Tag Archives: Translation

Miron Białoszewski: “An explosion in American poetry!”

Posted on December 18, 2009 | Leave a comment

More news from The Quarterly Conversation (which I’m considering making my homepage): editors Scott Esposito and Annie Janusch surveyed over 40 translators, writers, and editors as to what books and or authors they feel most urgently need to be translated into English. The results are wondrous to behold and I hope will have some very direct effects. For his choice, poet, translator, and Words without Borders poetry editor Ilya Kaminsky selected Miron Białoszewski (1922–1983)—the second (after Leśmian) most difficult-to-translate Polish poet, whom Benjamin Paloff dubbed the “holy grail of Polish translators” at Poets House last month, and who indeed needs urgently to be represented in English, and not just by his poetry. Well, there is interest; but who knows from what quarters it will happen and when. At any rate, the whole “Translate This Book!” survey can be downloaded as a pdf and is both worthwhile and necessary reading. In the meantime, here’s some of what Kaminsky has to say:

Poems of Miron Białoszewski is the book I hope to one day hold in my hands. A great post-war Polish poet, Białoszewski wrote work radically different from that of his contemporaries—Miłosz, Świr, Kamieńska, Herbert, and Szymborska—but his poetry was just as powerful and important to the development of the contemporary European lyric … When I mentioned [him] to Tomaž Šalamun in a recent conversation, Tomaž’s face lit up: “Białoszewski, when he is translated and available in English, will cause an explosion in American poetry!” One hopes so.

The ignition for that explosion may take place very soon, in fact. The next issue of the excellent poetry magazine Aufgabe will feature a special section on innovative Polish poetry, guest edited by Mark Tardi and due out this spring. From what I’ve heard, it will include a sizeable number of Białoszewski’s poems, both newly translated and reprinted from the 1974 volume translated by Bogdan Czaykowski and Andrzej Busza.

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Paloff reviews Anders in The Nation / Post on current state of translated literature

Posted on July 31, 2009 | Leave a comment

The Nation has just published a great review by Benjamin Paloff of Jarosław Anders’ Between Fire and Sleep: Essays on Modern Polish Poetry and Prose, which Yale University Press brought out recently.

anders

The title, “Cures for the Common Cold War: Postwar Polish Poetry,” is a little befuddling, since much of the work discussed by Paloff—and Anders—is prose. The editorial oversight notwithstanding, the review is informative and, like Anders’ essays, brings an indispensable perspective to bear on the reception of Polish literature in English:

…while [Polish] literature is hardly a historical relic, our approach to it often risks being just that. In this regard, Anders’s critical approach is an invaluable tonic. His fleet-footed leaps between biographical detail and scholarly commentary are enormously edifying and entertaining in their own right. At the same time, Anders generally refuses to succumb to the romanticizing that has reduced so much journalism about these authors to a pocket lexicon of moral clichés.

* * *
The fate of Polish literature in this country certainly cannot be isolated from that of translated literature in the publishing economy. Chad Post, the publisher of Open Letter Books and blogger of Three Percent, offers an indispensable assessment of the situation in the new Publishing Perspectives, “Translation Nation: A State of the Union.” He addresses a current conundrum—

So why, if Bolano’s 2666 and Per Petterson’s Out Stealing Horses can hit the best-seller list, and if everyone’s arguing that literature in translation is important for enriching our culture, are there fewer translations coming out this year than last?

and identifies causes not only in the economy, of course, but, structurally, in the

disconnect between publishing thoughtful, long-selling literary translations and a system that thrives on the HUGE HIT and is willing to spend millions to make that hit happen IMMEDIATELY.

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New Translations from Polish Ahead…

Posted on July 1, 2009 | Leave a comment

Well, Chad Post beat me to the punch with the news about Danuta Borchardt’s new translation of Gombrowicz’s Pornografia, which is forthcoming with Grove in November. It will be the first translation of the book directly from the Polish (Alistair Hamilton’s translation from Georges Lisowski’s French translation appeared with Calder and Boyars in 1966 and with Grove in 1967). Here are some other new translations from Polish to look forward to (I’ll post a downloadable list here soon as well):

Fado
by Andrzej Stasiuk
translated by Bill Johnston
Dalkey Archive Press, forthcoming September 2009

Towers of Stone: The Battle of Wills in Chechnya
by Wojciech Jagielski
translated by Soren Gauger
Seven Stories Press, forthcoming October 2009

Primeval and Other Times
by Olga Tokarczuk
translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones
Twisted Spoon Press, forthcoming November 2009

The New Century: Poems
by Ewa Lipska
translated by Robin Davidson and Ewa Elzbieta Nowakowska
Northwestern University Press, forthcoming November 2009

The Last Supper
by Paweł Huelle
translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones
Serpent’s Tail, forthcoming December 2009 (appeared in UK in November 2008)

Archipelago Books‘ Fall 2009 catalogue includes announcements of the following new translations:

Poems
by Cyprian Kamil Norwid
translated by Danuta Borchardt

A Treatise on Shelling Beans
by Wiesław Myśliwski
translated by Bill Johnston

Stone upon Stone
by Wiesław Myśliwski
translated by Bill Johnston

There are also rumours that in addition to Lipska, Northwestern UP will be publishing a new book of poems by Julia Hartwig, translated by John and Bogdana Carpenter; this will be Hartwig’s second book in English (In Praise of the Unfinished came out with Knopf last year). Another book that we’ll hopefully see very soon is Zbigniew Herbert’s collected essays, translated by Alissa Valles and forthcoming next year with Ecco.

Incidentally, there’s an early issue of The Complete Review (Twice Removed: Case Studies [Vol. IV, issue 4; November 2003]) that discusses those first second-hand translations of Gombrowicz’s novels (it’s interesting to see, too, that John Ashbery reviewed both Pornografia and Ferdydurke for the New York Times).

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Biserka Rajčić awarded 2009 Trans-Atlantyk Prize

Posted on June 19, 2009 | Leave a comment

The highlight of the 2nd International Congress of Translators of Polish Literature, of course, was the award ceremony for this year’s Trans-Atlantyk Prize, which went to the Serbian translator Biserka Rajčić. It was a lovely event, which was introduced by the Book Institute Director Grzegorz Gauden and featured a string quartet that played a stunning piece of music, the name of which I forgot to learn… Last year’s winner, Xenia Staroshyelska, did the honors. Here’s an excerpt of the description on the Book Institute website:

Over her forty-five years of translation work, Biserka Rajčić has translated and published 77 books in all spheres of the humanities (poetry, prose, essays, philosophy, theatre studies, political sciences, historiography etc.). She has translated around 330 of the most outstanding Polish artists, philosophers, and historians of all generations, including: Witkiewicz, Gombrowicz, Miłosz, Schulz, Szymborska, Herbert, Różewicz, Hartwig, Międzyrzecki, Białoszewski, Lem, Filipowicz, Herling-Grudziński, Konwicki, Mrożek, Kapuściński, Brandys, Nowakowski, Stachura, Fink, Zagajewski, Lipska, Kornhauser, Barańczak, Tokarczuk, Gretkowska, Goerke, Świetlicki, Kielar, Podsiadło, Sonnenberg, Różycki, Kołakowski, Kott, Kantor, Grotowski, Zanussi, Topolski, Łowmiański, and Michnik. Since 1962 she has published over 470 texts in magazines of every sort, devoted to authors she has translated and Polish literary-cultural life. Her bibliography includes over 1584 items. She has also published 2 books about Poland: ‘Poljska civilizacija’ and ‘Moj Krakov.’

She has received the highest Polish and Serb distinctions for her translation and promotion work, including the Serb Translators’ Union Award for lifetime achievement, the Jovan Maksimović Award for translation from the Russian, the Belgrade Radio 2 Award for her many-year (1958-2008) co-operation in the field of literature and art, the ZAIKS Award, the Polish Republic Order of Service, delivered by the President of the Polish Republic, the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ Diploma for outstanding service to the promotion of Poland in the world, the Zbigniew Dominiak Award for the translation of poetry, and the Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz Award for achievement in promoting Polish theatre culture in the world.

The Trans-Atlantyk Prize is the Book Institute’s annual award for the most outstanding promoter of Polish literature abroad. Its previous winners are:  Henryk Bereska (2005), Anders Bodegard (2006), Albrecht Lempp (2007) and Xenia Staroshyelska (2008).

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Modjeska & Sontag

Posted on March 25, 2009 | Leave a comment

My theater-programming colleague here at the PCI, Agata Grenda, has been working on a program about the fascinating nineteenth-century Polish celebrity Helena Modjeska (née Benda, aka Modrzejewska). Modjeska was a Shakespearean actress who rose from humble beginnings to become a star of the Warsaw stage, immigrated with her nobleman husband to California, where they founded a utopian community, then reinvented herself as an American actress to become a star in this country, too. The Polish Cultural Institute is co-sponsoring two events to commemorate Modjeska, who died a hundred years ago this year: a panel discussion on April 8th at the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, CUNY Graduate Center, with Duke University Professor Beth Holmgren and Polish Shakespeare scholar Andrzej Żurawski; and the official unveiling of a memorial plaque at St. Stanislaus Church in Manhattan’s East Village (where Modjeska’s final funeral ceremony in America took place before her remains were shipped to Poland for burial).

In my increasing curiosity about her, I turned of course to the interwebs and immediately stumbled on Susan Sontag’s 2001 novel IN AMERICA, a fictionalized account of Modjeska’s life (the publication and story of which were overshadowed first by allegations of plagiarism and then by mediated public outcry over Sontag’s critical statements following the destruction of the World Trade Center in mid-September 2001). I remember when the book came out, but forgot all about it until today.

The opening chapter, which I’ve just read now on Googlebooks, is interesting from a technical viewpoint since it fictionalizes the process of fictionalization itself. The “uninvited, unseen” narrator begins the narration while people-watching at a party, setting her sights on the charismatic figure of Modjeska, whom she names.

It seemed to me I’d caught her name, it was either Helena or Maryna—and supposing it would help me to decipher the story if I could identify the couple or the trio, what better start than to give them names, I decided to think of her as Maryna.

This coyly mistaken nomenclature levers the surface of the text away from the biographical lathing behind it. It  allows Sontag to assert the fictive and the real qualities of the narrative simultaneously, to have her realism and eat it too. In any case, Sontag taps into her own—and everyone else’s it would seem—fascination for this historical person, Helena Modjeska, and uses it to propel the story:

I had no doubt that all the men and several of the women must be at least a little in love with Maryna. But it was more, or less, than love. They were enthralled by her. I wondered if I could be enthralled by her, were I one of them, not merely someone watching, trying to figure them out.

I’ve unfortunately only read Sontag’s essays, so I can’t speak for this book as a whole, but I understand, I think, at least a little of Sontag’s thrall; and this, and the fact that what I’ve read so far is stylistically quite remarkable, makes me want also to read this novel (not on Googlebooks tho’). The more one looks at Modjeska’s life, the more fascinating it becomes, even a century later; and Sontag seems to be exploring that capacity to enthrall—and the capacity to be in thrall—here, too.

hmodjeska_lg ssontag

Incidentally, Susan Sontag has done a great service to the cause of literature by establishing the Susan Sontag Prize for Translation, which is awarded annually (the first award was given in 2008) to “a literary translator under the age of 30 for a translation project of his or her own design.” More information about the award can be found at the Susan Sontag Foundation website.

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2nd World Congress of Translators of Polish Literature to take place in June

Posted on March 18, 2009 | Leave a comment

Here’s some great news from the Book Institute (from their website):

Four years have passed since the First World Congress of Translators of Polish Literature. With that extraordinarily successful gathering in mind, the Book Institute has decided to organize a Second Congress this year, which will take place June 4-6 in Krakow. The event is sponsored by Bogdan Zdrojewski, the Minister of Culture and National Heritage.

One hundred seventy four individuals from fifty countries took part in the First World Congress of Translators of Polish Literature, which happened in Krakow in May 2005. Participants ranged from translators with decades of experience in the field and considerable accomplishments—Henryk Bereska, Anders Bodegård, Bill Johnston, Zofia Bobowicz, Esther Kinsky, and Karol Lesman—to others who are just getting their feet wet.

This year’s Congress will provide its participants with opportunities to get to know the most recent Polish literature, to meet with authors, literary critics, and publishers, and to talk with translators from other countries. As with the previous Congress, a program of panel discussions and workshops devoted to the work of Polish authors and newly published books is expected.

The Congress will also feature the award ceremony for the fifth Transatlantyk Prize, which is awarded annually to an outstanding promoter of Polish literature abroad. Previous recipients of the Transatlantyk Prize are: Henryk Bereska (2005), Anders Bodegård (2006), Albrecht Lempp (2007), and Ksenia Starosielska (2008).

[Update] By the way, nominations for the Transatlantyk Prize are still being taken until March 31. More information here.

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Romania!

Posted on March 11, 2009 | Leave a comment

The Director of the Observer Translation Project, Jean Harris, just sent an email with a footnote to the statistics about translations into Polish that I posted last week:

The Observer Translation Project translates monthly into Polish along with Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish + Magyar, Bulgarian and Russian. We’ve been known to show up in Serbian…but the interesting thing is that from a Romanian point of view, Polish is a major target language. We regularly post news of translations into Polish, and we are very proud of our team of native speaker Polish translators.

Lo! Just look at this website: http://translations.observatorcultural.ro. It’s enough to make a literary programmer for some other former Eastern Bloc cultural institution green with envy… Here’s their mission statement:

The Observer Translation Project is an international magazine of Romanian writing in translation. Launched in September 2008, OTP showcases previously untranslated fiction. We highlight a “pilot” author each month. This is the place to learn about Romanian writers, find updates on Romanian writing abroad, read CV’s, take a look at covers published in countries around the globe, check out the bibliographies, dip into author photos, search our steadily growing archive, and discover essays that put Romanian writing in context. Look for single author fiction issues every month, with free-wheeling updates in between.

Oddly enough, a half hour after this email arrived, I was on the phone with Ms. Robinson at Harcourt Houghton Mifflin, who mentioned that they’re publishing a book by the Romanian writer Filip Florian this summer and even bought the world rights to it. It’s called LITTLE FINGERS and appears to be a mystery around the discovery of a mass grave. The only thing I’ve read from Romania recently is Mircea Cărtărescu’s amazing Nostalgia, which New Directions published a few years ago. But judging from this forthcoming book by Florian, the Dan Sociu poems in the latest issue of Calque, Dalkey Archive’s three books by Dumitru Tsepeneag, the fanciful excerpt by Ştefan Agopian in the OTP’s March issue (I’m sure the other authors they feature are great, too, I just haven’t read them yet), and last but not least the remarkable films coming out of that country in recent years, it seems Romania is experiencing some kind of cultural renaissance.

Incidentally, Wydawnictwo Czarne has recently published two other books by Cărtărescu: Travesty and Why We Love Women (the first evidently being a Romanian Middlesex widely perceived as Cărtărescu’s ‘gay novel’; the second evidently setting the record straight) along with a book cowritten by Filip Florian and his brother Matei; and they’ll be publishing both Florian’s LITTLE FINGERS and a novel by the author Dan Lungu later this year. The excellent magazine Literatura na świecie published a special issue on Romania last summer, which looks quite interesting; the table of contents can be viewed on their website.

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Statistics

Posted on March 6, 2009 | Leave a comment

There’s an account on the Open Letter Books blog Three Percent of a recent survey of translation statistics, Ruediger Wischenbart’s (draft) Diversity Report. Open Letter publisher Chad Post discusses some of the salient features of the report:

First of all, there’s no real surprise in terms of which languages are most often translated—looking at the global market, books originally written in English represent approx. 60% of all translations around the world. This number has increased dramatically over the past quarter century, rising from just over 50% of all translations in 1979 to almost 64% in 1999. When you look at the graph in the report, it’s almost shocking to see the English line rise and rise while all the other languages remain muddled at the bottom of the chart, fluctuating slightly, but not nearly as dramatically as English . . .

It’s also not that surprising, but the second and third most translated languages are French and German, respectively. Put together, these three top languages represent around 80% of all the translations published globally. The next five most translated languages are (in descending order): Italian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Dutch. And taken as a whole, the top 8 languages account for 90% of all translations. (It’s like a wealth pyramid!)

There’s a special section of the report on Central European languages, which is really interesting as well, and it’s from that research that Ruediger uncovered a very interesting correlation: aside from a select handful major political occurrences (e.g., fall of the Berlin Wall) the only identifiable event that directly impacts the translation statistics is when a country is the Guest of Honor at the Frankfurt Book Fair. As you can see in his report, translation numbers for both Hungarian and Polish jumped when the two countries were chosen to be Guests of Honor (in 1999 and 2000, respectively) and translation levels from those languages are still higher than what they were pre-Frankfurt Book Fair.

Wischenbart’s report is in part based on the statistics available at UNESCO’s Index Translationum, which has a variety of databases and search forms available. Evidently UNESCO takes stock of all titles published in translation every year, categorizing them according to original language, target language, country of publication, author, and publisher. It is not clear to me from the website exactly how complete this bibliography is, what kind of books it includes (I assume it is the total number of translated books regardless of field), or what their methodology is for collecting the information. It also doesn’t take translations into periodicals into consideration. Also, there seem to be some errors in data entry, as when the numbers for total annual translations from Czech into English jumps from 19 in 2001 to 109 in 2002 and increases again to 308 by 2004 (not that it’s impossible or that I don’t wish the Czechs greater popularity in English, but it seems unlikely given the averages for the previous two decades and the lack of any explanatory event, such as guest-country status at the Frankfurt Book Fair).

Anyway, here are some stats for Polish literature that I compiled based on the Index Translationum data. I cannot vouch for their incontestability, but they do give an idea, I think, of the position of Polish literature in a global book market.

POLISH IS THE 14th MOST TRANSLATED LANGUAGE!
Poland, with 12,279 translated books, is #14 on the Index’s list of the top 50 translated languages, after the following (total number of translated books in parentheses):

1. English (1,000,758)
2. French (186,036)
3. German (169,387)
4. Russian (93,779)
5. Italian (55,397)
6. Spanish (43,365)
7. Swedish (30,738)
8. Latin (16,602)
9. Danish (16,222)
10. Dutch (16,050)
11. Czech (14,642)
12. Ancient Greek (14,315)
13. Japanese (13,437)

It precedes:
15. Hungarian (10,487), 16. Arabic (9,952), 19. Hebrew (8,161), 21. Chinese (7,411), 32. Ukrainian (2,706), and 44. Hindi (1,387), among others.

THE 12 MOST POPULAR TARGET LANGUAGES FOR TRANSLATIONS FROM POLISH (again, total number of translated books in parentheses):

1. German (2777)
2. English (1960)
3. Russian (1325)
4. French (1060)
5. Czech (897)
6. Hungarian (515)
7. Spanish (497)
8. Slovak (405)
9. Italian (297)
10. Bulgarian (291)
11. Lithuanian (286)
12. Dutch (200)

THE 10 LEAST POPULAR TARGET LANGUAGES FOR TRANSLATIONS FROM POLISH (languages with large populations or relatively large readerships):

1. Indonesian (2)
2. Malayalam (2)
3. Hindi (3)
4. Chinese (4)
5. Icelandic (8)
6. Persian (14)
7. Arabic (22)
8. Korean (24)
9. Turkish (31)
10. Greek (31)

THE TOP 10 LANGUAGES TRANSLATED INTO POLISH:

1. English (37,423)
2. German (8472)
3. French (5531)
4. Russian (3190)
5. Italian (2546)
6. Spanish (1155)
7. Swedish (752)
8. Czech (689)
9. Ancient Greek (525)
10. Latin (517)

THE TOP 10 LANGUAGES TRANSLATED INTO ENGLISH:

1. German (23,332)
2. French (22,353)
3. Russian (11,531)
4. Spanish (6899)
5. Italian (4307)
6. Danish (3427)
7. Hungarian (3137)
8. Japanese (2625)
9. Czech (2347)
10. Dutch (2234)

COMPARISON OF ANNUAL NUMBER OF TRANSLATIONS INTO ENGLISH FROM 7 EUROPEAN LANGUAGES 1978-2005
Here are two charts comparing annual numbers of translations into English from 1978 to 2005 from the following original languages: Polish, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Czech, Hungarian. The reason I’ve chosen these 7 is that after French, English, and German, Polish, Italian, and Spanish are the three most widely spoken languages in the European Union. And clearly Polish, Czech, and Hungarian share a common region and circumstances for transmission into English.

First the numbers:

polstats1

And now the data compared:

polstats2

That gap there is pretty extreme. And Polish could be doing better (maybe one day even overtaking Italian?!), though it’s hard to know how to make that happen, especially in the current financial environment. As I mentioned above, the sudden surge this past decade for Czech seems a little fishy. I suspect the numbers are actually in the double digits, with an average of around 25 books per year from 2001-2005, instead of what was entered into UNESCO’s database; but who knows. It is, at any rate, interesting that the Central European languages have generally fared worse since 1989, as Chad Post pointed out. And the spike in 2001 for translations from Polish confirms Wischenbart’s claim that events like the Frankfurt Book Fair have a direct influence on numbers of translations (one would, by that logic, expect a similar spike for the Hungarians in 2000, but it looks like it happened a year earlier, 1999, the year they were the guest country in Frankfurt).

Last but not least:

THE TOP 10 AUTHORS TRANSLATED FROM POLISH INTO ALL LANGUAGES, EVER:

1. Stanisław LEM (551)
2. Henryk SIENKIEWICZ (389)
3. Czesław MIŁOSZ (186)
4. Janusz KORCZAK (178)
5. Witold GOMBROWICZ (160)
6. Sławomir MROŻEK (149)
7. Ryszard KAPUŚCIŃSKI (146)
8. Karol WOJTYŁA (Pope John Paul II) (133)
9. Joanna CHMIELEWSKA (123)
10. Wisława SZYMBORSKA (92)

Of them, only the popular writer Chmielewska has never been translated into English. Which is interesting, but would require doing some research to figure out why.

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