 Okay, I'm going to speak very loudly because I do not have a house mic, so it's a great pleasure to introduce Professor Aron Ajee from the University of Iowa's Masters in Fine Arts program and Comparative Literature and also from St. Ambrose University where he is a Dean of Arts and Letters and embodies in all of those roles what I think of as translation as in scholarship, the scholar translator. They tend to be a little bit rare which is quite surprising and I'm very indebted to Aron for coming to Tucson to speak with us. He has a doctorate in literature, is a working translator, is the winner of the 2004 American Literary Translators Association National Translation Prize for his translation of Bilge Karasu's novel, beautiful novel, Götzmüskedüler Bahçesi which means The Garden of the Departed Cats. It's a delightful text, one of the first texts that I ever personally read in Turkish and he is also on the Executive Board of the American Literary Translators Society, American Literary Translators Association. The conference for ALTA will be next October 10th through 13th in Bloomington. I think we should all go to that together and form, I don't know, 21 panels or so out of the group. It's a great pleasure for me to have Aron here and he's been very generous with his time and I've learned a great deal from him already in the first 18 hours that I've known him. So please welcome Professor Aron Ajee. Thank you, thank you very much. I'm really incredibly honored to be here and the invitation to ALTA is real. I've already told David that there has to be, there must be a panel about this conference. This is because this conference that you are having, this symposium that you are having is in fact endemic of the new directions in our field and what is happening here is of very, very high significance that probably you're not aware of because you're in it, you're immersed in it and from the outside though I can assure you that you are breaking ground. What do I mean by this? Let me just say a few things as I was listening to the presentations because really this is really very significant. What? I have no idea. Somebody put a microphone on me. Can you not hear me? Can you hear me? Is it everything okay? So I will shout. Can you hear me? Okay, well this is not going to be possible to do this for an hour but I will emote. All right, first of all right now as you know we talk a lot about globalization. What globalization has done is really create an environment where we are constantly on the border of the other. Any moment we are at the border of the other here as well and the other can be the other disciplines, the other can be the other languages, the other can be the other epistemologies, the other can be the other religions, faiths, ethical systems, you name it. So what translation does is that it becomes now the new epistemology. It's through translation that we are encountering the other and to do this right we have to do it in its most comprehensive context where disciplines speak to one another and the panels that we already encountered here from gender studies to history to Middle Eastern and North African studies to the languages and many more. One of my, what shall I say, pet projects is to go to any campus I can and say that we need to have a translation across the curriculum just the way we did with writing. What does that mean? It means because in every single discipline in the humanities, social sciences, fine arts as well as natural sciences and in fact leading among them medic medicine translation has become a fundamental mode of discovery, mode of inquiry and mode of productivity right. It produces as well as discovers. So as what are these? These are exactly the things that we argued for writing when we made it writing across the curriculum. So this is really fundamental. Let me also say something to you and I will shut up in a minute but I'm so excited here. I have to tell you these things. The second thing is what David said, translation is the new critical thinking and indeed it can't be more true than that because if indeed we are to encounter the other and understand the other we have to do it through the critical lens that translation also provides. Now the other thing is this a very simple fact about you. I don't know of too many universities where there are translation studies programs that can have 13 faculty members sitting like you are today talking among yourselves about a shared concern. Even graduate degrees out there, schools that are giving graduate degrees do not have 13 faculty members who are so invested in translation and you are. I mean you have the Murakami translator here. You have from Italian, you have from Spanish. Those are the direct literary translators but you also have all these scholars who are so proud to publicly acknowledge that translation is not a shameful activity we engage in quietly in our solitude but we do it publicly and I will also say this to you. There are few schools where translation can be recognized as scholarship and this is one of those. I was just playing with your title translation, what did you say? Translation and in scholarship. I think this symposium could have been also called scholarship as translation and in translation because they are really becoming increasingly interchangeable. So there is one more item and I'm really pressuring your dean who is sitting there saying what did I get myself into. The field is in absolute need for advanced study in translation. We do not have the environments where we can really have programs of credibility if you will. So this multidisciplinary, multivalent context or approach to translation that is being displayed here among all these speakers is all the more relevant by the way and necessary to literary translators. You heard Hemi talking about how it is important for us to acknowledge translation as well as literary translation alongside interpretation because again to understand literature we have to understand the context. You know, newness enters the world through translation and however newness enters our world in this hegemonic universe that we inhabit and we are so proudly in America the hegemon like little clouds, a Turkish book, a Japanese book, an Italian poem as if these do not belong in certain very complex ecologies and they do and for us to really understand every single literary text we also have to understand the ecology and in fact what you were saying about how to study the colonial experience from both the colonizer and the colonizer through translation. This is context building. This is sort of creating the sky where those clouds perhaps will form a storm but without that we really are we are really not able to truly study international writing. So off my soap box please and again if I can be of any help I will be very happy to. You have something very very special here and I'm very honored to be invited. The title of my talk is faithful treasons or I could have been maybe faithful betrayals. You know the trope it's a very familiar one that the translator always also lays between fidelity and betrayal and you know also that there's a virtually every translation theory addresses this question of fidelity and betrayal and most of them address it in the in in terms of a continuum that somehow we either are going to fall on the side of fidelity or we're going to go all the way to betrayal. Now anyone who practices translation knows that the truth is somewhere in between and that no translation act is completely foreignizing as Venuti says or completely domesticating and that in fact unlike these very global or theories translation takes place in very small acts of encountering words between the translator and the text and in fact what one does with one word is not always what one does with the other word. So this business of fidelity and loss has also been subject of another set of translations translation theories that that sort of gesture toward a third entity almost like a metaphysical entity and I'm thinking here of Bin Yamin for example this sort of somehow there is some kind of a meaning purest meaning that exists outside all of its manifestations across human languages that somehow what makes translation possible between languages is exactly the existence of this pure meaning it's very platonic very romantic or you have a Goethe who says it is really about creating correspondence we are really talking about then every translation act therefore is like a cohabitation that that somehow the the source or in target languages cohabit in every act of translation. David also referred to this notion by Linda Liu who talks about host language and guest language that's sort of the translation as an act of hospitality as receiving guests but really that still presupposes a world where our interactions are contingent and that is becoming increasingly false our interactions are becoming permanent so really that beautiful metaphor of host and guest perhaps should be translated into a metaphor of cohabitation we are here to live together so what does that mean it means that therefore this business of loss and recovery or fidelity and betrayal has to be understood in their dynamic contradiction that they in fact inhabit each other's space what I mean by that is you know neither fidelity calls for identity nor betrayal nullifies that which it must betray instead in fact implicit in every moment of fidelity is the ever-present potential of its betrayal that's why we become strongly faithful the more we are tempted an implicit in betrayal is an acknowledgement of fidelity although it's often expressed in a violent acknowledgement it is still an acknowledgement one has to acknowledge fidelity to betray it so and and where do we fall here is it fidelity and it's a great virtue isn't it fidelity and this is I am reminded of Abraham Heschel an incredible Jewish mystic neo mystic who says and you know he's he's a rabbi and it's very surprising what he says is a rabbi he says it is absolutely unhelpful to ask whether or not God exists what we have to ask is what are we supposed to do here and and and to address the question of what is our purpose in light of whether God exists or not actually says adds a complication to the question it's the same thing this fidelity and loss has to be understood as an inevitability that really ultimately the goal is to translate and while doing so also to acknowledge that these moments of loss these moments where we are keenly aware of fidelity and betrayal those potentialities are the moment is the site of the most heightened epistemic activity involving as much creativity as keen critical analysis linguistic etymological and historical scholarship these are the moments where we sort of really become alert it's like when you're you know the hair in the back of your neck is raised by by that tense discovery that's those are the moments where we we are the most disaster of the translator so what I want to do is read to you a little bit from this book a long day's evening it's the most recent translation of Birgit Karasu's work and and then I'm going to talk a little bit about what Karasu well first I'm going to talk about what Karasu is trying to do in this book and then the challenges it poses on a translator and then read to you a little bit and then we're going to look at that one of those moments of loss and fidelity and betrayal by looking at one phrase okay can you hear me I mean this the loudest killing me maybe I can talk like this can you hear me oh good that's that's a little better isn't it all right Birgit Karasu was one of the greatest modern contemporary modern authors of Turkey he lived between 1930 and 1995 and he he witnessed first-hand and also as part of the first generation of youngsters going to school in the new modernist Turkish Republic where old Turkish was replaced by an intentional systematic new language called the pure Turkish an interesting detail for you to keep in mind is that he was taught most likely by teachers who themselves learn this new language so it's a very interesting almost translational space so to speak and when he begins to write he's he begins as a philosopher he's a semiotician and he uses literature in order to really understand the workings of language so he believes that a dynamic correspondence exists between language and the literary text as language shapes and takes shape inside the literary artifice so that each book is an advancement of a language meaning materializes in and through language and in every book therefore both literary expression and the language that's used is rendered more capacious it becomes more expensive so every act of literary creativity is also an act of expanding the language its expressivity and he has a beautiful beautiful quote that if you don't remember anything from this talk you should remember this he says the emergence of a literary text means that first its language has been made to express that text literature is the memory of language I am not saying the memory of authors it's the memory of language this book is the watershed moment in Turkish literature of course every every national literature has a watershed moment this shouldn't be the reason why you should rush and buy it but it is really a very very significant book after this book nothing remained the same in Turkish literature and and here you see Karasu at its highest in terms of his linguistic philosophy but also in terms of aesthetics it has three parts the first two parts come together as a complete narrative and it is in fact titled a long day's evening and it's the story of two monks eight century Byzantine monks and this is the time of iconoclasm and they are going through a crisis of faith on account of this new faith and then the third part is a tiny little 15 page story about an author living in 1960s and it is autobiographical and it deals with the crisis of faith of the 20th century we have in fact Mussolini the Italian fascism but also the first Turkish revolution military revolution or military coup I don't think this is it's a revolution sorry Turkish military coup the Yermiyedima is 27 of May the first time after the Republic was founded the military came in forcefully to preserve democracy it's a little bit like the way the Byzantine emperor is in forcefully preserving faith restoring faith right so there is a fantastic thematic continuity across these texts and also across the you know 1100 years of history that this book sort of sweepingly goes through okay and here's another thing you would like to know about Keraser and that is every one of his books consists of texts that were written concurrently so the first book and the second book and the third book will happen to have sections written in around the same time so he does this very very consciously he puts together the book for him it is a book rather than a narrative story if you will a literary story and this is again very postmodern and he was in fact in the context of the Turkish literature a postmodernist avon la letre but he was very much invested in you know contemporary critical theoretical debates so he was just sort of directly drawing from that so the the challenges of translating Keraser a fine esp ultimately always can be reduced to what do you do with all this intense language play that cannot be really translated unless you read it in Turkish what he is doing to Turkish you can't really do in English it looks either anachronistic passé or acutely self-consciously experimental like a language poet type which is not his purpose Keraser creates an incredibly natural language in Turkish so the challenge is then to translate him in a way that still hints at his preoccupation with language and that perhaps also conveys some of his experimentalism but do it in a way that it is still as readable in English as it was in Turkish what was so phenomenal about Keraser's experimentalism in Turkish is that he was the first author whose pure Turkish sounded literary not self-conscious but literary so how do we do this okay so what I'm going to do is I'm going to read to you just a couple pages this is the beginning of the second part what you have is the paragraph we're gonna arrive at and that's in fact the paragraph where we have the example we're gonna look at what I would like also for you to do is see if you can find some of find some patterns as you're listening see if you can find something missing especially the loss rainy or cold evening after evening for years he has been doing one thing his palms damp with cool sweat each time his hands tingling his whole being trembling with excitement as if each evening is the first time he is leaning on his staff dragging his tired feet climbing the foothill of eventus but it seems that the days when he had to trust his staff more than his feet even those days are behind him now with November coming to an end he knows the sunny evenings are numbered for a few weeks now when he sits under the solitary poplar on the riverbank during the drowsy afternoon hours he's noticed the rushing water is closer to brown than green dead leaves broken branches rotting baskets swirl in the eddies while a dense muddy current runs down the middle of the riverbed a few days ago the waters had pulled along the carcass of a dog all these signal that far away in the higher provinces winter has begun bringing with it the heavy rains almost no one from the northern cities visits anymore those places might even be covered with snow by now here it rains from time to time while the weather gradually gets colder but even if the month of December remains sunny he'll have to wait until March for the Sun to warm his aching bones soothe them again no matter how seldom it might rain the soil will stay damp the stones cold until March to see March again to feel the warm Sun in his joints to watch the river gradually change from brown to green to taste again the watermelon the fig the grape these seem to him now as incredible as improbable as fairy tales from far away times far away places vaguely remembered yet is it not also true that tasting the fig the grape once again will bring him closer to another winter sweep him into another altogether incredible all the more improbable adventure will he not experience all the more keenly in his heart that being ever near is also being never ever there something is born it grows out of the air softness when he started his walk there was sunlight but also a cool breeze beginning to make itself felt now after walking for some time after experiencing that the light drunkenness of exhaustion in his joints his flesh after bearing all the burden of exertion in his arms his legs he isn't surprised that a wave of heat begins to seep through his skin to the interior of his body the inner chill shooting outward like crackling sparks is also a sensation he has known for a long time but as the sun retreats behind Mount eventius the shadows deepen along the path he's been walking the rustling grows louder sharper among the leaves among the branches somewhat sparse yet still green in the woods ahead of him as the soft diffuse light swells then redoubles Joachim thinks of a thick nectar how suspended in that liquid the faded translucent petals of a rose suddenly become something beyond roseness beyond pedalness beyond pure sweetness dance ripening this the word he's been looking for ripening he's thinking of fruit now ripening fruit their skin growing thinner breaking open as if they can no longer remain hidden covered no longer contain the softness the sweetness teeming inside of them the edges of the split skin black and quickly within days within hours the onset of death call it rot call it mold call it blackness is it not also true that what protects the rose petals what carries them beyond roseness pedalness sweetness is exactly their half the solution in that nectar let's stop here anything as you are listening the rhythm the rhythm is very pronounced isn't it I mean it's almost like poetry what else yes a lot of descriptions a lot of descriptions here's an old man he's in his 80s maybe 70s he's taking this walk every day he has been taking and it's very unusual because he's been taking this walk for at least decades and yet now even after so many walks he's still keenly aware of the physical description right aware of the physical objects and he's describing them with incredible almost lust for life that I mean I think it's an it's an unnecessary thing but the the description of the fruit is incredibly erotic and this is a monk we're talking about the other thing that I wanted to do and maybe this didn't come across as readily and maybe when one looks at the text you one will notice it in Turkish the full meaning of a sentence materializes at the very end Turkish is a very accumulative language you have to listen to the very end of a sentence and at times you may think at the beginning of a sentence you are about to be asked a question which in the middle of the sentence sounds like it's scolding and at the end of the sentence suddenly turns into an apology so there is an emotional rhythm to Turkish that I try to capture and these long sentences are almost identical in length to the Turkish sentence but did you notice also that English usually flags the meaning from the very beginning let me ask you this well ask me this or do you right the way we however but on the other hand we have all these little troops and I don't know if you notice but almost all of them are gone except for yet and but there's a lot of yet and but in this book and also there is not a single in the course of 140 pages not a single and a total of 540 and said to be removed again to create not only the rhythm but also to give you a sense of what he is doing in Turkish because Karasu also does not use ve although the reason why he does not use ve is because ve is a borrowed word from from Arabic so it's a contamination and there are many many other ways to mean ve in Turkish you don't even need it it's a it's a superfluous conjunction but what I did is I took this and I lost his intent but I gained his experimentalism so sometimes what is lost in one house is found in the neighborhood okay now what I would like to do is very quickly show you one particularly Peski example two words yaklaşmanın uzaklaştırıcılığı and I will tell you that this is in the paragraph you have projected now you don't know there are some of you who know in Turkish so I'll ask you not to say anything can you guess yes far away places why ah so yours yours so you you you seized upon the repetitive sounds and you're thinking maybe it's repeated very good that's good but it's not correct that's okay why improbable adventure well no but I think you do because I was I was expecting somebody to seize upon that because you know the length wise those are sort of the longer phrases right so if one were to take the length so if I had something like constitutionalism and disenfranchisement or something right these are very and yet in Turkish these are extremely plain and simple constructions this is made of yaklaş which means come close approach uzak uzak means far away uzaklaş means go away go farther away yaklaşma is the act of coming closer uzaklaştırıcı is a the you know that which causes the repelling thetırıcı lığı the property of pushing you away yaklaşma nın these are all very basic suffixes in Turkish so yaklaşmanın uzaklaştırıcı lığı in this extremely beautifully poetic version means getting closer and closer to one's destination but never arriving makes one feel being further and further away from its each time that I mean that's sort of is that a good loose transliteral reading so what is being described is the closer you get to your goal but never but but can't attain it the farther away it feels now I could have put it that way but all sorts of things would be lost let me let me we already suggest we already showed how you have in fact some patterns here yaklaşma uzaklaştırıcı lığı yaklaşma uzaklaştırıcı and then here also you have yaklaşmanın yaklaşmanın one two three four syllables uzaklaştırıcı lığı right so you have four plus one plus one plus one right yaklaşmanın it ends with a nice pause right yaklaşmanın and indeed coming close always has the anticipation of arrival uzaklaştırıcı lığı it's open so and there is enormous amount of poetic material here that need to be somehow brought into english the other thing is again yaklaş and uzaklaş yakın uzak these are extremely common words in turkish and they are common root verbs so I have to preserve also the plainness and now you know now what's which one it is right which one it is being ever near is also being never ever there now that's not yaklaşmanın uzaklaştırıcı lığı and yet it is I think what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to sort of convey the emotional rhythm rhythm that being ever near is also being never ever there and then being ever near has that nice pause as yaklaşmanın never ever there has the openness of the right so what I'm trying to get at here is then every moment of you know this this fidelity and betrayal I am betraying certain things but I'm also trying to recover and I'm also trying to sort of atone for it if you will I'm trying to remediate to be able to do that however one has to really analyze these moments of untranslatability as deeply as possible and then decide which of the qualities of that untranslatable phrase are non-negotiable now these are personal choices as you were also saying these are very personal choices I happen to think that the rhythm and the emotional tenor these are unnegotiable you know non-negotiable but those are sort of what also sort of govern my entire translation so ultimately I have to be also consistent so that's what it is questions comments how much work you know just two words yes it is and also some of the untranslatabilities are endemic to the languages for example in Turkish these root verbs because we use these root verbs almost every let me give you the example here for example bil bil bil is the root verb of to know right bil so if I say bil dik it means we knew bilmeden means unknowingly bilin mezlik means indescribability or unknowability bilinç means consciousness bilge means wisdom or wise or sage so in Turkish because of this agglutinated character in Turkish every word inhabits a semiotic echo chamber its meaning is aggrandized by the meanings it evokes so even though each of these words mean something somewhat different they also explicitly echo each other's meanings not just implicitly but explicitly so notice here too in this one instance because it is such an unbelievably it's a very surprising phraseology in Turkish as well when you look at that being ever near is also being never ever there I'm trying to really create that kind of an echo chamber right these words are sort of echoing one another but maybe they don't have the richness of yaklaşmanın uzaklaştırıcılığı but the English already being a more verbose language you know a Turkish text is expanded by about a third when you translate it to English because of the word count I was happy to forego these words but capture the sense of the echoes okay I really that's a very anticlimactic ending but that's it so what questions you might have what comments yes I guess what's really stunning is what you've described would appear to me the process in translating a poem rather than a prose work now this is typical or do you think this is in some ways quite well you know one thing that we often say in fact you mentioned you know translation is the closest reading I liken it to poetic analysis and and so perhaps that's what you are also seeing I mean also very close to you and maybe for the same reason because we have chosen to live in multilingual environments we're really very obsessed with language we want to see how language works and of course it's best that's poetry right so we I gravitate to books like that and so as a result there is quite a bit of poetic analysis you're absolutely right yes you are familiar with the work of I'm arguing for translation potential to transform the viewer the theory of language the theory of language that was considered poetic dimension yes I don't know what to mention but exactly what you're mentioning because because of how important it is because the literary translation was probably for much more than just literary text so that's one thing that comes to my mind and the other edge from from a language teaching background or the background I come from it has to do with the second part of your response and comment here to the poetic of the language it's clear come recent theorizing we're not that recent actually on the liminality in which second language learners the second language the multilingual subject live and his potential to capture that right that much more aesthetic aspect of language now I agree with everything you said I will also try to sort of pick on some things you have mentioned first of all we all are now inhabiting a multilingual environment whether or not we are multilingual speakers we are inhabiting because English itself has absorbed quite a bit of the languages it has encountered English itself syntactically aesthetically grammatically also has been transformed through these encounters and so you're absolutely right in that translation then becomes in fact a theoretical lens through which to observe these changes to acknowledge to mark them perhaps but also in their utter fluidity we're almost like freeze framing change you know every moment is like freeze framing change and as it passes by our by our eyes the previous panel you asked about no you were saying that how it won at one point you were not allowed to translate from you know anywhere but to your native tongue and I am guilty for doing exactly the opposite and I'm also even worse because the author that I translate is dead so I can't email him or I can but I won't get but it's it's also of course that also has a lot I think that also points out a very critical component of experiencing international literature it involves not only ethics but it also involves trust you have to trust the intermediary and indeed that's sort of what perhaps was behind the disallowance at one point but right now we inhabit a world where somebody like me gets exposed to literature literary analysis in another language so my literary language my critical language my scholarly language is English I cannot translate back to Turkish I've been in this country for 30 years when do I get the permission so you have to force the issue and in fact one thing I said this morning people often ask me do you do you think in your translation Karasu sounds like he wrote in English I say well he sounds like he wrote in English as a second language and I am not trying to be just humorous because this is my aesthetic I would like by translation to always make you aware that it is translation and yet I hope a beautiful one you know I mean these these plays which of course you know in the span of 140 pages I can just pick any page and share with you these kinds of games that I found myself playing but ultimately what I'm trying to do then is honor both what I can contribute to translation but also honor the reader what he or she is expecting from a translation any other questions comments yes comments on translation and what happened here before I mean at the beginning of your talk what is happening now I am I can be more I'm happier about this the congregation of all these 13 scholars representing many more and probably even more are there that aren't coming out of the closet yet we tend to be very very we are endangered in the academy yeah translation with incorporating into our teaching our training or our guidance into the development of translation ability the idea of translation as a lens rather than translation as a grid only in the sense of translation as an interpret active interpretation in addition probably prior to the act of communication as such um but one thing that I am sometimes missing in the in the new shared ground that we're we're building here is attention to the work done already and for many years from within translation studies so many things you mentioned like the ecologies ecologies of books or words of within larger systems is is a huge work by the descriptive current our call descriptive studies in translation one of the one of the schools for example um then of course the idea of into the the epistemology of the translation as a epistemology is crony work by Conan actually we're talking about before so um so I did scholarship so one thing I would like and I'm going to put it in my x bar we had our feedback feedback form is how to also bring the voices of those who have worked on absolutely um all right well let me let's backtrack to the beginning the reason why I think this is a very very fertile ground for a fantastic translation studies advanced program is not because the voices we experience should be all there is to it but often in the other translation programs these are the voices that we don't hear what we hear is the translation theorist and the translation practitioner and the interpreter to lesser degree but that also by the way more and more interpretation uh translation interpretation studies programs are emerging right I mean that there's that's also a burgeoning field so in a way I am not suggesting that we do away with this far far from it I mean I am right now co-teaching a class on globalization and translation the amount of theory there is enough to explode my brain every Wednesday but it is really important because that's how you you're expanding your understanding of your craft I mean our craft or our art and I say this you know genuinely because wherever you are in this spectrum of interpretive translation to literary translation you're doing both art and craft takes place in a world that has to be understood because if you want to see yourself as contributing or participating in an urgent dialogue or participating in an artistic creativity in both cases you have to know the world in which you do this here I mean can you imagine asking Picasso what do you know about the Spanish Civil War why he knows a lot and we have to know a lot too we can't just all of a sudden pick up the text and begin translating war correspondences without knowing the war so you're absolutely right cultural theory you know all sorts of epistemology if you will of the postcolonial variety I mean all of that has to be but what isn't usually there is the range we saw for example I was just sitting here and saying if I could take a course with everybody one by one I would get a PhD just by taking one course while doing my translation workshop because again this range is what is missing right now in our studies and you also notice that translation theory also has started to close upon itself right why because again it's losing its relevance outside itself thank you anything else okay thank you very much