 Hello and welcome to the American Literary Translators Association live stream reading for the 2017-2018 mentorship program. It gives me great pleasure to welcome this cohort of mentees on the occasion of the culmination of their mentorship. I'm also excited for all of the audience members to hear the incredible work that they've done over this year. My name is Mira Rosenthal and I'm on the board of ALTA. I'm also a poet, a literary translator from Polish literature and a professor of creative writing at Cal Poly. Before we launch into the reading, I want to just explain the mentorship program a little bit for those who are not familiar with it. So these mentors are selected from a very strong pool of applicants that we receive each year. Those who are selected are paired with a mentor and that mentor is either working in their same language or in their same genre. They work over the course of the year with their mentor on a project of the mentees choosing. The mentor and mentees initially meet at the American Literary Translators Association conference and during that conference they give a reading. This past year at the beginning of this cohort's mentorship year, we were all so impressed with the strength of their translations already at that reading. So I'm doubly excited to hear where they've taken their projects over the course of this year. This reading, which we have in September partly because it's National Translation Month. So it's partly a celebration of translation in general, but also a celebration of all of the hard work that these emerging translators have done during this program. Anyone interested in finding out more about the Mentorship Program can go to the American Literary Translators Association website and you should find all of the information there if you're interested in applying for next year's cohort. Of course, a program like this would not be possible without the mentors who give up their time and give up their expertise and are invaluable resources as our mentees work along during the year. I'd like to recognize those mentors. Mara Fae Lethem working in Catalan. Sora Kim Russell in Korean prose. Don Me Choi in Korean poetry. Marion Schwartz in Russian prose. Bill Johnston, who was this year working in non-language specific prose. And then Stephen Bradbury, who this year was working in non-language specific poetry. In addition, I'd like to thank our invaluable sponsors, Institute Raman Lull that promotes Catalan language and literature, Literary Translation Institute of Korea, Russian Federation Institute of Literary Translation, Amazon Crossing and Amazon Literary Partnership. All of these organizations do invaluable work in fostering cultural dialogue and also really supporting the role that literary translators play as cultural ambassadors. One of the things that strikes me about this particular cohort is how accomplished they already are. And I'll be letting you know a little bit about those accomplishments as I introduce the mentees in turn as they do their reading. But I have no doubt that these translations that they've been working on, if they have not been already snatched up by publishers, they will be soon. For our audience members out there, we'd love to hear your questions and your comments during the Q&A after the reading. And you can send those questions and comments through live chat on the live stream broadcast or to the email address that's included at the bottom of your screen in the description of this video. So without further ado, I'm happy to introduce our first readers, Marcy Calabretta-Conseo Bello and EJ Co. Interestingly, this year we had two translator teams that were working together with a mentor. So EJ and Marcy are one of our translator teams, so they'll each be reading from their project. Marcy Calabretta-Conseo Bello is the author of Hour of the Ox, which won the AWP Donald Hall Prize and Florida Book Award Bronze Medal for Poetry. She has received poetry fellowships from Kundiman, The Knight Foundation, among others. Her work has appeared in Best New Poets, The Georgia Review, The New York Times, The Sun, and more. EJ Co. is the author of A Lesser Love, winner of the Pleiades Editors Prize for Poetry. And her memoir, The Magical Language of Others, is forthcoming from Tin House. Her work has appeared in numerous journals and received fellowships from Kundiman, the McDowell Colony, Vermont Studio Center, among other places. Co. received her MFA in Poetry and Literary Translation at Columbia University and is completing her PhD in English Literature at the University of Washington. So welcome, EJ. Hi, thank you so much. I'm going to jump right in here. I'm EJ, by the way. For the Ulta Emerging Translator mentorship with Don Mee Choi, we've completed translations from EJ's collections when they ruled the earth and the lightest motorcycle in the world. EJ has received numerous prizes for her groundbreaking poetry. She belongs to South Korea's foremost contemporary women poets, a successor to poets such as Kim Hye-soon, reasserting the far-reaching scope of a lesser documented history, technological immersion and political disillusionment, while challenging Korea's male-dominated field and resisting the expectations of delicate styles in favor of sharper expressions of reality. This first poem is called National Holiday. Today is a national holiday. Every storefront has lowered their security shutters. Shops have sealed off their dark interiors. The crosswalk is empty. Then one protest car drives through the silence. Honking definitely, it sharply turns. Someone who should be on the sidewalk is no longer. A red cross hanging from the rooftop breaks off. The end of a landscape. The window must remain as a window. Flanked on both sides are draped curtains and countless stars above, then below and above again. Beneath the stars, one man and one woman sit across one another with a table between them. A lamp light hanging between the man and woman divides them. Oblivious to the light overhead, the man and the woman suddenly clasp their hands across the table. Look there. The man leans the unravelled woman's body over a chair, holding each other's hands. The woman turns her head, looking at the direction he points to her. Look there. The man keeps pulling in their gripped hands towards him. The woman, looking at his direction, also yanks him in her direction, and they each get pushed and pulled, and the stars inside their widening dark mouths roll around. If they close their mouths, the stars will vanish. The universe opens and closes so easily. Before the man's words reach the woman, midair, the words split apart, and this moment the stars pour down. The lamp shines over the stars, fallen on the table, the stars briefly darkening. The window glows coldly. Still, a man and woman are seated, sure, only a candle at the center of the window. That time then as picturesque as an animal. Landscape from the window. The end of that landscape. All at once, that man and woman are sucked into a black hole. And also it's an honor to be reading with our fellow mentees to be able to hear all the great projects we've been working on. I'm also going to finish our portion of the reading with two poems. The first one is called At the Apartment 3. There are many old women squatting in the apartment parking lot at midday, birthing shadows. One woman gives birth to a stubborn stone. The second poem is a little bit longer. It's called Postcard. I am writing down your address. Today the air is brittle. As I write down your name and address, the daffodils by the window somehow open up my universe. I am dropping your name into the open daffodils. You will be able to touch the daffodils in that cosmos. Air loosens the bandage of rhythm. In the right corner of the postcard, a cat with two round bells on its neck is opening its green eyes. Like an antenna, the cat's shiny coat and observing eyes pull at the day from all directions, like whiskers sticking out all over. I write down your name beneath the cat's green eyes. Your name gleams softly. I scroll your address inside the six blank boxes. I write your zip code like a cat's paw print. The boxes waver. The third number pushes its way out of the box and rolls along the tail. The edges of the box break apart. Six more blank boxes in a different square dangle facing the cat. That is where I am. The nib of my fountain pen snaps off. The ears of air fall off and the wind pours in everywhere. The doors rattle and the ink keeps spreading. Your name and addresses crowd in. Time entangles and air rustles. No matter how much I split and split, the air is clear and makes me gasp for breath. A blue shadow approaches you, but nothing can pass through you. I cover you like bitter soil. Thank you. Wonderful. Thank you, Marcy and EJ. And to start us off with a line like the daffodils by the window somehow open up the universe. I feel like that's a description of what bringing literature into another language does for us. It's my pleasure now to introduce our second translator team, Riley Costigan-Humes and Isaac Stackhouse-Vehler, who are working from Russian prose. Riley Costigan-Humes and Isaac Stackhouse-Vehler are a team of literary translators who work with Russian and Ukrainian. They are best known for their English renderings of prose by great contemporary Ukrainian author Sir Hizadon, including Roro Shilovgrad published by Deep Vellum and Mesopotamia published by Yale University Press. And Isaac is going to be reading the excerpt for today, but then Riley is also on hand for us during our Q&A. So welcome, Isaac. Thank you very much. It's an honor to be here. I'll be reading from The Gardener is Gone, a novel by contemporary Russian author Lena Eltein, which Marcus, one of her protagonists, describes a novel that he has written and named after his lost love Paola, who abandoned him in Italy on a long, long ago, faraway trip. When the letter arrived at his previous address, Somerset Road, tiny apartment above the produce market, pervaded by the smell of onion skins from a publisher offering a 3,000-pound contra, Marcus couldn't believe his eyes. Exactly six years had passed since the manuscript plunged into the dusty archival rivers of grammars and house like a splintered tree. What hurricane had jerked it loose from the shallows where it was caught? His former landlady didn't know what to do with the letter, so she sent it to Marcus's rowing club, but he hadn't been there for a while. The guys knew where to find him, though. The book came out under a suit in him, M. Fiddle, which was someone's real name. It belonged to a person who died in August 1999, the same summer a wrathful and lonely Marcus returned from Italy. Fiddle, a math student nicknamed Bollum for his fair, wavy hair, was his college buddy. For six months, they shared an attic room with a slanted ceiling. The place had one enviable advantage. The fire escape led straight to the windowsill so they could return to their rooms any time just by hopping over the cast iron railing facing Osborn Road. This state of affairs made them both quite popular. All through fall, or at least until the real cold set in, the boys kept their window open, thereby letting curfew breakers back into the dorm. Bollum wasn't wild about that, wasn't wild about Paola considering her cold and belligerent, but he still helped his friend out when he needed to make a spur of the moment trip to Italy and had a problem with his passport. He left it in his jeans when he put them in the washing machine, so Bollum suggested Marcus take his, since he didn't intend to go anywhere in the near future. It would be easy. They had the same fair hair and skinny face. Bollum's eyes were round, though, somewhat bird-like, and he had a birthmark on his bony nose. Her friends who knew about this sort of thing advised buying glasses with clear lenses. Paola used an indelible pencil to put a black dot on Marcus' face before every passport check, wetting it first to make sure it wouldn't smudge. Three weeks later, on his way back, Marcus completely forgot about the birthmark, remembering it with a jolt while he was going through customs, and flashed the black lady checking his passport and exhausted sly fox smile. He'd picked that up from Bollum. The trick was to spread your lips slowly, scantily, but with a tinge of admiration. Well, it worked like a charm at Heathrow. Marcus didn't see Bollum on campus, so he tossed the passport in his desk drawer, assuming his buddy had decided to stay with his father, who owned a sports bar where they'd occasionally pick up weekend shifts. That summer, Marcus drank a lot and barely left the apartment. In late July, he heard the news that his friend had overdosed at a party during the Royal Henley Regatta. When he was gathering up his friend's papers and clothes for his parents, Marcus came across the passport and stuck it in his jacket pocket, almost without realizing it. Fiddle was gone. The child Paola had disappeared. This passport, with a picture of a dead math major, a fan of Jenny Greenwood and Nottingham Forest, was the only thing left from that trip along the coast. If someone had told Marcus that he'd extract that passport from a heap of useless papers, go to Triano and become an Englishman once again, he would have just scoffed at them. For some time, he was just living, oblivious to himself. He drank a few bottles of dry wine a day, nod on hardtack, and worked the night shift as a security guard at an office run by some Arab guys on the outskirts of town. He started working on his novel, but it was progressing slowly. Sometimes he fancied he was erasing more words than he was putting down. It seemed like his mind had gone to mush, but his body relished this new life. It was standing tall now. He looked a little rugged, sporting an imperial beard, and one time he ventured into the city, horribly hung over, and brought a waxed hunting jacket he'd had his eye on. Oddly enough, he could handle the rigmarole of daily life now. It used to weary him, but now it took care of itself, despite the constant lack of money that plagued him, like some interminable drizzle. The translation company, often silent for months at a time, suddenly loaded him up with work. His dusky-skinned neighbor, who used to just shake her head in response to his greetings, dropped a note in his mailbox inviting him to have tea, and the ballboy at the public tennis court kept the newer ones for him. Even the landlord's wife watched him with interest, and took his clothes to the nearby Chinese laundromat for him. Everything was just dandy, except as soon as he sat down at the typewriter, his eyes teared up, and the English letters ballooned, their fins stabbing him, his own native language clogging his throat with mucus. It took a few years, and one more trip to Triano for the novel to amass the necessary water and pulp, acquire a knobby pit, turn yellow, and drop from its branch into his hand. He had no doubts about the title. Moreover, he hoped the protagonist would be roaming the streets of Nottingham one day, see the book in a shop window, get his number from the publisher, and call him. Paolo was selling pretty well. An Italian publisher picked it up two years later. The sale of the rights was hastily finalized in the dark undergrowth of some agency in Rome. Markets received his Italian advance, eventually, took two boxes of Paolo to the bookstore, and bought a plane ticket, hoping the passport he'd gotten in 95 was still good for a trip home. On the plane, he leafed through his only remaining copy, the one for his father, and struggled to recognize his own words. The book was like a bird's nest that had fallen out of a thorn-apple bush. There were smooth, speckled eggs inside, seemingly easy prey, but the instant you tried to touch one of them, tentatively, with your fingertips, the nest would rise to its feet and bolt down the road, shedding grass and feathers as it went. It appeared as something else, not a nest, not the bird itself, but something frightened and unfamiliar, frightened of you in particular. His father met him at the arrivals terminal, and it was only after Markets had seen his wrinkly face, clean shaven, which was new, that he realized he'd spent half his life in England. The person leisurely approaching him in a camel haircoat was a disagreeable old man, and Markets looked through him in that fastidious way Brits do when a stranger comes too close. He'd never seen his father without a beard. In the old photograph, he'd lug along with him every time he moved. His father was standing by a low granite wall and smiling at the photographer. White teeth, blueberry mustache, yellowish skies. His father leafed through the copy of Paola, proffered to him in the parking lot, and then stuck it between two old hubcaps in the trunk. They rode in silence all the way home. His father was surly, his saggy cheeks seemed poorly shaven, and his heavy coat smelled of mothballs. Marcus Fiddle, his father asked when they got to the apartment, what's with the ridiculous suit in him? Since when do you go by Marcus? I named you in honor of my friend. He was shot in Angola the year you were born. But what do you know about friendship? You've never had a friend in all your born days. He lived at the dacha in Molotai now. On Saturdays, he'd come to his apartment, toss his laundry in the washing machine, have lunch in the kitchen, gather up his clean clothes, and head back after nightfall. He had a girl nearby, but he didn't want to talk about her. He didn't talk to Marcus much in general, avoiding him like an astute captain skirting in iceberg. Ever since his company, which flourished bizarrely enough in the troubled 90s, had gone under, he'd considered his son a worthless human being, a waste of money, and punished him with silence. For many years, Marcus saw Vilnius as a lost paradise, a place he could return to if he really wanted. Once he realized he was going home, his childhood memories came alive. Inundated with mute, bright images, magnified as in a diascope, sleeping pigeons perched on a weather van, stalactites black with soot on the hot basement pipes, a newspaper cone of cherries from the market with juice leaking through the fibers, a little used backcountry road covered in white dust as pure as flax, a homely sun the color of a dry lemon peel, and the tranquil sea four hours away by car, a real sea filled with icy, haughty fish. Something was off, though. The winter dragged on, and passersby looked like bumbling morose savages to Marcus. They were they now, and there was nothing he could do about that. In 98, England embraced me, like a silty riverbed. It was a bit slippery, wobbly, but still soft and warm against my feet. Marcus wrote at the beginning before words had lost all meaning. Here at home, no matter where you stand, you feel your stiff wooden heels and a perpetual prick in your side. Thank you. Thank you, Isaac. Wonderful. I think that that story is very apropos of anyone who has a real attachment to books and the physicality of books. I'd also be really curious to hear from both of our translator pairs during the Q&A about what it was like to work together and how that process was for you. Our next reader is Marlena Gittleman, who had a mentorship in Catalan prose. She is a translator from Catalan in Spanish based in the Bay Area. She is currently earning a PhD in comparative literature with a designated emphasis in women, gender, and sexuality at the University of California, Berkeley. Welcome, Marlena. Hi, everyone. Thank you so much. And thank you to everyone at Alta and to Mara. It's really great to be a part of this. So I am going to read a from a short story by the Mallorca writer, Neus Caneas. And the story in Catalan is called El Capot, the Nicolai Gogol, which translates to the Overcoat by Nicolai Gogol. And as you can already tell from the title of the story, the collection presents adaptations of well-known short stories from the Global Canon. And what the collection does is sort of adapt all of these stories into a one-central storyline of a protagonist, a first-person narrator, who is a middle-aged woman living in Palma, Mallorca, one of the Balearic Islands. So the story is written in Catalan, but the protagonist here is working in a Spanish-language newspaper. Before this, we see her begin as a proofreader at the newspaper and then work her way up to an agenda page where she gets to write a 25-line column called Through the Binoculars. Sometimes she refers to it throughout the story just as the binoculars. So I think the story really foregrounds some issues of gender and power in the workplace, which we see especially in the protagonist's interactions with the director of the newspaper, whose name is Renez. I'm going to read from the end of the story, where we can see how Gogol's Overcoat gets adapted and transformed in Kamnez's story. So. My desk was next to Renez's office. Every morning, there was a long line of people applying to work for him. They all wanted to write for the newspaper. There's no shortage of opinions in this world, and putting them down and writing produces a satisfaction that can't be compared to anything else. I couldn't figure out what was happening in that newspaper. It was as if no one could keep their mouth shut or their hands still, and they all got together to let out what they needed to say. I saw it from where I sat, through my binoculars. I barely had to make an effort. Sometimes you could hear screaming from Renez's office. Do you know who you're talking to? Do you? He once let out at a professional, wealthy man. But on many occasions, he and his visitor would come out smiling, shake hands at the door, and say goodbye amably. Some days later, a new column would appear in the main pages with the visitor's photograph next to the byline. And one day, out came two guys who seemed pretty important. Sunscreens, cemetery flowers, and book festivals could last you forever. Everything is, like I've already said, about consulting your toolkit to avoid tedium. About saying what you like or what you can't stand. About criticizing, about crying bitterly. About discussing those who move the pawns of every game. I had done it. And even your neighbors in the stairwell, your mother's hairdresser, and the shopkeeper on the corner had sensed it. But the person who made decisions at the newspaper still hadn't. In fact, he didn't even see me at all. Two years had passed, and to him, I was the same trainee he assigned one day to that insipid page of pharmacies and gas stations. And due to a series of coincidences, she had at her disposal a little extra corner of the newspaper with 25 lines that had to be filled in some way. He called me in on a day in which I was very proud of my binoculars. I had unfogged them despite the condensation at the newspaper that was a result of the heat and the windows always being closed. It was winter, and I had arrived from home wearing my new coat, feeling very sure of myself. I'd left it on the coat rack with care and sat down to type furiously. I went into his office and sat down. He asked me how I was feeling at the paper. I told him it was going well. Soon we'll have the Christmas street decorations, eh? He smiled. Yes, that's true. It's coming up, I told him. In fact, I'd already had the Christmas article written for days. He didn't look at me. His eyes were fixed on the computer screen, which was much more modern now. He told me that the agenda page would be completely remodeled and that through the binoculars already seemed a little outdated. It wasn't that he wanted to eliminate those little articles that I wrote that were so, what was it, beloved. But now they'd be adding two new collaborators. He wanted to give it a punchier focus with a touch of political commentary he didn't envision me writing. I'm sure you're aware that everyone has a concrete subject that works best for them. More appropriate for their personality. That's how it is. You should know that by now. Yeah, I muttered. Think of something a little more, I don't know. I don't want to say frivolous because we have the gossip page for that, but a light little thing with your creative touch, of course. You already show promise in column writing. Yeah, I said again, and I was thinking, wonderful, 10 years, and I show promise. And hurry, next week the two new bylines will be added. I don't know what happened to me. Maybe it seemed like someone had pulled off my coat from above and I was trampling on it, that it was full of footprints from dirty shoes. And my mouth, so often sewn shut, opened. You know, I'm tired of it too, the binoculars. Also, it's a little bit of a ridiculous section. He made a weird gesture, throwing his head back and opening his eyes wide. How could an idea of his be ridiculous, even if it now seemed outdated to him? But you'll agree with me that you can't write about such things. Of course, that's for the people from the lines. The lines? Why do you say that? I've seen some people come in here doing genuflections and twitching their heads like nervous horses. I have back problems that keep me from prostrating myself correctly. Now I don't follow. Never mind, personal matters. Before leaving the office, I told him I'd already done the binoculars for the following day. Too bad it wasn't a farewell. At nine on the dot, I turned off the computer as I did every evening and went to look for my coat on the coat rack. There were many of them in different colors piled on top of each other. Some had even fallen on the floor. I went through all of them, one by one. Mine wasn't there. I went over to my friend Fanny's desk, a little bit worried. Hey, I can't find my coat. Did you really look? Sometimes they get all mixed up because there are so many. They ask me, is everything okay? You're really pale. No, I just can't find my coat and it's cold. If you want mine, I can lend you it. I'm driving. No, it's fine. I'm leaving. I'll look for it. I finished late today, she said. I don't think you're going to find it, I added. Outside, it was cold and dark and mist hovered in the air. I walked slowly, dragging my feet. What pained me most was that my work over so many years hadn't served any purpose. I thought about my neighbors in the stairwell and the shopkeeper on the corner. Those people had understood me. How could it be that the person in charge of the paper possibly knew better? I walked home very slowly, like a ghost dragging more than its feet. My cheeks felt warm, but my nose was freezing. It was as if I had a fever. And the only things that came to my mind were unconnected phrases. Who will take over my binoculars? Where will all the things I've said wind up? Will anyone remember the flowers I brought to the cemetery this 1st of November? Or the jokes I wrote about the January sales in an attempt to be funny? And who will notice that I don't go to beaches anymore in the winter, just to prove that they exist and to say that they're much nicer than in the summer, even though no one actually goes to see them? A light little thing, Renez had said. All of a sudden, I began to tremble. I couldn't control the chills without the coat that had protected me before. As if I were naked. My whole body hurt. Head, neck, back. I didn't even have pockets to warm up my hands. That's it. This was the story I wanted to tell. Now I'm at home, sitting in front of the computer, and I'm writing an article. The one for this week won't be about economics or politics or society. Nor do I want to write about books or about language. I wanted to be a banal article for lots of laughs. About a time long ago when I had a desk among many desks and I worked this job, but as if I were doing it as a joke. And about when I had to listen to men who screamed, how dare you? Do you know who you're talking to? And in that way got things that they considered to be important. The shopkeeper retired, and my mother's hairdresser sold the business. But my neighbors in the stairwell who continued to read me told me a few days ago that since I changed newspapers through the binoculars isn't worth reading. For me, it's been a long time since it vanished into the mist of the night. Thank you. Thank you, Marlena. That was fabulous. I'm really glad I got to hear you read that piece out loud because it's so driven by tone. I also love the intertextuality of the project. Really great. Our next reader is Madeline Campbell, and she had a mentorship in non-language specific poetry and she chose to work on a project in French Occitan poetry. Madeline Campbell is a writer, researcher and translator who teaches at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. Her translations of North African poets have appeared in the University of California Book of North African Literature, Lighthouse and MBT Magazine. She is currently working on translating Aurelia La Sox poetry, and some of those translations have recently appeared on the Poetry International Festival website. Madeline's book Translating Across Sensory and Linguistic Borders will be published by Paul Grave Macmillan in late 2018, and that is co-edited with Ricardo Vidal. Welcome, Madeline. Thank you, Mira. And hello. It's very exciting and a little daunting to be performing in my first ever live stream event. Before I start, I'd like to thank the ALTA team, ALTA Mentorship Program and its sponsors, and my mentor, Stephen Bradbury, who has provided so much support and insights along the way. And to Mira and Rachel for their superb coordination of this global broadcast. Today I'm going to read translated extracts from Aurelia La Sox's second French Occitan collection, Enquête d'un visage, a prescient dialogue between Homer's Ulysses and his nameless lover, She, Ella or Elle, which takes the form of eight cantos and is narrated by a chorus. Since we started our collaboration a year ago, Aurelia performed an Occitan and English translation in the UK at T-junction 2018 and at the University of Durham in September, and several poems have been published in translation. I'll be reading excerpts from cantos 2, 6, 7, 8 and the epilogue, alternating between the chorus, Ulysses and the nameless one, She or Ella. Cantos 2. The hour has come for the first parting. The boys are mesmerized by the shine of polished metal, the promises of warriors with hands outstretched who call them son and handle ships as large as cities. Ulysses has pledged her return to take her for his wife. At the moment of departure, Ulysses doesn't look back. She. With every step you take towards these bright sailed vessels, your mothers whip their thighs and bleed a second time because of you. The wind carries their lament far offshore, far from your tender bodies, far away to lands where in silence emaciated horses die. Ulysses. I feel for the little brothers. The surf stifles their cries. I hear the youngest call his mother, but his voice returns no echo. The shores we left behind engulf the harbor. A drift I turn to you, your voice in my ear, your lips on the palm of my hand. Will you be here when I return? Cantos 6. They came by sea in their small skiffs. They came with plated beards and solemn eyes bearing news that a shepherd had stolen a queen. Ulysses joined them, weapons in hand, a smart helmet upon his skull. But before setting off, he made a pledge. May his soul be damned should he perjure himself. He says return, she hears departure. He says victory, she hears solitude. He says forever, she answers never. And so the old woman take to wailing again, terrified the dogs know at their rumps. She wraps herself in a shroud. Cantos 7. She. Here I am alone again with this soft rain that insists on blending everything together on finding harmony in this hateful landscape. Ulysses has gone. The stage is deserted. The chorus consigned to the cellar along with the set. The poet crosses this part out for it lacks a woman to wait for Ulysses, a woman, a dog and men to surround and to court her. It all seems chastened. The sun void. I built a labyrinth for the sun. There's a bull. No, not that one. A small rust-tinged bull with eyes like marbles. He's the sun, poor little blind beast. And if the sun should sing, the winged birds would burn to cinders. There are all manner of sorrows. Water pouring from this damn basin. Caresses ordained by the gesture. The perennial pleasures of warm water letting yourself be captured in the way that water catches the light. Finding rapture in bubbles even as the tears, the tears are falling. Bubbles warmth. The creases on the back of my hand all call for a truce. Here, now, a truce. But your name comes back to me and I want to bury myself in this pool of water. I wear a bracelet on each ankle. You could say I do more or less as I please. No man, no name, no sun. Alone as I am, I am the queen. Yes, that's what he called me, Ulysses. She's mostly me. Say she is all me, the queen. The one whose turn it is to speak. She has a king. He's often far from home with his horses. No, not the little mountain horses. No, tall horses they took from the stone masons with massive jaws and thick necks to bear the weight of their heads. There it is. The walls are steep. Dancing surrounds her, yet she will not dance. There is no music, no voice other than mine. Yes, I do have a mirror, but I lied. I don't want to see myself in it. I may turn it towards the sky or take my leave one day and prop it there, staring straight at the door. Canto 8. Ulysses. It seems I've been walking forever as if I'd emerged upright from my mother's womb. I cannot hear your voice now and so I count my steps. I take my rest. I sit down, lick my fingers. Again, I count my steps. I devote every dream to you, yet come sleep or waking. I cannot hear your voice. Even though I kept my word, I took to the road after the battle ended. You, who claim to be versed in every tomorrow, should know there was a shipwreck and my companions are dead. So why don't you come to me now laden with torches to show me the way? I know how to elude your silence. I'll pierce my eardrums with the tip of this knife stolen from a man I didn't kill. From a woman who may not have mourned for him but rushed into bed with the living because the night is gray and it all looks the same and the hardest thing you see isn't to forget but to keep your word. On the road I found a mirror and in the mirror an old man. I cut his hair, shaved his beard, cleaned his nails and put my helmet back on. Epilogue. She. Wake up, Ulysses. Open your eyes. You know every last detail of the set. It's the hottest time of day. The road is deserted. The trees appear to have aged and the roofs shine more intently. The young soldier approaching is the very likeness of you when I saw you last. He approaches bare-headed so you offer him your helmet. His shadow races ahead gliding towards yours. His shadow is on cue to reclaim its home as he leans in close and whispers. Is it mercy you want, old man? Mercy from Ulysses? Thank you, Madeline. That's beautiful. It's the first time we want to hear the rest of the dialogue. We have one last reader today, Jungmin Lee Comfort, whose mentorship was in Korean pros. Jungmin, her translations of sci-fi short stories will be appearing in a Korean sci-fi anthology next year. She also translates academic journal submissions, which is her bread and butter work on ISO certification in Korean English translation. There's a children's book translation project on the horizon, which she says that she's super excited about as she's a big fan and a hoarder of children's literature ever since becoming a mother of two. Welcome, Jungmin. Thank you, Mira, for the introduction. I feel like I have nothing else to say now. Can you see me still? We can see you. I thought I lost connection for a second. I've been working on short stories that are going to be published in the Korean sci-fi anthology next year. It's actually a cool translation project with my mentor, Swaragim Rossell, who's just been fantastic as a mentor, so perceptive, insightful, and generous with her time and feedback. I've gained so much from the mentorship, including participation in the project, obviously. So, yeah, I feel so ridiculously lucky to be sitting here and sharing my experience. So, yeah, I would like to thank everyone at ALTA and KLTI and, of course, my mentor, Swaragim. So, the translation excerpt I'm about to read today is from Scripter by the Korean sci-fi author Kim Boyoung. The story takes place inside an online multiplayer RPG world, a role-playing game world, into which an agent from the game company gets deployed in a mission to persuade the only remaining player to close his account and quit the game so that the company could shut off the game without breaching terms of service. And the conflict arises when the agent finds out that there's actually another avatar that's been living inside the game without an account for years without company's knowledge. So, the agent tries to expose the hacker behind the mysterious avatar, but the horror he tries, the more confused and lost it becomes as to the real-life identity of this character. So, is this a human gamer? Is this an incredibly sophisticated NPC controlled by the game's AI? If so, did the AI somehow achieve consciousness? What the heck's going on? And what about the gamer he was going after originally? Is he even human then? So, the story spins forward as these characters try to convince or deceive another of their humanity or of the legitimacy of their or her being, whatever it might be, that is worthy of life and autonomy. So, the scene is from the beginning of the story when the agent enters the simulation to appear before the avatar, who as far as a company is concerned is the last one in the game controlled by a human gamer. So, here he goes. Input, hello. Output, hello. It's been 23 years since I last encountered an outsider here, the man said. Dark skinned with a sturdy build, he stood a full head taller than most. Black paint surrounded his eye socket, and a pair of black stripes rained down each side of his face. His long hair was pulled back in a tight braid. With the exception of a black bandana wrapped around his forehead, he was clad from head to toe in what appeared to be a hand-tanned leather outfit that boasted meticulous needlework and intricate decorative patterns. On his back, he carried a bow and arrows, and hanging from each side of his waist were a dagger and a sword. You don't look that old, the traveler said. The man chuckled. Looks can be altered in any way you wish. I know that you're not what you appear to be, either, to be either. Otherwise, I'd have tossed you a few coins and got in my way. The traveler had a slight build and a delicate face muddled with soot. His hair looked like a rat's nest. His feet were bare, and he was dressed in a tattered burlap sack with holes cut out for the head and arms. Scratching his head self-consciously, the traveler said. I'm level one. My occupation is begging. My only skill said begging. It was terribly difficult to sneak in here as the barkeep tried to kick me out the moment he spotted me. I'd have loved to show up in my Sunday best, but that was in the cards unless my character suddenly jumped to level 20. What are you talking about? Forgive me. Everyone cautioned me against using real-life speech with you, given your reputation as a die-hard RPGer who'd dismiss anyone breaking character. Honestly, it's been stressful trying to figure out how it should interact with you. The two men were sitting in a shabby wooden tavern, a light swung from the ceiling, casting a warm reddish glow over the dark interior and highlighting the assortment of characters below, a musician strumming, a trio of rowdy drunks clinking their glasses together in a toast, a barkeep whole polishing glassware, and a woman in the corner dressed in red. Soon, however, it became apparent that the musician was playing the same song on the infinite repeat. The rowdy drunks kept clinking glasses at an exacting interval, and the barkeep polished away at the same sparkling glass in a tireless sequence of buff, blow or just eyeglasses, hold the glass up to the light. Everyone seemed to be dressed in meticulous compliance with a pre-ordered theme and color scheme. Even the air seemed infused with color to wash them all in the same hue. The barkeep slamed down a full mug of beer before the traveler and hissed, chug it down and buzz off. You don't belong here. The traveler flashed a gleeful smile and turned to the hunter. My baking skill worked like a charm this time, usually only one out of ten is a hit. I tell you, it's hard out here when your avatar is a zero-level nobody. No one wants to have anything to do with you. The hunter said nothing. The traveler downed his beer in a few gulps and contorted his face in a theatrical display of disgust. Tastes like cigarette butts, like most everything that passes for food here. The game's taste simulation is a mess. To be fair, though, it shouldn't come as a surprise, given what a relic it is. He closed his eyes and ran his palm back and forth against the beer mug. The haptic stimulation is brutally simple, too. Without looking at it, I can't tell from the feel alone whether this is wood, steel, or paper. And if you look at it really close, you can tell it's just a picture. I bet this thing doesn't even break. Clinking their glasses together once again, the drunks broke out into raucous laughter. One of them called out to the woman leaning against the end of the bar. Hey, girlie, why don't you come over here and drink with us? The traveler resided the words in perfect sync with the drunk. Next, the traveler continued in a whisper. He'll say, I heard that wolves got to the livestock a few days ago. I heard that wolves, the drunk echoed. Rolling his eyes, the traveler said, this place is full of boars. Everyone is stuck in one place, saying and doing the same things. Do they even answer back if you try talking to them? They're not human. The traveler clearly stroked. Well, I certainly wasn't prepared to hear you say that. I was doing my best to play along, though. Homunculus, alchemists created them to repopulate the empty streets after all the people were gone. There's a setting for that. I didn't read the manual that closely. You and I are the only humans in this tavern, the hunter said. And you, sir, are the only ones still playing. Every outsider you've met so far has been an employee sent by the company to persuade you to quit the game. The hunter was quiet. The game's original service operator had a rather unusual business philosophy by which a product would never be discontinued based on profit circumstances alone. They considered player data to be precious assets belonging to clients. Unfortunately, the company went bankrupt three years ago and was sold to us, who, by the way, do not operate on the same philosophy. Simply put, we don't see any point in maintaining so many antiquated games that aren't very profitable anymore, which is why all but a few have been scrapped over the years. This game, though, was found to pose a little problem for us due to its curious contract term. The hunter continued listening in silence. It basically states that if there is even a single active user, the game cannot be shut down. Naturally, in the event that the term is breached, the client is entitled to an enormous sum of monetary compensation. Shrugging, he added, I have no idea what possessed him to do that. Marketing strategy, I suppose. A user, as a winner of the game's mega-launch event, had been awarded a free lifetime subscription, which means that we don't make a single coin off of you. That would be out of the question, of course. Anyway, contractually, the only thing we can do is try to talk you into quitting the game on your own. Taking the hunter's silence for a cue that he should continue, he adopted an official tone and said, please, allow us to offer you a free lifetime subscription to the newest and shiniest game we have available, plus a generous settlement in exchange for closing your account here. The undisclosed amount may not be what was stipulated in the original contract, but I assure you that it will not disappoint. There was a long silence during which the hunter showed no reaction. Sir, I know that you are not found of outside lingo, but surely you do understand what I'm offering to you. Masa la lika. The hunter muttered and pointed at the traveler's beer mug. Letters appeared in the air around his finger. In a blink, the mug burst into flame. The traveler jumped and drugged his hand away. It doesn't break, but it still burns, the hunter said. Thank you, German. I love that that story ends on bringing up the lingo because it's kind of full of this variation in technical speak and colloquialisms, and I'm sure that that was one of the things that you struggled with in the translation. Yeah, for sure. It's very fun. I'd like to go ahead and invite all of our readers back again and have a conversation about this great table that we have prepared with so much different types of food. I love the diversity of this feast that we have brought before us today. And I want to remind our audience members that you can join our conversation by sending your comments and questions through the live chat function or through the email that's included in the description of the event. So I want to focus on hearing about your experience during the mentorship program and also a little bit about the particular challenges of the projects that you chose to focus on this year. So my first question is to get some of your reflections on one experience that really stood out to you as you're working with your mentor. I think the most striking experience for Riley and I was actually not on the technical side in terms of working with an actual text, but in terms of the sort of organizational side of translating. We've been spinning our wheels for maybe half a year trying to pitch potential translated books to publishers and getting exactly nowhere. So we had a conversation with our mentor about how to tell an editor a story that begins with them taking a risk on publishing a book in translation and ends with them being happy they did. And the very next pitch we attempted was successful and that book is coming out next year. It was really just night and day difference. Awesome. Congratulations. That's always the end result that we want. But yes, it's always a challenge to figure out how to convince a publisher to take a risk on a book in translation, knowing especially that it's only 3% of literature that comes out in translation every year. We always have to be fulfilling that role of advocate in addition to the artistic role of doing the translation itself. What about for other people, one particular experience that stood out for you during the mentorship? Well... Yes, Madeline? Yes, I thought someone else was speaking there. I think the most helpful bit for me was when my translator poet, was asked to provide a dozen poems in translation to a very short deadline. And although I'd been working on the entire manuscript, I certainly didn't feel ready yet to submit to any publisher or for it to be aired. And I said help to my mentor, Steven, and fired off what I had done. And he really helpfully responded within a week, which was the deadline we had. And couldn't have done it without his help and gave me confidence as well to get his feedback and for him to say, yep, it's ready to go. It's good to go. What an invaluable safety net there to have when you were under pressure, under the gun. One of the things, one of the extra little pleasures I had as I was listening to the reading was to be able to follow along in the copies that you sent to me. And one thing that I noticed is that every one of you made changes between a couple of days ago and what you sent to me and what you read today. It's so hard to stop. It's so hard to know when is it done? When is it ready to see the light of day? But I'm glad that your mentor really helped you in feeling confident in that. Any other reflections on your mentorship year? One experience that stands out? I had a... We get to Skype with our mentor and a lot of the stuff that we do because we're all in different cities and we have never been in the same space since the actual conference last October. And so a lot of the work that we do is all through email and we're using dictionaries and we're looking upset when we're looking at the original text and we're talking to each other, EJ and I. But when we sit with our mentor things that we didn't even know were questions to ask often come up in the conversations. Something as simple as this word could mean four different things depending on the context and they all kind of fit. And so she happens to be able to have a lot of historical information about literature movements in Korea as well as information about Iwon's background as a poet and as a person that she brings to the conversations about why she might make one connotation preference over another in those conversations and even in one of our earliest conversations having a lot of poetry in general but also translation especially you have literal permissions but you also have those emotional and mental permissions and at one point she was like well you could also email her because she's still alive and you're working with her so yes we can do that. Even something as simple as that little nudge opening the door crack is I think it was not something that we were very intimidated to even consider in that moment just starting out so she really kind of blew open the process for us so early on that I was really grateful that that happened at the beginning of the year so that we could continue the year really digging in on all levels I love that idea of the emotional and mental permissions that you need to give yourself as a translator it's not just about a lexical transaction we need to give ourselves that type of permission as we interpret especially those words that can have four different meanings or connotations I think one of the things that as I was coming up as a translator with mentors I've had is they had they knew what some of those words were and they'd say yeah there's that word again and the more you go the more you get familiar you get a list of words that are those tricky sticky words and you recognize them quicker when you come to them you were going to say something yeah I just wanted to add on to what Marcy was saying about how Donnie for us really kind of did open that door not just in our work right now but the context of that work so it wasn't just you on and talking to you on but learning about more of Kim Ha-soon and Kim Ha-soon's work and Kim Dong and you know she really introduced us to sort of and welcomed us into the sort of sisterhood of the Korean women poets that we got to be a part of and be with Donnie and feel closer to our work and understand how meaningful the process is and what our impact is as we're doing the things we're doing and so I think that really drove home for us this is important work and we want to not only do this now but like we're thinking of future projects into what things will look like much later down the road and making long-term plans and goals for that oh I'm so glad to hear that you know what we know about the lack or imbalance of representation of female authors in translation is important to address and I hear how you're thinking about that in relation to your project that's really wonderful I'd like to toss out another question to the group and this is a little bit more focused on your particular project and being intricately involved in the language what's the most challenging aspect of translating your particular text I'll speak I think for me it was the genre itself initially just getting over my overwhelming desire for familiarity because I haven't read a sci-fi novel I had not read a sci-fi novel for many decades so honestly they wouldn't have been my first choice if not backed by Soda but of course Soda suggested that we do it together so my answer was a resounding yes but I have to say that I'm blown away every one of them is a fresh original story that uses the tools of science fiction and they're also very philosophical very philosophical stories of significant relevance today is where the dawn of AI and there are a lot of ethical questions surrounding the topic as previously mentioned the excerpt I've read comes from a story that revolves around the human and maybe AI that may or may not have consciousness and another one by the same author that I'm translating co-translating with Soda right now is all about humanoid robots in a dystopian future where humans have long gone extinct and these AIs don't have a clue of their origin the concept of human beings doesn't exist in this future world so all these AIs think that they emerged one day from rocks and minerals so I mean reading these stories you have to wonder if we are creation currently creating another level of creation meaning AIs and entertaining this possibility like the stories do I think forces us to more critically examine big and existential questions that we entertain peripherally like what are we about what do we stand for what makes us human what is consciousness things like that that sounds like for you it was a real discovery of the genre as well yeah for sure rediscovery actually sci-fi was all I would ever read when I was little when I was a teenager but I took a lot of time off of it from it off of it so yeah they're experimental and they're conceptual but I think they're also very accessible are there challenges in translating your particular project yes specific to the stories I think yeah one of the stories that we are doing right now is it's the human humanoid robot story and the robots are not gendered although they have gendered names and it works in the Korean language because the Korean language is not as gendered as the English language with the singular pronouns and so yeah Soda and I've been I actually we discussed discussed how are we going to approach the issue like how are we going to refer to the robots which which singular pronoun we're going to use and we settled on it for now and yeah we also talked about how we could how using it could sort of automatically present the robots as non or subhumans and thus negatively affect the story which in essence grapples with the question of humanity so I also love how that dovetails into the general conversation we're having about a pronoun use personal pronoun so you even have a they available to you as a possibility today yeah but that got really confusing too you know yeah trying to construct sentences that sound smooth also not confuse the readers with all the they and so yeah we're still working it out what about for others of you any particular challenges for your project yeah I can speak to that so as I mentioned just before I started reading this kind of relates to questions of genre right the stories you know I was translating a collection of short stories and each one of them is itself a sort of free translation or adaptation of another story so this was definitely a challenge right because usually in translation we're already feeling very in between the language that we're translating from and the language that we're translating into and then to sort of add another element there were these sort of original stories signaled in the titles of Neos' stories so it was something that I was really engaging with you know it was very in the forefront of the project itself and working with Mara really helped me to sort of think through those possible connection points which sometimes were direct and other times were much more subtle and then also though working with Mara helped me think about okay yes these are all stories that have themselves been adapted from other stories but we have a character here and we have a character who's telling her own story through these stories and so working with Mara really helped me sort of go back and forth not only between you know Catalan and English but also sort of between these other stories that are influencing the telling but also that of the narrator itself and the protagonist and sort of thinking through okay in all of these different tones and intertext how do we still you know how can we still get a clear voice and through line for this for the whole collection so that was a challenge and something that I was really grateful to have guidance and support on too Did you have any conversations about whether or not to use end notes or some sort of explanatory material as a preface to help situate the readers in terms of that intertext duality? Yeah we did and I think the collection itself is very inviting in Catalan and so we were thinking okay in what ways can we what can get glossed into the text itself and then maybe what might need to go in something like a preface or an end note at the end of the whole collection but it's nice because you already have the titles themselves which sort of signal out to the reader this is based on something else but totally different at the same time so That's always a question with explanatory material whether or not you want it to intercede I have a question from the audience from Kelsey Vanada this is a question for EJ and Marci and it kind of relates to some of the particular challenges of your project how did you handle moments of onomatopoeia or sound words in your translation like zip and what those were like in the original? You know it's really interesting because a lot of words in Korean are already onomatopoeias that are not in English so there's so much sound in the Korean language that we almost have to really push for it in the English it's the other way around if you can think about it so like the word for like rain falling from the trees it's kind of very much sound like that word and we have something like drip drop which might be you know have this similar sound and it has that the this sound but it's almost like not enough sometimes you want to double it up drip drop drip drop or find ways to bend and curve but I find that one of the most enjoyable moments and enjoyable aspects of translating because that's where Marci and I come in I feel the strongest as poets and as like very sensitive to things like that and we kind of go over with Don being you know giggle a little bit and say oh I've got the perfect little thing it's not a real word that we'll use but we'll use it in conversation let's use that you know and then you realize that you've spent two hours contemplating one word giggle do you have anything to add to that Marci? uh yeah you know it I think that thinking about those sorts of things as translators and as you said earlier cultural ambassadors we talked a lot about accuracy as you did we talked a lot about accuracy and accuracy doesn't just mean the literal translation or even the sonic translation but also the connotations or the personal we talked a lot about personal attachments we had to certain words like oh I don't like that word but it's more accurate than the word I actually personally like and setting aside ego to really open up your mind to all of the possibilities and getting to know the English language in a way that even an average creative writer doesn't necessarily think about or making up words and that being okay and I think that for us for our particular project we might have might have had a little bit of leeway because Ewon is a even in Korean literature an avant-garde poet in terms of her school of thought so for us to be able to translate her into English we kind of have a little bit of understanding of the English avant-garde versus the Korean avant-garde and how those intersect or separate and that helped us a lot in trying to make those tactile sounds and even in the reading of it Donmi instructed us a lot on this is what Ewon sounds like in her own reading of a text so that even in that you're thinking about words that she would think about in a way that she would even perform the sounds of the and things like that that's staying true to what the author intended in our particular thing because we are able to talk to her and have access thanks to the internet to a lot of things that many translators don't necessarily have in their projects you might be working on I love what you're saying about how translation really teaches you about the target language in this case English I know that both of you are poets yourself and often times I think that you don't really know your language until you try to translate into it and suddenly you realize wait a second, English uses these strange things called articles what are they supposed to do with those because they don't exist in the original and then you start thinking about articles I want to hear from Riley because I think we haven't heard from him yet and I heard from Isaac that you're really smart and so I want to throw this next question out to you and then of course I want to hear from all of you what's one piece of advice that you have for an emerging translator who's interested in applying to Alta's mentorship program well first off you should definitely consider applying and I think you should also choose a project that is slightly more difficult than what you can handle at the beginning of the mentorship and then allow your mentor to guide you through this process of feel like you're barely you barely have your head above water at the beginning and then towards the end you feel more and more confident and I think that allows you to grow the most throughout the year because we definitely thought we were in over our heads at the beginning and Marion said you weren't quite ready at the last fall but now because we were able to we took on such a challenging project we let Marion kind of prop us up a little bit which was which was nice and encouraging also throughout the process we could tell that we were making progress and Marion was very good about telling us oh you've actually you've worked very hard and you have actually accomplished something which was nice so so definitely apply other pieces of advice for an emerging translator well I would suggest if that appeals to you to try and find a translator who's alive the last translator that I worked I mean the last translator I worked with was a poet who had passed and to work with a living poet who becomes part of a collaborative exercise between you your mentor and the poet in question is really really rewarding you can ask questions you can exchange ideas you can bounce things around I would really recommend that I'm curious if anyone else who's been working with the author has any comments on that I think sometimes you hear stories about a really difficult author who wants to change lots of things but doesn't actually really know English but I think they can also be really helpful like Marcy and EJ have been talking about in terms of answering those questions about sticky word choices that's a sort of broad philosophical question for translators that's raised by that issue the way that Riley and I always try to guide ourselves through that issue is reminding ourselves that it's the reader we work for that we don't work for the author or the publisher or ourselves or the English language or the Russian language that we work for the person who's going to hold this book in their hands and attempt to read it just one quick comment I wanted to make in terms of our particular case it was hard for us sometimes to ask the right questions of we wanted to we wanted to empirically understand what was happening in a sentence or paragraph and because it would be maybe even at times overloaded with metaphors or metaphorical language and we would we would ask a question and then we would be thrown even further into the project we were looking down the rabbit hole and then the author just yanked us down it which sometimes was a little bit which was fun but it didn't necessarily produce the best results in certain cases yes definitely you can go down the rabbit hole one of my most wonderful experiences on working on a poem that I just could not construct a reading of I just couldn't quite figure out what I thought this poem was getting at so I finally threw out my hands and I sent a email off to the author and I said can you give me some clarification maybe here or there and he wrote back and he said well this poem is about Polish literature it's a kind of cipher and I cannot say anything more about it which is actually kind of good because then I had Lee Wei to say okay well I don't know what this poem means either and it is what it is I have another question from an audience member Rachel Dom who has a question for Marlena and Madeline how did you approach the translation with the text itself being settled in another literary works linguistic, temporal and geographical context did that present specific challenges you hadn't faced before yeah I think there was one very specific challenge and that is that the source text was both in French and Occitan and those are very different languages French is very elegant and sparse Occitan is very lyrical and earthy at the same time and also the genre Aurélia Lassac is a performer and she tends to sing Occitan parts and recite the French and her work is written as much for the stage as for the page and I almost sometimes feel that there should be two English versions one for the stage and one for the page and the other thing is that we're working with a narrative because after all it's a story with a beginning and an end when trying to give only extracts either for this reading or also for publication in magazines and journals trying to select parts that tell a story in themselves those were all challenges how I address them is still a work in progress yes I think it would be really good to work with some intersemiotic practices in this work work with some actors and performers and try and create a version for the stage that would be I imagine quite different from the written publication that's fascinating it's almost like you're dealing with some of the issues that arise when you're translating for theatre yeah what about for you Marlena just sort of think about what really caught me and the question was the idea of you know a text based in one sort of geographic location and language sort of bringing in geographic locations and languages and I think that interestingly it's something that this sort of within the realm of the text also gets dramatized right the title of the book is in Catalan My No Se Café Forra de Casa I never know what to do outside the house and it's a woman who spends a lot of time in her house she lives on Mallorca which is an island and this also gets dramatized at the same time that she is sort of the protagonist is sort of interpolating other literary texts from many different places in the telling so I think sort of similar to what I was saying before it was always this question of going back and forth between what are we getting from the intertext and what's actually happening in the realm of this story and also something that I was thinking of when Madeline was speaking Madeline mentioned Occitan and French and you know Catalan is very close linguistically and even in the story that I read we have the Spanish language also as another language that's just right there she works in the Spanish language newspaper but we're getting the story in Catalan so I think that there were sort of a lot of levels of this to negotiate throughout the work and it's still each story in the way that it brought in say other languages or other literary traditions presented its own unique challenges for sure. Interesting I wanted to before I open up the floor to all of you asking questions of each other I wanted to just give a shout out to Allison Charrette who has written in she is the instigator of our mentorship program she started the mentorship program for Alta and has been instrumental in really building it up into what it is today and she just wants to say congrats to everyone I'm so impressed with your work and happy international translation day so all of you met were able to meet at the beginning of your mentorship at the Alta conference and then you went off and you did your work sat at your desk pulled out your hair chewed your pencils and now you get to come back around after a year what questions do you have for each other I guess as the translator pair I'd like to ask the other translator pair exactly how your process has evolved over the year and has it changed anyways anything that you abandoned throughout the process or maybe thanks to your mentors suggestions you start to emphasize or de-emphasize I was totally going to ask you that also so I could start and then you can jump in she doesn't have anything else to add when we started we worked a lot with the literal trot sheets and we kind of I think that we brought a lot of our personal creative practice to it of working alone and then waiting to show each other when we thought it was completely done and then actually the very first round we barely showed each other the drafts before we sat down for the first conversation and Donmi was like you guys should share more because the styles were very clearly our own word choices and stylistic preferences I think and so over the course of the year and a lot more sharing back and forth and getting to know each other's process as well just in terms of drafting things up and then looking at it and then what happens after we give suggestions or don't give suggestions after the meetings we work a lot together outside of the translation project already and we're also very good friends in real life so we've got different synergies for different projects but we all kind of step up whenever something happens or doesn't happen and it's been pretty fluid I think we've just become a little bit in how we're living submissions and who initiates what yeah it's been pretty organic for us I think I hope you do that go ahead that discussion of the need to make the process more collaborative really resonates with me our collaborative process certainly evolved a lot in the course of trying to translate this enormous novel it very much we very much began to take on distinct roles over the course of this project and that was always sort of the case for us because we always have different hats that each of us wears one of us will be the translator and the other will be the editor so for this project Riley was translating and I was editing him for our next project we'll switch hats but we discovered that having a translator who was taking a sort of different tack in the approach to the text was very useful a lot of the time I felt that it was my role just to provide a backstop for Riley so that Riley could know that he'd be met with skepticism in whatever he did and that way he was able to be bolder because he knew that if he took a risk that didn't succeed I would take no pity on him that says very much wearing those different hats enabled us to sort of enhance each other's efforts yeah I think that's so great something to add is I feel like me and Mercy do have some similar ways of working that was helpful I've worked with her several times before and she's a really good friend in life too it's like this is not life or something but we're also friends in life I found that we both are just work mules you know that's how we both work we don't do kind of like little bit like let's set this plan and you know every other week we're just like no we're busy for two months but let's set this one week where we do we pump out 20-30 poems and let's just put our heads down and get to work and so I think me and Marcy have a really good synergy that way where we just get to work really hard and we look at each other just covered in like dirt and mud and destroy it this is awesome this is euphoric and you get to share those giggle moments together you have someone there to witness everything that went in to arguing about one word for two hours and then you get to share the giggle at the end of it that's something really special there's a lot of I envision a joint or several joint residency application so you can have that month where you just intensively translate other questions that you have for each other yeah I heard that some of you are also poets and I just wondered if if you had found the process of focusing on one translation project made you have to suspend your own creative work did you find there was some kind of interference between translating another poet or writer and your own work I write poetry as well as translate and I find that the two activities synergize very well for me cognitively because there's a similar sort of rigor involved the way Riley and I often talk about translation is that we're applying a hierarchy of different layers to a translation of a particular phrase a sort of hierarchy of criteria that it has to satisfy which might be a A hopefully it has to mean the original means B it has to use the same metaphor the original uses C it has to be on the same register between slangy and official speech as the original and you know on to DEF and so forth I find that there's something about poetry that's similar in that what distinguishes poetry from other sorts of language is that it's sort of pressurized it's high demands are being placed on each unit of language and there's a very low tolerance for units of language clashing with or contradicting each other in unproductive ways so I find translation and poetry to be sort of allied disciplines in that way yeah I think they are very much allied I was thinking more in terms of voice perhaps it's the material I was working with which has a very strong voice especially I suppose I relate to the she more than to Ulysses but I found it quite hard to maintain my own creative work at the same time because I it got to the point where I didn't know who was speaking anymore whether it was the poet I'm translating or my own voice when I'm trying to write my own stuff we actually had sort of the opposite experience where we were feeling sort of eerie kinship with the different characters in the book so we were concerned that our voices sort of had too much in common with them and we sort of made a deal that we weren't going to speculate about what that meant so we had one character who was a bullying small town police chief and Riley had like eerie sense for this guy's voice and what expressions he would use and what expressions he wouldn't use and then we had another character who was a sort of frustrated layabout alcoholic writer and I always knew exactly how he would phrase something so we just made a deal I wouldn't draw any inferences if he wouldn't I know for you E.J. and Marcy you both are poets as well do you want to respond to that question? go ahead or you both are workhorses so it was no problem for us we're lucky because I feel like very early on Donnie talked to us about this we have this exact conversation I think even at ALTA and the first few conferences afterwards because we're also a poet and translator and we're all writing poetry while translating that's just continuously part of our work and she really told us some of the values and surprises be ready to be surprised by how translating Ewan is going to influence your work and not to be afraid of that but instead like really welcome and enjoy it because that's another incredible Korean woman poet that's becoming a part of you and you're kind of continuing this tradition and veering in some ways but that's also something you're offering and so she really played out this almost connective tissue to where we're going to go and where we come from and so I think from speaking for myself I felt really comfortable and excited about that element I said you know Marcy and I are coming off of books our first book so I think for me especially I want something new now and I want to change and veer off and discover something otherwise I don't want to write the same stuff I think that that's a wonderful place to end our conversation with that invocation of the connective tissue that we are providing as translators but also what keeps us coming back to literature, any literature whether it's through translation or not and not to not be afraid of that kind of influence and connection but to embrace it I know that if we were in front of our audience at the moment you would be hearing lots of loud applause but unfortunately I cannot do that for you but I want to thank you immensely for your participation in the program I'm so glad to hear how fulfilling it was for you and definitely thrilled to hear the end result in the little bits that you've read and I want to read the whole thing now so I'm looking forward to doing that when your work comes out in book form so with that I will say thank you very much and thanks to all of our sponsors and all of the mentors who provided such valuable input to you and certainly to the American Literary Translators Association which fulfills so many vital roles for us who present literature from other languages so thank you all very much thank you so much goodbye