 So, as we gather back together, I think I'm going to be sitting in for Professor Teresa Pallavi, who is under the weather today. She just arrived back from Kazakhstan and was not able to be with us for the second panel. So I'm going to be sitting in her stead and this panel is entitled Conceiving and Crafting Translation. So as we begin with some of the more sociological aspects of translation and interpreting and some of the social justice aspects of it, some of the procedural concerns that go along with translating, this panel is primarily about craft and conception, which is very exciting to have an entire discussion around how to conceive translations, how to craft them, all of the kind of nitty-gritty steps that go into making a translation come alive. And for any of us who are working translators, this is one of the, one of our day-to-day issues that we always confront. So I'd like to give our panelists an opportunity to share some of their experiences with conceiving and crafting translations, but that's a question that we'll come to after each of them get a chance to introduce their current projects and share some of their experiences with you. So I'd like to start with Beppe Cavattorta, professor of Italian here at the University of Arizona. Well, I have worked on many translation projects since I came to the United States, and so on, hello, not my, that's okay. So I was saying that I have worked on many translation projects since I came to the United States in 1995, both from Italian into English and English into Italian. I would like to remember, I mean, I would like to go back to my first project ever that came about because of a request by an Italian literary journal for a long, to translate a long experimental poem written by Lurid, the work on the white side, Lurid, titled The Murder Mystery. It's an incident that can provide a good idea of my upcoming battle. This is the beginning of the poem. Relent and observe and inverse and perverse and reverse the inverse of perverse and reverse and reverse and reverse and reverse and reverse and chop it and pluck it and cut it and spit it, see it to joy on the edge of a cyclop and spin it to rage on the edge of a cylindrical minute. My main scholarly interest is in experimental language, both in poetry and prose and being able to render in another language the sound effects of the original along with this obscure content gave me the same satisfaction, I believe, since I'm not a poet. A poet feels after finishing one of his poems. After that, translating has always been part of my scholarly work and I kind of remember a period of time I was not working on some translation project. I definitely feel more comfortable when translating from English into Italian and in addition to Lurid, I've published translations of several American poets, among which Paul Carroll, Kenneth Irby, Bernadette Mayer, David Lemon and Stan Rice. On the other hand, I have to say, my main translation projects in order to make more Italian literature available to the Anglophile world have been from Italian into English. The most ambitious one was the translation of what can be called the most experimental, the most language-conscious novel in Italian literature, that is the Portal by Adriano Spatola, a novel which defies any accepted notion on what a novel should be, where its main character is born and dies several times, where he is just, and I quote, a body made up and living solely by the unique force of adhesion of the letters that make up his name, where punctuation, rather than playing the role of explanatory clarifier, serves as the bearer of the rhythmic scansions, where it is possible to observe an anti-deterministic evolution caused by the shifting of interest over language rather than to the denomination of the plot, the plot that Spatola calls a catalog of mannerisms of rapes. Just to give you an example of the problems encountered in the translation, I chose a passage in which both words, hybridization, and sound play a major role. In this passage, we see Guglielmo, the main character, kneeling and praying. His prayer in Italian reads, di esu, di esu, proteggi tu. Translate easily into protect us. Where the name invoked, di esu, is the hybridization of the Italian word dio, god, and jesu, Jesus. The Italian is characterized also by the sound effect created by the rhyme, di esu, di esu, proteggi tu. This is the best I could come up with in order to save both effects. Guglielmo, with his charred face and hard-boiled eyes, Guglielmo calm in the mud like a corpse awaiting the sleeper car at the train station that will take him back to where he was born, where he has lived, where he has had the purest joys of his life. Guglielmo on his knees, Guglielmo hands together praying. Lord Jesus, Lord Jesus, deliver us from evil. I'm sure that, I mean, many of us may do something, I mean, a better job than this, but this, again, a translation I believe is not ever a final. This is my translation of the work. A lot of possible different translations can be given when sounds, when experimental language is involved. It took a long time to finalize the translation, as you can imagine, but it was definitely worth it. It generated a great interest in the United States, an expert of it had been reissued in some of the most important literary journals, both in the United States and in Canada. I have several projects on the table right now, some of which are about to be finalized, and others just in my head. One of them involves an author from Sardinia whose writing can be described as a hybridization between standard Italian and Sardinian, not a dialect, as you know, but a Roman language itself. Like many of the authors I worked on, Adzene is one of those writers that is not easily labeled, unflinching in his strangeness from literary clicks. A loner, and as often happens, almost forgotten, because his work with no support from the literary establishment is easily cast aside. Before giving the word back to my colleagues, I would like to conclude with one last text I translated, which Adzene openly declares war, one that is fighting alone outside any group of school without the need, or most importantly, the desire to be part of one of the many gangs that often gain ground to the strength of the group itself, praising one another without having anything new to say. Adzene does it his own way, creating, I believe, one of the most beautiful oxymorah of the last few years, the banda individuale, that is the one man gang. He writes, life is a war for gangs. No news there, and nothing wrong with it. It becomes a condemnation if they forbid you to bring forth for love and worship of the leaders the solitary war, to be your own one man gang. And again, this is maybe also a situation in which we would translate find ourself when we are looking into a publisher to accept our work and print it. Thank you. How's this one working? That was great. All right. Hi, everybody. My name is Wendy Burke, and I'm a poet and a literary translator. And I work at the University of Arizona Poetry Center. I'm the librarian there. I actually share a lot of the concerns I'd say that the first group of panelists brought up. I got my start a very long time ago as a volunteer interpreter in a hospital. And that experience has stayed with me as I've moved towards literary translation. Speaking of the word volunteer, when you take the word poetry and the word translation and you put them together, a lot of times you end up doing volunteer work. And with one important exception in my life, which has made my current project possible, I find that my work as a translator and as a poet takes place outside of my nine to five job. And well, I think of it as a profession very much. I recognize that it's a largely unpaid profession for those of us who translate poetry, which I think is interesting for our discussion. I've worked with the poet Teri Lopez Mills since 2004. She's a contemporary poet from Mexico City. And she's also an essayist, an editor. And she herself is a translator of English, US, and French work, largely poetry. I actually met her here in Tucson when she was reading for the University of Arizona Poetry Center. And I had the chance to translate a selection of her works for the occasion of her reading. Since then, I've translated work from nearly all of her books, except the first one and the most recent one. All of her books of poetry. And we work very closely together in this process, which is especially nice because she herself is a translator whose experience far outstrips mine. I received a 2013 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship in translation to translate Teri Lopez Mills's eighth book, Contra Corriente. So this is the very important exception to my largely volunteer career, for which I really want to thank the NEA. Contra Corriente was published in 2008. And for me, it's Teri Lopez Mills's most difficult book. It consists of poems with extremely long lines. And each poem is one single long sentence that is brought together with commas. And then there's a period at the end. And a few colons and semicolons in the middle. But each poem is one long sentence that is lettered after the letters of the alphabet. This form evokes the central trope of the book, which is that of a river. It's an urban river, however. And it carries along all kinds of debris, trash, as well as treasure, I'd say. This is also personal debris, history, memory, fragments of the self, fragments of literature. And it's also a physical river that is impacted by the load of trash, the oil, the metal, the plastic bags that are carried along with it. When I started translating as a student, this was about 20 years ago. And I was told that, well, you should try translating. It will make you a better student of Spanish, which is my second language. And then a few years later, I started studying creative writing. And I was often told that translation would make me a stronger writer and a poet. You should translate, because it will strengthen your own writing, too. And these are both true, but I would say that the strongest benefit or one of the two strongest benefits of translation for me is making me a better reader. Translation helps me to slow down and pay attention and to read deeply like very little else does in the very busy lives that I'm sure we all have in common. The other major benefit is to teach me how much I have to learn. And maybe that's just as important. I feel that with every poem that I translate of Teddy Lopez Mills is I realize how much help I need in every way. And surely that's a benefit to me as a scholar and also as a person. I know that one of the topics that we'll talk about later today is collaboration on this panel. And I think that notion of interdependence, of never having all of the pieces of the puzzle, has been enormously interesting and beneficial to me. My name is Phil Gabriel. Can you hear me? Is it working OK? All right. And I don't know. I always lug around these books. They're for sale out of the back of my car afterwards, but recent projects that I have, I just like the materiality of books sometimes. One was, this one is called, in English, 1-Q-8-4 by a writer that I've been working with now for 25 years, Haruki Murakami. And this book was translated, rather written, in Japanese in three volumes. And the publishing history is different from what it was in the United States. Murakami has done this twice, where he publishes two volumes, actually pretty massive volumes. This is one and two in Japan at the same time. And then people are not sure if the story is over. And critics write articles saying, well, I think it's over, but he sort of leaves it hanging, which he likes to do. And then exactly a year later, he publishes a third volume to wind up the story. And I ended up doing volume three of this book. But in English, it's published, I mean, there are many things that are different about it. It's published in one volume all at once. In England, they tried to be a little tricky about it and published book one and book two separately. And then a week later, they published book three, not a year later, but a week later. So it was kind of a nod to that. But as my co-translator, Jay Rubin, said the title itself already is hard to translate. Some people are reading this in English as if it's describing somebody who's not very bright. They read it as IQ84. It's one Q84, but the Q in Japanese already is not translatable or is difficult because it's a homonym for Q, which is nine in Japanese. So each Q84, meaning, so it's 1984. Anyway, so we're already losing or having difficulties there with translation. And my other project, a recent book, was this one. It's called Villain in English in Akunin in Japanese. It was a one by a very big Japanese novelist called Yoshida Shuichi. And somebody commented on how the, I don't know if you can see the design. This guy, Chip Kidd, who does all the designs for this company. He's a big designer. They said, can you see this? This is supposed to be a gun made out of human bones, like a skull and bones and things like that. And there's actually someone pointed out that, yes, there is a murder in this book, but there's no bones and there's no gun. So did this guy read the book? We're not sure. But anyway, it's an interesting design. Kind of a murder mystery. And I'm just finishing up a third book, which has an easy title to translate. And they even give you the English here. Got a kind of scary title, Genocide. This is the way it's written in Japanese, but it's just pronounced genocide. And I like to, I mean, I've done Murakami Haruki for, Haruki Murakami for many, many years. And I like to keep up with his work and translate that pretty regularly. But I'm also looking out for different writers, new writers. It's one of the joys I find in translation is to take somebody who maybe is pretty well known in Japan, but is just totally unknown here. And try to weave my way through the tracks of agents and publishers and editors to finally get an agreement and get it out in English. Sometimes what happens is this actually very great book, Villain in Japan, sold 2 million copies, made into a great movie. And it just was not marketed here. And they just sort of let it die. And I mean, I went to bookstores and I couldn't even find it. It was kind of sad, after all that work, right? But there's always Britain. Britain, they publish simultaneous versions of it with different covers. And so I was talking to the editor here and she said, well, it hasn't done that well here. And but in England, it sold 25,000 copies in one month. And I said, wow, how is that possible? And it just turned out that a chain, something equivalent to Target, I guess, had picked it up for his book section. So all throughout England it had. So they'd sold it in the sense of the books being on the shelves, not necessarily sold to people. But there was interest in it, it was more interest in it. So drumming at interest, marketing, getting the books chosen and published, how are they chosen, which authors make it, which don't, all of these are big issues. One person who, in our field in Japanese modern literature, about 20 years ago wrote that in America there is an unlimited consumer desire for Japanese products, but there is a quota every generation of imports in literature may be limited to two at most Japanese writers. That means that only two or three actually break through and become, not household names, but they become recognized, they become regularly published and reviewed. And so in my generation, it's definitely Haruki Murakami. This writer has achieved that. And he has a new book coming out. Working with him is becoming a little bit like working for a spy organization in the sense that I received the galley proofs, the first galley proofs back in December and was told not to reveal that there is a book in existence that's going to be coming out in Japanese. Then they said wait for the announcement in Japan that the book actually exists before mentioning that. So people around here were asking, what are you doing? And I'd say, well, I can't, I'd love to tell you, but. And then they announced that the book exists and then they announced that the book has a title and they announced what the title was. So that's where we are right now. But yesterday somebody asked me, what's the book about? And I said, April 12th it's published in Japan and then everybody will know. But I don't know why they do this, just to build anticipation I guess in Japan. But anticipation is building in America for his work. He's really become a well-known writer here. And what really gets me most excited is to see, for example in my graduate, well mixed graduate and undergraduate class, MFA students coming in who, to take a class on Murakami, they don't really know much about Japanese literature. Maybe they couldn't even name any other Japanese writers. But at least one has broken through that barrier and has become more than just a niche foreign writer but has become somebody that people who love literature are aware of in our reading. And to have played a little role in helping that happen is, to me, is a very happy thing. So that's all. Thanks everyone so much. I think we're really in the thick of it in terms of the next topic being collaboration. Wendy's reminder that every poem she translates reminds her how much help she needs. That's a beautiful thought. I think we had a literary master class with Professor Aron Aji who's in the house somewhere I think. Yes, oh Aron, wonderful. Anyway, so one thing that he mentioned was this concept that is source language, that there's no source language, target language as much as there is a host language and a guest language, I think that's the, and that those languages need to collaborate with one another in the process of translating. So we have, I remember my earliest image of a translator was of a 74 year old woman on a high backed couch alone in her apartment smoking a cigarette and having kind of food delivered to her when she was able to take a 15 minute break from translating. So that kind of vision of the solitary translator and of course what our guests have demonstrated very clearly is that there's a great deal of very intricate collaboration that goes into producing and conceiving these works. So maybe Phil mentioned espionage almost, collaborating with the non-existent, non-released book. So I wonder if you could, yeah, conspirator, right? So what are some other modes of collaboration that come up in your work, whether it's multidisciplinary or working with authors or working with co-translators and what could you share about those experiences? Well, since I work on most of the time, let's say on living poets, it has come about that I had the possibility to work with them and I would say that sometimes it is a blast but sometimes it's also a huge problem, especially when the poet maybe doesn't know very well the languages which he's translating and you begin fights on little things that the translator cannot accommodate at the very end unless he wants to change completely to what was the original work. Besides collaborating with other, I believe that for me it's very important to collaborate with people that has a clear and precise feeling of English. After, I mean, I completed a translation, I mean, always I have, I mean, I'm lucky to be friend with a lot of American poets and with translator who actually works and no Italian. So I mean, before publishing anything, I feel the need to send them there and signal the problem, signal when maybe there is too much Italian into my English in order to perfect what it has been done. And I would like just say one more thing, it is very important, I mean, I think that collaboration is extremely important and translation is really important and I use that in my class. I teach a class on the Italian resistance in which one of the project for the student is to translate short stories that we read together. After they do their own work, I put them together and they have to negotiate at the very end with their own translation to come up with what is the best translation possible using their translation. This makes, I would definitely agree, it makes them better reader. They are able to get a better grasp of the language and sometimes it brings very good things also for the instructor. My last translation that was published is actually a project that I did with one of my undergraduate student that was here before, but I don't see her anymore, an undergraduate student, Brenna Ward, and we worked together for all year on a long poem that was just recently published and it was great for me to hear what she felt, what she was able to take out of the poem and I hope it was great for her to listen to my input. And the final work, I think it was at the end a good one. Well, I had a kind of interesting first experience with this new book, 1Q84, which was the first time that I translated a novel with another translator and people ask us how closely we worked, we didn't really and I feel sorry for the editor because until the very end we just did our own thing separately. We're very good friends, but we were so busy just doing our parts of the translation and there was some pressure to get it done fairly quickly and the editor at one point said that she wished that she had two brains because she was kind of going crazy trying to take his version of the story, parts one and two and then my version of part three, which were done, as I said, kind of separately and put them together. So she sent off this master list of words that we had, word choices that were different and they're just some banal ones like I think I chose veranda and he chose balcony to describe it throughout the story so all those things had to be reconciled. But we got to the point, fortunately, like you say, working with living writers, my experience has mostly been pretty positive. They've been very generous with their time and Murakami himself is a translator of American literature. So I think that really helps that he knows the ins and outs of translation and it's very sympathetic to the translator. So there were times toward the end where we sort of dug in our heels on our word choice, the other translator and myself. There was, and then we had to consult the author and get him to be the referee really for that. There was just one that I remember that was it's bozu atama in Japanese which basically means that your hair is cut very, very short like a priest, like a Buddhist priest. I had an image of the guy as kind of scary and a right-wing guard type for a cult is what he was and I called him skinhead. He had a nickname, bozu atama and so I called him skinhead throughout and my fellow translator had gone with buzz cut. So we asked the author because we both liked our own version and the author said well, I was thinking more of a military, militaristic image for this guy and so I think buzz cut maybe works okay and since he was a translator himself and I think had given it some thought, we decided to go with that. So there were lots of little things like that but you really learn, it goes back and forth if you're doing, if there are two translators, I learn a lot from the other translator and admire some of the choices that he makes and hopefully it worked the other way too. But the editor has a tough time in some project like that and in the hardbound there were still some mistakes and things that got by her and they were, I just got the paper back and I hope they're corrected in the paper back. So like Japanese doesn't have a single or plural often and so there was a major figure who spoke of a religious cult leader who spoke of hearing koeh which could mean voice or voices and I translated as voice and the other translator did it as voices and I'm almost afraid to look in the paper back to see whether she, she promised she was gonna correct those but we had that major difference of sort of a view of this cult leader and his religious views but that's the sort of the major experience I've had in collaborating. I was very interested to hear that you translate both ways from English into Italian and Italian into English and so you're having about equal experience with that or? Again, I think that it's much easier for me to translate from English into Italian because I mean, I don't know, I have the feeling of the rhythm of everything that would be involved in Italian poem. When I go into the English again, I need to have somebody to tell me you are doing the right thing before I publish anything. Well, one way or another we always need native speakers as collaborators, I think. I mean, I'm not confident enough to send out a translation without asking all my question marks in the text to go back with a native speaker and double check or maybe multiple native speakers, yeah. Well, like both of you, I work with a living writer and so I also have the opportunity to communicate frequently and collaborate with Teri Lopez Mills and it's a really great experience. We mostly keep in touch by email and there's a wonderful feeling of being able to ask just about anything and as you said, Phil, it's very fortunate that she herself is a translator and it's interesting how we get into questions of translation and we're able to each see what our own strengths are, what is easier for me to translate harder for her to render in English and easier for me to say, oh, I know what you mean and then other things where because I'm not a native speaker of Spanish, I may see a phrase that's not that uncommon but is unfamiliar to me and I do a corporate search and try to find out what exactly does this mean and I may have limited results whereas of course she can just tell me, well, it's this. There you go. I'm actually also interested in other forms of collaborative translation though and one of the ones that I came across quite recently, I guess you could say it's what the Argentinian poet Lila Semborein called collaboration with myself, self-translation. Probably something that would give most of us pause, you know, translating one's own work but I've been editing a special issue of a literary journal for which it's an issue that's collaboratively curated so each writer that I invited to contribute to the issue also invited one other writer of their choosing and we have interesting scenarios where one of the poets is translating another one of the poets in that issue and is also translating his own work and in fact several of the poets in the issue are translating their own work and I became fascinated by, this sort of goes back to my earlier comment about what's difficult, what's easy. I was fascinated by what things are more difficult for a writer to translate in their own work and also what might be easier. I am starting to get this feeling that while it's certainly true and this is one of the reasons why we're cautioned not to translate our own work maybe that it's just a much smoother experience to translate into one's own first language for those people who would say that they have one first language. I would say that there's some kind of richness or interest or complication that I really enjoy because the writer of the piece knows something about the piece that no one else does. But of course this is kind of a conundrum because there's also certainly the reality that the readers of the piece know something about the piece that the writer doesn't. So I became very interested in that. Other ideas that engage me with collaborative translation are chain link translations, taking one work and translating it into another language and then another language and another language. We did this at the Poetry Center when we asked four poets to translate each other's work into their first languages. And in some cases one of the poets translated the work out of her first language and into her second language and then another poet translated that work out of the poet's second language into his own second language. So fascinating to me in the way that was discussed in the first panel with the Islamic text which had traveled throughout the years. You can actually travel in really a very, very long way even just in a group of three people like this talking together. I think one very lovely concept that came from Mary-Louise Pratt and some other who's theorist is the traffic and meaning and these chain link translations, traffic and meaning, they move meaning from one place to another. And I think one thing that I've noticed is that over the past 20 years platforms like Google and Microsoft's global or go global platform, they now do automatic translating for most products, for most software items, texts in the broadest sense. And they've really kind of taken that responsibility away from what used to be the university and diplomatic sphere and vernacular practices of translation. I'm kind of curious whether we're also talking about a kind of ethics around translation. Does translation embody a certain kind of ethics? Maybe translation practice in some senses is the new critical thinking of which we talked about so much in the 1990s. What would it mean to frame curricula or university units around translation as a practice? I think the reason why I've been thinking about this is this morning at our literary masterclass it was pointed out that as a translator you do not have the option not to translate something. You can't skip over anything. You can't take a holiday. Nothing is allowed to be translatable if you're a translator. And that practice of having to make a decision as part of both the craft and the responsibility of being a translator I think could be generalized into a lot of different educational spheres. So is there a kind of ethical core to your own translation practice? I don't know, I just jumped into this panel. So I'm making a couple of questions. I was thinking of the translator as editor also because then the editor has to make certain choices. A lot of the texts that I work with, let me put it this way. Japanese editors don't edit the same way as American editors do. They're very light in editing, especially with famous writers because famous writers in Japan do not publish with one publisher as they do here. It's a big deal here when a famous novelist changes publishing companies. But in Japan, like Murakami regularly publishes with four different publishers. So in order to get in line and get their book in time from him, they sort of treat him with kid gloves, I guess you'd say, and that probably goes for any writer. So what you end up with is a book that the author has edited but the editor has perhaps only lightly edited according to our standards. So when the book, the text is brought here and given to the translator, I don't know if you'd say ethical choices but you find certain things going on in there that need to be addressed. And for example, many books in Japan are serialized. And when they're in magazines every month, let's say, or a weekly magazine, there's a lot of repetition. You know, you forgot who that guy was from last month, right? So let me tell you again. And when that's collected into one volume as a single novel, a lot of times that's not always edited out. And then we get it and the editors here think it's rather strange. They certainly don't want the translator to hand them something as is. So you have an ethical choice there of actually editing and maybe you said, we have to translate everything. Well, sometimes we have to cut or consider cutting certain things because we know they're just, they don't work in our system of telling stories. But in Japan, it's fine. It's accepted. And so that kind of, I don't know if it's an ethical choice, and then also confronting mistakes in the original. I don't know about mistakes in poetry, but factual errors in long novels, we find this fairly often. And what do you do with that? One time I remember with Murakami, he had his character say the equivalent in Japanese of I think therefore I am. And didn't Pascall say that? And I said, well, I don't know philosophy, but wasn't that Descartes? And he said, oh yeah, I think you're right. And so I said, well, I'm changing it in the English. And he said, well, thank you for pointing that out. And then when it was republished in Japan, it still said Pascall. And so there's those kind of things. There's what do you do when you confront an error in the original? I mean, there are gonna be errors in our translations if you do a long work, but if you confront one there, how do you translate it as is and make the author look a little open him to the risk of looking wrong or silly? I don't know if that's ethical decision, but so translation plus, translator plus being an editor at the same time is something that I have to work with a lot. Phil, to what extent is that? Editing responsibility formalized, if at all, is it something that you negotiate with a publisher when you're preparing to translate a book or is it kind of unspoken or does it happen sometimes after you've produced a first draft and then you communicate with the editor and the necessity arises? Well, first I communicate with the author to make sure that the author is aware. I don't wanna give you the impression that these books are riddled with mistakes, but especially that issue of overly repetitive things in serialized novels really needs to be addressed and the editors here are very heavy handed sometimes. They wanna switch, I mean, in one book of mine which is still sitting at the publisher because the editor and the author got in a fight, the editor wanted to literally take like chapter three and make it chapter two and chapter two and make it chapter three. She said the chronology doesn't work here and I said, well, you know this one, the equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize in Japan, I think it worked for somebody, and but they didn't buy it and so it's still sitting there about two years after I finished it and yeah, I don't know the collaborative, we're sort of in the middle, I feel you probably feel that too between the author and your publisher or your editor and we're sort of the one who often is called upon to see both sides and negotiate two different viewpoints that is sometimes mutually exclusive but it leads to some interesting things. It's sad when books are published or are translated and just sit there. Short stories I can live with but a year long project to have the book just kind of sit on the shelf is kind of sad. Do you ever hear about the second generation translations? Have you ever heard of that? Where they take an English translation and translate it like Japanese into English and then English into another language based on the English version, that happened to me. Well, I didn't even know it was happening, it was in German and the first novel of Murakami as I translated South of the Border West of the Sun, the German edition was apparently translated from my English version, which doesn't make any sense. There are lots of German scholars who can translate Japanese but that's what happened. I had no idea or suddenly got this flurry of emails from German scholars and grad students saying, do you approve of this? Do you think this is a good idea? And I guess that's kind of an ethical issue too. And I said, I had no idea. They were doing that and no I don't approve of it. It's something that sounds like what happened in the 19th century but not in the 20th or 21st century. Well, I just wanted to go back to finding mistakes or supposed mistakes in the original text because it is true that I work mostly with living poets but the main experimental moment in Italy was during the 60s and now some of them, some of those poets are not anymore with us. And also in that period there was an opposition toward establishment. So many books were self-published at the very end and not curated very well. So I mean, sometimes you find a lot of typos in those but on the other hand you are dealing with poets that are interested in experimenting with language. So sometimes you find yourself in front of a world in which there is just a vow of change to give maybe a different meaning but wanting to maintain at the same time the world that is there. And at that point it is something that you have to make a decision about. What the poet wanted to do. And I don't know, in translating this kind of poetry, I mean with poetry I think it's pretty easy at the very end. I mean, you can end up adding an out explaining what the problem was and what was the decision of the translator and leave it open for anybody who's reading to make their own decision about that. I also think about ethics a lot. And I think part of that just comes from the fact of being a US poet living in Tucson translating the work of a Mexican author. It's just there right from the start in everything that I do. But I also think about ethics in the sense of the way that poetry is, it's really context rich and context differs from culture to culture from place to place. And even though the US and Mexico we're right next to each other, we share. But obviously there's a lot of differences in our context especially Tucson to Mexico City. And so there are maybe expressions that are reading one way in the original that I think, okay, how can I make this work in a translation so that it will give the right feeling and be true to the original but it will also fit the context of a poem written by, or rather read by an English speaking audience in the US. How can I make it fit? And there's this whole idea of well, is it good to leave it just as it was because this is how it was written. And even if this might strike someone as strange or off or different, well that difference is really all part of what we want to do or since this is a contemporary poet, a living poet whose work will be read by her peers or contemporaries, other poets who hopefully will be influenced by her work, is it better to produce that work so that it fits better the context in which it but will be read. One of the things that I think is kind of funny is that in this book of translations that I'm working on for Contra Corriente, I told you it's about a river, it is really rich in symbolism and a lot of the symbolism involves animals. So it's really not all that often that you read a contemporary poem by a person in the U.S. that has roosters in it. It's like roosters does not a commonly used word in contemporary U.S. poetry. Don't know why, but it's not. And so when the poems are populated by roosters and mules and cows, in addition to plastic bags floating down the river and little bits of trash and oil floating on the surface of the water, so you're like, okay, well, this is gonna maybe strike U.S. readers as strange. Not so much us maybe because we're familiar with the contrasts that are present in urban life in Mexico where you may be living in the biggest city, Mexico City, and yet someone in a neighborhood nearby keeps cows or has a lot of chickens. And so what I think is funny about that is I know that that's actually changing because a lot of people, including myself, now keep chickens. And you've probably seen, if you ever walk in the Sam Hughes neighborhood, you've seen someone walking their goats maybe. These things are kind of changing over time. And so sometimes I just say, well, all right, this is difficult, but it's going to work itself out. As our place, as our context changes, maybe it's just, maybe I'm overthinking this. Maybe I should just let things be, let them flow as it were. I feel a little bit remiss that we haven't asked you to bring in on any of these questions. Does anybody have a, yes, I see a hand. I'm gonna walk over to this gentleman with a microphone. Thank you. I actually have a couple of questions. Now, you mentioned that some Japanese novels are published first in serialized version. And then they, of course, amplify the narrative with characters and descriptions. May I assume that when they, are those novels then subsequently published as one volume? They're subsequently published as one volume. And when they are, wouldn't the author also edit those passages out? You would think so. But I find still the, I mean, usually I get it when it's in one volume. So I don't really go back and compare the serialized often with that. Sometimes if I get the original galley proofs, I can see. But I just think that there are probably more editing that needs to be done before it reaches our shores. I mean, to be acceptable. I'm starting to, with quite a few years of experience, to know or anticipate what the editors here are going to say and think. And I know that when they see those kind of things, they're not gonna say, oh, that's a very interesting process that the Japanese go through of not editing those out. And let's leave that in. They're never gonna say that. They have pretty strict rules. And they, like I said, they're pretty heavy handed in their editorial approach. One other thing I wanna be, you're a little example of, in a work of fiction, yeah, the first novel that I translated of his is called South of the Border, West of the Sun. And very big part of this novel was a vinyl recording of Nat King Cole singing South of the Border. And first of all, many Japanese readers wrote to Murakami, who was a big jazz guy. And they said, excuse me, Nat King Cole never recorded South of the Border. And he said, I asked him about this too when I was translating. He said, it's fiction, you know? I know he didn't do this, but that's just part of the story. So yeah, you have those elements. I think that's when you need to communicate with the author and see what the intention was. So certainly in a book like that, I would not, I would not change it, you know? I have a question for the thing. In the, I was interested, being interested when you said that you translate from English to Italian and vice versa. There was a time, I don't know if that would be true, where you were not allowed to translate from a language into a language that was not your own. Those were the regulations that the UN, when I was working at a translator in my former national, you know, they were not allowed to do that. And I thought, you know, regulating the translation for questions of power. And I want you to, you know, tell me what you think about that. Do you want to know about my experience? Yeah, yeah, because the claim was that you would translate from this, by translating from the foreign language into your own native language. So do you find? I find that, does my microphone work now or? I'm coming. Well, I think that, I mean, as I said before, I am definitely much more comfortable in translating from English into my own language. It comes easy, I can work very well with the traditional structure of Italian poetry with the nuances of the language. When I do vice versa, I mean, I have some of it, but no matter what, I mean, every time I have published something that is a translation from Italian into English, I either publish the translation with somebody on my side working together to the translation or at least having somebody that I trust, most of the time a poet, most of the time somebody who also speaks Italian to check that everything I was doing was the right way to do it. I think it is, I think it is, I mean, I've known a translator that are totally bilingual, that actually write poetry both in Italian and in English. But I know that these people, no matter what, when they do not write in their own, in their primary language, they will, I mean, these people I know will go back to a native tongue to ask if everything is fine. So, I mean, I don't know, maybe there are people who feel totally comfortable if we go into publishing without having anybody to consult their work, not in my experience though. If I could just add to that, I think there's an important trade-off that maybe we don't recognize when we talk about the importance of translating into, and I say we, I don't mean that I talk about this, but the importance of translating into one's first language or primary language. And I think that we, as a whole, just as Irene said, this is something that's talked about and often is accepted as a truism, right? But one advantage that we have if we're translating out of our primary language, translating a text that is in our primary language, into another language, is that we are better readers of that text. And that's not always taken into account, I think it's maybe more taken into account with interpretation, particularly forms of interpretation which accurate understanding of the source message is just essential as in legal interpretation. But the same, you could say for literary translation too, that I know for myself when I am reading Spanish and translating into English, I can do maybe a better job in the text that I produce, but I do have much more difficulty being absolutely 100% sure that I understand everything that I'm reading. Of course it's poetry, so who could really say? But. I think this kind of goes to the core of the issue. I mean, some of the, I found recently some of the most vigorous thinkers about translation are those who translate into their second or third language. Or as Aron Agis spoke of this morning, translating into English as a second language. That you can do that as well, that that's a possibility. And in my own translation class yesterday, we translated a Langston Hughes poem, Mother to Son into German. Most of the class are non-native speakers of German or non-heritage speakers. And the decision-making, the emotional, kind of affective practice that is involved in translating a text like that with its dialect, with its oral quality. It requires of a non-native speaker of that host language a great deal of fortitude, I would call it, and I'm wondering whether we will hear a little bit more about that.