Chris Quirk has a nice feature on Samantha Schnee for Dartmouth Alumni Magazine:
More than 20 years ago, Schnee cofounded Words Without Borders (WWB), an online journal that publishes literature translated into English from almost every part of the globe. The journal has published 4,600 writers—including seven who later won the Nobel Prize—in translations into English from 139 different languages. Today, 11 staffers operate the publication with an annual budget of just under $1 million, funded primarily through grants and donations.
WWB builds bridges between writers and readers across languages and cultures, providing English-language readers access to lesser-known works and opportunities for translators. It draws an estimated 750,000 readers annually, half of whom live outside the United States. “It’s a handbook for understanding the world,” says Iranian American author Reza Aslan, who edited WWB’s 2011 anthology of Middle Eastern translations. […]
Schnee learned about the project that would be become WWB when she heard W. W. Norton editor Alane Salierno Mason propose the idea at a 2002 meeting of the organization PEN America. “I ran up to her as soon as she finished speaking and told her that editing WWB was my dream job—it synthesized my interests in literature, language, and culture,” Schnee recalls. She started the following month, and the journal launched in mid-2003.
U.S. publishing companies have been slow to pay attention to international literature. A watershed moment arrived with the 1970 translation of Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gregory Rabassa ’44. “It got Americans to open up to reading contemporary translated literature,” Schnee says. Still, opportunities for translators of literature remain limited. “There are a few who have translated Nobel laureates who can kind of cobble together a living.” WWB attempts to fill the gap. […]
“A language is specific to the culture it arises from,” says Schnee. “You can’t always replace like for like, but you can translate the spirit of a poem or story or novel.” A phrase from a [Carmen] Boullosa novel that Schnee is translating illustrates the tightrope translators often traverse. In the novel, dead poets from the past gather for a conference, and Dante sees a television for the first time, which is showing a Britney Spears video. “The narrator describes the video as ‘un rosario de refritos mal refritados,’ which literally means ‘a rosary of badly refried refrieds,’ which makes no sense in English,” Schnee says. “I translated the phrase as ‘a string of half-baked clichés,’ which loses some of the Mexican-ness of the description—the rosary reference would be known to some English language readers but not to a majority—yet retains a culinary reference. Ultimately this phrase must make sense as a description of the Spears video to make sense in context.” […]
Schnee originally intended to study medicine. Born in Scotland, she moved with her parents to Houston when her father, a surgeon, took a job at the Texas Heart Institute. After high school, Schnee’s parents, who both attended college for free in Scotland, balked at paying for an undergraduate education. Her father finally agreed, but with one condition: Samantha had to learn German.
Pleased but slightly mystified, she agreed and signed up for a battery of premed courses in her first year. That summer she observed her father as he operated on a patient. “I saw him make an incision in a leg, and blood splattered onto his scrubs. The next thing I remember, I was lying on a stretcher outside the operating room, and my dad was looking down at me, wondering what had just happened,” she recalls. “I told him, ‘I don’t think I’m going to be a doctor.’ ” Schnee majored in English.
I’ve posted stuff from Words Without Borders since 2004, and I’m glad to know the story behind it (and behind Schnee’s change of majors). Thanks, cuchuflete!
Interesting that Cien años de soledad is called a watershed moment for Americans reading foreign literature. Borges’ Ficciones had already gone through multiple editions in the USA by that time, and Camus was an outright pop-culture figure.
Yeah, but I don’t think Borges and Camus were thought of as translations in the way that the García Márquez was. Rabassa was heavily promoted, and I remember his name in connection with the book in a way I don’t with the others (in fact, I can’t tell you who translated either).
Speculative Theory: Colombia (at least in the specific case of Garcia Marquez) was thought of as being a Third-World-or-Otherwise-Exotic source country in way that Argentina (at least in the specific case of Borges) was not, and the times were right for a trendy new novel from a TWOOE source country to catch on with a certain U.S. readership.
“I told him, ‘I don’t think I’m going to be a doctor.’ ”
While Schnee evidently made the right career choice, not a few of my contemporaries fainted outright or at least felt very light-headed at their first sight of someome making a surgical incision. I think it’s pretty natural.
You get this in ophthalmology sometimes even with students who have got used to seeing operations of other kinds. For some reason …
One of my kids had a very minor surgical procedure (but the sort where you want a specialist with the skill to avoid leaving a scar on a quite visible part of the body) done by a surgeon whose undergraduate education was at the same college attended by Ms. Schnee. The reason I recall this is that the surgeon had *not* done some sort of obvious science-based premed major but something more liberal-artsy. Not literary, like Ms. Schnee, but “Classical Archeology.” Good preparation for digging around, perhaps.
I think it’s pretty natural.
Yeah. In biology class at (boys’) school, we observed a dissection of a rat. The rat was thoroughly dead (and only slightly thawed from the freezer), so nothing spurting anywhere. Somebody fainted.
You get this in ophthalmology sometimes …. For some reason …
The whole idea of messing with eyes, and the thought you might blind somebody. I had a cataract operation with local anaesthetic, and felt distinctly queasy — despite the theatre nurse trying to distract me. In many ways I would have preferred to be completely unconscious.
J.W. Brewer, yeah, I guess that must be it, because I can go even farther back than my previous examples: Ibsen’s plays, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky would have been found in lots of American bookstores in the early-mid 20th century. Stefan Zweig’s Wikipedia article claims that he was widely read in the United States before WWII.
Rabassa was a translation rockstar (he’d already won a National Book Award for his translation of Cortazar’s Hopscotch), and his name guaranteed initial reviews for 100 Years. Obviously, it didn’t need much help after that.
I am very familiar with Marques and have never heard of Rabassa. Of course by the late 1980s the idea of reading Cien años de soledad in the colonial language of English already struck us college students as an anti-progressive old white guy move. Fine for Boomers I guess.
I am actually surprised to learn the book was translated and popular in the 1970s, I always kind of imagined Cien Años was a foundational Gen X text.
I suppose what we are talking about is non-genre literary translations for adults read widely by general readers”. Otherwise you would have to include
1. Adventure novels, e.g. Jules Verne
2. Fairy tales, e.g., Grimm, Andersen
3. The Arabian nights (could be subsumed in 1-2)
4. Children’s books (was Pippi already out in the 50’s? Did many Americans read “Emil and the Detectives” or “The Little Prince”?)
5. Nonfiction, esp. Psychology/sociology/(popular) history/religion/philosophy/science
@PlasticPaddy,
I think J.W.B is right – when Schnee says “international” she relly means “non-Western European”. Obviously Hesse, Sartre, Camus, Duras, Tommasi di Lampedusa and Solzhenitsyn (arguably part of a “Western European” tradition from an American p.o.v.) were all incredibly popular in the 1960s/70s.
In fact even Mishima was fairly well known in the US in the 1960s. “International” here is probably supposed to stand for what we then might have called “third-world” literature. Although I think it’s difficult to substantiate the case that “One Hundred Years of Solitude” really marked any kind of watershed in terms of Americans’ willingness to read translated literature (it wasn’t even a best-seller in the 1970s, whereas August 1914 by Solzhenitsyn cracked the top 10 in 1972), Marques arguably was the writer who opened Americans’ minds to the idea that people from “poor brown countries” could produce amazing works of art.
My third grade teacher read Pippi aloud to us in class, & that would’ve been 1959\60. I read the sequels myself. Hah! Bought them all again later for my now-37-year-old… Still on a shelf upstairs.
Of course by the late 1980s the idea of reading Cien años de soledad in the colonial language of English already struck us college students as an anti-progressive old white guy move. Fine for Boomers I guess.
Oh, what horseshit, assuming “us college students” were in an English-speaking country (if it was a Hispanophone one, your comment would make no sense whatever). Are you really claiming that everyone in your generation reads Spanish fluently? Or is this some kind of performance art/trolling that I am too Boomerish to get?
Rabassa was a translation rockstar (he’d already won a National Book Award for his translation of Cortazar’s Hopscotch)
With the important (to me, vital) caveat that that Hopscotch translation was abysmal. One of the foundational experiences of my life as a reader was comparing it to the original and discovering how lazy and ignorant it was: he misunderstood simple idioms and simply left out anything he realized he didn’t understand enough to translate. He must have had a great agent and/or friends in high places.
Hat, thank you, I was just about to say exactly that about Rabassa.
“International” here is probably supposed to stand for what we then might have called “third-world” literature.
parallel to “world music” as a marketing category. i think there’s something important to the parallel: on both sides there’s a very strong founding-selector effect that shapes what styles and genres get into the u.s. commercial market, affecting even english-medium work from “exotic” places. i’m thinking about rushdie and murakami, for example, whose work i think was taken up so enthusiastically by u.s. publishers because they were able to see it as similar to garcia marquez and other “magical realists”. (and, since it’s now year 30 of the zapatista revolution, i feel like it’s worth pointing out how el sup deployed those stylistic gestures to be more publishable/readable by u.s. audiences)
Or is this some kind of performance art/trolling that I am too Boomerish to get?
Partly that, partly how I remember a lot of Cambridge MA lefties actually feeling in the 1980s.
The special aura accorded to “exotic” Third World authors reminds me of Gene Wolfe’s quip “magic realism is fantasy written by people who speak Spanish”.
@Vanya/Hat
I think there was a “no translation” ethos in some educational circles, probably dating from a time when Classics were read in the original and students were expected to be able to give Latin speeches ex tempore. I am not sure when World Literature started being taught in school, instead of, say English (or Irish) , where English (or Irish) texts were studied, or French, where French texts were studied.
Cien años de soledad in the colonial language of English
Are we to suppose that the original is not written in a colonial language? Or was the book originally written in the unknown Charrúan language and then incompetently or fraudulently translated by a certain García Márquez into Spanish?
a great agent and/or friends in high places
Not to mention being proclaimed by the author to have written a book superior to the original. What the devil?
“magic realism is fantasy written by people who speak Spanish”
Of course that’s not true, because magic realism is Not Genre, whereas Wolfe’s fantasy is Genre (except when compared to (say) Poul Anderson’s, in which case it is Not Genre). Pfui.
he misunderstood simple idioms and simply left out anything he realized he didn’t understand enough to translate
But naturally. He was a native speaker of American English.
a time when Classics were read in the original
Any time up to now, in fact.
and students were expected to be able to give Latin speeches ex tempore.
When was that, the 19C?
Rabassa was “proclaimed by the author to have written a book superior to the original” … according to Rabassa. At least, Google showed me several examples of Rabassa relating this to English-speaking interviewers from 1978 onward (often adding that the honor was really due to the English language, or to the book — quite the humblebrag), and I didn’t find anything sourced to anyone else. Did anyone think to ask García Márquez directly? I don’t know Spanish; anyone who does want to look?
Rabassa’s Hopscotch translation has been previously dissected by languagehat and Rodger: RABASSA ON TRANSLATION (2004; 2021 comments) and Earliest Known Draft of King James Bible Found (2015 comments), with Rodger singling out the sentence “On top of physical pain like a metaphysical pinprick, writing abounds.” There’s now an Amazon customer review citing that very sentence — and blaming it on machine translation! “Only a machine could have made such a mistake”, says the customer. Ha ha, if only!
Of course, if a reader can think that, it means the publisher didn’t properly credit the translator. There is at least one e-book of Hopscotch that doesn’t have Rabassa’s name in it at all. Disgraceful.
Were Rabassa’s later translations any better?
@kts
Pero he leído alguno de los libros traducidos al inglés por Gregory Rabassa y debo reconocer que encontré algunos pasajes que me gustaban más que en castellano.
https://www.elespectador.com/el-magazin-cultural/garcia-marquez-gregory-rabassa-y-los-pobres-traductores-buenos-article-638135/
Article written by Marquez
Well, that makes more sense: some passages are better in the English version.
Hey, JC, could you poke the Commented-On Language Hat Posts machinery and see why it’s acting up?
*Some* passages, yes, *that* I can believe (thanks, Paddy). In any translation there may be some expressions or sentences that can be put more elegantly in the new language, e.g. through a fortuitous sound combination, or a grammatical structure that doesn’t exist in the original, or a cultural resonance. By the same token, I’d expect there are at least as many passages that are less beautiful in translation, but García Márquez didn’t mention them out of politeness, or because it’s unsurprising.
But Rabassa repeated the praise without the qualification; over and over, especially when the media called him for comments on García Márquez’s death in 2014, he said that the author had told him that the book “was better in English”, not “some passages”. Sounds self-aggrandizing to me — but then, artists are often self-aggrandizing, it doesn’t make their work bad. Perhaps a more charitable spin would be that by giving out a snappy soundbite, he was promoting the novel itself and raising the profile of translation.
(García Márquez was happy with Rabassa’s translation as a whole, too: e.g., “my work has been completely re-created in English”. That’s still not the same as saying the book as a whole was “better in English.”)
Too bad neither of them said specifically which passages were better in English. That could really have been a useful conversation.
I’ve taught a couple of Garcia Marquez’s stories in Rabassa’s translation. They read better than his Cortazar because GGM doesn’t write frequent passages of philosophical meditation couched in academic prose, which is what repeatedly flummoxed Rabassa. He was very good at rendering colloquial prose in language that didn’t “sound like a translation,” hence no doubt his reputation. On the other hand, as a translator of GGM, someone should have told him that catinga doesn’t mean “woods-animal smell” …