 Nicknamed, always fighting fascism, which I hope will become clear as we proceed. So I thought, since this was my partial idea, I thought I would start by just talking about how the genesis of it and how I got to propose this panel or what the thoughts had that have been going on for me about this idea. And then Dick Cluster and Susan Bernofsky and Stephen Kessler will continue. We did have a change in our panel at the last minute. Rosine Zarros was supposed to join us and she had to cancel due to family problems. So Stephen Kessler very kindly agreed to join at the last minute. So he will go last so he can know what we're talking about or try to figure out what we're talking about. It's a really bad light in here. Do you want to? No, I'm okay. You know, I'm going to change the process. There's a window here. I just didn't want to be shining. No, no, no. I'm good. Okay. So the idea for this came sort of from four different angles and I don't know if there's any way to synthesize them but one is ever since I began translating, I've always been uncomfortable with the whole question of dualities that are presented to the translator traditionally, you know, foranizing, domesticating, accurate, improvisational, objective, subjective, beautiful or faithful. I think they're useful. I'm sure they're useful in certain contexts to talk about translating but they just never felt to me true in terms of what my experience as a translator is and what happens to me when I do this work. So that's one thing. Then comes a sense that the act of literary translation has something to teach us about truth, which is and that translators after five years at Banff and coming to Alta for all these years, I've never met a fascist translator. Now I'm sure they exist. Translators tend to have a certain sense of the world and sense of reality and sense of truth and the relativity of truth and the multiplicity of meaning, which I always think if everybody could translate, even a paragraph, we might have a better world. So because this is the theme of this conference is politics, I thought, okay, this is something. So the whole question of the idea of literal to me has political implications and by political I mean we as human beings, social political beings in the world, historical beings in the world. So there's that lesson that translation practice gives us. Okay, and then I went to a lecture at UC Berkeley given by Robert Alter, it was the Center for Jewish Studies inauguration and he was the director and I saw that he was going to be talking about his translations of Udami Kai and I thought, wow, this amazing scholar who's done so much and he chooses for this really important public lecture to talk about translation. So I was really pleased and I went and it was fascinating and wonderful. But he several times during presentation, he would, he gave, passed out poems and talked about his translations and the choices he made and many times he would say, okay, now here's what it says literally and then he would go on and say what he did and it bothered me and I thought okay, I know Robert Alter knows that there's really no such thing as a literal translation so why is he using this term? And I looked around at people I know and didn't know and I thought ugh, I wish I could just say jump up and I didn't and say what do you mean by literal? I didn't, I kept to my seat and kept quiet. So I hope this is coming together a little bit in people's minds. Then there were these two articles in the New York Review of Books, both wonderful articles and again I'm not being critical of Robert Alter, I understand why he says that and we all do it. We all use that term even though we all know that it doesn't really represent what we do. Anyway, so there were these two articles in the New York Review of Books, both really wonderful articles, one by Claire Massoud on a new translation of La Tangelle and it's a great article, blah, blah, blah, it goes on and then she says translation is inevitably to a degree subjective and then the quality of the translator will depend then not merely on her understanding of the mechanics of language or on her facility as a writer of prose but also on her capacities to read as a reader of text or sense of subtext of connotation of illusion, blah, blah, blah and I thought to myself what if a review of a symphony orchestra started with to be a musician you need to know the scale but you also need to have a good sense of rhythm and what it struck me is it's not her fault, what is the level she's speaking to of understanding of what translation is and I think that's what struck me. And then again in the same issue, an article by Edmund White on Joan Giorno where he was talking about Giorno's translation of Moby Dick in the 30s and he says, there's two quotes, he's talking about, he says the translation is accurate but Melville's strange terms of phrase as elusive as Shakespeare's cannot be reproduced, I don't know how that makes you feel but and then again he goes on and says, is there any way to capture Melville's biblical Shakespearean prose in French? La plus petite chose peut avoir une signification doesn't really capture the diction of the various trifles capriciously carry meanings and again I'm not blaming Edmund White, I think he's, you know, this is a really interesting article and he's exploring this but again it just brought up for me, what is the level, the reader of the New York Review of Books, what is the level of understanding of what translation is and can do, so that's, so how can we talk about what we do in ways that more, we are wordsmiths, that's what we do I think principally or to a large extent, so we think we could find ways to talk about what we do and educate others that's a little more accurate and enlightening, so that's my question, I don't have any answers, I have a few sort of, I think all of us and you know read articles by all of us and many people in this room have written articles, have used metaphors to talk about what we do but somehow it's not getting out into the general public and so I guess that's the idea, it's like what can we do to talk about translation in a different way, do I have another two minutes? Okay, so a few things that I would, a few things that I throw out there to talk about, not talk about whether translations are accurate or beautiful or faithful but think about translation as convincing, like where is the conviction, the conviction of the translator or is it a convincing translation, so I think of the example of Hamlet, did he know that Polonius is behind the curtain when he's in his mother's bed chambers before he stabs, well it's not in the script, so the idea as a director, the director needs to tell the actor you need to decide and then be convincing in that decision, there's no right or wrong and I think that something has translators, our reading which is what we manifest in our translation, we have to be convinced of that reading and how well do we do that is one way of talking about how well we do it or we could talk about the breadth and the depth of the reading that's reflected in the translation rather than the accuracy or the beauty or the, I don't know, I'm just playing with ideas and then one other thing that I thought about which is rarely talked about with translation is our medium as it is for all writers in English is language and specifically the English language which has particular meaning as translators so one way to think about it, I think about it is how well or how effectively has the translator harnessed the potential of the English language so all these ideas can be discussed at length but I'm just throwing them out there and then let some other people take it from there. Well I'm going to try to alternate between continuing to debunk the notion of literal and with each debunk I hope toss out some other way of looking at what they do, what they do. So if I look out here right now I'm looking at this room and I say I see Danuta, I see Mark, I see Gary, I don't see Allison even though she says she would be here. Am I describing literally what I see? Yeah, I'm describing literally what I see except for the part about Allison what she said but there are nine million other ways I could describe literally what I see. So if words describe things as we all know so what does it mean to say they describe them literally with all those choices but I used to teach critical thinking and reading and writing to freshmen the way I did it was by doing translation exercises some language to language but mostly like social discourse to social discourse, how do you describe something in a letter, how do you describe it when you're sitting in a bar, how do you describe it to your mother, which of those is literally true. So everything we write and say is an act of construction, this is not new to you, it's an act of interpretation, could we describe ourselves as selectors, critical thinkers, choosers, all those kind of things which are in essence what wordsmiths do, what writers do. There's this idea that because what we're doing is turning words into words like oh then somehow there's this one-to-one equivalency. There's lots of ways we can talk about how there's not and I'll give one example in a minute. Another thing we might describe ourselves as is guides. I've been thinking a lot lately about cultural translation, I just had a Cuban writer that I translated visit and we did a bunch of readings and Q and A's and what most... Good morning. And what most fascinated, I just used... He already talked about you. What most fascinated the audiences actually when they asked questions, the answer was the little ways in which in the translation we worked in ways to explain stuff that the Cuban reader knows that they don't know. And I think it was also because they were seeing that she didn't speak English, she reads English well, but she didn't speak English. So in the Q and A they saw me interpreting. They saw all the ambiguities of interpretation that we sort of had to pause over and they asked more and more questions about this. Okay, an example. They came from a workshop day before yesterday, the Cuban word habal. Is there a literal interpretation for this word? Let's see. Habal describes a person who is very light colored, almost albino, but with lots of African genes and with freckles and you have to understand that in Cuba people are much more open than here about being a word in their physical descriptions of people and their reference to race. That's the definition of the verb. Is it literal? No. So what we are is guides. We're guides to these other understandings that are built into the words but looking up the word in the dictionary and choosing among three equivalents is not going to guide our readers to what the original intended reader knew. What's the literal meaning of a pun? The whole point of a pun is that it has no literal meaning. And then I come back to thinking about Melville. Why did Bartleby not like to continue to recopy things over and over again? Subject to interpretation but presumably among other things because copying the same word without changing it is stultifying and so we are creators, we are guides, we are interpreters. Now I want to throw out that we're also something like Supreme Court Justices and this ties to the political point that Katie was making. Think about the arguments about loose construction of the Constitution. What does the Constitution literally have to say about net neutrality? And yet the Constitution has something to say about net neutrality and it has to be interpreted, it has to be asked. On voting rights, if you look at the original Constitution and you look at the later amendments and the post-Civil War amendments clearly it's a contradictory document. It's purposely a contradictory document. So is much of what we translate. Including those contradictions is an important part of what we do and making them evident is an important part of what we do. To take an example the opposite of the Internet here's an amendment to the Constitution. A well-regulated militia being that comma, being necessary to the security of a free state, comma, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, comma shall not be infringed. So all the debates today about gun control laws hinge on a Christian meme at the time this was written. And B, what the hell do those commas do? They're trying to say the right of the people to keep their arms and the well-regulated militia. Are there two things? Or are one things? How did they understand comma at that time? We do this constantly when we interpret things in order to translate them. So we are Supreme Court justices, scholars of whatever you might call that. The bill of rights is a prologue, which they didn't realize they didn't call it. They went to look up the text of the Second Amendment. It has a whole prologue justifying in terms of people's how to build people's confidence in the government. Without, that prologue affects everything. That's how we understand every one of those amendments. Just as what's on the first stanza of the poem or pages one to a hundred of the novel affect what we do on page 293 or in the last stanza. So again we don't have the word yet, but try to think about how what Supreme Court justices supposedly do as described. See if you can come up with the word. And then finally maybe this is a word that audiences could relate to better. We are impersonators as Katie said about the actor. As literary translators we are impersonating the writer in the act of impersonating a narrator's voice a poetic speaker's voice. And we do this like additional impersonation that we are impersonating them as if they spoke English. So I hope that broadens all the senses of what's not literal and contributes a little bit to the discussion of what other words we might use. Thank you. Okay, yes I'm up next. I was so happy when Katie started talking about what this panel was going to be because I've had so much difficulty just in communicating with my students and communicating about with the administrators at my university about what translation is. So I'm going to talk out of school and talk a little bit about the classroom and the perils of the notion of the literal trying to talk about translation to people on the outside which I think that we agree absolutely that we need to get better at doing and in a sense I'm looking out here and I see some of the best translators in the country sitting in this room who are deep thinkers about what we do and so maybe the Q&A can become a little workshop session and we do some collective brainstorming about ways we can talk about our translation in a useful way. Now everyone uses the word literal all the time well not Katie anymore I do, I literally do Chris Merrill just did in his keynote and I use it in my classroom too because it's a short cut for talking about a certain approach to translation and I want to say something about the trajectory that typically translation students following in the classroom around this concept and I'm wondering if changing the paradigm the way we talk about translation could maybe change this. So literal sometimes I'll use the word dictionary translation to talk about it but you know when we say literal what do we mean in the classroom we mean that the students are using a lot of cognates probably without questioning the cognates enough I'm not going to add to the list of what's wrong with literal and give you a whole bunch of examples of how it goes wrong because every single person in this room already knows all about this what happens if you use too many cognates when they're not supposed to be used. It means also in a terms of thinking about sentence structure basing English language, sentence structures on the sentence structures of the original language in a way that is not productive or helpful or beautiful or effective in English Katie talked about convincing translation and I think that is a crucial thing to keep in mind and I think we need more terms about that. I talked to my students about selling a word or selling a concept in the sentence that's the language I might now adopt the language being convincing you know I will give one example of this just from my own work Kafka's Metamorphosis Gregor Samsa has made a picture frame with ornate little cuttings like of the sort that you might see on the wall right behind you actually that he of a picture frame that he's done with a fret saw and my editor immediately said well I don't know what a fret saw is can you make it a band saw? Those of you who are laughing know something about saws right? So a fret saw is a tiny little thing like a small jigsaw whereas a band saw is a large table saw that you know is a piece of furniture which I had to learn about this but I realized that my editor my editor was objecting to the use of the word fret saw because of how I had placed it in the sentence namely you know Gregor's mother is talking to the procurist about you know her son's fret saw project and the problem was that the concept fret saw was not sold well in the phrase fret saw project and if I then after my editor said you must change fret saw to something else I started thinking how can I sell this better so she won't notice that I put a kind of saw she doesn't recognize in there and you know it turned into something like you know woodworking project with a fret saw or something like that you know he was doing woodworking projects and then later blah blah blah carving the frame with his fret saw and then somehow it was sold differently and the editor forgot that she had minded and so I talked to students about that a lot you know recasting and that's getting away from oops the literal and so we need better ways to talk about that you know maybe it's getting away from copying an exact syntactical structure and maybe we have to get a little more discursive in our description of what we're doing so what I see in students sort of journeys when they come to translation for the first time in my classroom and I can see them starting from zero typical trajectory at first the translations use way too many cognates you know are syntactically way too bound to the original make cultural assumptions you know assume that the English language reader is going to understand the same things that the reader of the original did and then I'll and then I start saying things in class like okay this is a way much too literal an approach you know you have to find a way to make this text you have to write this text you have to find a way to make it your own so I'll use language like that and what often happens is that the students will come back and bring in texts that are so much their own that the relationship with the original becomes so tenuous that will say okay this isn't really translation anymore and they'll say but you said we were being too liberal right and besides this author's style you know this is very German or very Polish or very whatever it is and it's not you know I don't feel this is a writer in English so I've just written what I am thinking might be that writer style in fact they're doing an impersonation but then something that we feel is too loose an impersonation to be a translation so who can help me find better language to describe to them what they need to be doing when they're moving farther away from you know certain strictures and then closer to them because ideally we want language that's going to help them find a synthesis I'm still looking for it so I would like help for finding that but I think this notion of convincing translation we need better words for this and this is ideally this would be the panel presentation where I say okay I figured out these are the words here's my proposal I don't have it yet it's a work in progress I want to read to you though a semi-related document because I'm up for tenure at Columbia University and because it's the first time that a literary translator has stood for translation as a literary translator in the history of the university and my dean is therefore we'll see if it works for a second and my dean is therefore asking me to teach the university what translation is I've been asked to write about what translation is what we do and I spent three months writing this document I wrote the 20 page version I wrote the the version that you know people may think that translation is looking upwards in a dictionary but in fact it's you know the very defensive version of it unfortunately I didn't turn it in and the longer I worked on it the shorter it became until it's only a one page single-spread statement which is short so I'm not going to read it to you now it's pitched to the dean of the school of the arts among other things it's my job to talk about why translation is a form of writing and a useful practice for writers who are not going to be professional translators so some of this is irrelevant to us but I think talking about translation as writing is something that we should do more of in general and here's my first stab at this what I think is a collective project of us thinking more together about how we talk about our work the art of translation literary translation is a form of writing with extreme constraints as rigorous as the composition of a sonnet or susena it requires not only a deep understanding of how style is created but also the ability to write in many different styles not only a sophisticated mastery of tone and nuance but a sense of the direction which a particular word choice will nudge a sentence not only a profound familiarity with the cultural context in which a given original is written but the ingenuity to make it come alive in another tongue there is a slight of hand inherent in all artistic translation and ability to intuit the way Bologna or Krasnohorchai will sound or would sound if they wrote in English that's basically what Dick said which among other things means taking into account all the literary and artistic innovations that distinguish their writing within the Spanish language and Hungarian traditions translation means pushing the boundaries of English to accord with the ways authors push the boundaries of whatever language they write in even or especially when the innovations have arisen organically within a specific linguistic context translation also offers writers a way to expand their horizons with regard to what is sayable, thinkable in English young writers attempting their first translations are forced to confront the limits of their own sensibilities and skill and inspiration and invitation to experiment and grow many who grew up bilingual are dismayed to discover that translation does not come naturally to them others whose foreign language skills are spotty discover that they have a powerful natural ability to intuit the essence of a foreign author's sentences although I should footnote I think that somebody who is a professional practising translator in the world does need to know the other language very well like other forms of writing this is pitched to that's the sentence that's pitched to the school of the arts at Columbia like other forms of writing translation is mastered through a combination of talent and discipline the joy of translation this I think is why so many writers are captivated by the art is that years of practice make it possible to grasp a sentence paradoxically as something liberated from language as a set of impulses rhythms patterns and sounds that can be abstracted from the written words that embody it in its original language the translator studies a phrase turning it over and over and then in a sort of alchemy lifts it out of language to be blended briefly in the translator's mind before being wrapped in new words that fit so perfectly they seem organically conjoined with what the text is saying Walter Benjamin wrote of the difference between originals and translations is that between the skin of a fruit and royal robes draped around it in loose graceful folds in translation practice at the highest level of the art the robe encases the orange as snugly as an appeal so this is really metaphorical in a large sense and obviously it's pitched towards a dean but I think that thinking about talking about our craft in terms of writing first and not just first and foremost in terms of copying and representation is a way to strengthen how our field is viewed from the outside and maybe you know also a key to how to talk to our students but anyway it's a work in progress so I want more contribution and I think we should give her a tinier, don't you think? Thank you! I am so relieved, thank you I am too really I don't know what I can add except from a slightly different angle because I think I am the only person on the panel who is a specialist in poetry as opposed to prose so it's a formal distinction but I can talk about a little bit, one of the first notes I made before we were even talking was translation is writing and it's something that really can never be emphasized enough to people who are not initiated because a question I frequently get because I'm also a poet and a journalist and a critic and essayist and people frequently ask me you know I say well I'm working on a project where I have a new book coming out and they say oh is it a translation or is it your own writing and I say well translation is actually my own writing and when I'm doing translation I'm not being a stenographer I'm actually writing an original piece of work and the proof of that is if you give two or three different translators the same text they'll come up with three different results so that's something that I think when we're talking to civilians about this and trying to remind them one of the things that occurred to me while listening to Dick and Katie and Susan is that I think we're at a different stage culturally in the literary culture of the United States than we were when I started translating 45 years ago in that there were hardly any translations when I started out I mean it's one of the things that got me started translating was that two or three poets that you could even find in translation from Spanish I was looking at the original across the page and I was looking at somebody's translation which in my 20s I assumed that it was somehow authoritative if this person is a published translator they must know what they're doing but I was looking at these translations and I was going that doesn't really have a way to me and maybe I'll take a shot at it I have my high school Spanish I've got straight A's in it but I'm not a native speaker I had a good sense of the language and I knew the grammar but I didn't claim to be fluently bilingual by any stretch of the imagination but I was writing my own original poetry and I brought that to bear on what the translations would sound like okay so from this early phase of the late 60s early 70s when I started paying attention to this kind of stuff there are many many many thanks to Alta and all of you and a lot of other people there are many more translations now out there and I think the more translators sort of infiltrate the culture at large that understood what we do will be so Gregor Robassa famously has spoken of the critic called he calls Professor Horendo who reviews your translation in the New York Times and points out the inaccuracies from the dictionary and I think Professor Horendo is sort of well there's still a lot of ignorance about what translation is but I think that there are enough translators willing to fight for translation as an art that there are fewer professors there's not quite as much fascism and dogmatism I think in the critical community even though there are I think there's more ignorance of people who think well it's a translation therefore it's like stenography and if it's not to the letter of the original it's not a good translation but just to speak up for a kind of retrograde concept that Susan actually was illustrating what she described as when she tells her students to loosen up and then they take it to the other stream I know when I started out I was really trying to be faithful to the words and when I was trying to decide between one word and another I was thinking well this is what it really says because I was just I didn't have the confidence to trust my own imagination and I think of that period as sort of my training wheels as a translator and kind of it was good to be conservative as a beginner because I wanted to be sure I wasn't going too far from what the author was saying and my practice over all this time now has evolved to where I have so much more confidence in my ability to understand what's going on in the text that I feel freer to make my own departures from the letter as a way as you all know of getting closer to the meaning of what's there it works now way more intuitively than I ever had the confidence of doing when I was starting out and I think for beginning translators that's something I say to people I don't teach professionally but occasionally somebody asks me to do an independent study or they show me their translations and ask me what I think and what I usually tell them is loosen up you're staying way too close to the text and you're missing three quarters of what we do which is tone atmosphere, it's mood, it's style there's so many ineffable aspects that it's really impossible to put your finger on and when people say and I tell them I translate poetry and they say oh that must be really difficult and I say well yeah it is but on the other hand it's a lot of fun because I get to write a new poem it's something that for me is really exhilarating I learned so much from the poets that I translate and as a poet myself I feel like I'm taking a workshop like a master class in poetry when I'm translating Luis Samudo or Alessandro wow it's like what a privilege to be able to immerse myself in the sensibility and the voice and the style and the creation of this other writer and try to represent that in a way that is persuasive to the reader. I know one of the things that I an argument that I have with some of the prevailing translation theories is this idea of foreignizing I really want the reader to forget that they're reading a translation I want them and this has to do with the conviction I want them to be fooled into thinking that they're reading an original poem and the way I describe it in the preface to the book I just finished is that my goal is to create a reliable illusion of what is going on in the original Spanish. So those are the few of the things. Let me see if there's anything else that has been said that is worth riffing on a little bit. The idea of translation for a better world, we do have an evangelical mission with every book we translate and we're trying to project the voice of that author. It's like standing on the street corner preaching and trying to get people's attention and to convince them that reading this work will save your soul in some way. I like that concept of being missionaries for literature really. One of the things I love about Alta as distinct from some other kinds of writer's conferences that I'm sure many of us have attended is that everybody here, in addition to being a creative writer has a dedication to literature and has a dedication to an author other than themselves and most of them. But to me that's just so liberating for me as a writer, setting apart my life as a translator. For me just to have the privilege of representing these other voices is just a great thing to do because the reason I got into this business, because I love literature I love poetry and I want to spread the news, you know. Should we open it up? Yeah, let's open it up because I'm sure I'll tell you guys. I just want to... I'm going to be dictator. I'm not a fascist. I understand the multiplicity of meaning. I wanted to clarify what you say is absolutely 2-2 but what I was saying is it's not the books that were evangelizing, that I think what I meant in this case was the act of translation is a saving of the soul. The act of translation of anything, even of a document that's not particularly literary I think anytime you grapple with equivalencies in language you are informed about multiplicity of meaning and possibilities for interpretation and the fact that truth is not black and white as represented by language. So I just wanted to clarify that what had been my intention. That was really interesting. I think we're using the word literal so much because the word faithful has gone out of favor. We're all tired of it like Larry Vanity slapping us around because he said faithful at times. But I think we should think about if we're thinking... I see people talking about in various different formulations semantics and everything else. There's a separation of thinking about meaning, content. I had in my statement what the text says but I put in scare quotes because I don't really mean it but I do. And then everything else, the form the things Stephen was just talking about. There's an exercise that I stole from someone that I sometimes do and that's grab a paragraph of a translation original and show it to my students and ask them language that's commonly known and ask them which was the original which is the translation. They very very often get it wrong and the reason that they get it wrong is that the translation is often smoother and reads better than the original be weird and so they think the weirdness is. But no, the weirdness writing is weird which I'm bringing up just to say that the more we think about our privilege to use the language as writers when we're translating, I think the more interesting translations we're going to write and so that's not coherent. I want us to do it more consciously and talk about it more consciously. Just two quick things. So I also think about teaching poetry which I've done sometimes and saying to students well before you jump at what figurative meaning of the poem is think about what the literal meaning is and I realized that actually what I mean by that could say differently if I were to do this in the future. One is like we're looking at what is the narrative, what are the physical images and then the other is what are all the other meanings and sounds and rhythms so however we feel like to talk about that the thing to stress about translation is if it doesn't do all of that it's not a translation. The only other thing I have to say is that thinking about Susan's image about how we kind of abstract all those things from the original language and then alchemize it into the new one, could we call ourselves and so I'm having this evaporation, can we call ourselves moonshiners? Okay, let's open it up to all you brilliant people. Mary and Heather had her hand up first and then Jason. Susan maybe I didn't hear the whole statement, maybe I spaced out a little bit but one thing that I keep coming back to is that translators need to read in their mind which they write in and that as in an educational situation the teaching of translation is also the students are using their experience in writing but the broadening of their understanding of literature and styles is also another factor and that kind of goes into one of my other three comments is about this idea of convincing this which I really like and I think that to me the reason often that texts aren't convincing is that they use a very poor set of English devices, they're using the devices that match that overlap, oh we can do that, we can do the same kind of thing but English can do all these other things. And that goes to what I said next which was harnessing I don't know if you were, did you come in right, harnessing the potential of the English language. Right, and I guess the last thing is I would object to the idea that there's the semantic meaning and then there's all that other stuff because all of other stuff is meaning too. It's not just an effect, it's meaning and if you can't translate the syntax into meaning especially non-standard syntax or anything that's special then you're missing content you're missing this denoted Well that's precisely what this panel is about, we know this and how can we talk about it and exactly, how can we get that across? Again this was a wonderful panel, thanks very much. Just a couple of comments, one I very much appreciate this notion of talking about translation as writing I love all the metaphors too but sometimes I feel like the used metaphors less than, that's a lot better so starting with something very grounded. The other question or just the thing I wanted to put out there was I mean we translators are very good about thinking about our audience and knowing our audience and we have different types of ignorance about translation. We have a dean we have this reviewer, we have the guy on the street and we can all think about the million different misconceptions people have about translation but I'm wondering here if it might be useful for us to kind of think about some of the main taxonomy of ignorance about translation. Something along the lines of like those Mr. Men books popped up in my head, kids books, you know you would have Mr. Two Academic, Mr. Look It Up something like that. So that we could hear our arguments toward them or our pitches toward these different types of ignorance. So the question is do we want to be defensive or offensive? Right, in some cases we need to be defensive right, I think. Or just find the line or maybe not even defensive or offensive but again so Edmund White is great and Claire Massoud is great but if a translator writes a review of a translation what language will we use to talk about it and how can we elevate that how can we both educate and elevate that discourse Well right, I mean you have people who think very deeply about literature but have never thought about translation have people thought about foreign languages a lot but you know have never considered the kind of literary for us. Okay, let's Leah and then Bill. Just something that you said about the taxonomy of ignorance I was thinking next year at Ulta I would love to have us do some interactive workshops where at the individual tables we talk amongst ourselves and come up with some ideas. This topic ways to address specific kinds of misinformation about what translation is and maybe compile a document that we can put up on our new website to you know to provide all of our members with ideas of ways that we can address this. That's a great idea. By the way I think we can do that of course by talking about teaching but I'd like to see us do that next. Well it's actually in the panel that I will also be on in the afternoon we talk about professionalism I hope we talk a little bit about that too in terms of setting standards and weed defining it and Ulta could do that anyway. Bill. I think Jason's idea is really wonderful because there are many aberrances back playing with them. I'm also extremely grateful because I've also been wrestling with this quote this word literal I wanted to suggest two possible I guess strategies one is taken from linguistics where if we talk about a literal translation of a sentence I don't know how many people here have seen the kinds of glosses that are used in the study of linguistics but they're basically incomprehensible you have the words are set out in a sentence and under each word it will say for example third person plural future it's got all of the so called semantics or grammatical information there but when you look at it you can't actually make sense of it and I think that kind of reduction sometimes helps people to see that even translating very very simple sentences there is no such thing even as a literal translation the other kind of point where we haven't really questioned things is that there's an assumption that we know what that is and I think it very often comes from first of all bad dictionaries but also all of us when we learn our languages remember the little notebook that you had for vocabulary where you had chair shares and full 30 whatever and it's a one to one thing that's how we think about big problems between language and sometimes I show my students a page in my own copy of the Stanisławski dictionary but I use the word cześćki which means in the one to one version is heavy and Stanisławski has I think 60 different words for this incredibly simple everyday normal Polish word it can be stolid it can be plodding it can be weighty cześćki diota is like a complete idiot for example and I think that also questioning when we talk about using the dictionary and what it says in the dictionary I think we should be questioning what dictionary we're talking about and how dictionaries are themselves put together and used and that's another level of ignorance that many people start to find and just to follow up on that one of the other things which I didn't say in my original words is this whole idea of that we don't translate words and I think that's really important to repeat over and over it's something I forget and this came up at BAMP we had this panel with Steven as part of where we compared musical performance with translation and we talked about do we translate words do they play notes or do they play measures so the whole idea of that we are not translating words exactly so yeah you can't replace literal for dictionary definition though you could I suppose for one word you could say here's the range of the dictionary definition but then you say the adjective in the noun and you have safety possibilities here and there and that's going to be an awful lot of possibilities exactly and I feel like as a translator I'm still struggling to remember at every minute that I'm not translating words I feel like it's something I have to constantly remind myself of I'm constantly telling the students please just try and think in phrases as you would if you were writing and that's where you know what did I just say yeah these are habits but again I agree with Jason I think you said about using metaphors I also you know I sometimes talk about it as like an actor and again it's like here we are we're the wordsmiths why are we using metaphor why can't we just say what we do because it would be too weird because writers we frequently but I also someone and I will play Bevel's advocate here we are not writers in the sense of there is a difference between writing original and translating just like there's a difference between writing a script for play and acting and we have very special skills that writers don't necessarily have and that we are writing in a certain we are interpretive and we are working from a script so it is different but that's another whole conversation but I think it also we have to think about that to just say well we're also writers yes we are but we're a very particular kind of writer and in some ways we have certain skills and certain our ability to harness the potential of the English language should be more developed than most than many people who publish under their own name and I think are I think we as at wordsmiths as translators that is our area that is our expertise that is our power I'd like to share one thing that's been useful for me I find that when I'm talking to people who think they know something or who do know something about translation I'm always defensive I'm saying like stupid things like I can account for every word in the original I don't even say like ridiculous things like that it's just the way certain questions have been phrased and I have to respond to it like yeah your chapter one is not literal but chapters after that are just silly however what the breakthrough for me came when I saw that people were responding actually not to the writing but to the understanding you know so it's not so much about translating words but about translating authors or understanding the source so with the Gita it was about understanding sort of where it's coming from and that whole context and the whole aura of it and you know getting into the groove of that and with Kalidasa it's been about you know this is how Kalidasa looks at this it's a conversation that moves to completely different areas it's no longer about are you being faithful or not it's about together appreciating something that actually is amazing and then when I do that then nobody is questioning what I'm doing in the language I suddenly feel it becomes collaborative almost like a collaborative appreciation or a friendship of two people appreciating this author that we haven't looked at for a long time so moving away from writing altogether actually works very well for me I talk about with the Gita I find I'm talking about spiritual practice all kinds of stuff and then after that they're like my god we love your reading you've given us so much about the Gita that we never even thought it was so dramatic and those would never have come at me if I had simply gone and I'm this wordsmith and I've looked at all these I've never have gone to that stage also that's really helpful to me and I like the idea of collaboration because your author collaborator is the author if you're doing a text that you know who the author is of course and for me just listening to a bunch of your comments all lining up and thinking about the classroom part of it and also as someone who comes to translation from poetry who had a lot more training in poetry before I started thinking through what translation is and how translation fits into the poetry curriculum and vice versa it was really interesting to hear you use the word conviction but then we kind of replaced it with convincing I think we're the work of convincing as it goes towards the communication with the editor but to go back to conviction and to think about translation in the classroom and the different disciplines of the students that might be in that classroom helping them find their conviction and helping them find their authority is also really important for what you guys are doing as the leaders of that workshop to go into the text the source text and to go into collaboration with the author of that source text and to build an authority within that that makes sense to them that seems important which is why the process that you're describing that you see again and again Susan might need to be the process because that's a way for those students to find their authority that they can describe and rationalize and the other thing as a poet for me I don't want to talk about the metaphors because the metaphors are literally the translators like they literally are the translators of mainstream translation this is a big weekend for us the metaphors are us and the metaphors are both literal and they have real things in them they have a velvet dress on lemon for some reason and then they are something that makes sense they are the paradox that is shed when we put those two textures together and the different senses that are called that make sense of that there's no word that you could use that wouldn't be a metaphor so for me as a poet with sense of translation to dwell in that middle phase regardless of the goals that we have for them and they happen themselves to come later I think that middle phase where they are taking too many liberties and they're in the metaphor phase and they might be writing some kind of velvety citrine translation and then they're working as maybe they're working now a little too far away from each other into their artistry but then you can invite them depending on their goals you can say okay now run away into the hills with this and this is just your new work that is or you can say you don't know you're a lurker translator how much do you need to step back I would say as someone who comes from a different discipline that those metaphors are important for building authority aesthetic authority over the text and it's an area to go to form collaboration with the text of the writer that's another place on the spectrum on the different spectrum that we're kind of building here yeah maybe maybe we're talking about two different things oh okay maybe we're talking about two different things about metaphor maybe I think he was talking about how we talk to the outside world how we talk about translate right and you're talking more maybe in the classroom or to other power yeah perhaps and this actually doesn't contradict anybody it's because it has to do with what you're talking about to begin with but who your audience is when you're trying to discuss translation I think we should also have t-shirts printed next year that said metaphors are awesome I think I thought what you enjoyed said actually though these two works are very it will be connected for me nevertheless I I experienced a very important distinction between the two which points to I think a very important distinction you made about translation work from a script because I think to me the distinction occurs is that when I'm translating translating if I like a poet I also do essentially poetry if I decide that I want to translate that the first thing I do that's the only way I can translate really is that what do I like about this poet and I translate my perception of what is value in that poet so that in a strange way every translation for me starts with the misreading of the total text destruction of the total text and when the translation occurs the process then becomes a much more self-conscious process of what are the tools of my trade of my knowledge that in the target language I can use in a parallel space to create something that to my mind at least echoes reincarnates really there is an accommodation to that experience but in a way it is very because I think to me the most dangerous I mean it's not dangerous it's a fact of life the biggest obstacle we have to to be able to talk about translation is that we think of translation as reproduction we are replicating reproducing an original where is actual and then you can say translation is impossible it's betraying the original it's not like this some of the most important works in a language are the translations but if you want to accept the idea that to some extent you are destroying the original conceptually it liberates you to get things from it and that's really what I want to say something Steven said set off in my mind sort of the essential difference in my visual concept is a dance and as we all know there is solo dance and what we try to do is be a partner ice skater a partner in language with the author in a sense but eventually with the text and so I'm not trying to reproduce and do everything but if the partner is lifting an arm and the partner in this case that text is the leader and I'm the follower but is there any good dance thing there are times when the text responds to me is the translator and I think what we look for and a good translation is have they stumbled is there a a miss is one arm down and one arm out and because I dance differently to Dick the same text will get a slightly different performance but it's always partnering and so I suggest the word a language partner something like that of what we try to do a partnership something more a better word than that maybe but something that really reminds that we're in constant movements with the text and some of us are bad and they the text will find other present company we're not all great dancers we're not all great dancers with any partner with the right partner we can become excellent dancers I think that's knowing your limits as a translator as well which I find extremely important that's a beautiful metaphor and I think we've sort of clustered metaphors around us today that still leaves us with the what's the center that all these metaphors are clustering around it's so hard to get at the center which is the non-figurative way of describing what we do I mean I'm contributing to the the onslaught of metaphors just as much as anybody else it's not can't we find a way of talking about what we do that's not through the other arts or through one word I don't think I've heard in this whole conversation is a word that I frequently remind people is required of a translator and that is imagination and I don't know if imagination is a metaphor for anything but the act of translation is an act of imagination I think it's important for us not only to keep that in mind while we're working but when we're talking to other people about what we do we imagine it the translation is an act of imagination just in a very analogous way to the original composition one of the things I found myself saying recently was that the process of translating for me is just as mysterious as the process of writing the original poem because I don't really know people tell me I'm a good translator and I say well thanks but I can't explain what it is I do or why I have an instinct for it that often works so it is it is a creative act that I think that it's one way we can talk about it with people who aren't initiates and to remind them that although we are constrained by the original of the art we do have these moral and ethical obligations to not betray the original we also have to have the confidence to trust our own imaginations reimagining what you just said that's a good word I think that should go on the list it's really interesting so in this conversation I find myself going back and wanting to play the devil's advocate and say we need to get back so there's all these wonderful images and metaphors and senses of what we all do and we all know we do it and yet when one of us gets up in front of a crowd and says this is the literal meaning and I think I'm almost going to pull around and say kind of like what you're saying yes but and all these things are lovely but if we can't write about this in a review we can't use these images and then if we do people who aren't in our field will say oh you just kind of look at the text and then write whatever you want and then I go back to know we have an ethical obligation we are translators we as, and I'm going to say as literal as possible so how can we talk about that side of what we do and so yes there's all this other stuff and we're writers and we're creators and we're an imaginer and we're all these things and we're poets but how do we talk about that skill based I find it a little bit I don't know if sad is the right word but that we are we feel obliged to justify what we do like everything we're talking about is how do we talk about what we do I mean I think I don't even know how to say it as a quantum physicist has to talk about what he or she does in a way in a way that's difficult and also uses constant metaphors I don't think the metaphors tell us the problem I think the problem is why do we all feel that there's some need to justify what they do and is every single field feel or is it just because in academia we feel we need to or because we feel put upon by the larger word when I was asked what it is that I do as a translator I said I quote David Markson who said when Schubert was asked to play the piano and played it again and that's what I say that I do as a translator I sit and now it's a metaphor but I sit down at the piano and I play the book again with this time in English you could use a metaphor as a different key but it is a metaphor and people will grasp that and then I feel I'm just going to be Schubert and then I'm done I feel like Justin at this point in our careers why are we fighting? I think part of the reason other than the stuff to do with departments and jobs and pay and getting more than one sentence in the review the reason why we do this is this is a problem about invisibility if a lot of the time and it's a contradiction in what we do because a lot of the time we're trying to be invisible makes us invisible so I think that may somehow be part of the problem also I want to come back to the other purpose here to see if there are any thoughts about that which is besides the question of how we talk about what we do does this have to do with what other people do and what other things do with this question of the other problem with the literal is the assumption that everything has one best interpretation the Bible, the Quran the Gita, everything has one best interpretation and we know the kind of problems that it leads to so I don't know if people have any and we're kind of forcing that into this thing of talking about how we talk about what we do but I'm curious if anyone has thoughts about that about how our practice or how we talk about it has anything to do with helping the world get away from this notion that things have one meaning again? I taught high school French and one of the first things I had to teach them was about translation first year French students I would give them an assignment write me a short paragraph about something that happened to you last week in French so inevitably 90% of the class would write their thing in English they put it through an online translator and probably bring it back to me and I'd say oh you went online to translate this how did you know? so then I would give them a French paragraph and I'd say take this home, put it through an online translator and they come back the next day and say that's not English well that's an interesting that was a literal translation I just want to respond for a second to this question of self-justification because I don't really think I mean I don't work in academia I've been doing this long enough that I don't even care what other people think about what I do I just do it but there is the curious person who is not a literary person necessarily like who is that a reading idea or something and inevitably I have a reading and I divide it between like my original writing and my translation most of the questions are about translation because people are curious and I think this is one of the motives for Katie's calling this panel together is that it's not so much to explain ourselves to our dean but to like sympathetic readers who say wow translation I've never really thought about what it takes to be a translator and so I mean it's partly an educational function for us to help sympathetic people understand you know not by defending ourselves but just by kind of explaining how what we do is different from what they might have thought before they started thinking about it before they started thinking about it positive corollary to the taxonomy of the ignorance about translation the taxonomy of curiosity right Elizabeth I'd like to suggest that we all use literal literal old time from now on whenever we use it it always has quotes around it you know every time do air quotes at least at least do that whenever you talk about sometimes we really do need to use it that we always counter it or somehow explain it qualify it something that I find that I say is a meaning commonly associated with this thanks or if we were to take this word out of the context it can often be yeah you don't have to have like 60 dictionary definitions of a word to have a crisis which is like even three names to use and that's a function of I've used in discussing this with people who asked me about translation and I use the Spanish verb espedad which means to hope to wait or to expect those are three really different I mean those are three and probably another 20 meanings but the just getting people thinking about oh well how do you decide which one to use and explaining well the context and it's Polonius behind that frequently say to one of my colleagues who shows me your translations is you're looking at the trees and not the forest and you really have to step back from this one line or this one word and read the whole stanza or the whole poem and figure out what the whole thing is about before you know what this word is about this is all been excellent I don't know if this is productive or not but in terms of taxonomy of ignorance the worst experiences I've had of actually doing with editors and I recently had an editor I said this in public and the editor was I thought I had a chance to have it up feel like what a translator feels like when somebody says oh but you know you're not doing this right these editors are actually even more invisible than we are we really never get the name on the cover although apparently in France sometimes but my understanding of this and I didn't study literature so I don't know enough about it but from what I hear people who study literature aren't taught that what they're studying is the translation so the most difficult experiences I've had have been it is a crisis then because you're in the editing process and you're dealing with an editor who thinks that what you're doing is something more like what we're talking about that it is a transfer words and having to make a decision about on the other hand they are a reader who's giving you feedback on whether or not the translation is convincing so having to make a decision in that moment you have one week or you have two weeks to go through this which battles am I going to fight about trying to get my decisions approved versus convincing this or explaining to this editor what I do and why they might want to think about it differently you know I think that to me would be the number one category in the taxonomy of ignorance are you taking notes Jason it's for me and the rest of the world you know I mean that's terrible I don't want to think I'm going to work about it that's a really good point because I'm sure we've all had these experiences where you're translating somebody who has a very Baroque style for example any style or any style that's where it usually goes style exactly and but the ignorance of the editor who thinks well Americans don't read sentences like this well I don't know you ever read Henry James or Saul Bellow or any number of other people I mean there is not one American style and to reduce your reader to the person who only knows how to read Hemingway who's a good example of something that has been reduced to this kind of simplicity you do need to educate your editor the word foreignizing winds up in my classroom as meaning approximately conscious of and attempting to communicate something about the original style because of the sort of default erasure that we all know better than to do or I think but that students don't understand yet but editors I have the same thing well maybe that goes back to this idea of harnessing the potential of the English language maybe that's a way of talking about it to editors to sort of well I'm stretching English this is something I can do in English that can be done and you know are there any editors in the room here? of course I've done yeah but these are like brilliant public transfer editors I've edited yeah absolutely and the good ones get this some of us are lucky to work with those somebody else at the end for me there's a lot of stuff implicit in everything that everybody has said and one of the important things that I think is underneath it but I think it's really important that we start including in our discussions among ourselves and how we're not without the public or the editor is what we do first is reading the text and re-reading the text and re-reading the text as we're going along translating it and what we're not going to know who does this but I just keep changing words to try to pull the reading into more of itself but we are literary critics first we analyze literature first and we do that either because we know the language and that's the most homogenous way to do it and probably the most fun way to do it some people do that by a native speaker or somebody to help them read it and we hardly ever talk about our reading process here at ALTA I've never seen anything about that and I think that's something that translators have to learn how to do how to read literature and the language of literature is so different from the language of science or even history although that's also creative writing in its own way and what the nature of literary language is I would love to see more panels on both literary analysis and reading as a way of just getting us talking about it going from what you said to sort of I think you sort of expanded a little bit on what I had said at the beginning of this translation as how deep and broad is the reading behind this translation who's on the conference committee here there was somebody else who did it this was related to what the remark says made I translated a so-called experimental text a very difficult novel by a Swiss writer and then the Swiss sponsoring agency about difficult texts about experimental texts and what I ended up saying was I would recommend that you approach these texts no matter if it's in your language or not as if you were translating them and that's a little bit of George Steiner of course but specifically for this purpose of reading difficult texts you stick with the text you don't let go you tough out the tough spots getting back to what we do which is not free form it's not writing it is staying close to the text so the analogy with reading is another way we let people most people read the ones we're talking to well I hope this was useful get us thinking and talking in different ways more consciously a little bit baby steps yeah baby steps thank you all thank you