 Yes, hello. I'm Susan Thorne. I translate German to English and I'm maybe being less anecdotal than my colleagues here on the panel and Wanted to pass along a few pointers just for those times when I have them and sure you do too When you finish the project you're ready to start something new translate something new what will it be and pass very likely you have something in mind, but sometimes I don't or the The text I was excited about six months ago doesn't appeal to me quite as much. I'm looking for something I'm shopping around for a project and To jump start your brainstorming I could suggest One thing that helps me keeping a list of what I've read because you know having Recall or calling up things that I read years ago That might be very good choices for a current project That that can be difficult so You know systematically Well, it's in the computer or whatever keeping a record of works that you already know and might want to go back to and Keeping a record of works that you've heard about or read about that that piqued your interest that you might want to work with Might be sticking book reviews in a folder and you go look at them, you know at a time of need when you're wanting to Identify a new translation project a work that interests you If you translate contemporary lit literature their websites to consult and publications with information about new resources new releases and I Might go to these. There's new books in German that the They are day produces Sorry, the good to institute Publishes regularly. There's a website called literature critique calm that That will email you regular releases about New books with reviews of them so you can assess a little bit of what they're like whether you might like them And I know there are other national government in just agencies like in Norway and Austria have them for example that will Put out regular internet internet lists of new publications in those languages You can also look at publishers websites see what they're doing Check out their offerings and they often have links to book reviews that would let you form some idea about the text And there's a particular issue that I run into with German and some of you may share this but others may not It's the problem that German is a language with a fairly wide exposure in English translation relatively speaking, I mean historically the German classics have been you know widely read studied their Academic departments devoted to this so And more modern canonical works to you know Kafka grass and others Are pretty well represented in English translation so compared with many other languages So if your source language is one like this with fairly wide currency in English translation You may need to do some digging to find a Work you engage with that hasn't already been translated and I don't I don't know how many times I've Become excited about a novel or a short story and then only to realize that it's out there in the in the bookshops already so checking checking with websites like UNESCO's index translatomium translatomium or The University of Rochester Site for more recent the most recent works could spare you that that pain and So finding a new project may require you to get off the beaten track a bit if you have a favorite author I'd suggest looking around for lesser-known works by that writer or maybe something that Has been written in a genre that is less Not associated so much or not as well known for that author for example Kafka's diaries or Herta Miller's travel writings or someone's children's book that is Is not widely known? They've been overlooked And by wandering the stacks of the local University if you've got a good if they have good holdings in your your language area You can turn up some Some fines there and you can assess them on the spot. It has that advantage And one potential source of Works that may have been overlooked by even well-known authors are anthologies Sometimes they're along genre lines, you know our theme the check short story or The Russian descriptive essay something like that. I have a book a fairly old anthology devolved, you know the woods or Forest That has a story by Friedrich Nietzsche that is a fairly conventionally romantic story from from his youth Before Nietzsche became Nietzsche really that I'm translating and I think this this may be of of some interest as to a publication and That came out of this rather Rather old battered paperback found in a in a secondhand book sale. So things can turn up in Unexpected places and I wouldn't even rule out academic anthologies, you know disc books to discuss a theme and include excerpts that might Identify a good, you know a longer work that would interest you So these are some approaches that have helped me and Might be of interest to you and I I Think now it's time to hear from the others about particular instances of Finding texts. I have a sort of two opposite examples. I think of how texts have come to me I must say I probably Incredibly new at this. I was at Alta for the first time last year with having just started really in translation And I had two projects and it came to me in different ways I translate Uruguayan poetry, so I translate poetry from the smallest Spanish speaking country in South America and my first project and Is translating the poetry of Cersei Maya who is 82 and is one of the leading poets in Uruguay and one of the generation that includes I guess the best-known name in America now would be Eduardo Galliano is the last living one of that generation and Cersei and And I came across her because I had been in Uruguay for my sabbatical year I went back down to visit some friends over three kings over Epiphany staying with them at the beach. They knew I'm a poet I love poetry I have been reading Mario Benedetti and other other Uruguayan poets and In my shoe and the three kings, you know that the three kings come by and they leave presents in the shoes of children But anyway my shoe I got the complete works of Cersei Maya the complete poetry of Cersei Maya 400 pages Because she is from a town Takuura Mo What my friend was from and so I just sat there in a hammock at the beach and I couldn't stop reading these poems I just felt absolutely in love with it. You know that this is love at first sight And when I got back I started translating a few just for myself and looking around to see what I was sure would be lots of Translations and found out they're just a few in a couple of anthologies And so it's a Uruguay. So you ask the first person, you know You know how to get in touch with Cersei Maya and this case they knew and if they didn't you'd ask the second person But I had great luck because She immediately responded warmly. I said that I really like to translate a few things just in the amount of literary journals in the United States I wish people knew your work better. She said how lovely please do and so First first problem there was no problem getting an agreement for the person to do it The response was so immediate Editors that I have worked with as a poet for years who routinely turned me down and or take six months to sit on my work answered, you know on a Sunday night and said yes to her poetry and and Paul Muldoon took one for the New Yorker and So I began to get more excited about it and translate more work And then I moved on to go ahead and get a book contract for that that a selected poems is going to be coming out from the University of Pittsburgh Press so that was just the happy happenstance of you know, I've met her now. I know her it was There are other ways this could go including having fallen love with the book and someone else is already bringing out a book and Someone else has the rights all those things But that was me finding a passion Just by finding a book like you're talking about The other was the idea first. I decided to do an anthology of younger Oriolian poets poets under 40 And so I just deliberately set out to stalk them And this can be done Really amazingly well from far away these days So I started Contacting the poets that I could see had we ever went poets doing things online or that someone mentioned to me another poet I knew an older poet and I would email them or contact them on Facebook And when you contact a young poet, you know poet 25 year old poet You say I might be using five poems in an anthology. They send you like three manuscripts for you. I'm just bam attached to that So no rights problems. No, you know, they'll whatever so so then I went down to order way And I went to readings and I met more poets. I had an event where you know I met all the poets in one place and told them at the anthology and then I had 65 poets for the 22 so I think that Sometimes it would be probably be hard to go right away Maybe take the best 25 year old person's work and translate it as a single poetry collection and have it published in quite the same way It says a Maya, but by doing this anthology great response from the poets Contract for the book. It's coming up from the University of New Mexico press so But in that case it was like just a concept first, you know, I teach young poets here I knew there were young poets in order way and then I went to find them Those are my two anecdotes of how work has come to me Well, I too will be anecdotal and kind of on the same side of things as Jesse I think the word search appears in this description But so does the word find and find is the side of things that I'm on or rather being found I think like many people I was a poet for many many years before I ever even thought about translating And the way I came to it is the way I know a lot of people came to it I was reading a bilingual edition of a Latin American poet who should remain unknown Unnamed so that the translator can and I said to myself gosh, I could do better than that and So I just started working on these poems. I had a Spanish minor in college I dusted off my college Spanish and Just started working. I had no intention of publishing. I have not published these poems I could not publish these poems if I wanted to Say another word about that at the end But it was what I sort of consider my Translation adolescence and that will be the beginning of a metaphor that I carry on for the next couple of minutes What happened next was what I would call dating and I should emphasize that this is a metaphor And we'll continue to be so so my first serious dating was with The poems of a German poet Richard Exner whom I met at the MacDowell Colony when I was in residence writing poems We exchanged poems. I Realized that our poems had quite a lot in common. So I dusted off my college German I'd spent a Semester in Germany when I was in college and worked on those poems for a while Published a number of them including a chapic local poem. I don't know that I ever had an intention of Going on past there, but it lasted for a while In the meantime, I had a number of shall we say one night stands A Spanish poem would come my way and look very attractive or another German poem I even had a blind date blind in a couple of senses One was that a friend fixed us up and said can you do this for my anthology and the other was that my French is pretty terrible But at least so far. I knew something about all the languages. I was translating from my second serious dating coincided with my learning of Italian and my friend and teacher teacher in quotation marks because their class was very casual gave me the poems of dacia Marini and They were they're short little things. They're really quite delightful and Just working on those got me It coincided with my learning of the language. It helped me learn the language. I was having a fine time with them I published a whole bunch of them in magazines thought I might go on with that and Then I fell in love now metaphor right not with the poet but with the poems and Like a great deal of falling in love. It was totally inappropriate Which is to say that whereas I had known something about these other languages. I knew not a word of Vietnamese Which is what this person spoke so a little background about how that happened. It was quite serendipitous I was teaching at UMass Boston directing creative writing program The director of something called now called the Joiner Institute for the Study of War and Social Consequences Came to my office one day and asked if I would like to Collaborate a little bit because they had a writer's workshop and the Joiner Center was founded in the 1980s by Veterans and of course in the 1980s that meant Vietnam vets So it was just about the time that things were loosening up in Vietnam. So they started this workshop in the beginning The faculty were people like Bruce Wybel and Tim O'Brien And there were writers always coming from Vietnam when it opened up a little bit I was asked to teach and I was asked to teach of all things of all things translation I How did I teach? How would I teach translation? I had no idea. I had done the things I described But I agreed and the first year I was there I met a poet named Marine Quaintio who brought three of his poems translated into Kind of bad English but it was good enough that I could see the poem underneath His English and I was hooked. I was in love and I thought okay No more Italian at least for the time being and this was 1993. So I've been at this for a good long time As it turned out I did not fall in love sufficiently to become fluent in Vietnamese though I had fantasies of doing that. I took a year of Vietnamese at Harvard. I can get along. I can read poems But I make terrible mistakes. So I'm completely Dependent on my co-translator whoever that may be But it's become a significant part of my life and it just kind of happens Not something I searched for the last thing in the world. I needed was something else to do in my life So the idea of translating anything was just why would I bother with that and then here I here? I come to a language. I don't even know It's enriched me enormously the very fact that it's a language I didn't know anything about that it's an Asian language that does not act like the European language was pretty wonderful. I was very fortunate in Easily getting the rights to these poems and I do want to say something. I I greatly advise Falling in love if you are going to translate a book Particularly of poems, poems are really sort of intense. If you're getting paid money, you can translate anything But but if you're getting if you're translating poems, you can't so I really I Recently was in contact with a former student who who indeed fell in love with a text and Discovered that she couldn't publish the translations because she did not have permission so you've got to get what to say the parental permission for This marriage to to go ahead. So that's my story Well, I'm in a great position because I've heard everyone else and I have to pick up the key phrases that I think matter From my point of view just from my own experience happy happenstance Finding or being found I like the phrase just kind of happened because that sounds so unprofessional And it is it's unprofessional But once it just kind of happened you make it professional So to take an image, I think it was Gerta, but I'm not sure somebody said The difference between everyone else and a writer is that there's a writer walks along. He's carrying a little notebook And a pencil Well a translator is could be any traveler Let's say but you have to be on the TV if you have to have your eyes and your ears open You have to be ready to receive actually Christ said it better than Gerta Christ said many are called but few are chosen. Has anyone ever looked into what could that possibly mean? It sounds so nasty Many are called for just I think what what Christ meant is many are called and very few listen So what really happens in my experience is always traveling. Okay, so I can't I feel that miss Susan Susan Susan's was a very useful Opening for people who let's say are here. They're in their university. They're stuck wherever they are And what do they have they have books and they have the internet and I do kind of the opposite I just go somewhere and so I can tell you a lot about that if you go to a small country It's a lot easier if you go to a small country you one poet and within a few months You're gonna know everybody in the whole It's a huge advantage Then you still will have to pick whom do you feel most sympathy for most sympatical with their work, right? But the small countries great advantage a huge country like Brazil is it's really it's really a problem. It's it's enormous and The serendipitous nature of these encounters becomes even more important in a place like Brazil So I end up devoting this started seven years ago And I'll be working on with this guy the rest of my life or at least the next five six years So that's 13 years with one poet in Brazil. It's complete. It's pretty much an axe I didn't think somebody else picked him and that somebody else I had respect for and The person said to me, this is whom you should be trying to say this is the most important voice amongst contemporary poets And this guy so I don't matter young so difficult that when I started reading it I my first instinct was to run because I didn't think I could handle it, but the the head of Portuguese-Brazilian studies at Brown said you're the only person you're the only person who can possibly translate this guy so flattery Flattery will turn anyone into a slave So he not only flattered me He then invited so that I'm young to a conference at Brown all the way from Brazil and he invited me and we met And I really liked the guy. He's a really great guy and so that made it easier and then we began to discover things that we have in common um and And and we began to work together together and that's one aspect that I want to hope I think collaborated Even if you don't call it a collaboration, even if the book doesn't say See some Adam Sorkin's books always say translated by Adam Sorkin and or translated by Adam Sorkin with And I've had the strange experience most of the people don't want it done that way Most of the people I work with And they feel that the English is entirely my responsibility, but they're very willing to help nudge me along the way Okay, so even a language. I know well like Portuguese I want to be nudged along the way because I always have doubts and when it's a language I don't know well like Spanish. I really really work very hard to make up for my deficiencies by ringing the poet dry I mean, I just grab hold of them and ask a million questions until they're almost dead And then I have a book a good book um Now serendipity is the key thing But it's serendipity plus character You have to count when when if you're walking down the street and there happens to be a $10 bill on the ground You can keep walking if you're a noble person or if you're an ignoble translator You can pounce on the $10 bill and grab it and you have to do that as a translator You're traveling in a foreign country you meet people you like someone then they hand you a book You start reading it and you see something you like you got to begin You got to do it and you got to go back call them up visit them start working with them People will work with you usually because and this is not nice. This is The way the world is a colonial, you know America English and all this America has been dominating the world in the 20th century the way England did in the 19th and it's not a Pretty thing to look at but it's a reality. Therefore Almost anyone from a small country like Uruguay or or Ecuador Is going to be delighted if you're translating them. They think That you are opening the door to the world for them because without you they can only be known in in in Montevideo in bucarest in What was my other small country? Oh, oh or in guayaquil The people in guayaquil can't even be known in keto Because keto is the capital and wants to ignore guayaquil But if they get can get hold of me or if I offer to translate them they think that they can actually Be discovered by the world and to a very small degree. It's true I mean, you know 300 people 600 people Maybe if you're lucky a thousand people will buy the book and and so you have in a way made it into the world So so chads I can just give anecdotes when I left brazil Oh for me the key thing is traveling and if you guys are young if you don't have a million children and all that Uh, I or if you're very old and your children have grown up I would say that the best most important thing is travel go to the country spend as much time as you can So I taught in brazil for two and a half years Uh, and and when I was leaving my best student gave me a pile of books She gave me a whole box of books got back to america couldn't find a job It was the middle 70s. I've been out of the country for a few years. I was out of the loop So I settled down in granite village and started to translate cladici respecter whom I had never heard of Well, this is 1974 But I had the book in the carton two books by respecter. I started translating them everything I sent out unaccepted I didn't receive my first projection of any translation. I ever did Until six months had passed. So I was tremendously lucky. I'm not saying I was great. I was just incredibly lucky I came at a moment when everyone was interested in south america and nobody except gene longwood Nobody was translating anything from brazil at the time So I packed all this stuff except it which is very encouraging and that's how I became In a sense of translator if everything gets accepted you you're pretty happy to be in that right You know, it's a good right um Okay, so that was just that a student gave me the book So I translated several of the authors that I found in this carton of books And the only one that got published in book form was cladici respecter And then a couple of two years later was on the beach with my little one year old son running all over the beach and a couple of people near us were admiring my son and Particularly the woman was admiring our son. She started chatting with my wife or whatever my son's mother and And they started chatting and it turned out They said what are you doing here? And my son's mother said, well He that guy is he's translating portuguese poets I had come to portugal to do an anthology of portuguese poets, but I just arrived I hadn't begun the guy comes back our husband. It turns out. He's a portuguese poet And he says I'm having tea at four o'clock with a la chandra o'neill Who was really one of the most famous poets at the time in portugal? Why don't you come and join us so because of my son running Naked he wasn't yet an american. Um, so he was running naked all over the beach. Um Thanks to that I got to find a talish under neil sauce and I ended up translating him for years and years and years And then a few years later. I came back. I had a grant Uh to translate so few of the mellow brand anderson a wonderful wonderful woman poet But just a wonderful poet, but she's also the most famous woman of letters. I think almost in the history of portugal In any case, I got a grant to translate her. I arrived in in in lisbon. I called up Alexis how nice to hear from you. I said, well, I'm here. When can we begin and I had planned the whole thing with her Half a year earlier. She said begin. Oh, yes. Yes. Well tomorrow. I'm going to a wedding And I said, well, how about the day after tomorrow? Oh the day after tomorrow. I'm leaving for greece I said, well, when are you coming back? She said three months from now So I was left with a big grant and nobody to translate And some guys said to me, why don't you go up the portal and translate your genio d'andrade? Um, he's always at home. He never goes anywhere and he's a very vain man. He'll be delighted to be translated So I went up there and and and transited him for the next 25 years and With the material that I managed to do that first summer I returned to america. I sent it to my publisher who had given me a contract to do so fear the mellow brand anderson And he said, oh, I like this guy even better and he changed the contract. He published your genio It was my first book. So fear didn't talk to me for 10 years She was so angry, but um, these these are these are the little things that happen And and uh, ecuador. I my my language is portuguese, but um, um eight years ago a colleague from the spanish department said Tell me what do you think of this and handed me a bunch of poems to read in english and they were terrible just Really terrible the kind of thing you guys didn't didn't want to talk about terrible translations well, they were translations of excellent ecuadorian poets by a bolivian Who knew more english than my colleague, but was a foreign wasn't english at all And he said are these publishable? I said no and he was a pretty tough guy. He wasn't afraid of the truth he said Can they in any way be made publishable? I said you need a real translator and he went like this And I said where he said how about guayaquil? I said well, I'm busy on two other books. Uh, I'm free uh after christmas He said i'll meet you i'll meet you in january 1st in guayaquil I said done a deal and i've been going back to ecuador every year since i've been there seven times Galapagos five times And uh, this was the first complete book that came out but before that an anthology of 17 poets came out This is completely serendipitous. It was his idea his desire. He wanted to give some um Relief, what's the word not relief? Shape silhouette he wanted to highlight highlight his Poets from his hometown guayaquil because everyone in keto ignores guayaquil Um And uh, I had no i'm not party freeze. I'm just his colleague So I was simply the hired gun who knew english And who had a poetic ear but That was a hired gun. I didn't choose the poets. I didn't choose the poems He made all the choices. I made sure that the results were really good poems in english And the book was good. It never sold it was with a Press it doesn't sell much But the book looks good. It has a good cover It has good poets in it and because of working with those 17 poets I got to meet all of them and they were delighted one guy I went back to ecuador a year later and I gave $50 to everybody Who who got published in america through us and one guy who was about 75 80 He took this $50 bill from me and his eyes filled with tears And I said what what's the matter? He said This is the first time in my life That I have ever been paid for poetry. So that was really touching Really touching. I was happy to that I had overcome my stingingness and gave away all the money to the To the ecuadorians instead of keeping some of it for myself So I keep going back to ecuador and going back on january 1st And I have another ecuadorian book coming out So it all started serendipitously because a colleague wanted to get an anthology published And he suspected that what he had was unpublishable and he was right And he suspected that I could make it a real book and we did we did it from scratch We did not work from the bad Puppies, you know, that's another thing some of you may have to think about Do you want to redo something that's already been done and it's bad? If so, I would say start from scratch Don't look at the bad text in your native tongue It will only distract you and irritate you and and maybe pollute you a little bit Some of you may have heard of whereabouts press anyone from san francisco anybody whereabouts press Did you do the mexican one? Yeah So whereabouts press is an excellent endeavor The idea is wonderful. The guy should be a millionaire and of course nothing happens Nobody buys the books unless unless someone like c.m. Mayo is hawking them then they really get sold But it's a wonderful idea. It's called a traveler's literary companion And what he does is he provides in english A book of short stories that represent all the different parts of a country So it's done geographically and the idea is that a tourist A tourist landing in hamburg will read a story that's set in lancanesa And a tourist landing in munich will read a story set in the english when zoe weiter And so I suggested to him how about brazil I had already read the costa rica anybody nobody's in here many alter members continued contributed to the costa rica Edition which was one of the very first and so I knew about the Book series and I suggested brazil and he said yeah, go ahead and that was it I simply have to gather stories again. Which stories do you gather? It's a big question of chance I cannot give you any guidelines You you go to a library you sit down with a million books. You see what you can find you call up everybody You know and and six months later you end up With a pretty interesting collection with a lot of sex and violence, you know, of course Because you wanted to sell and with all the sex and violence in it you managed to sell 350 copies So I'm all in favor of chance. I believe here's the deal with chance. You have to understand what heraclitus said Character is fate And here's the deal if You've just been told by the Delphi oracle That you're going to kill your father and sleep with your mother You do not upon leaving the oracle kill the first old man you bump into A crossroads That's where character becomes fate for the translator. It's the other way around when you bump into a poet at the crossroads translator Do something grab hold of it Don't kill him translator In other words, you have to jump up upon your upon your chance and turn it into your fate So those are some anecdotes, of course, I have many more but so do we all so Does anyone else have something to question any comments back and forth for on the panel across the panel or shy? Let's have some questions Or anecdotes Stereo anecdotes Yes, well, this is I need to give Alexis more time But I was struck by by something that you said Alexis by by everything you said, which is the Your collaboration with the living translator Because my experience is is really the opposite And that when I work with living poets or when Nicole and I work with a living prose writer Prose writers just trust us and that's the end of that and we will of course ask questions Which is very nice to be able to do we can't do that with someone said that very nice But I wouldn't call that collaboration And when it's with the french the only french the only live french poet I'm trying to say an old good friend whose english is awful but who reads english fluently Jean-Claude Cate, you know He thank god trusts trust me and just says have you are you sure that you've got this nuance of my home Occasionally you will say and that's very awful and occasionally, you know, I've made mistakes and The ones that that my collaborator in america didn't get But I can't imagine collaborating with him that would be a nightmare because his english isn't it's it's just not He's not a quote in english is a quote in french No, but I completely what are you saying is a corrective of great importance But it has no relevance to my experience because Believe it or not the people have collaborated with don't speak a word of english that is the advantage They don't speak a word of english. That's better. So what happens is I go down to a city in the interior brazil It's about a hundred degrees. We've got a breeze blowing through our apartment and my pal Salgado is lying there with almost no clothes on on the couch his legs dangling over the end of the couch with utter patience simply waiting to hear The english of each poem. He knows all his poems by heart Completely all of them because he comes from an oral tradition didn't learn to read and write till he was 15 years old He knows everything by heart. It's absolutely astonishing. So he's got it all in his head He lies there in his bathed in patience And I simply recite in english So it's all about rhythm. It's all about music. It's all about sound Now you might say well, this is crazy Look, I think more than half the value of poetry is in the music That's what I feel. I don't feel it's in the content if it were in the content You might as well write prose In any case, in any case, those are the kind of poets I favor Where the music is very important. Eugenio D'Andrade whose world I mean everyone in portugal reads in my I once got on a train a night train to the algarve from porto with three girls in my cabin Already then 20 years ago. I was much too old for them, but Now I can't even be able to see them but In any case, there were three girls Medical students and they said well, what are you doing in portugal? I said well, I'm translating Eugenio D'Andrade They all threw themselves on me Now If you read him, he has nothing to say at all But boy does he boy does he say it well I Talking to himself about what does he want from life anymore as if he were Odysseus What morning does he wish for still of sand or silk upon the mouth? Before he enters Ithaca, it's all about the sound. It's nothing happening And it took me a couple of years to realize that And and as we worked together the collaboration. He didn't speak a word of English. He had no interest in English Strangely enough, but this is how the collaboration wouldn't go He'd sit there and he'd recite a poem of his Que extra no oficio meio Focurar renta chão Uma folha renta chão procurar entro sono eu poeira Moliado ainda do primeiro solo and I realized after a while took me a year or two, but he was directing his own poems Okay, so when I translated was his directing What I tried to do was produce a poem in English that was his musical So I've chosen poets where the music is the major thing and I have to say poet after poet In the end they listen to the English and whether they know the language or not Their final words are so a bank so a bank it sounds good now Of course you could do something wrong that sounds good But I hope my portuguese is good enough. I don't do something wrong So sound is the key thing that linked me with my so-called collaborators Okay, but when I had a real collaborator, I didn't marry her like me But she was in montreal an hour away With her it was a real collaboration and she refused to let her name be put on any book She didn't feel her contribution was enough, but she was utterly she was portuguese Her english was impeccable her french was impeccable Even her german was very good and she understood poetry. So she was absolutely I thought that I could never work without her But when she went off to the un and disappeared into the wilds of barundi and where did everybody kill each other? Right next to barundi She disappeared into Rwanda barundi Then she went to Haiti where all their friends got pumped off in the earthquake everyone they were working with Her husband stepped out of his office when he came back the office was gone and everybody was dead and he survived So she's gone. I lost her 10 years ago. She's alive But I lost her as a collaborator and I thought that I could never go on And I felt I could only go on by working with the living people Okay, so it's a different experience I think martha wants to get here for a second I am necessarily dependent on a co-translator not just a collaborator Whose name is always on the book and who in two out of three cases has been the poet And to me it's been invaluable not only because my vietnamese is insufficient I make terrible mistakes But also because the culture is not my culture and there is so much that I don't understand And I don't have a basis for doing that the first poet I worked with would draw little diagrams This is what a buffalo cart looks like this is what the perch climbing falls do this Is what these fish do and and I have this little scrapbook of little drawings that he gave to me I think it depends completely says more serendipity, you know I would not work with somebody if I started working with somebody and there was tension and the person seemed Bossy and was going to tell me how to do it. I would quit I just wouldn't go any further. So there's always a little testing period But I have been really really fortunate the once that I worked with a co-translator who was not the poet She had a degree in French and English literature. She's a lawyer, but she's a poet But she would say things to me like hmm. Well, you were translating this woman poet. She said That reminds me a little bit of emily dickinson. You think about it that way or One of the poets I was translating who knew English said I said I couldn't I couldn't figure out what he's doing He's really unusually long lines. He's small. I was reading Walt Whitman. I said, oh, I got it Um, so I have been very fortunate in In the kind of working relationship. I've had but I think it's like any relationship, you know Uh, it's got to work and I I guess if I'm giving advice and you are going to work with a collaborator or co-translator be sure That you can work temperamentally be sure that before you go too far The dress I'm going to answer But working work whether you work with a your translator With with your person Directly have you ever done that? No, I haven't worked with a living writer yet Is another question. Well, I have a piece of very small piece of advice I really believe in and it'll sound a little nasty, but it's really honest and true If you're a foreigner that is to say if you were not born if you didn't take in English with your mother's milk I do think you should have a friend check out your translation I know really intelligent people Who are dedicated translators and who have published translations where after the first paragraph I couldn't go on and he's a friend I couldn't read any further A sentence like I had known him since seven years I just stopped reading and it was a really interesting novice. I had known him since seven years But give me a break And and all all all she had to do was ask her husband And she didn't bother to do it. You got to check with a native speaker Even if you came here when you were 16 years old and this is not an attack on an individual It's the nature of language. You will never get all the prepositions right If you didn't take it in with your mother's milk Yes, my students don't they were born here. Well, yeah Another question so it's hopeless for them Another anecdote Yeah If you identify something on a publisher's website, how do you actually get that book? Like I found things that I know are on amazon.fr But I don't You can order books from France. Yeah I would also it's just a postage problem Yeah, just I thought you had it shipped over. I would also um, we're talking about strange little resources I think people don't uh use interlibrary loan enough I mean, there's almost no book that can not be gotten to you by interlibrary loan Especially when you're first just thinking, I don't know if I really want it to to do this I actually said say my this poet that I'm translating in order way. She's nine books She doesn't have copies all of them and when I went down So she has this because they often print quite limited editions And she's just a person who gives them away and so they had published her collected works But I I managed to get a copy of one of the original books And I saw that they justified them all on the left margin right They had knocked out some original spacing So I went down to order way thinking I would go to the national library and look at them there And they didn't have all their books And I got back to the university of wisconsin and I put in a request for interlibrary loan And they looked and looked and looked and slowly they all came to me Somewhere in this country. There was a copy of every single one of those poetry books God knows how they got here, which I then could scan and have forever I Was there a question on this back other table? It's You mean the translation isn't good or you fall out of love with the original text The translation I think it's like I think it's like love. I mean, there's that metaphor again. It's try try again Are many things that I love so the anthology I did a younger order boy and poets, you know, I picked out all 22 poets I only translated one and all the other translators are wandering around the altar basically and there are people who took on stuff that I couldn't have done ever Because jeff brock did some stuff in form for me So there's another person who writes in port you know, I couldn't translate that There's someone else who did language poetry. I mean, you know, I picked them out I could read them in Spanish, but I couldn't translate them So, um, I think people often do fall in love with a poet I just do poetry and so I don't know about the prose and then when you sit down you actually just That you know loving it and being able to translate it can be two different things And I just I think you just go well, okay I learned something and and you move on and try and find something else But but if you really love it, I would keep looking at it. That's a good other approach Because you know, I mean whether we like as in a relationship This is a tough marriage, but I really really love this person and what you will do is just learn so much You will learn so much from getting I have translated poems that were really easy to translate really easy But I know everything and I didn't end up caring a whole lot, you know But poems that are hard. They're really tough. We have things to solve. I mean not to me It's also when I write my own poems, but but that to me is one of the joys of doing this is is Is sort of getting to the point making something work that was really hard. So I Unless you've got some other reason I I would keep at it for a while I would also say again from my not nearly as Baby experience compared to Alexis is that when you work on someone as the more you work on them the easier they get to be for you So, you know, there are 400 pages of said to say my poetry and every poem I did was easier than the previous poem Because I just began to learn what she does in a poem. I learned her vocabulary. I just began to think like she does Which is the same thing that happens when you read a writer, you know The more you read and that's of course what translation is Let's face it. It's good reading. That's really all it is and the more you read the more, you know I think I don't nearly vocalize nearly enough And I work collaboratively all the time, but I'm sort of going between the two languages by that But I've got to hear it and I've got to somehow say it in the way in English and I want to say too easy is often real challenge Yes The hardest thing to be transparent. Yes Sometimes Yeah, and I guess what when I said easy, I didn't mean the kind I know what kind of easy you mean, but Because some of the I mean one of the first people I I don't know fooled around with was wasn't a ruta and and the ode seemed like the easiest thing in the world and they're horrible Because if you just sort of follow line by line, it's just doesn't come out right at all And so I know what you mean. I think what I mean easy. It's like would you translate this poem for me? Here's an assignment I don't care about the poem um Maybe I'm missing something but Yeah That's more Either you're gonna get somebody who doesn't like any other writer and you'll never pay or a good word about other writers Or a couple honest people say you ought to look at this person. You ought to read that person. You ought to consider that other person And this is a tremendously productive way from within A culture that you're translating from within the language and a particular native Version of the language you're translating from to get a sense of what other Sincerely go ahead and see your writers think one of the writers would be good I think one word that we haven't used none of us up here have used is voice If you're translating poetry, I like talking about it as music and so on But if you're translating fiction, I think sounds still matters But when you're doing a 380 page book I think it's the voice of the author that you've got to capture and certainly I've done very little fiction, but in the case of Lee specter. It was her voice. I wanted to capture It was the voice of a person who Is so confident that all us human beings are in the same boat that we're all Lovelily doomed people and she just tells it the way it is and she has complete confidence that if she speaks Directly from her heart Unmediated almost almost by thought That we will understand her that she will get through to us She believes in this so thoroughly that was the voice. I tried to capture It took me many years in in in the only respective books that I did So voice is a good thing to think about if some of you are doing Of course, of course a poet should have a voice too, but In fiction you have to because what will be your guideline in fiction? It cannot just be the content Without style then it isn't literature Content alone cannot make literature Another person? I guess I saw another hand up the side of the room is not raised their hands at all The school teacher of me wants to call on someone on the side of the room I haven't done their homework I'm kind of in the middle so I'll Okay, okay take take responsibility Well, I as much as I agree that I would much why I prefer to travel and get to know Writers, I also agree with what you said just in terms of Stalking contemporary writers on social media Because right now I've got a project that's going to come out in January and I hadn't heard of popular writers that I'm including in this In this issue and now I'm friends with all of them on facebook It was really easy to just chip them in emails. Hey, I want to use your short story for this thing And they were delighted and and now there's a lot of dialogue and then they're sending me stuff And yeah, so it's a lot. I think it's it's really neat now, even though I I took me forever to get on facebook and now I I'm addicted so I agree with that point that it's really easy to Now at this moment in Urtaway I think that Urtaway writers are more in love with facebook than people here They're a little bit behind us, but they're all on facebook and and skyping of course is another possibility And it's like so if I want to talk with a poet about something they're a poem and I'm not in Urtaway And instead of you know shooting endless emails back and forth again, this would be in Spanish talking about what they mean in Spanish They didn't know fucking to skype. So that's another way in which the world has gotten smaller I have to say Saturday Maya at 82 is a great emailer, but she doesn't skype. So um, I've gotten that far, but It's a smaller world I have to say that you know Saturday Maya is 82 and she will not talk to me about her poetry We have lovely luminous times together in which she likes to read my poetry which is in English Or talk about if I take her a literary magazine that her stuff in read anyone else's poems Or talk about Shakespeare or her garden or my kids, but she just will not talk about her poetry And I think she was always been that way about her things that she doesn't have much ego about them She just lets it not in the world and I also think she thinks that 82 she doesn't I was like So um, she says, you know lovely things about how much my translations mean and how it's the most important thing about the book Because it's a bridge between us But you know, I can ask her a question about something But it's it's sort of like chasing her down the hall to get her to say something about what she meant in a poem So I I haven't had the sort of living collaborator experience there with the younger part. I was working with he used so much street slang You know, I would ask everyone I knew and then I would finally ask him Because I would say this person is not a 10 seller standing on the corner. So what is he selling? Now what kind of drugs does he sell? So um, in that case, you know And I have another poet I've translated in her 70s Tatiana Aronio and she makes up words And people who do that I wandered around all day. I googled a heck out of a title of winners poems is m a d r o r And I thought is it someone's name? Is it a reference to a you know, another little bit of literature It doesn't seem to any do with the poem. I guess as far as I could tell I wandered around I asked every order boy and I saw for two weeks. It's a friend there. I'm going to ask Tatiana and it's madre and delor put together Oh, of course you should ask. Yeah. Yeah, you know, it was just I I didn't ask her because at that time She her mother was sick and I didn't get a chance to ask but I was just setting this out like a task for myself Surely I can figure this out. There is no way you can figure this out Now I have to say also I'm not sure that any other any Spanish speaker would ever have known that either So how did you render it? You know, I actually haven't finished that poem and I now know what the title means But I it's just sitting there going Very hard. Yeah. Yeah. She's one of those dating things yet I've translated some of her poems which have been published individually and she's quite a hard poet and I'm trying to think maybe that That's my next project to do a whole book or whether we're just gonna leave it with a few poems I have to say that I Had not I'm like many poets. I don't like to talk about my poems I mean if you can't figure out what my problem is too bad But this experience of working with the Vietnamese happened at the same time that I was being translated into Italian and It really made me very generous with my translators To have the experience of having the enemies tell me I I suddenly opened up and and in the same way that A poet would tell me a story behind a poem that had nothing to do with the translation But at least I knew where it came from I found myself telling my translator More about my poems than I've ever told anyone and It was useful to have it be working both ways anybody We have more anecdote time. We get that. Alexis give us another anecdote. There's a hand over there I was just wondering if any of you have ever had the experience of wanting to translate someone But also not wanting to have a terribly personal relationship with them And is that possible? Do you know um Well, I want to say that Alex that Augustine Lucas the the younger poet that I did for the santhology is now The only one I haven't met because he's a professional football player and he has been an argentinist and I haven't met it So there's I know everyone else. We've spent considerable amount of time hanging out um Another friend of mine here was just saying having done a book with someone who they ended up being psychologically troubled and very difficult So I think that's an example of it. Yes. I have a friend So there must be It doesn't sound like you've done that. Alexis like you've had someone you really Yeah, I I did a book With a person who is psychologically troubled, but it didn't interfere until Happy until months after the book was published. So the only interferences will never say a word will never speak to each other again I absolutely hate her um But uh, I went I went I went down to Ecuador And I bought this cover. I I paid for this beautiful goya on the cover Um, my publisher was dedicated to book. I was dedicated book I got all the poems and magazines all over the country. I brought a hundred copies down I'm a weak old guy I bought a hundred copies down in my luggage To ecuador because we had scheduled three major readings in the three biggest cities in the country And at the first reading she said just on pass on. Oh, by the way, I've cancelled the other two readings With no no excuse. She just got a new job and she didn't have the time to worry about them So, um, and then of course you afterwards you find out that Yeah, that she's a very difficult person. I'm working with her. I already knew she was difficult, but but you know she she was a real poet and I thought it was worth it But of all the people I did 17 people for the anthology. She was the only one who was A problem. She arrived two and a half hours late completely hung over Had spent the entire night drinking And so I gave her a buck and I said cross the street get yourself a coffee come back in half an hour I was very severe and she's 23 or 24 at the time was 25 She went across the street drank a cup of coffee came back and worked all afternoon with me and we got it done So, uh, but I don't think I will ever talk to her again. Everybody else I got along with um very well the most famous. I think the best living poet in portugal today I have never met He's sort of a bit of a recluse, but very nice. He wrote me a letter after reading my translation saying, uh, you know It's flattery, of course, but still one likes flattery. He wrote me a letter saying, uh, oh, he's so better than the original Um, what's the name of the poet Alberto elder? He's really great I offered it to new directions and the remark was the usual remark apology won't sell um So eventually I will publish him somewhere, but I don't know where I've been sitting on this book now for 11 years And uh, he's really great. He's still alive. He's almost dying, but he's alive and I've never met him But I had the fortune the good fortune 11 years ago My the woman in montreal was still in this country. She had not joined the un yet And she's terrific. So I did all of my Alberto elder with her help. I could never done it on my own He's the wild man of portuguese poetry The opposite of yoshinio bendai who is this lucid little stream with little shiny stones in it And you simply have to say it right, but there's not much to talk about Now this side of the room is coming alive. I say a hand Actually, this is a reaction to your question I'm wondering if you had in mind that you didn't want to be influenced by the writer No, I have a particular person in mind who uh, I would like to translate him, but he also makes me terribly uncomfortable He makes you feel terribly uncomfortable? Yes He's very nice, but like too nice kind of Yeah, that's a particular problem. Well, I never had that nobody ever comes Yeah A moment At the end of it you really believe Opposite things about how a certain things is to be translated, but when I talk about the translated himself or herself is very strong conviction about The choice How do we deal with that problem if you have had it? Well once it only happened to me once and uh, I finally said to the poet listen Your English is pretty good, but You have to either you trust me as you're trying to say or you don't I can't go on working like this and after that everything was fine That's what happened the one time she was correcting every little word and she was wrong, you know 90 percent of the time Uh Correcting my prepositions. You know real bullshit. And I think she just was irritated This is the woman whom I had abandoned because she went to Greece. I felt she abandoned me Um, and uh, so she after that allowed me to translate her But she was very stickly and it was only personal and I finally said I can't work like this and then it was okay But if you really if the other person really interferes Yes, I think that finally you have to say I'm I'm the translator English is what I'm doing if you see that I made a mistake in your opinion with the original tell me But you have to trust my English In English I told him I won't give it Yeah, that's what I would do if I were you I would do exactly I think we've got time for like one more comment We want to be able to get well. We want to be able to get over to the five five five o'clock reading for the altar fellows, so Well, I was just in second on the response to your question about not wanting to get too close and then also, you know If you've got somebody with a big agreement The last result I read a few poems from a really good friend of mine, and I was translating them And that's a difficult situation because I'm really close to friends of him and every time he would come up with all kinds of Little changes and we'd be discriminating about poems all the time And I was already too close, you know because he's been living with it for a while I was like better drop it You know you have to maybe before it's a person that close you got to say look there's gotta be this kind of These ground rules about how this can work because I have to have ownership of this project And also once you've already been close you're gonna say look There's a decision that has to be made and It's it's it's a therapy, you know either I'm gonna do it and I can decide Well, I actually have an instructive Unfortunate little tale my mother's a trans my mother's dead My mother was a translator and spent much of her life translating her husband My stepfather was a russian writer, but he was a man of great ego and he was a bully And he was a very nasty tough man and a very good writer and his english never was good My mother's english was exceptionally good He would hover over her because they lived together And he would argue over every comma and finally after they Three or four or five of his books were Translated into english and were published. My mother finally quit. She didn't leave the marriage She said I'm not going to translate you anymore and the poor guy started writing in english Well, he'd lived in america for many many years But his english could never have the verve the variety or even the humor that his russian had And so in a way he became an emasculated writer because he was so nasty to his translator I do think if you can have the power lines clear It isn't always true, especially if you're doing translation for hire But like on the editor of the anthology that has to know 22 poets and 22 translators and the um And sometimes the poets the poets knew me but they didn't always know their translator And they were just meeting them They would take the translation that they got in the english translation from the translator and show it to a friend who spoke english And they come back to me with concerns and I would just say look i'm going over every single translation No translation will go into the anthology that i'm not absolutely certain is good You just have to trust me and no i'm not making these changes So um, and I don't even want you to tell your translator about it So but beware of the friend who speaks a little english Thank you you guys were great. Yeah