Greatest Women in Translation: Valentina Gosetti

Posted in Interview series by Carol's Adventures in Translation

Welcome back to our interview series!

I hope this post finds you and your loved ones well and safe, considering.

Please welcome our interviewee this month, Italian translator Valentina Gosetti, nominated by Michèle Métail.

Welcome, Valentina!

1. Originally from Collio di Vobarno, a small Italian town in the province of Brescia, you are a native speaker of Bresciano. Could you explain what Bresciano is for us, non-Italians?

Bresciano is my first language, my mother tongue (for those who still believe in this concept…), or rather, as I like to call it, my “grandmother tongue”. It is the language my grandmother spoke to me while I was growing up and the language I still often speak with my mum when we videocall from the two ends of the world. Bresciano is often merely considered the “dialetto” of the northern Italian province of Brescia, in Lombardy, one of the most hit by this dreadful Covid-19 virus at the moment. Being a so-called “Gallo-Italic” language, it shares some sounds and words with French. It is one of the many lesser-spoken languages of Europe. Being able to speak it is a great richness. I consider it my nonna’s gift. These fast-disappearing languages are an invaluable cultural (and human!) heritage and it is our duty to preserve them and to hand them down to the next generations. I speak both Italian and Bresciano to my newborn son Roberto. I hope he’ll be carrying this heritage with him into the future.

2. You decided to revive your mother tongue by combining some of your passions: poetry and translation. How do you do that?

Some years ago, I was challenged by an Italian friend (Manuel) to translate a poem by the French poet Baudelaire into Bresciano. This seemed like an impossible task. Bresciano, being the spoken vernacular of a traditionally modest, hardworking, population, is a very down-to-earth language, which lacks abstraction. But with a little bit of creativity and poetic licence I managed to “transplant” one of the well-known Spleen poems into my native language. Unexpectedly, the splenetic soundscape worked remarkably well in Bresciano. This adventure encouraged me to keep translating more poems into Bresciano as a way of reviving this language and enriching it even further through poetic creation for the next generations of speakers. This is what led to the creation of my blog Transferre, which is an unapologetically multilingual blog hosting translations of poetry in verse or prose, from any language into any language, standard or not, with a particular focus on endangered local languages.

3. Speaking of which, could you tell us a bit more about your blog?

Although Transferre was originally created to host my translations into Bresciano, it has soon become a shared creative space to encourage poetry in translation for the preservation and the promotion of minority languages. It soon started to welcome submissions from all around the world. It now features a range of “guest translations” into languages ranging from Estremeñu to West Frisian, from Béarnais to Romanesco, from Galician to Romagnolo. Particularly dear to me are translations sent by high-school students who, hearing about Transferre, started to rediscover their grandparents’ languages through the means of poetry. Transferre is always open to new submissions from all around the world. For example, some years ago I had the great pleasure to receive a translation of Robert Frost’s poem ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’ into Guarani from a group of students based in Paraguay. This encouraging story of language preservation was even featured in the national press in Paraguay.

4. How was translation introduced in your life?

Growing up in a non-English speaking country like Italy, reading has often meant reading in translation. My first encounter with the great international literary authors has often been mediated and facilitated by brilliant Italian translators. There are some books that stand out in my memory. One of the absolute highlights of my readerly youth was Leone Ginzburg’s translation of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. I tried to read it in English once, many years later, but to my ears it was not as authentic. My Anna Karenina will always be Ginzburg’s. Translation is also an integral part of TV watching in Italy. Everything is dubbed in a country where dubbing is a real art and career path. I remember being quite disappointed to hear Leonardo DiCaprio’s real voice for the first time as a young adolescent. I thought the Italian DiCaprio sounded more charming…

5. What do you do as a translator?

As a poetry translator I mainly read, re-read, and listen. I try and fail a lot. I go back on my steps in search of a mot juste that can be glimpsed, but seems to be just ever so slightly out of reach. Or that does come, but only fleetingly, before the next change of heart. What completes the translation of a poem for me is often an unnegotiable deadline. What I mean is that when I translate poetry, I could potentially re-write the same verse for ever, in a constant quest, which is the endless present of inhabiting another voice. I think that every translation is a sort of “selfie” in time, a selfie of our reading at a given moment of our readerly Bildungsroman. But this is a kind of selfie which is not at all individualistic or self-centred, it is a selfie where the self explodes and dissolves among all sort of otherness, all the voices, the encounters, the conversations, the mentoring that have informed our reading, thinking, editing throughout this process of (self)discovery. In a recent chapter, inspired by Loiterature,^[1] Ross Chambers’s brilliant essay, I termed this process as “transloiterature”.^[2]

The most enriching experience in my translation journey so far has been the prolonged work on the collaborative poetry anthology of French-speaking women poets from Romanticism to the Present Day I coordinated (Donne: Poeti di Francia e oltre. Dal Romanticismo a Oggi, Ladolfi Editore, 2017). As I wrote elsewhere, reading, selecting, and translating texts by so many different women poets has been a sort of ‘ventriloquist’ activity, to say it with Ross Chambers, it is an activity ‘that takes the time to know the other’, even to inhabit it, ‘a practice that calls into question the hard-and-fast distinctions – between sameness and otherness, between familiar and distanced otherness, and between the trivial and the significant’ (Ross Chambers, Loiterature, 35). Within this anthology, I selected and translated poems by contemporary, mainly living, poets. This has given me the unique chance to meet many of them either virtually or in person. I have since undertaken new translation projects with some of them, notably Michèle Métail and Katy Rémy. Every single encounter has greatly enriched my poetry translation practice as well as my personal journey on this planet.

6. You teach Translation and Translation Theory at the University of New England, in Australia, having won the School of Arts Teaching Awards for Teaching Excellence in the Languages in 2017. What does your experience as a translation teacher teaches your translator self?

The conversations with my students are an integral part of this journey. They are embedded in that explosion of the self which forms and informs my reading, listening, writing, and translation practice. Every translation workshop I have had the fortune to host has led me to discover new, hidden treasures, which were often invisible to me. In these workshops, students are peers. They are a collective conversation during which everything is up for discussion. When we are dissecting a text together all sorts of perspectives are potentially plausible and inexhaustibly enriching. Everyone comes to the text with their own “baggage”. The text acts as a crossroad where we all meet, mingle, sometimes change direction. The result is something new that creates its new exciting pathways for others. I often have the feeling that during a translation workshop I am learning much more from my students than they are from me. I am just another student. The real host is the text.

7. Now it’s your turn to nominate our next Great Woman in Translation.

I’d like to nominate the great Nina Parish & Emma Wagstaff! Their collaborative work is brilliant and they’ve been a constant source of inspiration especially when I was working on my poetry anthology.

^[1] Chambers, Ross. Loiterature (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999).
^[2] Gosetti, Valentina. “Ross Chambers, Beyond Baudelaire: In Defence of (‘Transloitering’) Poetry” Still Loitering: Australian Essays in Honour of Ross Chambers, edited by Valentina Gosetti and Alistair Rolls, Oxford Peter Lang, 2020, pp. 145-168.

3Mar2020

Greatest Women in Translation: Jody Gladding

Posted in Interview series by Carol's Adventures in Translation

^3BD2FAACEAC897D21BE68030808476304DC722B6E37A1C22D8^pimgpsh_fullsize_distr

Created by Erick Tonin

Welcome back to our Greatest Women in Translation series!

This month, after a one-month break (my bad), we return with the series with Jody Gladding, nominated by Linda Coverdale.

Created with Canva

1. What came first, the poet or the translator? How?

Poetry came first. Translation followed as a way to earn my living. But its real appeal is that it lets me work with language in the same close way—and I don’t have to come up with content.

2. You wrote Translations from Bark Beetle (Milkweed Editions, 2014), a book of poems that, according to this paper, helps “students get the profundity of the Latin of translate, which points toward a carrying across.” Could you tell us more about the book?

The title comes from a series of poems that are, literally, translations of bark beetle engravings, with the original “text” as the facing page. I include notes on bark beetle grammar and invent a new pronoun form. I’m playing, of course—for me, play often precedes discovery. If insect marks can be a text, then the realm of linguistic beings expands enormously. Imagine the possibilities for translators!

3. Besides being a poet and translator you are also an artist. Do you combine poetry and translation into your works of art? If so, how?

The art I make extends from the poetry, and translation plays a part as well. My latest project, for instance, is a collection of nests in which text—strips of it cut from a nineteenth-century French phrase book—is included as one more nesting material (http://www.jodygladding.org/nests). I’m interested in how poems operate as physical acts, in three-dimensional space, in the world at large. Artists like Cecilia Vicuña, Ann Hamilton, and Roni Horn also explore these questions, although they’ve come to them through visual art and I’ve gotten there through writing.

4. You translated two meditation-related books by François Cheng. Did your experience translating the books inspire you to start meditating? I ask as someone who has tried meditation a couple of times but hasn’t given up just yet.

Keep trying! François Cheng is a remarkable figure. He’s written extensively on Chinese art and poetry as well as being something of a zen master. I’m married to a Chinese translator, David Hinton, so I was already familiar with Cheng’s work when I translated his meditions on beauty and on death. I’ve meditated from time to time, but don’t have a regular practice, though I do practice yoga.

5. François Cheng is also a translator. Is it a different experience to translate for an author who is also a translator?

I’ve translated three authors who are also translators, all of whom translate Chinese: François Cheng, François Julien, and Michèle Métail. I’ve also translated a French translation of The Tao Te Ching into English. In all these cases, the main difference about the experience was dealing with three languages, not just two. Though in the company of Chinese, French and English hardly seem like different languages.

6. Are there any particularities in translating French into English that you like and/or dislike?

Well, as Linda Coverdale points out in your last blog, the on is a great and versatile French pronoun that we don’t have a good equivalent for in English. And going the opposite way, a particularity that keeps striking me, especially this winter as I’m spending it in France, is that there’s no word in French for home.

7. Now it’s your turn to nominate our next Great Woman in Translation.

Thanks for this opportunity to bring women translators into the limelight. I’d like to nominate Michèle Métail, a wonderful French poet who translates from both German and Chinese. She has translated into French the remarkable “reversible poem” by the 4th century woman poet Su Hui. A grid of 840 characters (originally embroidered on silk as a gift to her husband), it can be read as many as 12,000 different ways.

3Jun2019

Greatest Women in Translation: Robin Myers

Posted in Interview series by Carol's Adventures in Translation

Created by Érick Tonin

Welcome back to our Greatest Women in Translation interview series!

This month, I talk to Robin Myers, US-born, Mexico City-based literary translator and poet, nominated by Charlotte Whittle.

Created with Canva

1. Could you start by telling us about your beginning in translation?

I first became fascinated with translation in my late teens. At the time, it felt like the natural amalgam of several other interests: poetry, the Spanish language, and Mexico. I was born and raised in the US, but part of my father’s family came from Mexico; I visited a couple times as a child and always wanted to spend more time here. So I studied Spanish as the means to this very specific end. I lived in the city of Oaxaca for a few months after high school, then again halfway through college. It was during those early experiences of real immersion—in the language, in a place I loved, in my first Spanish-speaking friendships, in my first forays into reading contemporary Mexican literature—that I started experimenting with translation. There was something very simple and earnest about those initial explorations: I just wanted to share what I was reading (whether in English or Spanish) with people I cared about. As innocent as this may sound to me now—or at least as far removed as it can feel from certain parts of the day-to-day grind—I still believe that the desire to translate springs from the desire to connect, period. Of course we want that! Of course we want to bring disparate words, disparate worlds together.

In any case, it wasn’t too long before my translatorly hopes and expectations came into contact with more technical realities. In college, I spent a semester studying in Buenos Aires and took a workshop with Ezequiel Zaidenwerg, a remarkable Argentine poet and translator. Ezequiel’s approach emphasized the metrical building blocks of the Spanish-language poetic tradition, and at first I railed against this focus on syllable-counting and form. But I came around, and I started to genuinely enjoy the search for poetic “solutions” within a set of formal parameters. Ezequiel’s mentorship was very important to me as I started translating in a more professional way, and we’ve both gone on to translate each other’s work over the years, which has been a great gift.

2. Besides being a translator you are also a poet. Does being a poet help as translator and vice-versa? If so, how?

It absolutely helps. Both poetry and translation (and by this I mean the translation of anything, not just poetry) are practices rooted in the materiality of language. If you write poetry or translate anything, you are in the business of dealing with words as stuff, as resources, as concrete elements you shape and combine to form certain structures and spark particular effects in the reader. Of course, in translation, you’re using language in response to—in relation to—language that already exists in the world. You’re writing (because translating is also writing) in the service of and in complicity with that language. In this sense, too, translation demands both that you saturate yourself with the original text and that you distance yourself from it. That doubleness has helped me write my own poetry, I think, at least in the sense that it’s made the experience of writing poetry much more interesting. For one thing, it’s made me more conscious of the artifice of whatever I’m doing (and I mean “artifice” not as an insult but as a fact). For the same reason, it’s also made me feel freer to experiment: to think with more curiosity and more gratitude about language as “tools” and how I might try them out. I do feel that writing poetry affects my translations as well, or my approach to translating. For example, I care a great deal about sound when I write poetry, about what happens to words when we string them together and speak them aloud, and I feel a similar need to “hear” what language does in translating both poetry and prose. That said, I don’t mean to talk about this obsession with sound as if it were strictly the domain of poetry, much less of poets, because that’s not the case at all! I’m just musing about what it feels like for me in going about things as I go about them.

3. Could you please kindly share one of your (short) poems with us?

Here’s an untitled poem (they’re all untitled) from a collection called Having, which was translated into Spanish by Ezequiel Zaidenwerg and published as Tener in Argentina, Mexico, and (soon) Spain:

You can have it.

You can have the mad dash
and the mist,
the burned tongue
and honey-slick,
the cup
intact.

The night rage, the gray dawn
forgiving you.

The train,
the track.

The soft hairs
at the nape of the neck,
the thrilled plunge
and the cast.

You can have the rest of it.

You can rest.

It will drive you mad.

You will scald your way through
the days, trying
to have all of it,

having it.

4. In this interview you gave for the Los Angeles Review of Books, you said “translation is a weird, lovely, mysterious, largely invisible relationship, both for the translator and for the translated.” Why is that?

I mean, it’s so intimate! Even if the author and translator never meet, even if the author can’t read the language she’s been translated into, even if the author’s been dead for hundreds of years. No matter what, the translator gets to—has to—inhabit the text, figure out what makes it run, spend an unholy amount of time studying how the author thinks and what she cares about.

The translator invariably has to make tradeoffs, has to figure out what can or should or under no circumstances ought to be sacrificed. It feels like a serious responsibility!

The translator is entrusted with something. With any luck, if she and the author exist on the same mortal plane and can talk to each other and choose to do so, they’ll both view the translation process as something that links them together. And they’ll both register this as an honor: the translator, honored at the invitation to engage with the text, attend to it, and deliver it somewhere new; the translated, honored to have her work—which she, too, once produced in a solitary act of faith—engaged with, attended to, and delivered in this way. But even if the translator and the author walk the earth at different moments in history, or are never in personal contact, or don’t even personally like each other very much, this relationship still exists. The devotion, the attention, the responsibility, the anxiety, the fact that the translator ultimately creates a second work of art that is both inseparable from and necessarily independent of the first: it’s all there, all the time. I find it so strange! Thrillingly strange, though.

5. Your poems are translated into other languages, including Portuguese, right? How is it like being in both sides, as translator and translated author?

It’s been very joyful and moving. Yes, poems of mine have been translated mostly into Spanish, with shorter selections into Galician, Arabic, and Portuguese. Many of these translations have emerged from long-term dialogues and friendships; several of the translators are themselves poets I’ve translated from Spanish into English. So it’s hard to be objective about it; it’s all felt like a series of long, warm conversations, marked by a sense both of deep connection and of distance. Distance in the sense that I always hope a translator will feel that the poems also belong to her, you know? In all her particularities, all her personal styles and tastes and approaches.

If I write a poem and someone else translates it—or the other way around—it’s ours.

Part of what I still find uniquely powerful about the experience of being translated into Spanish, though, is that my books have only been published in Spanish translation. Not in English, and not in my own country of origin. And since I’m based in Mexico, when I take part in poetry readings, for example, I mostly read in Spanish. Which means I’m directly and constantly identifying myself with someone else’s work as my primary form of participation. Which means I’m inhabiting and sharing theirs as much as my own.

6. Are you currently translating any books? If so, could you tell us a bit about them?

I currently have three prose projects in the works: by Mónica Ramón Ríos (Chile), there’s Cars on Fire, a wild, free-wheeling, darkly funny collection of short stories set between Chile and New York, forthcoming from Open Letter Books in 2020; Animals at the End of the World, a novel by Gloria Susana Esquivel (Colombia) about a young girl growing up in her grandparents’ house in Bogotá, forthcoming from the University of Texas Press in 2020; and The Restless Dead, a book of critical essays by Cristina Rivera Garza (Mexico) about disappropriation, “necropolitics,” and contemporary literature. I’m also working on various poetry projects in hopes of eventually finding homes for them in English. These include work by Javier Peñalosa, Maricela Guerrero, and Isabel Zapata (three Mexican poets whose recent books take beautifully and radically different approaches to the natural world and its relationship with contemporary humans); Daniel Lipara, Claudia Masin, and Alejandro Crotto (all from Argentina); and Adalber Salas Hernández (from Venezuela).

7. Now it’s your turn to nominate our next Great Woman in Translation.

I’d like to nominate Juana Adcock, a Mexican-born, Scotland-based poet and translator. Juana translates between Spanish and English in both directions (a superpower that never ceases to amaze me!). Into English, she is the translator of Sexographies by Gabriela Wiener (with Lucy Greaves) and An Orphan World by Giuseppe Caputo (with Sophie Hughes). I met Juana in person only recently, although we’d been in touch for months before that, because I had the privilege of translating her poetry collection Manca into English. By the end of the process—which involved great openness, engagement, and creativity on her part—I really felt that Juana and I had become co-translators. I feel lucky to know her and learn from her in both languages!

1Apr2019

Greatest Women in Translation: Charlotte Whittle

Posted in Interview series by Carol's Adventures in Translation

Created by Erick Tonin

Welcome back to our Greatest Women in Translation interview series, dearest readers!

This month, our Great Woman in Translation is the British-American literary translator Charlotte Whittle, nominated by Julia Sanches.

Created with Canva

1. I always love to learn about translators’ beginnings in translation. How about starting by telling us yours?

My path into translation wasn’t exactly a linear one. I grew up in a monolingual family, learned Spanish in Mexico when I was 18, studied Spanish and literature in college in the UK, and lived in Peru and Chile. The first translations I remember doing were of César Vallejo, when I was still an undergraduate. I was living in Peru and became obsessed with his work. Translating poems seemed to me like the best way to engage with them, to get inside them and see how they worked, and there was something really thrilling about making them breathe in another language. A couple of years later, I did a diploma in translation studies in Santiago de Chile, but this was an experience that closed doors as well as opening them. My final project was a translation of a story by the great Peruvian writer José María Arguedas. I was so happy thinking about and doing translation, but I remember the instructor saying in very clear terms that it was impossible to make a living from literary translation. Being young and inexperienced, I took his word for it, and I didn’t pursue translation seriously for a long time after that. I took the academic route, and translated poems for fun. I discovered that I loved teaching, but after a few years, I found it didn’t leave me enough time for creative projects. I finally realized that translation was the activity that brought my skills, experience, and interests together under one umbrella, and that was when I decided to make it my focus, despite the dire warnings of penury.

2. Could you tell us why your translation of Norah Lange’s People in the Room can be considered important for the gender imbalance in literature?

The data collected on this subject – for instance, by the Three Percent Translation Database, now housed by Publishers Weekly – tells us that of all the books translated into English, as many as three fourths are by men. Why is this? Partly because of the implicit bias that male writers are somehow more “important,” partly because of the lack of gender parity in publishing in other countries as well as our own, and partly because, while women translators translate both men and women nearly to equal degrees, male translators seem to be more disposed towards translating men.

People in the Room was published in English 68 years after it first appeared in Spanish; during that lapse, Lange received significantly less critical attention in her home country than her male peers (who were also more often translated), despite the importance of her writing. It’s so easy for women writers who weren’t sufficiently lauded in their time to pass under the radar, and translators can play a role in rectifying this. Obviously, I’m not claiming to be able to shift the canon with a single translation, but the fact that I was able to find a publisher for this novel and that Lange’s work has been well received in English, demonstrates that there has been a small change in the tide, at least in the world of literary fiction in translation. I think there is more interest than there’s been in the past in projects that draw attention to women writers who’ve been overlooked. Recent books such as The Houseguest by Amparo Dávila, translated by Audrey Harris and Matt Gleeson, and The Naked Woman by Armonía Somers, translated by Kit Maude, are further evidence that there is now an audience for this kind of work. All these projects are significant because they go some way towards rebalancing the gender inequality in translation. Of course, there’s a lot more to be done and there are multiple forces at play, but things are slowly evolving in a positive direction.

3. You are currently working on the translation of Jorge Comensal’s The Mutations. Do you feel there are any particularities between translating men x women?

Norah Lange and Jorge Comensal could hardly be more different: People in the Room is somber and full of mystery, while The Mutations is satirical and hilarious, but I would trace differences between authors to geographic region, time period, and individual authors’ concerns and idiosyncrasies before making sweeping statements about gender differences. In the cases of both these books, their style captivated me, I felt a deep, personal draw to their subject matter, and an urgent need to share them with English-language readers. In terms of the practicalities of the two translations, perhaps the biggest difference was that one author was dead and the other alive. Sometimes, when translating Lange, I wished I could hold a séance, or a table-tapping session like the one described in her book, just to be able to ask her if she thought I was on the right track. In contrast, I talk to Jorge often, and think our conversations have enriched the translation process. But to go back to the question of gender, the concerns and idiosyncrasies that make writers unique may result from their experience, and gender can certainly be a factor in that. A woman writing in the mid-C20th is working under a different set of constraints than a man writing in the present. As a translator, I think about gender less in terms of the characteristics of the writing, and more in relation to the conditions that determine how writing by men and women is read and received, and the conditions that allow them to write in the first place.

4. Could you also talk a bit about your translation of Agus Morales’ We are not Refugees?

Morales is a Spanish journalist who has spent most of a decade gathering the stories of members of displaced populations in different parts of the world. We Are Not Refugees is the result of his intensive exploration of the factors that cause mass migration, and the real-life experiences of those who are forced to flee. The book describes the situation of multiple displaced communities: Central Americans fleeing northwards from violence, Afghan and Syrian refugees in Turkey, internal displacement in the Central African Republic and South Sudan. Few writers have such breadth of experience when it comes to mass migration, and Morales identifies the specifics of a range of cases, while also finding commonalities between them. He writes movingly of his subjects, while letting those he encounters tell their own stories, so readers can get to know some of the faces behind the headlines to which we are often numb. I came away from this project with so much admiration for writers and journalists who have the emotional stamina to tell these stories in a clear-eyed manner.

5. What have you learned so far about being a (literary) translator that you could pass on to newbies?

I’m still learning! But here are a few things that come to mind: I’ve learned that it’s difficult, but not impossible, to pay your bills as a translator; that there are many different ways a book can happen; that there’s no limit to how much a translation can change during the first few drafts; and that the editor is not the enemy.

But the most important thing I’ve learned so far is that as translators, we have to create our own community.

Translating books requires hour after hour of solitary work, week after week, month after month. Without an office to go to or a cohort of colleagues you see every day, it can get lonely. That’s why I’m so incredibly grateful for my translation colleagues, both in New York and further afield. I have regular workshops with translator friends where we discuss everything from tricky sentences to how to collectively improve working conditions for translators. It’s important to see your colleagues as allies rather than competitors, and the brilliant and fascinating people I’ve met through this work are one of the things I most treasure about it.

6. Now it’s your turn to nominate our next Great Woman in Translation.

I’m nominating Robin Myers, a translator from Spanish based in Mexico City. Robin is a tireless translator of poetry and prose, and an extraordinary poet in her own right. I recently devoured her translation of Empty Pool, a collection of gorgeous, luminous essays by Isabel Zapata. I also had the pleasure of editing her translation of Ezequiel Zaidenwerg’s Lyric Poetry Is Dead for Cardboard House Press, where we publish bilingual editions of Latin American Poetry. Robin’s handling of rhythm and meter in that collection is a masterclass – I’ll leave it to her to tell you more about it!

Robin’s interview will be published on June 3, as I’ll be on vacation from April 20 to May 19.