This Little Art

Don’t do translations, I remember being advised, about a decade ago, by a well-meaning professor. At least, not if you’re planning on making a living. Or, let’s say, on getting a job in the university. It’s a thankless thing, really. A ‘little art,’ Lowe-Porter called it, despite the great determining resonance her own work would have. You could try writing a monograph instead. Perhaps a monograph about translation. But don’t spend your time, and certainly not all your time, on doing them.

‘Who we choose to translate is political,’ write Antena in their ‘Manifesto for Ultratranslation’. ‘How we choose to translate is political.’

Because it is this process of discovery, this adventuring into the writing of a sentence, with no clear idea of what will happen when I start to try, that makes for the real, lived-out difference between reading a sentence – even reading a sentence and speculating in advance how I might go about translating it – and the concrete task of writing it in my own language, again.

what order or of what combination of orders (lexical, syntactical, atmospheric, psychological, ethical…), its difficulties will turn out to be.

public lecture, openly offered, ventured speech, writing written for the lifespan of saying it out loud, is something that must and wants to die.

What is it that makes this activity interesting for the translator? What are the features of this practice of translating that invite and challenge and sustain her? Before the translation reaches the world – and for the short time, or the long time, the days or years of time, it can take to write one?

Do translations! This is the invitation I want to make, relaying and rephrasing – deliberately countering – the advice I once received. Yes, yes and absolutely. Do translations, for the simple reason that we need them. We need translations, urgently: it is through translation that we are able to reach the literatures written in the languages we don’t or can’t read, from the places where we don’t or can’t live, offering us the chance of understanding as well as the necessary and instructive experience of failing to understand them, of being confused and challenged by them.

There is still the pressing question of how to make a living as a literary translator, and the fact that translations still make up only the smallest percentages of the books that get published in English each year (what Chad W. Post has termed ‘the three per cent problem’).

Neither I nor the writing I have published is immobile. And yet it’s something people seem to find very hard to accept

There was this whole period in the 1960s, notes Barthes, marked by a kind of incuriosity with regard to the life, the circumstances of the author, and the article I wrote was a part of that. But now? Now I feel a bit differently. Now things have changed. In fact, he writes, I feel this curiosity developing freely in me.