Nos comparte Rowena Galavitz el siguiente artículo sobre un tema inagotable: la visibilidad de los traductores. Aunque se refiere específicamente a la situación en Estados Unidos, mucho de lo descrito es general para el gremio.
Verán que el articulo está lleno de enlaces a otras referencias, toda una guía por el asunto de la visibilidad/invisibilidad. Y si entran al enlace de origen, podrán leer además los comentarios de otras personas. Igualmente, si tienen ustedes sus propios comentarios al respecto, los pueden ir colocando aquí en el blog.
Si alguien de entre ustedes quiere y puede traducir esta nota a español, será muy bienvenido y agradecido su esfuerzo.
Name the Translator
por Lucas Klein
Nota publicada en Words without Borders
19 de febrero de 2014
http://wordswithoutborders.org/dispatches/article/name-the-translator
Recently two of my Facebook friends posted links to reviews of their
work that neither named nor noticed them. This would be inconceivable if
my friends were authors, film or stage actors, or artists, but my
friends are translators, so not being mentioned is par for the
proverbial course. Add this latest offense to the
Los Angeles Review of Books write-up of Howard Goldblatt’s translation of
Sandalwood Death by 2012 Nobel Prizewinner Mo Yan (University of Oklahoma Press), which prompted the discussion on the
Modern Chinese Literature & Culture listserv that led to my
Paper Republic blog post “
Translation & Translation Studies as a Social Movement,” and to
The New Yorker’s review of Anne Milano Appel’s translation of
The Art of Joy, by Goliarda Sapienza (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), which I mentioned in my
Q & A with the journal Asymptote.
It’s no secret that translations into English represent an abysmally
low number of our publications—the best statistics have it at a measly
three percent. In “
Viva Translation!” (as translated by Anne McLean from “
¡Vivan las traducciones!”)
Luis Magrinyà wonders if the disparity between translation publication
in English and in Spain, where translations account for roughly a
quarter of new books, may turn out to benefit the translator when it
comes to reviews. “In a ‘world’ in which practically nothing is
translated,” Magrinyà says, “… it’s not unusual that, like a
poltergeist, it should be received, more than with curiosity, almost
with skepticism, and should be submitted to the most rigorous scrutiny.”
It’s an oddly beautiful notion, but as
Margaret Carson points out
in her reply, “the state of translation reviews in the US … is probably
pretty much the same as in Spain.” The omission of my friends’ names in
reviews of their work attests to this similarity.
For reviews not to discuss or even mention the translator is so
standard, in fact, that my friends felt they had to backpedal their
outrage. Don Mee Choi, translator of Kim Hyesoon’s All the Garbage of the World, Unite! (Action
Books), can’t bring up how she was overlooked without apologizing: “I
despise self-centeredness, so I hope I’m not being [self-centered] right
now…” Likewise, Elizabeth Harris, translator of This is the Garden by
Giulio Mozzi (Open Letter Books), writes, “It’s such a strange feeling:
I’ve read two reviews now that don’t mention me at all and yet quote
the book. Very, very strange. I am glad they like what they’re reading,
though. I can take some pleasure in that.”
This is not your average humblebrag. This is the typical
self-effacement of the translator: after devoting years of their lives
to interpreting, rewriting, and publishing someone else’s work, when
their contribution to that effort gets overlooked, they can’t even be
properly indignant! Nor do I think it’s incidental that these
translators are women (so are the reviewers, in fact); both male and
female translators play a role that society sees as feminized, and
therefore finds easier to diminish. (Deborah Schwartz’s review of All the Garbage appears in Critical Flame,
which pledges to “dedicate one year of its review coverage to women
writers and writers of color,” yet neglects to mention the
woman of color who translated the collection.)
Since it isn’t my work here that’s been overlooked, and since I
haven’t been socialized to believe that I should demur when my
contributions go unnoticed, I’ll state it outright: I think these
reviewers should be ashamed, and they and their venues should write to
the translators in question on official letterhead to offer a formal
apology and promise never to leave out appropriate discussion of the
translator’s work ever again.
In conversation and in print, I’ve come across defenses of leaving
the translator out of reviews. Short word limits, fear of distracting
the reader, the reviewer’s inability to “judge” the translation because
she or he doesn’t know the language of the original… all of these raise
questions of their own: Why, especially in the age of the internet, do
book reviews deserve such little space? Why is talking about translation
a “distraction”? Why do we trust translators so little that their work
always has to be “judged” as if it were a foreign language exam? In
short, none of these defenses is defensible. There is no excuse for not
taking the translator’s work into account when reviewing a work of
literature in translation. None.
I’ve published dozens of reviews of literature in translation. Often I
know the source language in question (modern and classical Chinese,
some French), sometimes not. I would find it unconscionable not to
discuss the translation and the specific performance of the translator.
Can you evaluate an actor even when you haven’t read the script she’s
acting from? Can you evaluate an artist even when you haven’t seen the
model he’s painting, or a musician when you haven’t read the score? Can
you evaluate a dance you didn’t choreograph? Then you can discuss the
translation of a book of fiction or poetry for how it contributes to the
overall effect of the work under review. (Lucina Schell provides
specific tips on
how to review a translation from a language you don’t know.)
Anna Clark points out that the “three percent” figure cited above for translations published in English is supposed to include
all translations,
not just literary translations—which is to say that books of poetry and
prose in translation only account for a fraction of that figure, the
rest accounted for by cookbooks, tour guides, textbooks,
manga,
and so on. Literature by women accounts for an even smaller fraction.
The question, then, is simple: do we want more and better translations,
or not? Given that so little of the world’s best writing makes its way
into English, there is lots of room for improvement. And given that the
translation of literature is related to our culture’s perception and
reception of immigrants and people from other parts of the world as well
as heritages beyond those first expressed in English, the stakes of
increasing and improving translations should be clear.
When Magrinyà points out that “in Spain, translators often complain,
with good reason, that their work is not sufficiently valued” or
discussed in reviews, he indicates that there’s no necessary correlation
between number of translations published and public awareness of
translation as important to cultural life. I made a similar point on Paper Republic:
“China, for instance, publishes much, much more translated writing than
the US does, without any significantly more intelligent discussion of
translation defining reviews or conversations of international works of
literature there.” Nevertheless, I cannot see how we in the
English-speaking world can increase and improve translations—both in
terms of demand and supply—without promoting a strong, broad-based
conversation about translation and its significance. More translations
are published in Spanish and Chinese because these cultures cannot
afford the myopia that comes with global dominance (they have other
myopias to deal with, I’m sure). I expect Spanish, Chinese, and other
languages need these conversations to draw attention to the
cross-cultural work already being done. In English, we need a public
conversation to correct the myopia and encourage both readers and
publishers to engage more with literature in translation.
So what are we doing to encourage translators to translate and publishers to publish those translations? Eliot Weinberger
says of translation:
“An anonymous occupation, yet people have died for it.” I do not
believe we need more martyrs, such as William Tyndale, convicted of
heresy and executed by strangulation and burnt at the stake in 1536 for
translating the Bible into English (the King James version, published
within a century of his death, plagiarized his translation), or Hitoshi
Igarashi, stabbed to death in 1991 for his Japanese translation of
Salman Rushdie’s novel
The Satanic Verses. I do not believe we need the anonymity.
So if you are a writer and know a language other than modern English,
translate. If you have read a book in translation and have an opinion
about it, regardless of whether you know the language it was first
written in, write a review that names the translator and discusses the
translation. We can demand more. We can demand better. We can do more.
We can do better.
Acerca del autor:
Lucas Klein, former radio DJ and union organizer, is a writer, translator, and editor whose work has appeared in Jacket, Rain Taxi, CLEAR, and PMLA,
and from Fordham University Press, Black Widow, and New Directions.
Assistant Professor at the University of Hong Kong, his translation Notes on the Mosquito: Selected Poems of Xi Chuan 西川
won the 2013 Lucien Stryk Prize and was shortlisted for the Best
Translated Book Award in poetry (see http://xichuanpoetry.com). He is
translating Tang dynasty poet Li Shangyin 李商隱 and seminal contemporary
poet Mang Ke 芒克.
