Picking the Right Work for a Literary Translation

One part of the art of the literary translator that is rarely talked about is the hunt for the right work to translate. For most translators, extensive research and digging goes into selecting poetry, fiction, nonfiction, or drama to translate. It’s not unusual for a translator to read forty poems by a particular writer just to find one that s/he wants to translate. A translator might also read multiple biographies of an author to discover which novel or play by that writer to translate.

But where do you begin? Finding the right work to translate is like being a detective on a case with few leads. You have to look at everything about a writer to see if anything is slightly out of place, searching for something that stands out. Sometimes you have to interview people who know the literature of a particular language, probing for ideas that might work for you.

I was researching the poet French surrealist André Breton when I came across this description almost six hundred pages into Mark Polizzotti’s definitive biography of the poet:

“Far more consequential was Breton’s meeting in 1954 with the twenty-six-year-old poet Joyce Mansour.…it was other aspects of her personality—the dark, frenzied eroticism that emerged in her poetry; her unconventional public behavior—that had most drawn Breton. Soon after she joined the Surrealist group, a legend sprang up that Joyce lived exclusively on oysters, hot water, and cigars…”

Mark Polizzotti, Revolution of the Mind: The Life of André Breton, pp. 589­–590.

André Breton and Joyce Mansour, 1959

That reference intrigued me. A woman poet in a literary movement known mostly for male writers, and she came along decades after the surrealists had made their initial splash in the 1920s.

I starting looking for Joyce Mansour’s Oeuvres complètes, her complete works. It wasn’t an easy book to track down in the United States—the least expensive copy is currently selling for $463 used on amazon.com. Interlibrary loan is often a good way to obtain a hard-to-find book of this sort.

When I did find the book, I realized that there were many gems among Joyce Mansour’s poems. I looked quickly through the 600 pages in her complete works—not reading every page, just skimming at first, searching for a style and themes in her work that spoke to me.

Joyce Mansour (1928–1986)

Once I settled on several of her poems that I liked, I started to do rough drafts, looking for poems that would work in English. Sometimes that’s not the same as a writer’s best efforts. There are factors that make a piece of literature work in another language, and factors that have the opposite result. Writing that brilliantly uses local dialect, for example, may not be as effective in translation, since there is often no equivalent in the target language for that particular style of speech.

I was also conscious that some of Mansour’s work had already been translated into English, and I was prospecting for poems that had either not been translated, or where the translation stopped short of conveying the “dark, frenzied eroticism” that Polizzotti described.

In fact, what I found in Mansour’s poetry was somewhat different—eroticism, yes, but permeated with compassion, wisdom, and honesty about intimacy. It was those qualities in Mansour’s writing that I wanted to try to recreate in English. I was seeking poems by Mansour that touched me personally, and there certainly were several where I hoped that I could add something by translating them in my own way.

That is also part of the translator’s quest. What is it that you as a translator have to contribute that is unique to you? You want a project where the work of another writer matches up with your own sensibility in a way that gives you insight into how that author should sound in your own language. Ultimately, you are looking to become a vehicle to convey that writer’s personal style and subject matter to readers of your own language.

Here’s a poem by Joyce Mansour that I translated, to give you a flavor of her writing:

            Joyce Mansour

“Do you still know the sweet scent of plantain trees…”

Do you still know the sweet scent of plantain trees

Familiar things can seem so strange when someone leaves

Food can seem so sad

A bed so insipid

And cats

Do you remember the cats that screeched their claws

That yowled on the roof when your tongue ransacked me

And that arched their backs when you dug your nails into me

They vibrated when I yielded

I don’t know how to love anymore

Those painful bubbles of delirium have dried on my lips

I’ve thrown away my mask of leaves

A rose bush agonizes under the bed

I can’t wiggle my hips anymore in the midst of all this rubble

And the cats have fled the roof

translation © 2019 by Zack Rogow 

Another post on how to choose the right work for a translation project, focused on George Sand.

Zack’s most recent book of poems, Irreverent Litanies

Zack’s most recent translation, Bérénice 1934–44: An Actress in Occupied Paris by Isabelle Stibbe

Other recent posts about writing topics: 

How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka, The Villanelle
Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer
Writers and Collaboration
Types of Closure in Poetry

How Not to Become a Literary Dropout, Part 10

 

To sustain your work as a writer, you not only have to write the books that you can successfully complete, you also have to write the books you were meant to write.

When I started writing, I wanted to be exactly like the artists I admired. They included the Beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and oddly enough, the French filmmaker, Jean-Luc Godard, who was not a writer, but whose attitude and politics I admired. So I imitated them at first. When I got to college, the poets my literature professors promoted as role models were Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot. There are still many things I admire about those two, as much as I find their politics extremely distasteful. I especially admire their multilingual and international approach to literature, and the originality of their diction. When I’m trying to get my eight-year-old son into his shoes and jacket and out the door, I still find myself saying out loud these lines from Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock":

Let us go then, you and I

When the evening is spread out against the sky

As soon as I started to meet people my age who also hoped to be writers, I wanted to write like my junior-year-in-college roommate and fellow poet, who admired André Breton and the French surrealists. Surrealism continues to be a lighthouse for me, even though my acid-head roommate ended up becoming a minister, but that’s another story.

In general, the trick is not to write like the authors you admire, but to find the way that you, personally, were meant to write.

There’s a famous story about the 18^th century Hasidic leader, Rabbi Zusya. Hasidism is the mystical branch of Judaism. The story goes like this:

Once, the great religious leader Rabbi Zusya went to speak to his followers. His eyes were red with tears, and his face was pale with fear.

“Zusya, you look terrified. What's the matter?” asked one of his followers.

“The other day, I had a vision,” Zusya responded. “I learned the question that the angels will one day ask me about my life.”

His followers were puzzled. “Zusya, you’re pious, scholarly, and humble. You’ve helped so many of us. What question could you be afraid of?”

Zusya turned his gaze to heaven. “I’ve learned that the angels won’t ask me, ‘Why weren’t you more like Moses, leading your people out of slavery?’ The angels won’t ask me, ‘Why weren’t you more like Joshua, leading your people into the promised land?’ The angels will say to me, ‘Zusya, there was only one thing that no power in heaven or on earth could have prevented you from becoming.’ They’ll say, ‘Zusya, why weren’t you more like Zusya?’” 

Other recent posts about writing topics:How Not to Become a Literary Dropout, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10

How to Get Published

Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop

Putting Together a Book Manuscript

Working with a Writing Mentor

How to Deliver Your Message

Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?

Why Write Poetry? 

Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka

Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer

Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone, Part 5: Taking Leaps

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This is Part 5 of a series of blogs on the ancient concept of the muse, and whether it has any uses for writers today.
For a writer, it’s useful to listen to those voices in your head—call them the muses if you want. Those voices sometimes tell us to do crazy things: “Joan, put on men’s armor and chase the English out of France for the glory of God.” Did Joan of Arc say, “Dude, that is so random! I’m just a teenager in a small city in France. You must be totally tripping.” No. She chased the English out of France. I think listening to those voices can be a much more exciting and daring way to work as a writer than to write from your everyday consciousness.

So when do you not listen to the voices, to the muse? When the voices tell you to do things that will not strengthen you or your writing. How do you know which ideas will weaken you and your writing, and which will not? There you do have to make the call yourself, using good judgment.

I’ve been talking about the power of the muse, but I've hardly even mentioned examples from poetry, the art that has always been the first to call on the muse.

There are the times that a poem just arrives as a gift from out of the blue, almost in a finished form. As I've mentioned, Rainer Maria Rilke is one classic example of this, writing the final sections of The Duino Elegies and his Sonnets to Orpheus in the space of a few weeks in Duino Castle in the winter of 1922. That sort of gift poem is the product of inspiration, one way the muse comes into our writing.

 But there's another way we as writers can really learn from the idea of the muse: in trusting those leaps of language, emotion, and subject that happen when you stretch logic and metaphor and feeling to its breaking point. In those moments you trust that the muse will allow you to stay in the realm of communication even though you may feel you’ve jumped off a diving board in the pitch dark with no sense of how far down the water is. I’m talking about poetic lines like these from Federico García Lorca’s “Gacela of Unforeseen Love,”

A thousand Persian ponies fell asleep

in the moonlit plaza of your forehead

while through four nights I embraced

your waist, enemy of the snow.

[translated by W.S. Merwin]

“A thousand Persian ponies fell asleep/in the moonlit plaza of your forehead”. The guy is nuts, right? And yet, when you fall in love with someone, you glimpse a peace as profound, crazy, and beautiful as a thousand Persian ponies dreaming in a midnight plaza, and Lorca has described that as literally as William Carlos Williams’s cold plums missing from the icebox in his poem “This Is Just to Say.”

And where is the muse in this metaphor of the poet jumping off the high diving board in total darkness? Is the muse splashing around in the pool, waiting to swim with you when you reach the water? Too distant. And anyway, then you might land on her when you hit the pool. Is the muse holding your hand as you dive? No, sorry, no one is holding your hand. As André Breton, the French Surrealist poet said, “Writing is the loneliest road that leads everywhere.” No, in the metaphor of the diving board, the muse is the one who pushes you off before you’re ready to jump, not knowing if what you’re going to say will make sense to a single other human being.

Other recent posts about writing topics:How Not to Become a Literary Dropout, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10

How to Get Published

Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop

How Not to Become a Literary Dropout

Putting Together a Book Manuscript

Working with a Writing Mentor

How to Deliver Your Message

Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?

Why Write Poetry? 

Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka

Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer