High Fidelities: On Some Recent Translator’s Notes
Kate Briggs | This Little Art | Fitzcarraldo Editions | September 2017 | 400 pages
Ann Jäderlund, trans. Johannes Göransson | Lonespeech | Nightboat | May 2024 | 96 Pages
Jacqueline Feldman | On Your Feet: A Novel In Translation | dispersed holdings | March 2024 | 320 Pages
In translation, the stakes are high and the compensation indubitably low. That the task, rewarding as it is under various scalpels, goes so unnoticed by lay-readers, explains my experience that translators are a pretty tight-knit group, braided with squabbles ranging from petty to the ideological. I won’t mention the competition involved in the trade. I often wonder if Maurice Blanchot’s avowed distaste for Lydia Davis’ English translations of his fictional recits had much of an impact on her confidence. I would have melted. Maybe it’s best to compare them to the Free Masons, the kind of group that, by keeping a low profile, has the cursed privilege of being accused of global conspiracy. The difference, of course, between a tenuously conspiratorial secret order and a group of linguistics-specializing literary aesthetes is that I’ve rarely met a translator satisfied with this subdued position, or who has ever reaped all the esoteric rewards.
Over the past decade or so, interest in translation as labor and an artform in and of itself has steadily grown. There are, of course, the collected nonfiction essays of the aforementioned Davis, many of which deal with the vicissitudes of translation, but Kate Briggs’ This Little Art might be seen as a touchstone. The book ponders the author’s own experience translating Roland Barthes’ lecture notes and the interplay of desires, misunderstandings, and hiccups that come with the trade. The translator walks the line between “fidelity and freedom,” as Walter Benjamin distinguished the “conflicting tendencies.”
“What makes a good translation?” is only the ostensible question of the book. Its implied ethical angle puts pressure on the standard of “good” which, as with any value, bears cultural baggage. Translation is a partner's dance: every “good” translation bears the mark, necessarily, of the “good” translator—good because they tried, Briggs more than implies, good because they are artists. Despite this, so few readers care about the name relegated to the visibly slight placement beneath the real author’s name, like attendants to a throne.
Like Benjamin Moser—a writer who I am, on the whole, not aligned with—I wonder at the assumed preciousness inherent to the description of this little art. I agree there is something off-kilter about an avowed, immediate political import to any art-adjacent activity, yet many translators are quick to claim a positive politics regarding the global project of cultural transmission. Moser infamously took Briggs and other ruminative translator-memoirists to task in his review of This Little Art: “I resist the insistence that translation is an unambiguous good. If that is true, then it follows that any translation, and any translator, is good, too; and it becomes possible to sing the praises of [any translator]: as artists entitled to their caprices.” Notoriously assertive (e.g. Moser’s iron grip on New Directions’ retranslation of the works of Clarice Lispector), Moser holds firm to the belief in translation as an art of scientific objectivity, beholden to standards which, in his review at least, remain largely undefined. If uninitiated to this unseen professional order, the implication seems, you aren’t supposed to know.
The anxiety of authorial influence in the art of translation remains partly immanent to translators themselves, the myths they’ve kept alive about the task precisely by their perennial self-criticism. “The hidden masters of our culture,” Maurice Blanchot called them, and that has always stuck. But I wonder, is part of that avowed hiddenness not what defines this as cultural work at all? Precious few literary artists get the validation Blanchot bestowed upon the translator: “the enemy of God,” who by the act, “seeks to rebuild the Tower of Babel.” This seems to be a common trope among the canon of critical literary theorists. The valorization of the act persists, it appears, because no one—not even God—has convincingly absolved us of our Babelian guilt. In every translators’ note there is a melancholy nostalgia for the harmony we squandered by once being, in those brief moments at the top of the tower, too close to heaven. In the incongruity between languages, also known as misunderstanding, there’s an acknowledgment of a kernel in each lexicon that resists transfer. And in each attempt to smooth out a translated work’s re-telling, there’s an admission of faith in the originality of the author’s text. If we’ve learned anything from Kierkegaard, we know that faith is only fulfilled in its tumbling down. We know from Marx, that faith follows funding.
The figure getting in the way of translation’s divine machination, then, has always been the translator herself. To Benjamin, for whom the importance of literature exceeded the meager bounds of correct or incorrect words, the “task of the translator consists in finding that intended effect upon the language into which he is translating which produces in it the echo of the original.” This is the ideological point around which the internecine squabbles proliferate. That the translator’s note has jumped its postscriptual pen and become a dedicated genre in and of itself gestures to a heightened attention to the conditions of the work, and not simply, as Moser and others would claim, a play for a different sort of legitimacy.
Lowering the stakes, maybe—but only to place better emphasis on the financial and biological tolls involved—it’s not the translation at all which is pertinent here. Rather, it’s the task of translating that is the translator’s plight, hard at work in a culture more dedicated to vocational mythologizing—which upholds the job’s necessity despite real conditions—than repairing structural supports. Ironically, the so-called freedom of the translator-as-artist is their proletarianization, their becoming artists just like the rest of us. Welcome to the revolution.
This is, perhaps, why the most interesting translation work, as well as translator’s note, has always been done by established creative writers. Poet Johannes Göransson’s recent translation of Swedish poet Ann Jäderlund’s Lonespeech is a stunning example. “It is a poetry of heightened emotion and volatility, paired with an incredible precision,” Gorannson writes in his translator's note. “Heightened emotion and volatility” could be used as descriptors for all the poets Göransson has translated over the years, as well as the many pathmarking books published by Action Books, which he runs with Joyelle McSweeney, or those which he has trained his translator’s eye. From Johan Jonson to the inimitable Aase Berg, Göransson has presented English-language readers with a different surreal path, with poems that are zomboid, animalistic, viscous as the fluids listed within.
Jäderlund’s poems resist digestible consumption as much as they elicit a terrific awe. Precision is the problem, and not just in regard to translation. Jäderlund’s books once sparked controversy in her native Sweden, not because of their content per se, but the opacity of their form. “Inaccessibility” was a word that was thrown around, otillgänglighet. Though incredibly precise in execution, what the work’s focusing ring is set to bring into view is either multiply articulable or jarringly absent. The speaker of the poems themself appears to be searching, as if compelled to pause a conversation for a moment of temporary aphasia, not in search of images, or even meaning, but simply “the word.”
Now you will
be able to see
again
wave it off
after Koln
I was very afraid
and now
I can simply
not find
any word
The voice of Jäderlund’s lyrics here appear to reach for a space beyond denotation as much as it elegizes the livable presence of such a space. Like the task of translating, the poems seek to present something characteristic of an original utterance—“Now you will / be able to see”—and affirms the fear when one is up against scrutiny. The difficulty in finding “any word” out of the proliferate onslaught of all possible words brings one in dangerous proximity to the void, the de-creation that seems to occur when word and world no longer correspond.
Ann Jäderlund has enjoyed literary fame in her native tongue since the 1980s, writing poems, plays, and translating poems herself. Taking a glance at the poems in Lonespeech, it is not hard to understand her particular affinity for Emily Dickinson, adopting a similar totemic, bejeweled affinity for concretion. Like Dickinson, Jäderlund’s poems open a gulf of indiscernibility between language’s concision and precision with regards to content, perpetuating the eternal war between less-is-more mimesis and the type which believes in the blossoming singularity of ‘magic words.’
As Göransson narrates: “Whenever I tell anyone that I’m translating the poetry of Ann Jäderlund, they inevitably ask, ‘isn’t that impossible?’” By everyone, I presume he means Swedish speakers, those who would remember the aforementioned debates around this body of work. “This comes no doubt in part from the idea that poetry is untranslatable,” he continues, adding that what makes Jäderlund even more difficult to translate is that “her poetry is extra poetic, and thus extra untranslatable.”
I can’t speak to the extra-poetic-ness of Jäderlund’s oeuvre, and honestly, I have my doubts about speaking on the present collection, other than the fact that Lonespeech, while a book of lyrics, is also in some sense a translation, or transliteration, of another text: that being the 1948-1961 correspondence between writers Paul Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann.
Speaking of the poems’ friendly proximity to Celan’s, Göransson writes: “It is both apt and ironic that the work of a poet who’s supposedly untranslatable is collaged from and transformed by translations of a poet also known for his untranslatability.” In such a way, “it’s not that Jäderlund’s poems are untranslatable; it’s that they are fundamentally unstable,” he continues. Given that these lyrics are themselves accumulative remixings of larger source texts, “There is no ‘original’ to begin with. We cannot ‘own’ the words, but we can bring their catastrophizing into contact with the English language,” he says. Or as one poem itself claims of the spectral structure of communication:
I cannot
see
the words
you
start out
from
Recalling once again Walter Benjamin’s winning formula, Göransson’s respect for the boundaries of linguistic difference by acknowledging the limits of one-to-one translation, results in a stunningly brilliant presentation of not only Jäderlund’s exciting work, but the translator’s own unimpeachable involvement. By admitting this, Göransson admits, too, to his decades-long lovesick adherence to the written word. Translation is not meant to override, but to correspond, as one would try to mimic the dialect of a friend or lover in an exchange of letters.
Jacqueline Feldman’s recent book, On Your Feet: A Novel in Translations, released this year from dispersed holdings, the art-studio adjacent publishing outfit, is likewise informed by an undeniable passion pour la littérature. In a sort of fit of mania, the book collapses the generic distinction between the translated work and the translator’s note into such proximity as to deeply reveal the material conditions of this work. For Feldman, it entails both a “translation of the self,” and in the necessary embodied act, putting oneself in the physical place of the original author, “the translation of art into life.” In the process of foregrounding process-over-product, On Your Feet illuminates a new path for the dusty old, conventional codex—footnote-laden, typographically colorful, and full of photo inserts. Yet, it also might strike one as a return to codexical origins, acting as a sort of textual archive of various authorial concerns.
“Each life has its proper expertise,” Feldman writes in untranslated French late in the book, “for this translator, it is her strangeness which immunizes her to the seduction through expressions that aim, strategically, a common feeling, which seeks to define its electorate or people” (such is mine and Google’s translation). Though touted as a novel, it is rigorously multi-generic, proceeding from the titular translated story by French author Nathalie Quintane, to auto-fictional epistle, to master’s thesis in a sober, opaque array. The multiple “translations” ambiguously hinted at in the subtitle reveal themselves as the passage between these written forms, and written languages (only the translation and the autofiction is written in English, all the rest in French), each gaining and losing certain elements of literary fortitude based on their rhetorical, and particularly important to Feldman, industry rules.
The book begins with the translated story from Quintane, studded with superscripts that refer to empty, though enumerated, footnotes hanging down the remaining half of the page somewhere between concrete poetry and literary John Cage. This is followed by Feldman’s own sort of translator’s note, “Casting Off,” which forms the autofictional heart of the book. Addressed to “David,” a name one would be hard pressed not to attribute to David Richardson, editor of dispersed holdings, the narrator recounts not only her own life, but the life of the project we, the readers, hold in our hands. A post-academic shiver haunts the narrator’s recounting of the translation process to David. At the same time, the yawn of alt-academic careerism, too, seeps out in every instance Feldman’s narrator enters a justificatory mode—back on the defense—as if it only occurs to her every once and awhile that David, though perhaps primarily a friend, is structurally an editor, an ultimate judge. Like many narratives of the last few years, it’s a pandemic story, one of isolation and the work one does to sustain oneself through it. This is to say, it’s a story about dozing off, of persistent attempts to remain on task even when the goal of such tasks is actively subdued by the specter of complete global catastrophe.
“The lockdown coincided with the period of the year when it gets warmer,” she doomily breathes. As if to cope, the narrator is more worried about providing deliverables: whether that be Feldman’s final book, finishing school, or eventually providing the most faithful translation of her chosen author’s work. Her visa lapsed. “The most important texts to me during this period were…a document attesting to my scholarization at a French institution, statements of domiciliation with utility bills, identity cards and passport,” she writes. And yet, “more seriously,” no texts meant more than “the works of Nathalie Quintane.”
Here, I think of the final line of Roberto Bolano’s Antwerp, which speaks of one poet reciting the lines of another for courage. Translating Quintane became not simply a living for Feldman, in the sense of financial stability or scholarship, but a lifeline. Hence, Feldman’s meticulous, meticulously recorded, care in translating even one story from this author.
Nathalie Quintane, activist and author of several books in French, is far from untranslatable. Her story included here, “Stand Up,” translated by Feldman into the more colloquially imperative “On Your Feet,” is written in prose perhaps idiosyncratic in delivery, but wholly unadorned, resembling reportage as much as it does the stream of one or several consciousnesses. References to critical theory and the history of French letters are brief but occur often enough as ideological sign-posting rather than true considerations of thought. It’s a political story—basely politically-conscious as with all of Quintane’s work—regarding a narrator’s finding out about a visit by far-right politician Marine LePen to the small town of Digne, in France, where Quintane resides. The story is repeated, later, in its masters thesis form, the footnotes copiously filled in. Here, Feldman seems to be making quite a prescient, if notably unclear, argument about the reception of literature in translation. The footnotes serve to justify the translator’s editorial choices and, on the surface, to do the dirty, tiresome academic work of contextualizing the project. However, what is actually represented is Feldman’s hypertextual detours and recommitments to the task; the hidden, though Herculean, feat of any translation project. The footnotes are a goldmine of anecdotal digressions and citational frenzies.
In one instance, a gloss on Georges Bataille, Feldman cites: “Selon la description-capsule de ce personnage offerte par Google en anglais: Elementary school librarian — retired.” Notwithstanding the mistakes one makes translating one language into another, the machine aids one uses to complete the task often also have their own slippery agendas. Written mainly in French, Feldman invites the reader to come at the story of her translation effort through translation, especially given that many readers, like me, will be primarily English speakers.
The rest of the book remains more like a challenge than an invitation, and the reader is spurred on by the narrator’s own inability to be definitive. As much as the narrative allows us to relax, satisfied with the finished translated text, the empty footnotes raise one’s awareness of a just as vital experience. We’ve been stood up, to follow one of the thematic puns of the book, and it will take work to plumb the depths of Feldman’s own, masochistic plaisir du texte.
This ambivalence around what Feldman’s narrator herself admits is an “aggressive number of footnotes,” represents, for her, a theoretical problem regarding:
the amplification of an oppositionality already latent in the gesture of translation–what the scholar of literature, writer, and of course translator Tiphaine Samoyault calls translation’s “violence.” … A reality that writing must be de-written before rewriting it can be achieved.
Feldman hews close to Samoyault, more because of her definitive pronouncements (and attendant denouncements) of the ethnocentric project of translation, than any poetics of the task. Without prescribing a politics of translation, Samoyault affirms the basic, degree-zero political import of literary translation against the State’s compulsion “to brandish translation, to praise it, as a strategy of pacification, of reducing difference to something decorative, something in need of fixing (and, in the day of Google Translate, something fixed easily).”
Feldman’s allegiance to any sector of translation theory is consistently troubled by a consideration of the work before the work, of properly “getting it up,” to continue the other femme-phallic motif of both Quintane and Feldman’s ruminations. There is also a theme of “getting back up” when one fails: “for the foreigner, mistakes are a form of knowledge production, about cultural meanings and more.” Somewhat a parody of Heart of Darkness, Feldman’s narrator, and ostensibly Feldman, goes to meet Quintane in Digne. It is unclear whether she gleans some truth from the author to any measurable effect on the translation or the master’s thesis. The narrator, though warmly invited, feels understandably out of place, as much focused on getting a lead on the author’s foundations of knowledge than accidentally forgetting to close the door and letting her cats out.
My thesis that I’d printed off was flopping in my hands as I made reference to the text. Distinctly I remember the exercise of restraint, refraining, or so I thought, from taking notes so frequently I’d seem insane.
Here Feldman’s narrator is confronted by the physical presence of the victim of her translational and scholarly violence, unsure of whether she is there for validation or apology. “This is a canon of outstanding negativity, of seediness even,” she admits to David in her retelling of these events that will, eventually, become part of the book, the American aesthete in Paris. Mock-salacious anecdotes overcrowd salient criticisms: Quintane’s car, she reflects as being “one of the dirtiest I’ve ever been in.” There is the intellectual journey, and then there is the story one has to sell, or the master's thesis one has to sell—the joy of vocation is inherently guarded by commodity counters. In On Your Feet, Feldman tells—or tries to tell—the whole story, exploding the obscuring wall between the work (of translating) and the work, between the original and its lovingly rendered copy, and most beautifully, between the differently employed members of the literary community.
Had it not been for translators’ precarious compulsions to talk about it so much, I might as well have been kept in the dark about the labor of translation. Going about my merry way, thankful, if unclear, about that for which I’m thankful: happy to be reading poems from “elsewhere,” poems from ancient times! Kenneth Rexroth’s poems from the Japanese come to mind as an early becoming-conscious of the phenomenon, or Louis Varèse’s heart-beaten transformation of A Season In Hell and The Drunken Boat, and this in New Directions’ bilingual en face edition, lending me at least some illusion of access to the lingua originalis. Although I might as well have said King James’ Holy Bible. That’s a better place to start, in fact.
Apocraphylly, St. Jerome’s translation of the Bible into Latin (the Vulgate) brought the word down from the mountaintops a second time, into the tongue not of a prophet, nor Pauline-Greek, but the people—the people who read Latin, that is. In reality, it was a re-translation of disparate Latin translations of the Greek which, itself, had been translated partly from Hebrew. Does it go back any further? It always does. The prescient historical anomaly here seems to be that, rather than simply being translated, the biblical text had a translator, commissioned by the Church no less, and eventually sainted for the task.
If one chooses to see Jerome as the first in the line of celebrity polyglots, then it’s easier to understand the pressure under which our own translating peers are placed. Combine the inflationary rhetoric of linguistic stewardship with liberalism’s fiery passion for global connectivity, and you’ve got yourself a profession suited (or doomed) to a cycle of valorization that so many attached to the humanities possess. It’s the curse of the ostensibly valueless activity of the artist-in-capitalism that it must, in perennial sleights of contradiction, at once displace value from the market to the safety of heart.
If translation as a labor, let alone a labor of love, has a future in a techno-era of immediate results, it will not only take passion, like that of Göransson (and Jäderlund) or Feldman (and Quintane), but a continuously critical discourse from the inside. Despite those who would cry for a return to some standard of professionalism and objective artistry, there are those who are, thankfully, constructing a new language for it.