 So just a little bit of background. The impetus for this panel came from a two-part essay that Karen Amarick, to my right, wrote for Words Without Borders about called the making of originals, in which she discussed the frangibility of what we think of as an authoritative, as the source text, and what in fact is involved with translation beyond simply rendering a text from the source language into the target language, and what kind of editorial changes are made along the way, both the kinds that we assume we'll be making and the kinds that occur in every text, and then those that present themselves in individual text as we go through them. So Karen Amarick, to my right, is a professor at Princeton University, well known for her excellent translations of contemporary Greek literature, currently touring with one author, in fact. Just finished. Think about it. Just finished. And we're catching Karen at the end of her tour, so. Intensities, intensities. Yeah. And to Karen's right is Edric Gauvin, who translates from French, is a well-known specialist in graphic novel, a consulting editor for graphic novel for Words Without Borders, and also does a lot of French literature. It also translates a great deal of contemporary French literature, and also has a brand new book out, just in the consignment room. Yes. And oh. Show it. Show and tell. Contemporary Parisian noir, eyes full of empty, will be touring little in LA in the Bay Area after Alta. The author's flying over. And to my far right, Alex Zooker, a translator from Czech, who has done a number of Czech novels and Alex Wincher, last publication. This last summer I did a crime novel for Soho Press called Innocence or Murder on Steep Street by Hedda Margolias Kovali. OK. Karen, we'll let you lead off. OK, I'm actually going to stand up, because I have a very soft voice, and I got yelled at in the last panel for not projecting enough. So I'm going to try and make myself heard and also keep an eye on the time, so I don't talk too much. So my interest in textual instability and translation and what we do with textual instability and translation started with the first novel that I ever published in translation, which is this one. The few things I know about Glavkos Trasakis by Vasili Strasilikovs that came out in 2003. And this is the English version that was published by Seven Stories. And I tried to get images of all of the Greek versions. And I couldn't find them all, but here are some of them. So the story with this novel is that when I signed a contract with Seven Stories, I was told it's a standard translator contract that says you can add nothing and remove nothing from the text, a faithful translation of the Greek original, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, but also that the translation that I produced should be approximately 300 pages in length. And the most recent version of the novel, the one that the translation rights, the publisher who owned the translation rights had published, was approximately 800 pages long. So that was a big difference for us to deal with. And what happened was that I, so Vasili Kos is still alive. And it's sort of a fictionalized autobiography that he wrote over the course of many, many years. So it kept on coming out. You'll see some of these are some of the covers. I think it came out first in like 1963, I want to say. There was a short story. There's a character that created who's sort of an alter ego in a short story that then turned into a novella. And then he wrote a novel. And then he wrote a second volume. And then he wrote a third volume. And then they all were published together in a collected edition. And then there were some more, the two on the right, or the, it's this character who's sort of, it's like Vasili Kos, who lived in exile, who was a writer, who keeps on living. And every time there's another period in his life, he was living in exile in Berlin. Then he returns to Athens and has to write about that. So he writes another volume that gets reincorporated into this growing, growing work. And at the end of the day, so when I met with him in order to figure out how we were going to deal with removing 500 pages from a book that had already appeared in four versions that differ extraordinarily from version to version, his suggestion was that we just take out a big chunk of the book that he didn't feel belonged anymore. And so I don't have a picture of it for you, but the copy that I was actually translating from, he just tore out this section. So there's a big chunk missing. You open it up and there's just emptiness. And so I was actually translating from something that is utterly original in that sense. There's only one of them in the world and it's in my house. But it still wasn't enough. I still had to remove about 150 pages from the book. So I did extremely intensive editing that probably is, it's an extreme case. It's not something that we see every day. We might, as translators who are reading something and we would prefer for it to be otherwise, we might do something about that. I was given license to by the author, the author. I kept very elaborate details of what I was doing on the level of the sentence. Sometimes there were entire chapters that left. Sometimes it was paragraphs. And he signed off on it all at the end. And in fact, to the extent that he then created another version, this one came out in 2008 that is based in part on the English translation. So he made a lot of cuts in accordance with what I had done. And this is something that he writes about this version. Thereafter, various revisions followed in which I personally reversed the material. The last time in 2008 in a definitive edition, his italics, if one can speak in such terms about a work in progress of this sort. And I'm noting that this is my translation from what I assume is a Spanish translation, presumably by Ángel Perez González, who is the translator of the Spanish version that came out in 2003. And I assume that, I mean, Vasilikos doesn't speak Spanish. So I assume that there's a Greek text that nobody has access to for this thing that has only appeared in Spanish and now here in English. So this is his definitive edition in 2008. However, when he says, if one can speak in such terms about a work in progress of this sort, what that means is that the work is continuing to move in other places, including this, the Spanish edition. And I'm quoting from the same author's note. I consider the present edition, and by that he means this one, of the present edition, the Spanish edition, the most representative of the work. And it will remain as presented here in its reissue, sorry, as presented here until its reissue, this time final, in Greece in 2015. And so any day now, apparently, another version of this work is going to be released that will be based on the Spanish, which actually is based on the English, which is based on four different versions of this text and other in Greek that came out over the course of 20 years. So obviously, I know that this is an exceptional case, but I think it's only exceptional in its extremity, not in the basic nature of what it is. Textual instability is just a fact that we all deal with. But since this was the very first thing that I ever worked on as a 22-year-old translator, I had no idea what I was getting myself into. This has shifted the way that I think about all of my translation work. And so I'm much more attuned to the problem of textual instability and to what I do with it when I'm making decisions, and also when I'm sort of investigating the publication history of the works that I deal with. So I just wanted to give you one more example. From my experience, this is a manuscript page from a poet Eleanor Bakalo that Ugly Duckling is going to be publishing. And this is something that is very dear to my heart, because I saw it for the first time before I even spoke Greek. I was an undergraduate student, and I was at a place that had an amazing archive of Greek poets' manuscripts, and so I spent a lot of time in the rare book room reading their stuff or looking at their stuff. Because not only did I not speak Greek, but I definitely didn't read Greek poets' handwriting from the middle of the century. And so she's actually a poet who sort of cuts and pastes things. The stuff that's in red over there is a self-quotation from a previous volume of poetry that then sort of works its way into her later work. And that's just to give you a sense of how important the sort of visual organization of material on the page is to her work. This is something, this is a note that she gave to the typesetters of another one of her works that says, this is where the page numbers are to go. That's the title up there, but she's like giving you instructions as to where, how the indentation is supposed to work. And in her note to the typesetter, she says, basically follow what I do down to the centimeter or whatever. Pay attention to the way that I'm designing things for you. And this is one of the books that was, this is a page from one of her books that is designed. I won't go into the, I have reasons why I think that this, that it matters what it looks like. But just look at that for two seconds. And then look at the, this is the collected volume of her work. And what is on a spread here is all collapsed to be on the right hand side there. So in the collected version, there's a sort of collapsing of the work in order to fit on fewer pages for far financial reasons. As I was told by the person who edited it. And because he didn't think that the visual was actually a meaningful aspect of the work, it didn't occur to him that that was something that mattered. To me, it really does matter. And so to my sort of interpretation of her work and to the way that I want to present it in translation. And so what that means, and I, of course, I might not even, so the first editions of her work, you know, this one exists in maybe 200 copies. I now own one of them, which I feel very, very lucky to have it. But I wouldn't have known that I should look for it if I hadn't seen this first, you know, when I was 20 years old, 18 years old. And so that is something that I sort of feel should be more a part of the work that we do as translators is not to take the text that we're, that sometimes we're given or that the world gives us, that sort of lands in our lap as the text to base our work on and to think of a work as something that exists in many textual configurations. Some of those are translations, some of those are not. I mean, this is utterly obvious, right, to all of us who, I mean, I hope, like, this is nothing new. This is nothing that we haven't thought of before. And yet sort of insisting on being given the space to talk about it or to make decisions that might not be convenient for publishers or if they're not convenient for publishers such, to an extent that they don't want to let you deal with it, then to find other ways and other forums for talking about that. And I know that Alex is gonna give us one of his solutions for that, so I won't go on anymore. And I will just turn things over to Edward, I think. Are you next, or? Okay, where did it actually come from? Do you want to go? So I thought I'd start with just really quick on my prose translation and then move on to comics. This was my, you know, this was my first full-length prose fiction translation. And it came out in 2010, and by which time I'd been publishing short stories, often by this author, Shatapani Noa, in Lit Mags, and he's, and so I had sort of taken what I thought of as a very traditional route to publication for MFA fiction people, you know, publishing Lit Mags to get a collection together. But the difference being that in this case, you know, I tend to do a lot of pitching because I tend to really, really only want to work on things I want to work on. So, you know, to that extent, I think translators already share in the role of Gatekeeper, which is a fundamental editorial role. You know, and then, so there's the exercise of choice not only in terms of text, but then the exercise of choice on the minute level, the thing that Adam Darwell calls the infinite sequence of minute decisions or Arthur Goldhammer calls the concatenation of thousands of small choices. Because, so apart from the Gatekeeper-ness, there's also the fact that Shatapani Noa is an extremely prolific author. He's got well over 150 short stories in French by now. At the time I was working on him, he had about 110, and they were spread across seven collections, three publishers plus stories whose rights had reverted back to the author, covering about four decades of work. So I was, I guess, because it was my first book, I was full of sand. I had that sort of translation moment, which was like, yeah, I can do this, which as we all know is the beginning of ignorance. And so I thought, okay, then introduce this author. I'm not gonna translate one collection of his because his only principle in organizing his collections in France is chronology. He writes for five years, he has 12 stories. He puts a collection together, and then they're just in the order of composition, dated at the end. And I thought, no, actually, there's probably stories, we could do an anthology that doesn't exist in France that is a sampler that is a more effective introduction to the author's work over a span of time. And I think one of the things that also spurred it is a story that is probably well known here, but at the time it was by my Japanese studies, brother in Japanese studies who told me about how Murakami's first US collection, which came out in 93, was consisted of stories that had been previously translated, some of which appeared in English, but it was put together essentially by Gary Fiske, John, his editor at Cannab. And then 10 years later, that collection, which didn't exist in Japanese, came out in Japanese. I had no such hopes for this in France, it was just. And it's interesting, I mean, in terms of sheer output, I would say the only people that kind of rival him as a story writer in the US might be someone like, I don't know, Joe Skyloats or T.C. Boyle, or on the other side of the divide, you'd have Ray Bradbury or Helen Ellison, and luckily that's exactly where I wanted to put him on this divide between literary fabulism and the genre writing. But I, you know, so the considerations for picking stories were, there were a lot of them and I was also thinking about how to arrange them, trying to underscore his repeated motifs. There's two mermaid stories, you know, there's a, there were two King Kong stories that had to be Buddha at the last minute because the King Kong, my press got really afraid, it's a small press, because the King Kong rights are notoriously tangled, and even though they're, you know, satires on King Kong, and you know, I thought about, you know, how many first-person stories in a row, how many third-person stories, you know, just, but I think one thing that did worry me, or at least I was always conscious of, was that I probably was designing a collection. I was helpless but to design a collection that was in conversation with what I thought the short story in the US was today, because that was the vision I came out of, an MFA in fiction, you know, half-red volumes of Best American anthologies edited by Jim Shepard or Richard Ford or Ron Hansen, you know, so like that, since that was coming, what I was coming out of, I was attempting to situate him, both, you know, for and against that I put in stories that I thought broke those rules, I put in stories that I thought people who liked those stories could appreciate, you know, put in stories I liked, of course, but, and the other thing is that he himself comes out of a tradition with reciprocal influence in that, you know, he read Stevenson and Poe and Wells in English and, you know, he self-identified as a specific kind of, you know, writer of the Fantastic, so, yeah, so that was sort of, more so than on a prose level, on a sort of book assemblage level that was an editorial task and delivered pretty much complete to small beer press, a press that specializes in literary fabulism. Some of you, if you've heard of it, may know it because Kelly Link is one of the founders. So then, with comics, you know, I could quote Karen actually from her two-parter in Words Are Up Borders, she says, at times, however, a translator might be called upon to fix, as in stabilize, rather than correct, a text in the process of translating it, that is to choose or otherwise mediate between existing versions of an original. And New York Review of Books is gonna start a comics imprint and launching next year, next spring and I was on board sort of advising them about titles in the beginning and one of the ones we settled on that'll be coming out is a toga epic by Blush. The very word refers to a sword and sandal genre, mostly of movies. This is the original French cover and this is the English cover, which I'm really happy with how it turned out. In fact, I was told that one of the editors who's also a cartoonist did this with a toothbrush. But it's interesting, this is a case where this book, the artist Blush, he set out to create a sequel to a book that he loved, which was the satiricon, Petra Patronius' Satiricon and it's a book that he said he never wanted it to end and it's already a pretty motley tonal medley. It's got prose and verse and comedy and tragedy and romance and satire and it's only survived in fragments so Blush thought, oh, since it's only fragments, this is great, I can make up the rest. But then, he's a lover of jazz and his drawing is always very, lives in the moment, it's a free form and so it soon turned into some more sort of kind of a remix of the satiricon. He cribbed a conceit from a 1950 ballet by Roland Petit and you can see it in this, it was called The Lady in Ice and he prominently features a frozen lady and this lady's head is from a stash in the loop, the lady of Ossere, a Cretan sculpture but the body is Egyptian and the hero of the Kaplum falls in love with this young boy as well, whose head is bowed from another and an androgynous statue in the Palazzo de Conservatory in Rome, it's a statue called The Boy with the Thorn and so this kind of borrowing, promiscuous borrowing is not only a principle in the art of the book but in the text. He, you know, Blush changes or drops names, Blush takes lines out of context. You know, Petronius once compares a city without culture to a pestilential field but Blush reifies that and just makes it a pestilential field. Blush, these are lines that were part of narration but by putting them in characters, Malachi makes it sort of a Greek chorus reflecting on the actions as they're being performed and so I sort of had to mediate between existing translations and quotations and fragments of the satiricon, some of which were really obscure, like in this one they talk about fowlers catching birds with a net made of reeds that is lined with sticky paste and none of the English translations were the same for that and they were all different from French as well. So yeah, and the other thing that Blush does is he resets the entire satiricon into the second triumvirate so he's able to restage the murder of Caesar and he extensively quotes from Shakespeare but he drops bits of Shakespeare's lines but you know you have the famous Et Tu Brute scene here and so the other challenge was to elevate the diction of Blush's original writing to match both the Shakespeare and the satiricon and in my head it sort of became like the various versions of the satiricon were snatches of a single musical tune that was covered by different singers or translators and goes with the remix metaphor, like I was taking snatches of those and then setting and putting them in a new context and it's funny, the book itself is an editorial artifact in that when Blush published it, it was serialized in a magazine that was on its last legs and that magazine did not know what he had given them. He, they were completely unprepared to accept it because it's a text with a fair amount of ambiguity holes, deliberate holes, deliberate, you know, it's deliberate aporia I guess and so they just cut out all the silent pages and then they promised to restore them in addition when it was published but that never happened so then when finally Cornelius, a small press decided to do it, the editor there, he's the one who really had a vision for what the book could be, he made Blush do all new sketches that he, vignettes that he put the head of every chapter, you know, and he inserted blank, he inserted the wordless pages back in, he inserted blank pages to, you know, even out the pacing and it made the book a different artifact. And that's something that we've definitely tried to respect in bringing it over in having to redo the lettering by hand but not by Blush's hand. So and just some other quick examples and a third kind of subcategory of this is that sometimes the quote unquote original is itself already a derivative work or an adaptation, I've been asked, the weird vagaries of the comics industry are such that sometimes there's popular novels that are written in English at like Shutter Island that get adapted in French in the comic books and then an American publisher will buy it though that the rights to that batch. And so I had to sort of translate Shutter Island which amounted to me buying the paperback and stimming through it and reinserting phrases into the proper phrases. That was like the most, the easiest version of this kind of anomaly. And but this was a more challenging one was a very recent one. It was a biography of Agatha Christie that draws heavily on her autobiography but also has, it's really fun because it gives a sort of classic linear clear line style to Agatha's life. But and it makes a little quarrel, a little figment character of her imagination who shows up to harass her every now and then. And in fact, it's written by Anne Martinetti is not a writer. She's an editor at Le Mask, a French, a very long running French crime publisher that does all of Agatha Christie's books in French. So she wrote it as a tribute to Agatha Christie and there's lots of new scenes as well as scenes that are drawn right from Agatha's autobiography. Another one I did that was like this was Manchette's Fatale, which was translated. These are original French covers, the Contemporary Paperback and the Classic Paperback which is a cover by a famous French comics artist, Jack Tardy. And these are two covers for Donald Nicholson's Smith's English translation, the Serpent's Tale one from Britain and the NYRB one from the US. And I did wind up consulting his translation for the comics version, French cover. It's a UK company that's actually putting it out, tagging in comics, so UK cover. But I wound up finding myself, as I went along, I wound up finding myself straying further and further from it. And it's funny because in these cases when it feels like the first draft already is a revision because so many texts exist. And I find it interesting that all three of these examples on this level are in the crime mystery thriller genre, which like fantasy, I think is a genre with that self-conscious and reciprocal influence. I mean, we borrow the word noir from the French and yet the French were the ones who kept authors like David Goodis and Lionel White in print for years when they were out and they in for influence the New Wave and what have you. And so that, of course, leads me to my most recent book where I... Hi. Do you know what sort of... My first noir translation, one where I was very conscious of trying to get the hard-bitten noir tone? And it definitely felt like... It's gonna sound like I was... It definitely felt more like pruning than past translations because the succinctness of the hard-boiled tone in English is... He's writing hard-boiled French. I'm not making him sound more hard-boiled than he is. But hard-boiled French still sounds hard-boiled. It's hard-boiled. So, yeah, those are some... Hello, everybody. So I think the reason I was asked to be on this panel was I was one of a couple people who commented on Karen's article on the Words Without Borders website when it came out in April 2013. I have that comment in front of me here. I'll read you that just so you know how this started. So I basically wrote, I agree 100%. Translating Yaquim Topol Sestra into City Sister Silver required me to make many decisions of the type Emerick describes. As she writes all of them with the author's knowledge and permission, as I wrote in my preface, by the time I translated Sestra, there had already been a second edition shorter by 26 pages, though not the same pages I would have cut had it been up to me. My editor on the book, who was also the publisher, was in favor of the cuts. Some of them he suggested himself and he even agreed to post the major cuts on his website, but he was eager to keep the changes hush hush. I wrote a little bit more. So basically, this is a Czech novel I translate from Czech that was published originally in 1994. Yaquim Topol was the author, the title of Sestra. It was really hailed as the first major work of the post-1989 post-Velvet Revolution era and was a long book, about 500 pages. At the time, I had gotten to meet Topol first in New York and then I knew him during the five years I lived in Prague in the early 90s. And by the time I actually found a publisher, I decided I wanted to translate this book. By the time I found a publisher, there had already been a second edition of the book in Czech, which was shorter. So what was interesting, I think, and I'll actually talk a little bit more about this, but the parts that, as I wrote here, that he chose to cut and that I chose to cut were a little bit different. One of the major parts was a long section. There's a dream sequence in this novel that takes place in Auschwitz, a concentration camp, that has a lot of Czech Jewish authors in this camp talking with each other and then up in heaven after they've been killed in the camp. These are mostly, they're people from different time periods. So for instance, he's got Kafka in the concentration camp, even though he died well before then. And he says that he just decided it was too long and boring. The reason that I suggested cutting it or Rob Wexler, the publisher of Catford Press, suggested cutting it was that most of these authors were really unknown to any English language reader because they simply hadn't been translated. And we did publish the book with end notes to identify a lot of the cultural references that are in the novel, but to publish this whole section which would have been constantly referring to authors that nobody knew at all we felt like would have been basically pointless. I'll come back to that in a second. Another section was about the narrator of the book is referring to his school years. And again, a lot of references to the kind of movies that they watched in school, a lot of the period environment that again, we just felt like would have required either so much explanation, glossing into text itself or notation that there was no point. But I guess what Karen thought was interesting was that I did translate all of those sections and then Rob agreed to put the sections up on his website in a PDF and it's there still to this day. I think that he was very reluctant to for me to even acknowledge that we had cut some of the book, but I felt like we needed to say it. Michelle Woods, who's a translation studies scholar, she was here last year, couldn't come this year, actually wrote an article about called Translating Topol Kafka, the Holocaust and Humor. And she writes specifically about this section which we cut and I've had conversations with her and this, you know, my translation, so the book was originally published the checkbook in 1994, the second edition I think in 97. The translation came out in 2000. I think we both agree that, you know, it were to be published today. We probably would have left that in, but there's a lot more, I think, toleration or tolerance of unknown cultural references and even more attention, if that's possible, paid to Kafka now than in the past. So just by the virtue of the fact that Kafka was in there, although in a very, in a form that you wouldn't recognize and there's a lot about his visits to the whorehouses and how he couldn't get it up and it's very ribald, irreverent to put it mildly and that's all on the website there still. But, you know, another thing that I realized in thinking about this was how often this has actually happened in other books that I've translated and I just finished the translation now for Charles University Press, Karolinum Press, which will come out next year by an author named Josef Jedlichka who wrote a book in the mid-50s, which was the Stalinist era in Czechoslovakia that's the harshest period of communism there. And the author wrote the book between 1954 and 1957, but it wasn't published first until 1966, which if you know Czechoslovak history, so this was already during the Thaw period of socialism with a human face in Czechoslovakia. It was published in a slightly somewhat censored form, not the full text and then finally in its full version in 1994 and then again in 2010 in a critical edition, but none of those versions are exactly the same and there's also actually a handwritten manuscript of this novella, it's a novella, which is lodged in the Czech Monument of National Writing, I don't know exactly how they translate that, but. And the version that I translated or is asked to translate is the latest version, which is the critical edition, which draws on all the previous versions, that kind of amalgamates them. There's a pretty long explanation in the back of the book explaining not every single cut and change, but most of them and why they made them. So that's the version that I worked from, but at the same time I was referring to the French translation of the book, which was done from the original manuscript because there were things that weren't clear and the publisher in Prague suggested that I look at this French version, so I had access to this original of the text that the French translator had worked from, but I don't know how much she changed along the way. So you've got all these different layers of what is original, what is not and I'm going to give one example of that, which is there's a reference in the Yad Lichka novella to the real life event of Rambo and Verland leaving France to go to Belgium together and Yad Lichka has them leaving Paris from the Gal de l'Est, but in fact the trains that leave from Paris to Belgium go from the Gal du Nile, but Yad Lichka has this, but the French translator changed it. I suppose I didn't get a chance to ask her because she believed that any French person reading the book would have considered that such an egregious error that they would have, I don't know, discounted Yad Lichka as a credible writer. And I actually thought the same thing, but then I was in Prague recently and I met with the publisher as well as a man who's a textologist who works at the Institute of Czech Literature who persuaded me that really I ought to leave it and in the end I decided I really should leave it wrong. But meanwhile he went back to see if it was correct in any of the editions that they have lodged in the, because I didn't have access to those earlier editions in the Institute for Czech Literature. I guess I can talk about another thing that just occurred to me during the panel that Karen did earlier today where you have, talking about originals, what's original and fixing text in this novel, City Sister Silver by Topol. There are characters who are quoting literary texts throughout the novel and generally are misquoting them. So in my work on the novel I had to find, if I could, the original text, figure out what it said and then do a correct mistranslation of the original text. But I often didn't know when the Topol had intentionally had the character misquoting or when he'd simply gotten it wrong. And to make matters worse, he was in the middle of an apartment move when I was working on it. So I would write to him and ask him, well, this was actually early email days, he didn't have email, I would email a friend of his who would print it out and he would write it down, they would email it back to me. And all of his books were in storage. So he couldn't look it up and he would just say, do your best. So I had a lot of leeway really in choosing what to do in a lot of those cases. And I know that there are quotes that I missed in my translation of the check text. Probably mainly references to check works of literature that he was referring to or quoting that I just wasn't familiar with. And because he had misquoted them, I couldn't put them into Google and find them, which is one way that I did it. So I think that's kind of an interesting thing that the internet brings into play. And I guess one other thing that just occurred to me while the other people were talking is another way that we make originals is the translation I did of a first novel by Petra Huluba, a Czech author. The book was from 2003 and my translation is 2009. I think that's correct. And I used a different title for the book than she used and she actually liked my title better. And subsequent translations of the book into other languages have used my title. And I was just at her apartment actually recently in Prague and I saw this row of translations of this Czech novel into Swedish, I don't know, Italian, I think Bulgarian, where they all used my title, which I took from the second to last line of the book. So I didn't just make it up, I did take it from the book, but so there I'm making an original title which then becomes fixed. Again, there we have the idea of fixing, which is I also underlined that line in Karen's article, which I think is really key, is stabilizing a text. So I wanted to say, I don't have any visuals because I used up all my slide making skills to put together my panel for this morning at nine o'clock. So that's it for me in slide making. And I'm gonna leave it at that. There are a lot of other things I think we could talk about but the interest of freewheeling discussion as we decided, I'll leave it there. Karen, I wanted to ask you, your Greek author did, you communicated directly with your Greek author about how this abridgement was going to come about and your Greek author was the one who took the... He did, but then I did a whole bunch of other things. And in fact, so he's on the upper end of the age spectrum. And when I finally sent him my translation, he loved it. He was like, wow, it's so funny, I love this book. Who would have known? It would have been so much better if I had cut 500 pages from it. And he said, but there's this big section missing in the middle of the book. And I was like, oh, remember how you removed that section? So yeah, there was a lot of back and forth, but he wasn't overseeing necessarily. He just read, and he probably didn't even read. I sent him like a probably 15 page document of literally documenting every change and every cut. And I don't think he looked at it. He just looked at the final product. Do you think he gave your translation to the Spanish translator? Oh, 100%. Well, I don't know if he gave it to him, but it's another situation in which the Spanish title is based on the title. That was not my title, but it was Seven Stories. It emerged. And, but his version is only partly, it doesn't actually align with my version. It makes many of the same cuts, but it also does other things. So the chapters are ordered differently, and I actually don't know who's responsible for that. I have no idea. I, one assumes that it's the translator, but then I've actually been on this little book tour that I've been doing recently for the Escape Cup by Sofia Nicolaiso. Everybody always asks, well, why did you change the title? I didn't change the title. Melville House changed the title. I wanted to have the title be when elephants dance, and it wasn't my decision in the end. So that's, it's also that question of not knowing, if he's doing it on purpose, if he's misquoting. Right. I did change the title of, well, City Sister Silver also is not the title of the check, and I'm not gonna talk about that. So the book in check was called Cestra, which is just Sister. One of the things that we realized was, or I realized was that it didn't matter what this book was called, because Joaquin Topol was very well known already at that point in the Czech Republic. He had published Sami's Daat as a poet. He was a journalist. His father was a famous writer. His brother was a famous musician. His name was as large on the cover as the title of the book. So it really didn't matter what it was called in check number one. Number two, Rob Wexler, the publisher of Catbird Press, did a search on books with the title Sister or with Sister in them and found that a lot of them were by or about African American women. And we were really, this is again, 2,000 books were still not selling that much on the internet. We were afraid that the book would get mischelved at bookstores. And so we wanted a title that would be, the other thing about the word Cestra in check is that it refers to besides the kinship relationship but also a nurse and also a nun. And it doesn't have all of those same connotations in English immediately, the way that they do in check. It also doesn't have an article. I know the German title was Die Schwester, the sister, which I would argue isn't still, and there are all of these different types of sisters in the book. So we came up with all these different titles and in the end, the book was actually separated into three books, book one, book two, book three, which are called City, Sister, and Silver. And I picked those out and Rob liked it and Yacht came like it because it reminded him of Tinker, Taylor, Soldier, Spy. So we went with that and that's how that happened. But I don't know that any other translations picked up on that. I'm not sure, they may have. Edward, when you were doing Shutter Island, was they, and I think as soon as, I think this was probably on the cover, was they, what was the French title? Oh, Shutter Island. That's what I thought, okay. Yeah, it's interesting, you can trace the evolution of, the globalization of English through the evolution of French titles for movies because increasingly they get, that they don't get changed. I mean like, I think High Noon was the train will whistle three times. Fairly different, but then these days there's fewer and fewer changes. But the one I liked best the last time I was in France was for the Purge II anarchy. It was American Nightmare. I wanted to ask, was the French translation of Shutter Island, did you feel that the French translation of the comic version represented the English language text in this, like did it replicate its rhythms? Did it sound like? Well, unlike some of the other, like unlike Fatale, Fatale kept a lot of the narration. Even though Fatale's not a first person book, it's a close third and that was kept, but in the Shutter Island adaptation that wasn't the case. So since the narration was stripped away, then just having dialogue makes the flavor more elusive, I think that you're talking, yeah. But one thing I wanted to say was actually, this was a slide I didn't show, but for words that are borders, there's also a lot of editorial work that goes into the annual comics issue because inevitably we take 64 or 120 page French graphic novels and boil them down to 10 or 12 page excerpts that stand on their own. And that's, yeah, that's. That's the art. Yeah, usually I wind up doing like three or four excerpts from the same book and show them to you to see which you like best, right? And there have been some examples where we just pull say page 15 through 22 and that's our excerpt. And then other times, I know that we've done a few, I think where we've taken say page seven through 10 and then page 15 through 18 and not all the ones in between are the silent pages. Right. And it kills me that they wanted to cut the silent pages because those usually have much more action than the ones with words. I wanted to ask if I think what there've been, it sounded like there were different degrees of the book publishers or the book editors involvement in what you did with arriving at your originals. And I was curious to know if any of you had ever had a difference of opinion or a difference of approach with what an editor had in mind for that sort of revision as opposed to what you thought might be necessary. I'm gonna just keep my mouth shut here. Well, we're recording but we agree that we'd necessarily go up on the web, right? That's true, yeah. I'm sorry, do you need to plead the fifth? I'm pleading the fifth. You're gonna plead the fifth? Well, I can just say that this, I've talked about publicly before, but so the book that I just had come out in the summer, this crime novel, Innocence or Murder on Steep Street by head of Margolias Kovali. So in this case, the author was deceased, but representing her was her son, Yvonne Margolias. And there were things that the editor and I felt like we wanted to change where Yvonne didn't necessarily agree with them and we had to compromise about it. So again, it had to do basically with point of view and in the narration where it was going back and forth between first person and third person from literally one paragraph to the next and we felt like that was the editor and I that that was too confusing because in Czech, it was clear because the narrator was a woman and verb endings and adjectival endings all indicate the gender of a person in Czech that wouldn't necessarily be clear in the English. So I had to try to persuade Yvonne that it would be more confusing in the English than in the Czech than he realized. And I think this is something that we all have to overcome when we're translating is to forget that the original exists because you have to view it through the eyes of the person who has no access to the original and doesn't even think about the fact that it exists. And so the editor felt like to go from one section to another with shifts of point of view from the narrator would be okay, but from paragraph to paragraph, it would just end up being too confusing. So I mean, that's a case of editorial intervention but it's in discussion with the author or the representative of the author. But as far as with the editor, yeah, most of the editors I've worked with are really appreciate that because they don't know Czech. It may be different if you're working with an editor who if you translate French and the editor knows French they may be likely to have more of an opinion. I don't know than somebody who has absolutely no idea what it says in Czech. And perhaps a better way for me to frame my question would have been not difference of opinion but what are the different factors involved or what elements could it, or what considerations are involved when you're doing that kind of Alex? Yeah, no, I forgot there was one other this is extremely important and I can say it now because I think again, Robert Wexler who's the publisher of Catbird Press and very good friend of mine and we're still in touch but he would have been upset at the time to say so but the other reason that we decided to cut the sections was that he would have had to add another signature to the book to include those sections and we're talking about, I mean I don't know if anybody in the room ever knew anything about Catbird Press but it was basically a one-man operation out of his home in North Haven, Connecticut, very shoestring operation and the book was 500 pages long. He was, there was no way that this book was even gonna come close to making back money and I think that he was afraid to be frank that adding that extra signature to the book that extra, how many pages is it, 32 would have basically bankrupted him. So there was, so my initial suggestion about cutting it was not based on that but I think that helped the decision along. So there are economic considerations to it. Karen, that was a question, thank you Alex because that reminds me of a question that I had to be was that change from, was that reduction from 800 to 300 predicated on, or what was your knowledge of the reasons behind that? Yeah, I don't know because I was actually brought onto the project, I mean it wasn't my, that was the one thing that I've translated that wasn't my initiative. So I don't know why they wanted to do that. I would assume that it would be both financial and the unlikeliness of someone wanting, I mean Vasilikos is very well known. He wrote Z which Costa Gavras made into a film but he definitely is not a household name who people would be willing to read an 800 page novel by him. But I do wanna just say one thing and also they're all of you who should be asking questions. But lest we make this sound like it's just a matter of translators and publishers interfering in actually what could be potentially problematic ways, like one thing that makes me quite uncomfortable is the willingness with which authors do work with me. You know, that nobody ever has read, they're happy first of all to, I mean usually they project happiness at having someone pay this kind of attention to their work because they're not getting editorial aid in any kind of way from a Greek publisher. But like there's also a power dynamic at play that makes me quite uncomfortable. And like why is my sort of aesthetic judgment? Why should that hold any kind of water? But I just wanna to note that what I'm talking about isn't just it's when you're dealing with any kind of text, right? So I just finished writing this book that is about this subject. And one of the texts that I talk about is Gilgamesh. I mean like every single Dante, like any text that you can possibly think of, go find a text that doesn't have more than one, or go find a work that doesn't have more than one text. And so it's not just something that we're dealing with with contemporary writers who we could potentially talk to or get permission from, but basically anytime you're presenting anything, you're making editorial decisions about the work. I mean duh, but. Absolutely. Well I think that's a good point to open to your questions. Yes. Oh yeah, thank you. I have a question for Karen. Could I add a bit, frankly at the beginning of your presentation, you said that you thought that you could, that was actually an extreme example of something that happened in translation along the time. I wonder if you could say a little bit more about that. Yeah, so that's actually just, I mean what I just tried to say, I think it happens every time you translate. And even if you're, I mean you don't necessarily go looking for the various versions of a work that exists, but all works exist in multiple texts. I'm gonna claim. Well actually have you read Jordan Stump's The Other Book? No. Yeah, because he, I mean he basically, in The Other Book it's split into four parts. Jordan Stump's a famous French translator. It teaches at U Nebraska. And he, The Other Book he splits it into four examinations of four versions of a book. The manuscript draft, the published version, the translation and the critical edition. And he tries to investigate like, these are all the same books. So what is the bookness they share? And yet these are all manifestly different as well. And it seems to be moving toward, I guess, or moving away from a modernist, monolithic conception of the original text. And toward like polyphony, intertextuality, play, lack of fixed meaning, and a more post-modern concept of the original texts. And so yeah, it was a, yeah, that's all I really had to say, but it does seem like a related idea. Yeah, and I guess I mean, so like with Avagalo for instance, there are no lexical differences between the collected version of her work and all of the first editions of her work that she oversaw, but they differ bibliographically and visually, right? And so I work a lot in textual scholarship, in textual studies. And it's just, it's sort of a thing that is taken for granted that there's no such thing as a stable text for a work. And yet it's something that somehow when we start dealing with things as translators, I mean, experientially, we all know that this is true, right? But we also have to ignore the fact of it in order to get on with our job kind of. And I guess what I'm suggesting is that we don't have to ignore it to get on with our job because we're making the decisions already, so we might as well make them knowingly the same and sort of, you know, intentionally the same way that we make a decision about if blah is gonna be this or that in our, you know, linguistically, if we're gonna choose this word or that word or this phrase or that phrase or choose a comma or a semicolon or whatever, that we might also want to do some thinking about the textual history and the publication history or even the composition history of the works that we're treating. Other question? Yes, John. Well, it seems like a lot of the amount of text which you took out of your book was kind of based upon the publisher. And like the amount of pages they wanted the book to be and that a lot of the insight into this came from these kind of external factors. But as an author, you know, I'm out of here reading a long book and you think this is a really great book, but according to my personal taste, it would be better if I as an author took out 400 pages or if I as an author condensed certain chapters with redundancy. And you said that, you know, in maybe in Greek but certainly in other countries their editorial process doesn't necessarily exist. And so thinking about translation is kind of an act of transcreation. Like not necessarily taking out but also sometimes even adding. You know, how much can you actually talk with the author to expand upon an idea or a story? Which you as an author think would be better. Yeah, there are some authors who really like to do that. Patrick Orzhennik is another author I've worked with. I did two books of his for Dahlke Archive Press and he was pretty active in wanting to change things in the translation, add things, change jokes. But he himself as a translator translates both from Czech to French and French to Czech. So more knowledgeable about and invested in the process of translation than your average author. And he even suggested things like changing check names to less difficult check names, check names with fewer, you know, diacritical marks, that sort of thing. Yeah, I mean, he's also an author very interested in text as play. So he was really into that. And I mean, I really enjoyed it. I mean, I think that's something that can address the power dynamic if you are working directly with the author. I think even ideally if you can also write about it as a translator along with the book, although not every publisher wants an afterward, let alone a preface or forward. I thought there was, yes. I, the author herself, living in the Middle East. I thought, do I show to them again or do I just send it out the way I wanted it? I am assuming that if they commissioned you to translate that they understood that your expertise in translation was greater than theirs and that they would expect to concede at least some points to you and that expertise. Is that the case? Yes. Is it greater than yours? What I fear is that, or what I could see happening would be that you would send that to them and they would object to that and send it back to you and that there would be this endless loop where you're going back and losing time. I think there'd have to be a point where, I mean you wouldn't completely rewrite it against their wishes, but I think there'd have to be a point where you'd say this is going out now and there may be stages later that they can consult at. Is that accurate with what, I mean is that consistent with what you did? All these people were nodding. I think that's interesting. Those certainly seem justified. I have a situation, I don't know if it's unique. I've translated, I had translated two books by a Mexican poet. The third book, the text kept changing under my hands because he thought it was finished but then went back and rewrote and rewrote and took away. What happened eventually was that he wound up collaborating on the Mexican text, on the Spanish text where he would write a new thing and he'd say, what do you think? And I'd say, oh, you know, you don't really need it. So that in fact I was shaking the material that the original that I was translating at the same time. So I don't know how often that happens. This is a question where you were working with an unpublished work or a body of work that had not yet been published. He had not yet published it. Yeah, that book had not yet been published in Spanish. I think then you need to get a credit and I think you need to get your share of royalties. Yeah, that's not a poetry. That percentage of 1%. Correct, no, actually it's a wonderful process. I mean, we really had a good time with it. Oh, sorry. Alice. Yeah, just to follow up on that, actually, that what you described seems to have been almost every time I'm working, I always write in every book. And so I wanted to kind of make that point that according to what the context they're coming from in terms of infrastructure around creative writing so that seems to affect, obviously, that affects a lot how much that kind of intervention. I mean, I think it's really difficult to be problematic especially because, you know, the colonial context and so on. But what I'm trying to say is that if I'm writing, for example, the writer from Gaza and they've had absolutely no input of any sort in terms of even an informal kind of mentoring relationship that we might quite take advantage of, I mean, or even say how they've grown up with literate parents or, you know, having partners and friends that can kind of keep on to work, if that's not available, let alone an MFA, let alone an editorial relationship of any sort. So increasingly the text that I'm working on, even though they've been published in the Arab world, you know, I get the impression that in a lot of cases it's the first draft that the author has written and they've sent it off to the PDF to the publisher and they're just like stuck between two covers. And I'm exaggerating. So from the level of typos to structural anomalies and all sorts of stuff. And in a lot of cases the author is really inspired to work with me in that way because it's the first time they've had that kind of engagement and that really close reading of the text. But increasingly this seems to be like, wow, what do you do with that? I mean, I do much power and too much time and there's lots of problematic time. Yeah, I think the too much time and the question of whether your job is essentially to edit and agent this author. Because effectively if an author hasn't had that done in the original language. No, I completely understand. But it kind of has, in my context, and I've been interested in it in a lot of people. You know, in that particular linguistic context, it basically has to be because it's almost unheard of by anyone to have any kind of editorial input. But it's also really dangerous. I mean again, so there's a difference I think between dealing with textual instability that exists out there in the world. And then what you're saying is there's only one version of this thing and it just kind of is maybe not great according to certain kind of standards. But I did this, I did an event at which Katrina Dodson was there in the audience. And we were having this conversation afterwards as a group and she made and it's on in a podcast so this is already available information out there. But she made a comment about some, I don't remember what publication it was, that wanted to change the end of one of the Lyspector stories that came out and you know, and to make it sort of more in keeping with an MFA mentality of what a short story should look like, right? So there's always that, you know, but that kind of that like editorial work on the translators part or on the publishers part is actually quite different I think from the question of dealing with what do you do when you have smashed fragments of something all over the place in Iraq, getting overturned by tanks or whatever but you have to then put back together or put back together again to form, you know, you're forming some kind of text for this text that didn't exist. I think those are two questions actually that I don't want, I wanna make sure don't get conflated in a discussion. We I think are, we're over time, we need to wrap up. Thank you all for coming. Thank you all for fascinating.