 Hello! Hi everyone! It's so delightful to see such a packed room and it's so exciting to be back at ALTA. Let me just introduce, this is an insider's look at the politics of reviewing translations. And this is an exciting ground table which is co-moderated. This is my co-moderator. We've seen a shell kind of the cushioner. We've seen him introduce herself first, then I'll introduce myself and each panelist will introduce him or herself, as the case may be. And we'll get going. Okay, so Lucina, tell us about yourself. Alright, so I'm Lucina Schell. I created and edit the site ReadingandTranslation.com, which is dedicated to publishing reviews of translations written by translators. In addition, we publish some interviews with publishers and other content related to the industry, but mainly it's reviews. And we're trying to fill the void in reviewing in which translators are really kind of ignored. And the aspect of translation is not evaluated. That's what we emphasize. It's wonderful. Okay, many people in the room know me. I'm Abiyah Kushner. I'm a writer. I write about translation and about living between languages. My first book will be out in August. It's called The Grammar of God, A Journey into the Words and Worlds of the Bible. And I review and write about literature and translation frequently for the Wilson Quarterly, the Iowa Review, Tri Quarterly, the Jerusalem Post, blah, blah, blah. And so this is a topic near and dear to my heart. Sitting next to me has been a proctor. Do you want me to stand? Would standing help or sitting okay? Can you hear us or do you need a microphone help? It's for recording, right? It's not broadcasting. I'll just sell it. No, no, I'll sell it for broadcasting. You're so simultaneous in Chinese. I'm Minna Proctor. I edit the literary review, which publishes work in translation, includes some essays that are kind of like reviews. I also do a great deal of book reviewing, and often am given, let's see, books in translations to review. That's my feet. I'm a translation girl. I review mostly now for book forum, and that's enough. Oh, and I translated more in the olden days from Italian, but not anymore, as much. Hello, I'm Scarce Zito. We're in a place called Two Lines Press, which is a program at the Center for the Art of Translation. I write a lot of reviews about translations. They get published in a lot of places. I'm sure that'll come up and stuff. I also edit a publication called The Quarterly Conversation. We cover a lot of translations. Lots of translation in my life. And tell us about the places you review for, which are so interesting. Yeah, I don't know, like The TLS, Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, I don't know, smaller venues. I've done some work for book forum before, I don't know, random stuff. It's all up there on my website. Good morning. I'm Eric Lorber. I'm the Director of Brain Taxi. We're an organization that champions independent literary culture. So we're not translation specific, but we do cover a lot of translation in different ways. We publish a Quarterly book review journal. You're welcome to have a copy if you'd like today, if you don't know it. We also hold events, and translators and foreign language authors often speak of those. And we publish literary chat books. And again, some of those are in translation. Good morning. I'm Scott Venom, and unlike most everybody else on the panel, my primary way of earning my living is not reviewing or translating, though I've translated Thomas Mann. That's not a primary way of doing it. A flavor of love. For the new review, but I'm a teacher. I teach at Davidson College, which is a small, highly selected liberal arts college in North Carolina. And over the last four or five years, several of us who have done literary translation have started teaching about literary translation. And so the connection here is that when we select a text for a classroom in some ways, that's kind of like reviewing. You know, we tell them what they should read for them. So that's where I am. Well, as you can see, we're really lucky to have such a wonderful panel with such a diverse array of publications that are represented here. My first question to everyone is the most basic, okay? How do you figure out what is an important book? Oh, Lucas just... Oh, hi, Lucas. Oh, okay. What's that? Lucas, why don't you introduce yourself? Oh, boy. And we'll get you a chair, okay? You have to stand for your introduction anyway. I just stand for my introduction. I'm Lucas Fine. I've reviewed a lot of friends of yours. You know what we're seeing? Maybe we should sit down here. Yeah, yeah. Okay. We've got such a large panel here. Super exciting. Okay. All right. So how do you figure out which books are important? How do you figure that out? Lucas, since Minna was closest to Minna, how do you... How does that happen? In terms of assigning reviews or court pitching... Yes, yes. What matters? I think that translation is that there's... From the assigning reviews end of things, if you're an editor and you've got a whole lot of books coming in, the interesting thing about books in translation is that the different rules apply. If you're dealing with a mainstream publication, there's little kind of keys that you're supposed to follow, like, oh, this is from this publishing house or this author that everybody's excited about. And in translation, for the most part, there are no kind of obvious indicators. Everything is... You have to look at everything. You have to look at everything, a new read into it. We tend to... At the places at TLR, the literary review, or I used to do book review assignments at Bomb Magazine, things would come in and they were in translation, so we were interested in them because they were in translation, and then we'd look at the... You really have to read into the pages, because in many cases with work in translation, it's new to you. And you can also assume that the latest translation of Kafka, the Times is going to handle, and so you don't need to worry. It's not your business with your working in an independent environment. You don't need as much to worry about that. So there aren't as many obvious keys. You have to find something that you respond to. So you look at the matter that's included, the publicity material, and you probably read seven of the poems really fast in the first chapter of the book, and go from there. Wow. Wow. Yeah. I mean, I would... Yeah. Okay. And unhelp it in the wrong place. I'm just gonna lay it right there and see what happens. Yeah, so I definitely agree. It's hard to find keys, or maybe the keys that you do look at are a little switched up from stuff to natively written in English. But I feel like I have to try to triage a little bit because there's a lot of these books and a lot of them look really cool and a lot of them come from presses, whose names I don't recognize, so it's hard to kind of make judgments based on that. So I rely on my friends a lot. I know a lot of people in this industry and just kind of having regular conversations and stuff like that with them. You kind of build up a certain knowledge base and you do recognize names and things pop out at you. So I just kind of try to stay on top of what people are finding interesting at the moment. And again, stuff like Twitter and Facebook are really good for that. You can just kind of pick up what people are talking about at the moment and that stuff stays on your mind. I also use the names of translators. I mean, sorry, I love some of you more than others. I love you all in some sense, I'm sure. But definitely it's like getting a good recommendation from a friend. You just come to trust someone who has similar tastes to your taste, who is gonna do a good job with it. That's definitely something I'll key in on. I'll also key in on the names of presses. I don't mean to ever not look at stuff from a press that I haven't heard of, but definitely some presses have established in my mind that they represent quality or they represent an aesthetic that is also my aesthetic. So those are all kind of things that I'm looking at when I try to triage. Although also I agree with men, you try to read as much as you can. And also just to kind of chime in on the whole the Times is gonna do Kafka thing. I mean, I definitely agree with that. And there are certain things that I'll feel less pressure to cover because I feel like they have a good chance of getting out there. But in a periodical like the quarterly conversation or probably some of the others represent on this panel, we're gonna give a look at that Kafka that's gonna be very different from the Times' look. And I think that's like a really valuable thing to put out there, especially nowadays when someone Googling like new Kafka translation is probably gonna find a review fair easily. So I mean, I think it's important just to get that out there if you can. I have no wonder if you can chime in which translation's gonna be reviewed. Sure. Well, at the risk of being contrarian so early in the morning, I do want to say that that I'd caution against thinking that a reviewed book is a more important book than a not reviewed book. I mean, and Scott has laid out there are so many vectors that go into a selection process that certainly merit is one of them. But I think that it's important to kind of destabilize some hierarchical thinking about that. For me, the key element is whether I have a writer who can bring a combination of passion and acumen to the task. And so it might not be a book that is necessarily the be all and end all of this season's publishing. But to have someone who can discuss it with some grit would, I think, foment an important critical dynamic. So from my point of view as an academic and primarily a teacher, the parallel here would be, say, in the course meeting in May for next fall's first semester of a four-course sequence called the Western Tradition, which is Gilgamesh to Postmodernism over four semesters, and about a fifth of the whole class takes that. So it's kind of a legacy course at Davidson College. And so we're wondering, you know, what Homer are we going to, what Odyssey or what Iliad, whatever we're doing that year. And most of the people teaching in that class are not classical philologists, but, you know, impassioned readers of translation because that's what we teach. And so we're going to go to Google and see, you know, who is talking about, you know, the relationship between, you know, the new Homer translation to older ones. But that's just the start of the conversation because then we have to think, is this going to cost students 29.95 or is it going to be free from, you know, Gutenberg? And sometimes we have a stack of 10 or 15 texts that students are going to buy and we will often choose a 19th century translation because it's out of copyright and free. And talk about that in class and say, you know, here's an excerpt from this. This person made choice about verse, about, you know, domesticating a text, all the kind of stuff that you all do. But we have very different concerns and then that becomes the canonical text. So, you know, sometimes the Iliad, you know, from a text that's very distant from our world right now as a translation. So that's an interesting aspect. Well, this is a really fascinating translation that goes nowhere because it costs money. Imagine that. And Eric, if I'm understanding you correctly, a write about a book could take it out of consideration. Is that a fair understanding? That's absolutely fair. But I'd like to make the glass half full and say having the right writer for a project can make it really exciting. Yesterday we posted a review, I was just mentioning of Kurt Tukowski, two books in translation. And I feel like we just had the perfect writer for it. I'm not saying everyone should run out and get these books. But I feel like we have a piece that makes, you know, that creates some interest and we wouldn't have had that piece without the right person. I'll just add in here on the whole, on that subject. I mean, I totally agree with what you're saying. And it definitely comes through, like when I'm reading a review that someone submitted to me, you know, like a lot of times it just isn't very compelling or it doesn't sound like the book is being talked about in a way that makes the book sound interesting or kind of shows its best side to the public. And I mean, that's something that I really wouldn't want to publish just because, you know, it makes the book sound boring and people are going to be bored by reading it so no one's going to want to read my journal. And it's not really doing the book any service if you're making an interesting thing sound boring. And I mean, that's kind of my own criteria, too, as a critic. You know, I'm always trying to find kind of the most interesting angle on a book to talk about it. Even, you know, we're talking before this panel about positive reviews versus negative reviews. And I feel like either one of them can have value if you are actually keying in on what makes a book an interesting thing to discuss and talking about that in an intelligent way. So I'm always trying to do that as a critic. The reviews that I hate writing the most are when I just have something where I'm kind of like, eh, and you know, and there's nothing really to say about it and it can be really hard to like fill up 800 words because there's not a lot of space on a book like that. Isn't it hard to say that translations of languages that are rarely reviewed or translations from countries which somehow don't have writers who write about them a lot? I'm thinking back to my time in graduate school, I remember there was a Mongolian writer who came through, for instance. And apparently a major writer in Mongolia, it was very difficult to get him any play because there was no one who was particularly interested in Mongolia at that time. Can we talk about that? Are some countries or some languages more likely to get reviewed than others? In my experience, yes. But I think that those of us in the field should actually make an extra effort. I mean, it comes down to that. We have a review in this issue of a book from the Inuit. And the reviewer does not know Inuit, I'll confess. But we felt it was really important to but does know history of the region and felt it was really important, largely because this wasn't going to get a lot of play in a lot of places. What are things translators can do to make it more likely that an unusual book like the one you're describing, Eric, would get play? Is there something a translator can do? This is mine. Please, yes, please. I'm just kind of rehearsing something that we talked about at the Alta Conference in Rochester. But I'm a firm believer in translators getting involved in preparing a little bit of peripheral material for their book. I think that if you do think about reviewers or even editors, sometimes I look for serial for work to put in the magazine or I'm looking for work to write about, I think that if you as a writer or translator think about piles of books that are coming into editors and you're being plucked out of a pile, if you're able as a translator to somehow provide any kind of extra material that will give an editor a road map into the book, especially if it's Mongolian or if it's something that is in many ways extra foreign, which is probably another panel, but if it's more foreign than the regular foreign, if you as a translator can provide almost like a story or a narrative about the book, how you came to the book, how the author came to the world, any kind of tale or story about the work to accompany the work, I actually think gives all of us more interest, more reason to be interested in it and that's really what you want to do is peak interest. Stories help, stories are really, really useful even if it's like a language poet from Mongolia that's almost in many ways inaccessible. If there's a really good story around it, there's some way into the work. Yeah, I'll just add to that. Definitely translators are probably the best people in terms of being in a position to talk about a book in an interesting way. More likely than not, love this book, you've worked with it for a long time to know what makes this book interesting. I know that not everyone really feels confident in terms of writing a whole essay about the book that is translated or stuff like that. Interviews are a really good way to get into that. If you have someone posing intelligent questions to you, I feel like that can really help you articulate what you like about a book and there are lots of websites these days who are actually fairly interested in running interviews with translators so if you guys seek those out, if you can just make a pretty good pitch, like key in on those one or two things that makes your book noteworthy, a lot of times people will be really interested in interviewing you. And also, I know that not everyone totally loves social media, but definitely just having a presence there and putting out, this is my new book, this is an interesting thing about it. That does kind of get around and that's where I for one get a lot of information, so I would encourage you to have some kind of a presence up there. I would caution against just sort of becoming a second publicist. That's not typically what the book needs from an editor's point of view. But I do absolutely, from what I understand translators can sometimes feel a little effaced in the world. And I do really concur with both Minnan and Scott that to be present, to have your voice there, not even as an editor, as a reader of translations, I would welcome a lot more translators' prefaces afterwards, context. I love that stuff and the more it can be in the world, the more people remember that you were part of the process. And yeah, so being present, I would also say the same thing about doing that in person and that's why in our reading series and book festivals we regularly include foreign language authors and translators. It reminds people, hey, you're a real person. And if you're able to speak publicly, even a short thing at a local bookstore, whatever, I think is great. Let me add to that so not the bad news about not buying translations from you all, but in the course that several of those who have done translation developed called the Theory and Practice of Literary Translation, I'd be happy to send, you know, post the syllabus on the Davidson germ on my web page or something and get suggestions from you all. So it's a workshop creative writing course and students bring translation from various languages, so we're all not reading the same languages. And the capstone project in the course, there's two, one is a soiree which is sort of like the déclimation here, I guess, which is my first Alta, I'm really excited. The other is a translation and two framing essays. One is about the, one is a kind of annotation section about problems and puzzles and choices and one is a context essay, just the kinds of things you're talking about and students go to good models of that and that's some of the most exciting intellectual work for us in the group because they're teaching us about this contemporary Arab poet or this Brazilian writer that none of us know about but we all know about the process and so from the point of view of the real intellectual work that happens in the classroom around teaching how literary translation works these, you know, what Jeanette would call like the paratext, this is fundamental, this is really, really fundamental and models, they're great models out there that you all are looking for so that's key for us as a teacher. Have the worst design and production values possible? Yeah, no, I mean, honestly don't judge a book by its cover but when things just come in the mail and they look sad and poorly made it's hard to feel excited about them. I mean, sometimes they're really good it's just like, if you get like five packages you're going to want to go to the pretty one, that's just... I mean, it depends on the periodical, totally you know, my experience, not a ton and we were talking about this before the panel but like, when I'm writing for like very large circulation mainstream venues, you know, they don't care at all the only one that I've experienced that really is a plus is the TLS and that's why I love them and why... How is that in your cell phone? Yeah, and why I consider that they actually really care about translation I mean, that's an important thing to them and they'll often know about things before I know about them they're the only place that will send me stuff that I've never heard of and it'll be really great but you know, a lot of times that stuff will get cut out or that stuff just really isn't required in any meaningful sense but then, you know, when you're writing for other kinds of more journal-y things that's like a plus but those are usually involving people who have some investment in translation either the editor does or the journal specifically a translation journal I've found that as a reviewer length has a lot to do with it a TLS review is going to be very long that I've done you know, 500, 700 word reviews where you barely have the time to kind of talk about the book and the author and so it's difficult to say something that sometimes in order to avoid saying with a lyrical translation by blah blah blah you know, in a way it's like to avoid the offense of saying something really glib and offhand in like a parenthetical that you might actually be able to fit in I won't talk about it but but then when you're working in a sort of medium length which is what I tend to work on the what is medium length to me in length is 1600 words wow and it is long and I feel like I have space in 1600 words but not in a thousand often at that point for me as a reviewer the and the editors don't care if you can make a good argument for talking about translation then it stays if you're doing it kind of pro forma it's likely to get cut for space but I mean if you've incorporated it into the review it makes sense it has something to do with the book it's all related they're not going to cut it just because it's about translation they're going to cut it because it's not directly related to your main point so it a lot of it has to do with the medium length essay is how much the translation is part of the story about a book that you're telling as a reader and a reviewer just I mean I just respond to a few of those points which I mean I agree towards what you're saying it should always be germane to kind of the flow of what you're saying like I just wrote a review of the new book by Patrick Modiano the Nobel laureate and it's like an 800 word review and I got to the end of it and I hadn't mentioned the translator and I felt really awful about that I mean no really like I really tried to get it in every time but I just you know it's like there is no possible seam here for this to fit in anywhere I don't know if I can do this that all being said even like those really kind of short mentions where you're like this is an excellent translation by so and so I mean I used to be of the school of like don't include that like that's just so kind of minor it's not worth it but a lot of translators have actually told me like I really appreciate seeing just that so I do I do try to work even that in nowadays just because of that but I mean I agree like most like newspaper lengths you're writing at like 800 to 1000 words is really hard to get any kind of intelligent discussion of it unless it's just there's some weird aspect of the book that really makes the translation the story in some sense in which case you know it's a fairly important thing that you can work into the flow mentioning a translation is also going to allow it to be pulled by search engines you know if often the header is going to be you know an image rather than text and so it might be that that one like mentioned is the only place the translator is going to be searchable okay so I just wanted to caveat that if I mentioned the language I would mention the translator I would not I mean as a translator I mean and I remember translating a book that I think I improved greatly in translation I think I made it palatable in English and I remember all of the reviews talked about the gorgeous language and just to me as the translator it was like over and over and over again what wonderful language this woman had and I remember thinking it's how offensive it was that there was no mention of the fact that it was a translation so as a reviewer if I say the language is beautiful I am going to credit the translator I didn't mean to say that I just meant I wouldn't put it in pro forma yeah I agree and I think there is a difference between like talking about kind of the aesthetics or the larger structural issues of a book versus like the language in a very specific sense you know I mean one is a lot more easily attributable to the original author than the other so I mean I do try to kind of have that distinction and praise people accordingly rain taxi I've never personally run for rain taxi so I don't know but I wonder if you have some guidelines whether formal or informal for whether you want the reviewer of a book in translation to discuss the actual quality of the translation is that a way in here the answer is no and in listening to Scott Minna here I was thinking I was reflecting that you know our pieces really have run the gamut from those that you know we identify any translated book in the header for search purposes and for acknowledgement purposes before there was search but I mean it's the right thing to do obviously but there are pieces that won't discuss the translation at all largely I think for the reason Scott was talking about it's just not part of the fabric of that short piece and there are pieces that you know will go into what some readers might find a bit too much you know interrogation of the quality of a certain transliterative you know element and we don't you know we kind of want people to follow their bliss a little bit and mostly you know connect if that's the way they're going to connect with it and remembering that the third element out there is their reader their audience our audience and how that person's going to become engaged in that conversation is really key so yeah long answer but we find it more useful not to have strict guidelines about how to do it someone who most of those published reviews of translations were in rain tax I I think that I'll second that and say that Eric never gave me strong guidelines beyond you know right the way that you think is right that said I got the sense that you know Eric's goal of finding the right person for a review was finding someone at least in my case who could and would talk about the quality of the translation and the quality of the writing and have that be you know both an integrated topic and integral to the point of the review itself you know I I don't like a pro forma kind of you know ably translated by seamlessly translated by I don't like that any better than anybody else but I do think that's better than nothing and better than that is a discussion where translation is ultimately the point of the review I won't write a review I barely write anything where translation isn't the main point of life every so often I may have a discussion that's not ultimately about translation but even then pretty much that's all I have to talk about well you have many people who agree with me I know my audience and I just wanted to say for those who haven't read it Edith Grossman has a fabulous discussion of what's wrong with the phrase ably translated in her book why translation matters so I just want to recommend if reading about that makes you happy I won't recommend that book and I know it so you know as you can probably tell this discussion has two broad components first we got some input from editors on what's going on in the translation landscape and now we're going to switch a little bit and Lucina is going to ask some questions about why translators should review what translators can do about the situation I'd like to continue with the discussion that Lucas just started and if you could talk a little bit more about do you only review books from languages that you know and do you think that's important most of the books that I've reviewed have been assigned to me by her and so because of that most of the books that I have reviewed have been other people's translations from Chinese and English usually poetry but not always one of the particular one of my favorite reviews that I wrote was when Iraq asked me to write a review of Angela Wagenstein's Bulgarian novel translated into English called Farewell Shanghai and so the reason that he asked me to I expect was this is a book about that took place in China but it was a book talking about the experience of in the Jewish community in Shanghai under Japanese occupied Shanghai when Japan were allies with access allies with Nazi Germany during World War II and a novel written in Bulgarian I was in grad school and I had a friend who was Bulgarian we had a university library where I could access the source text and with my friend Rostin we went through a couple of passages and he told me generally how it was translated and I was able to talk about the translation in what I thought was it wasn't an intelligence in an approachable way even when I didn't know the source language and I felt like I was able to do that because I know how to talk about translation certainly I can do better talking about translation from a language I know but I think that there are things that we as translators understand about translation that the vast majority of the world does not understand and I really think that we should be reviewing as much translation as possible even and maybe even especially from languages where the source language we were not familiar with and there's another reason that I say this and this is again this has to do with the point about editors finding the right people for their to assign their reviews to if that's too narrow then that becomes a problem for a long time I felt like I was the Chinese literature guy for Rain Taxi then I moved out of the United States and Rain Taxi their budget for postage could no longer reach me and then I published a translation and I was really looking forward to Rain Taxi reviewing my book and it never happened because there was no other Chinese poetry guy maybe I mean I don't know the details of that and I don't know maybe you're just like why review for him he never gave anybody a favorable review in the eight years I don't know probably maybe something like that but I'll pretend it was you know that he tried really hard to find someone but the fact is that you know you're talking about translators being more proactive in framing their work and so on I published a book I wrote an introduction where I felt like I covered the context of I felt like I covered the context of the poetry that was being translated and so on where the author was coming from individually historically in terms of literature and I was very fortunate that I got for this book some of the reviews were written by people in this room so obviously fortunate and yet right also these reviews were written by people who said things very similar to what I was saying in my introduction and I felt like I also think that the other part of translation is how this works in the target text how this comes across in English and I was really hoping that there could be someone who didn't know about China and didn't feel like the goal of the review was to introduce China to the relationship of the review but rather to say in terms of poetry in English that we acknowledge as a translation how do we approach this where does this fit into in terms of a target centered review and that as long as we're talking about the political aspect of reviewing translations that's something that I feel like for pretty good reasons we've actually turned into a place that we're going to find ourselves surrounded by a handful of dead ends and calls to sat I think that I'd like to see in reviewing I'd like to see more discussion of what these translations are for rather than just only where they're coming from obviously where they're coming from is very important but when I translate I'm not only translating to explain China or Chinese poetry to a broader audience the audience of China is actually pretty broad on its own so I'm trying to do that for a certain community the reviews that I've written whether for rain taxi whether it's a general set of aesthetic taste markers that the readership has there or for academic for academic venues where the discussion of translation is a little bit different and you might want to talk about how this is going to work in a classroom and how much the book costs and so on whether this is just one more anthology when that's all that we've had for the last 30 years things like that so if you as translators I think that the more that you and we can review works of translation where maybe we don't know the source language that will open up new possibilities for the discussion of translation for people's awareness of translation and I think that could be a good thing to you and other panelists maybe Scott both of our Scott's weigh in on this do you think that translators have a responsibility to advocate for other translators in reviewing and when translation is so you know hardly discussed in reviews how do you approach a more negative or critical review of translation I don't know if I would say like a responsibility I think it would be a really nice thing to do to advocate for other translators I mean I don't know I guess like the counterfactual would be do people who just write natively in English advocate for other people who write in English and I think the answer to that is yes and no like if you if you look at kind of the it books that are the big darlings of New York publishing these days if you look on the back of them at all the raves like it's the same like 5 to 10 people were raving each other so like right there is like a form of solidarity and help that you know and the connections that all those people have are getting those books covered by the times and stuff like that they are even like on a much smaller level you know like there are certain communities that form like in the American MFAC and there are lots and lots of sub-communities and those people are very active on the web helping one another out so I mean I feel like definitely there is a sense of solidarity that forms around certain aesthetics and translation is you know the same in that sense you know I mean maybe I wouldn't go so far to say responsibility that just seems like you know I think people have right to be left alone or if you just want to do your thing like you can do that but definitely just to echo some of the things that Lucas said translators and people who edit and work in translation understand those principles just innately a lot more than people who don't and so you know you're going to talk about it from a much more informed perspective even if you don't know the source language even if you don't have any idea of the original culture it came out of you're just going to be looking at things and just keying in on stuff in a much more intelligent way you know so like you may not say anything stupid and your review is going to offend someone which probably seems really basic to you but it's actually like a really high standard to live up to if you look at a lot of translation reviews can I actually because I know you talked about negative reviews of breakfast and I missed that but the I do tend to get assigned books from Italian because it's useful that I know the culture around the books often I know the authors so I can't speak from a more informed perspective but also you know the little kind of competitive beast in me that's like the you know the other Italian translators are making choices that I wouldn't have made which I actually think isn't a discussion that belongs in a review it's sort of something that you just tell yourself at home but in terms of but what I think is interesting is that I so I'll sometimes get books that I don't think are translated well from the Italian for whatever reason and I won't review them I don't because just as a reviewer and this covers translated works and untranslated works I did a couple of negative reviews when I was very green and very young and arrogant and not only do I regret them but I found over the years that it's much more interesting to figure out what works in a book than what doesn't so if I get a book that I think sucks I don't really want to spend the time with it and I don't actually think that I want to tell people not to read something it's much more interesting to tell people to read something and why to read something and why something is working so it's not like rah rah only nice things it's just I actually think critically it's much more interesting challenge to figure out what's going on that's right rather than what's going on that's wrong and so if the extra little competitive thing where I see more flaws with an Italian translator translation that might add to that but generally speaking I think it's more interesting to know more and to be able to talk about what's going on that's right yeah I mean I guess I would just I agree with it's more interesting to figure out why a book's working I guess just one caveat like sometimes books suck in really interesting ways you know I mean either like it's a really big author and this book is just an outlier or it didn't work or you know or it's something that it's just it fails in some important way but there's also a lot that's right about it and so overall for you this is not a successful book but it's really kind of interesting to tease out like where things went off course or why something just wasn't working and I mean and this can be you know very subjective maybe just for you personally this book failed and you know and so you could acknowledge like this just kind of killed it and I'm interested in understanding why that is but it may not kill it for you you know someone else is reading your review yeah I'd love to concur with some books suck some books are shit and the world needs to know why I do not endorse that no I mean we could certainly have it both ways and just to your original question really I think that that where you're it's not important that one advocates for another translator or another writer or supports that person personally what I think one's advocating for in an intelligent piece that appreciates what is it being attempted that looks at why things work that perhaps take issue takes issue with why things don't work is that we're advocating for a culture that values that labor and that I think is really the the key element I have very high standards for for translation and you know I have not always met that I've published shit myself I won't tell you which of the pieces that I've published are shitty translations you can find out on that but you know I don't regret the negative reviews that I've published and I have a lot of fun reading negative reviews of books as well I don't want I don't want to pick up a bunch of book reviews and feel like I'm reading ad copy you know I don't want everything to be like oh this is great go buy this go buy this go buy this great now I have less money more shit to read I'm happy to I'm happy to say oh great I can avoid that now thanks very much you know so I can fulfill that role as a writer of reviews too and if that creates a discussion around these issues then all the better I agree like nobody in this room wants to read a bunch of reviews that read like marketing copy and are very clearly you know not being honest about the feelings or just not penetrating very deep into what a book is about but I feel like that can also work for negative reviews actually like this sheet I'm looking at says Stefan Zweig on it and that's like a really good example like Michael Hoffman who is just like a really noted sour mean man I mean I'm sure is really nice but in like his critical stance he often comes off like that which is cool I mean it's like it's his ditch and he writes really really interesting reviews for the one review books because of it but like I remember he wrote a really infamous review about Stefan Zweig where he basically you know called him like lesser Joseph Roth and just every savage thing you could think about a person to say and I felt like that review actually wasn't very sincere he he quoted a lot of like stuff out of context you know a lot of things that made Zweig look really bad or like things where he was praising his contemporaries and it just it felt you know a little disingenuous to me like he had a bit of an agenda and he was trying to you know get an argument across more than actually registering a deeply felt belief about Stefan Zweig so you know negative reviews can be like that too even though I would agree that it's usually more the overly generous reviews that come off that way let me just follow up on the Zweig review by Hoffman because that's one one thing I'm working on and teaching right now is Stefan Zweig and one question is how does this I mean so Hoffman is representative of much of the feeling about Zweig among you know Germanists among me in the Academy so Stefan Zweig is not on anybody's doctoral reading list but when Zweig goes out of copyright all of a sudden the Pushkin Press is you know putting out a book a month right and with good translators, Anthea Bell who did Zemald has done some of those translations and I think Hoffman is having a real hissy fit because he just think that Zweig is really a mediocre writer from the middle of the century and then he has his shtick which he has as you mentioned more broadly that he is like Mr. Crotchety and that's his thing and everybody wants to read Hoffman because it's just so it's like Schadenfreude at its best but that in the sort of you know academic Germanist circles really generated a lot of serious engagement with Zweig now you know how do we judge what's good and what's the relationship of Zweig's sort of typical often uninteresting mid-century prose to his place in exile and to his suicide and to all these kinds of other things so Hoffman is talking about Zweig's language mostly but for most readers and new readers of Zweig it's really all about context and history so a lot of ways and so Hoffman put that on the table for people who knew enough to pay attention instead of like gosh I'm never reading him so that I don't know who he's speaking to but I think more to me than to other people other people who don't know the German mid-century context, Austrian mid-century context I'd like to just chime in though and say as a reader I'm sort of glad that some mediocre writers and books get translated I think there's a place for that and I think part of that place is to ask and answer the questions you're talking about this isn't we shouldn't have such an insular party that there's only a handful of people at the table it's fun to read because he's not Hermann Brauch or something he's fun to read because you can read him and most sort of mid-century German modernists who are canonized are just hard so finally we get somebody who's talking about Austria and it's like really engaging and you want to turn the pages instead of like oh shit what are these why am I reading Muzio this is just no fun though I teach Muzio too but slowly is there a correlation between the invisibility of translation and reviews and the invisibility of translation in the academy yeah very much so in the sort of Homer example you know there's just never any engagement with translators and so imagine you know whatever we've got a set of distribution requirements general education requirements for really smart students who are asked to do you know they're we have a very rigorous curriculum and you know probably four fifths of what they read in their first two years in the humanities and social sciences is in translation and there's zero acknowledgement of that you know if they're in their social theory class or theory of anthropology or most things in the religion department philosophy world lit I mean you know there's just that's just not on the table at all and so in some ways that's part of our the group of us who are talking about the theory and practice of literary translation is to bring that to the table bring that element of really invisibility the translator in the academy when it's not at the center of things at least into discussion it's really it's entertaining you know to listen to colleagues get really excited about some passage in whatever you know Max Weber or Durkheim or something and they have it's they're parsing you know lexically what's going on and that's just not enough right I mean that's just not enough if you're or Kant for example you know there's a seminar on Kant it's taught by this wonderful kind of rockstar teacher who has a cult following and he doesn't know any German so it's okay but it's just different from the way it should be I have a question for the group like you particular but anyone else who knows about like that kind of a setting and I agree that it's really lamentable that you have people reading all these texts that have been translated and there's never a mention of it and there should at least at the very least be an awareness that these things are translations but like in a very kind of material sense like for the benefit of the course for the benefit of the students what do you feel is brought to that discussion by actually acknowledging the translation and bringing that more into the light ambiguity you know so kind of post structural questions the text is not this thing carved in stone the text has a context the text has readers different translators present different understandings and make different choices so and especially for my philosopher colleagues right who think like things mean what they say to talk about translation just destabilizes everything which makes for great teaching and great classroom moments because it empowers these young new readers to be able to make judgments that they can defend so it's about for me it's about ambiguity to point that out and to add on to that although less post structurally would be just historicity and the fact that it creates an awareness that our language changes over time and I think especially for students to understand that the language we're speaking now is far from static can be a profound experience you know I just want to express my gratitude to Scott and Eric for making these comments because I spent a decade writing on the Bible and it astonishes me the certainty with which people will quote an individual biblical translation sure that's what it says and I think we see that throughout the academic context just absolutely no thought to the centuries that have passed very interesting I'd like to switch gears and ask one more question that I think we should open it up to everyone questioning one another but Scott brought in the social media aspect and one of the campaigns that's been popular over the past year or two has been the hashtag named the translator so when one sees a review in a major publication where the translator is not acknowledged even in the heading even in the byline you then tweet it and you go hashtag name the translator and enough people do it and you shame the publication into them recognizing the translator do people do that is that where we should be putting our energy oh okay yeah shaming publications that's good I got named the translator weird because like I just like I got this new book by Alejandro Zombra that McSweeney's is publishing and I thought was really cool like I love him and I know a lot of people are really excited about him so like I just tweeted a picture of it like I didn't actually name the author I think it was just like oh this is cool from McSweeney's and it's like a picture of the cover and like someone named the translator me and I was just like really like come on so I mean yeah like there's definitely you should be out there like saying like hey there's a translator attached to this but like there's a cool way and a not cool way to do it and definitely like not cool way would be shaming Scott don't ever don't ever step to me but I mean like there are people who are on your side or at least are trying to be on your side and like ask those people nicely and then there are just people who are never going to get in and just totally say whatever you want to them maybe yeah just be aware of the context I've actually never I don't tweet I do have a pretty active Facebook account but I never hashtag anything but notwithstanding I'm very supportive of shaming organizations that deserve shame you know individual reviewers who make excuses for not naming the translators and their editors who say oh well you know it would be cumbersome screw that you know I'm not cumbersome I'm part of this book and it's distribution into this language and my friends and I deserve recognition I have no problem you know shaming like you know be cool about it and don't shame Scott but like I have no problem with that kind of with that kind of with that element of advocacy for what we do Back in the olden days before hashtags and Facebook and social media we used to have a watchdog committee where we would write letters put them in envelopes and mail them to the publications where we I know and hardly a groundswell and we'd send letters to the New York Times or to whatever review that had and it was exactly the same thing it was you have neglected to include the translator and that is a disservice to the literary citizenship and shame on you and I don't know how effective we were but we did do it diligently it was just something you did in the pen offices back in the 90's I do think though and I guess I want to echo what Scott maybe said that a lot of these people actually are on your side or potentially on your side and rather than shame there might be a way to invite them into a broader and more sophisticated sense of what we're doing as a culture and why they can participate and help that's a beautiful comment yeah we'd like to open it up to all of you and as well to the panelists if you have questions in the back there just briefly I heard on the one hand don't be a second publicist but on the other hand provide a roadmap to help the that's at the same tension we all can build so I'll put in our translators forward or we'll put that roadmap and we think now that I've been lying to the world would you not read this after this great forward so you could so much to read do you open up to chapter or whatever or do you just go to the translators forward what role does that play in helping you with the roadmap and that came up in this panel that we did on this because we had a publicist on the panel who was like stay out of my business and I understand that you don't want to be a second publicist I don't think translators should be composing press releases or anything like that but I do think that for the most part in the world of literary publishing and especially in translations it's a small community it is a community and we do things like have these conferences I think that for example if if you know somebody at a publication I mean if you as a translator were to send the book or send an email even saying you know my books coming out it's not being a second publicist it's just being part of the process not feeling shy about your book coming out maybe for example at the literary review we publish a lot of work in translation I try to know if one of my translators has a book coming out we'll pay attention to it and see if we can do something more with it but I don't always know and we're all so small you know will I see something and I miss it if one of my contributors comes to me and says I have a book coming out I just want to make sure you know about it that actually that has a value to me and it's part of the it's part of the community I want to support our contributors so for example in that case you might write to the magazine instead of published you the people you might know an email and that's sort of what I mean is keeping part of the process and yes of course if you've written an introduction there's the story you might maybe have a little tiny paraphrase of it you know I wanted to remind you about this book I spent years working on this this is my labor of love I found this this book in an old trunk and an attic and Moldavia and I carried it to the United States wrapped in ham whatever it might be but just giving a little bit of that spirit into the into your presence I do a fair amount of publicity work so just a chime in from that angle I think I know exactly who you're referring to with the scary don't fuck with my business guy but so yeah like don't try to do the work of the publicist for the publicist that's going to be really annoying and you may do more harm than good but if you can give that person pertinent information like yeah like you know a story that's compelling about the book some facts about like where it came out of even like raves that may have been in a foreign language press that will be useful like stuff like that is really helpful so you can be very helpful to the publicist and just like from my perspective if a translator is willing to work with me and be useful in that way like I love that so definitely like yeah like you can there's like that room for you to maneuver in and one thing I'd be curious about is um in the spirit of the back well first of all not every book does have a preface so in many there's a difference when I'm looking at books that do or don't it goes into the selection process of finding a writer because there may be a different task at hand but even if it does in the spirit of the back story I'd love to know is there more because what I really value what I'm looking for what I value is the intellectual content of what you've done and so and that's why I say you don't need to be a second publicist you're you have a higher calling there but maybe there's more to the story and maybe knowing that is going to contour how I think about placing the book I dressed this a little bit but I was just um I dressed it a little more directly um I'm wondering how much at the time reviewers of translations consult the source text and I mean it seems to me that even to say ably translated without having compared to translation with the original I don't actually understand where that how you can say it's ably translated if you haven't looked at the original and I understand what you've said about especially Lucas was talking about how this would be said for reviewing from languages you don't know but I just I had no idea is it like 80% of the time people don't look at the original or what is the overall picture with that I mean just to kind of talk about how I evaluate a translation like I mean I speak and read Spanish so like I definitely can do that sort of comparison when I'm doing a Spanish language book but I feel like like I try not to look at a translation that is like a line by line thing like I don't want to compare the two in that way I see it more as like you know is this whole book a successful thing kind of on the terms like that and I think you know translate really really pissed off when you're like oh this word is actually this word and you kind of miss it I mean and that happens and maybe you're right but like you're totally missing the forest of the trees there so I don't know like that's kind of the level that I would evaluate it on when I can and when I can't I mean I feel like you can still make some pretty useful statements about a book I mean you know if the thing has a consistent tone if there are like multiple voices in the book and you're getting those right if you know the structuring is feeling good you know there are things you can talk about without actually being able to compare like which is I think in a non-academic environment it would be inappropriate to actually review a book like that you have to as a reviewer you're the work of art and the work of art is the translation I think to go in and make some sort of critical evaluation comparing the original to the final it doesn't seem appropriate for a mainstream publication it doesn't seem as if it's necessarily interesting what readers who don't speak the language want to know what it feels like to read the book in English I mean that's what a reviewers work especially in a mainstream environment not in an academic environment but in a mainstream environment I read this book it was like I had this experience it was really cool because of this or it was really dreadful because of this and you're talking about the work in English and so it seems inappropriate to do that kind of evaluation although I do remember Kotsia doing that at great length on Zena's conscience he's like a special case it's a special case I mean it was hugely offensive and kind of entertaining but only he can do that I think only Kotsia can do that I always look at the source language of the books that I review it's pretty common for the books that I review to be translations of Chinese poetry where the left hand page is very often going to be the Chinese text so that's not that difficult but even if I'm reviewing something where I have to do a little bit of work to find the source text and like I said even the Bulgarian language I don't know you know I was in a position where I could do that part of what I'm talking about about us as translators explaining translation and how it works to people who don't understand is to talk about how translation can be good even if there are things that look like inaccuracies you know at the sort of the dictionary level right and trusting that translators have spent enough time with works to make informed decisions even if we don't agree with them we can say this is what this particular word choice does and it presents this work to a certain audience that may not be my audience or whatever I think that that's part of our responsibility and part of the advocacy that we have to do for our art and our craft but but I also think that ultimately what is important is that experience of reading in the language that we're looking at and sometimes we're not able to sometimes we're not able to make that but I think that you know even if it's a 400 word review we should be able to find a way to have that be an important aspect of something that shows up in the review it's political actually just to get tied to like I think it's a political decision yeah and just to say I will compare translations if there are multiple translations of a text just I mean and not again necessarily to say one's better than the other but I'll be curious to see how translators rendered certain passages and which I feel like is more successful or which appeals to me more so I mean that I feel like is definitely a valid thing one of the exercises we do in the theory and practice of literary translation seminar is have students look at about 10 different sections of the front end of book nine of the Iliad and then produce their own and that's a wonderful piece of intellectual work and then we're reading people who are just theorists who are acting in this kind of question and it's really all about just want to domesticate the language for now for the audience of college students on this campus or do you want to maintain some kind of distance and especially with verse that has to do with how are you going to approximate verse are you going to use alliteration rather than rhyme or rhythm or line breaks or those are choices that for students who've never done this before that you all have to deal with all the time become really telling and so they adopt very quickly a language that involves the word choice rather than accuracy it's all about the creative work even in these little workshop sessions over 14 weeks so the translating from translations to a new translation is a wonderful way to make that very clear that even without access to the source text you can have a really good idea of what you want to do and why is your ideal review is a review in which the fact that the translation becomes invisible that the reader gets a thing in itself because you said something if I'm quoting correctly if I mentioned which language is coming from I would mention the translator I'm trying to understand what kind of review is that of a translation where the language from which the book comes is not mentioned for someone who works in words I can be inarticulate what I meant to say is if I'm talking about the language of the book in particular I reviewed one of Chad's books for example and it was a very kind of post structuralist book where the translator had found this amazing kind of American idiom to represent the original language and I was impressed by the way the English was the choices of the idiom so I said that in the review and I said this is what the translator made those choices it was something about the book that I found interesting to have such a plain spoke and idiom and such a complex book I liked that, that was part of my review I mentioned it, that's what I meant by if I'm talking about it really was not a very big part of the review but where it came up and it was germane to the text so what I mean is if I'm discussing the language I will certainly talk about the translator in that context if I'm talking about if the subject of the review is translation I've written about purgatory and there was like six different translations that I was discussing at once of course I'm talking about the translation and choices made a lot of times though I might be reviewing a novel where it's not something that is part of the review and in those cases I may not talk about it if I can't fit it in and I always try but it doesn't always fit and also I don't have an ideal review every time out it's like what am I going to do and there's the story of that review so I don't mean to suggest that I have any kind of idea although I do think I probably have a slightly different agenda when I'm sitting down and I'm also writing for different places and that's just about what I'm good at writing about I think that that's what people assign me earlier also I think you expressed a frustration in a review of a translation in which you had improved the language you made it more oblivious that people were noticing that but you weren't quite getting the credit I mean none they weren't even I mean it wasn't the heading it was like as if the book had appeared in English but that was the olden days before the hashtag campaign sure and I'm certainly you should get the credit for it but there is a kind of poetic justice in that wow this thing worked so well in English that it was you know there was a compliment in there oh I was proud and angry yeah in the way back how translators advocate for fuller reviews notice that this is a key factor application but here's my thought and there are editors here who are, you're looking at copy reviewing it and editing it let's set a low bar that at least there's a mention in the body of review itself that it's a translation in other words and then at least that back to the universal standard we are still finding reviews that even in a header no mention of the translator at all would you editors commit to looking at your copy and also if you're a cinema diameter reviewer just include that there has to be a signature of the translator and this I also think you should just take out Abley seamlessly all these if they want to write about the quality of the translation it has to be a couple of sentences or else just say it's a translation you want it in the body of the text as well as the I mean what's the commitment Margaret the header yes the translation has to be there and that could be directed to the correct within the review itself comma as translated by name or in ex's translation as a low bar and I think that can be universally adopted we do want to comment or a commitment here here I think no one on the table is going to disagree with any of that well it's interesting because I have a little review section and because we don't pay a lot of times it's new reviewers who are reviewing the books and we when I was working with you on this project we told all the reviewers we instituted that they had to discuss the translation so every time a reviewer got a book in translation we said you have to make sure to consider the translation and what we got were just the most dreadful awkward interpretations of that often it didn't work in the review in part because I was working with new reviewers who needed a lot of hand holding anyway so I mean what's interesting is that there is a skill level too to making this work well I think that's easy I agree with you I have seen that a lot but I will also say that the problem is wider than just reviews I will say someone who teaches as well I have noticed reviewing syllabi from colleagues it's not mentioned on syllabi so I think it's a lot deeper I think that people are educated to ignore translation so by the time you get a bachelor's degree you think that you don't need to mention it and that I think is so to me the route comes much earlier than a reviewer I mean most reviewers you know have graduated college right but they've just been through a few years and so I would hope I mean this may not be your purview but I would hope that Penn Translation Committee would also advocate for inclusion of the word translated by on syllabi you know that's I'm going to do that I'm on our curriculum you know I said on the curriculum committee where we review you know approved new courses and I'm going to start sending things back if the translator is not in the bibliography please revise that's easy for me what Durkheim didn't write in English one more question while I make this as short as I possibly can so book reviewing is part of the greater sort of publishing of economic mechanism now if a lot of the conversations that we have about reviewing translations are had with the goal of finding ways to sort of break habits and the publishing mechanism this question is inspired by some stuff that Richard Nash wrote in the past the publishing mechanism relies on the idea of the author as the original creator of the work and the cult of personality sells books now it's become central so you know we talk about Stefan's why you know that the author becomes central to this whole conception and that is one of the main reasons the translators aren't mentioned actually because the publisher is afraid that if I distract the reader from this famous author name that I'm trying to fill with this no-name translator the review is not going to be interesting the book's not going to sell as well now as so the editor is when you are writing or commissioning reviews when you're editing reviews are you given the pressure that are on you are you trying to will you ever try to break away from that model which is after all illusory or would you be are you more apt to sort of keep going and we've got personality we've got the original writer personality and now we have a new personality we have the translator personality that sort of segues into the next panel actually I think as an editor I'm not trying to sell books so the irony of what you're saying is that in many cases the foreign language author is not so well known and the translator has a position of prominence so quite often I'm like ooh so and so translated this thing it must be cool sometimes it's not cool but it's often there's an inversion there but I mean like with Ellen Feronte for example who's huge right now and has this sort of massive personality of who is she people you know they're writing about her right now I think that I think it would be hard I mean we're not in the position of selling books I guess it's an interesting question that you represent I mean you're representing a very that's what the editors say that's what Richard Nash says that's what F.S.G. says that's what the publishers say that's the business of selling the books and they're going to use anything to sell books because books are hard to sell and I don't know if that's a question for us necessarily but as reviewers we're going to take what we've got you know and if they've got a lot of apparatus that is given to us around the personality of the author then that's some of the material we have to work with that's the primordial ooze of our work F.S.G. and on that next I would say F.S.G. is kind of an interesting case because I mean she herself or whoever actually is her she has a really interesting story but they translated it as two I mean it's Ann Goldstein who works at the New Yorker and I'm surprised I don't see that more than I do but anyways that's that's an interesting case you can ask your questions super quickly but he says the father says that we'll review the translation and if the translator's name is not mentioned we have translated the work and we're not comparing the translation so who's the work where we review I agree alright well on that note I'd like to thank all of our wonderful panelists for the time and the voice thank you all thank you thank you both thank you both thank you thank you all of you thank you thank you