read more translated stuff, I find I'm often running into the same sort of "translation voice," characterized by an apparent skepticism of semi-colons and wide-eyed lack of contractions, as if all people who aren't anglophone write the same way. Dangerous, I say. Anyway, it's been said before, obviously, but damn, The Savage Detectives makes me feel like I'd trust Natasha Wimmer with my life. Her brilliance is especially obvious when you try to read Knausgaard, who is seeming, more and more, to have been a little shafted by his translator.

Wimmer moved to Mexico City while translating the book. She rented an apartment near one of the protagonists’ favorite coffee shops—it is a very geographically minded book, explains Wimmer, so understanding the neighborhood’s layout was important—and met with student fans of Bolaño to discuss the meaning of the book’s slang. Still, when she was three-quarters of the way through translating the novel, Wimmer decided to start over; she felt as if her sentence breaks were too different from Bolaño’s.

And she has amazing hair, too.

-For all you upstarts compiling "Top 13 Foreign Words That Are Untranslatable in English" articles, the Wikipedia entry for "Untranslatability"would like to politely interject:

Quite often, a text or utterance that is considered to be "untranslatable" is actually a lacuna, or lexical gap. That is, there is no one-to-one equivalence between the word, expression or turn of phrase in the source language and another word, expression or turn of phrase in the target language. A translator can, however, resort to a number of translation procedures to compensate for this. Therefore, untranslatability or difficulty of translation does not always carry deep linguistic relativity implications; denotation can virtually always be translated, given enough circumlocution, although connotation may be ineffable or inefficient to convey.

-The New York Review of Books has a long piece about Khmer people who feel "denied their 'right to the precise term for what was done to us'" in the wake of the UN-backed tribunal's conviction of the last two Khmer Rouge leaders for crimes against humanity—and not "genocide." It's an interesting mini-history of the word in Cambodian culture vs. the precise meaning established by the 1948 Genocide Convention, and very follow-able/introductory if you don't know much about the Khmer Rouge. Plus Cambodian Folk Stories from the Gatiloke.
-And two things about lying in bed. 1) If only they'd had laptops in 1909. 2):

Dost thou not see the little plants, the little birds, the ants, the spiders, the bees working together to put in order their several parts of the universe? And art thou unwilling to do the work of a human being, and dost thou not make haste to do that which is according to thy nature?- But it is necessary to take rest also.

That's Marcus Aurelius, 167 CE.

Posted by Lauren Oyler | link