Kaya Genç writes for The Markaz Review about an impressive feat:
On June 15, 2012, at the age of 38, Kawa Nemir visited his family home in Istanbul, lay on his childhood bed and began translating the following sentence into his native tongue:
“Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.” The next afternoon, Nemir took the notebook with him, flew to Diyarbakır in eastern Turkey and continued translating the rest of James Joyce’s Ulysses into Kurdish. It did not escape his attention that it was June 16, Bloomsday, the day during which Ulysses, set in 1904, takes place.
Nemir, a chain-smoking poet with intense eyes and a romantic bent, had spent a decade translating Shakespeare’s sonnets into Kurdish. In Turkey — and increasingly in Europe, where many Kurds live in diaspora — bookworms have grown up on his translations of Emily Dickinson, Sara Teasdale and Walt Whitman.
For Nemir, translating Ulysses into Kurdish was a way to draw attention to a language that had been the victim of nationalist politics in Turkey. […] The elder son of an affluent Kurdish family, Nemir was born in 1974. His own linguistic history mirrored that of many of his generation: While he spoke Kurdish at home, his school lessons were in Turkish and English. By the time he became a teenager, Nemir had forgotten Kurdish. Between 1990 and 1992, while studying at a high school in Istanbul, he devoted his time to regaining his Kurdish by studying the language each day. He decided to stop writing in Turkish, except for works of criticism.
Nemir took to working in Kurdish instead. After graduating from college with a degree in English literature, he found work at Jiyana Rewşen, a Kurdish literary magazine, in 1997 and became its chief editor, encouraging contributors and readers to open their eyes to world literature and become more cosmopolitan. In the meantime, he began to translate works by Shakespeare and William Blake into Kurdish.
Ulysses begins early in the morning on June 16, 1904, at the top of a Martello tower along the water in Dublin, where the 22-year-old Stephen Dedalus is staying with the medical student Buck Mulligan. In translating the opening chapter into Kurdish, Nemir picked the word Til to describe the Martello tower. For Nemir, the defensive forts of Ireland resembled watchtowers, or “Tils,” in Mesopotamia — similar to those he saw in Diyarbakır, where many Kurdish citizens of Turkey live. He spent time in Birca Şems, one of the local towers, climbing to its top many times at the crack of dawn, when no one was around, to read and write. The Dublin Bay reminded him of the Tigris River and its valley.
Nemir felt he had been preparing to undertake this translation his whole life, having filled dozens of notebooks with Kurdish words and expressions in his 20s. He kept Ferhenga Biwêjan a mezin (The Grand Dictionary), a dictionary of Kurdish idioms collected by the writer Dîlawer Zeraq, by his side. Zeraq had spent 20 years preparing this 2,000-page work, which contains 18,000 entries of idioms in Kurmanji, the most widely spoken form of Kurdish, which is often written in Latin script. But it was Nemir’s own notebooks, filled with Kurdish idioms he overheard in conversation, that helped him the most.
A notebook he kept during his 1998 visit to Şırnak, a village with rivers and forests, featured names of numerous freshwater creatures that later appeared in his translation of Ulysses. In other sections of the novel, he struggled with matching Joyce’s large vocabulary about the sea. After all, Nemir noted, Kurdistan is one of the most mountainous regions in the world, and Kurds never expanded far from the mountains. For the translator, the problem was finding Kurdish words for sea creatures that Kurdish writers had not mentioned in their works — and that thereby remained unnamed in the Kurdish language. He studied various genera of fish, trying to locate words used in Kurdish texts, turning to his notebooks. In 1994, Nemir had scribbled the word “whale-path” in a notebook while studying Beowulf in college. He knew that Kurds called whales neheng, so he wrote in his notebook: “whale-path: rêka nehengan.”
Kurdish poet Ehmedê Xanî’s 17th-century epic Mem û Zîn, a mystical romance about two star-crossed lovers, was among Nemir’s main sources. He extracted names of ships from it: Xanî describes zenberîs, small vessels, sailing from Diyarbakır to the Persian Gulf. That came in handy when Nemir was working on “Cyclops,” the 12th chapter of Ulysses. If he couldn’t find anything in Kurdish sources or his notebooks, Nemir coined words himself, basing them in Latin and Greek.
Sometimes, he modeled his syntax off of Kurdish poetry. To translate “Oxen of the Sun,” the 14th chapter of Ulysses, which takes place in a maternity hospital during the birth of a son and surveils the beginnings and development of the English language, he drew upon Kurdish classical literature, and transposed the verse into the chapter’s prose. Translating the chapter took him four years, as he pondered individual words for many months.
Another notebook was just a dictionary of words Nemir had gathered from conversations with Kurdish convicts, words describing details about drinking alcohol, playing card games and having sex. For example, bûye pilot, an expression Nemir had heard from a convict while staying at a prison in Mardin, describes “someone ready for action in all hours of the day.” But the word, which has a double meaning, can suggest both courage and drink. When describing Bob Doran, a character who suffers from a bad marriage in Ulysses and attempts to escape it through an extravagant alcoholic binge, he wrote, “Hê di sa‘et pênca da bûye pilot”: “Boozed at five o’clock.”
More than 30 of Nemir’s notebooks comprised words he learned from his mother, who had a deep sense of the Kurdish language. “I used all of those in Ulysses,” he said. Among the words, proverbs, expressions and idioms his mother dictated to him were cagarê lihêfê (“quilt”), ‘ilmê sînemdeftera (“lore”) and zimanê maran li ber min qetand (“by your kind solicitations”). “I didn’t know any of these words he used, and they were all Kurdish,” Özmen recalled. Nemir said he considered those words, idioms, proverbs, metaphors and slang terms as “saved from death because they found their place in Ulysses.” […]
From 2012 to 2015, Nemir finished half of his translation of Ulysses in Diyarbakır. But in 2014, months into this work, a chain of geopolitical events intervened in his life and the lives of his fellow Kurds. […] The first barricades for the Kobanî protests were erected outside Nemir’s apartment. Between focused bouts of translation, he would witness violent clashes on the street below his study’s window and watch others on social media. After finishing a chapter, he would spend the night watching the aerial bombing of nearby cities Nusaybin and Cizre.
But staying in Diyarbakır became too dangerous. In mid-2015, Nemir decided to resettle in Mardin, a city farther south, thinking that it would be calmer. He formed a group of proofreaders, mostly Kurdish literature students from the Mardin Artuklu University. Because each member came from a different background, they all brought new words to Joyce’s text, calling the elders of their families in Hakkari, Van and Adıyaman to excavate words and then notifying Nemir of their findings.
While looking at the translation of “Scylla and Charybdis,” the ninth chapter of Ulysses, for example, the group tried to come up with the meaning of the word “jobber,” Joyce’s word for a black marketeer. One participant located the Kurdish equivalent, malgir, in a phrase they encountered in the city of Hakkari, named after the Kurdish tribe Hakkar. There was also the Kurdish word for “diver” — during a conversation in Mardin, Nemir learned that it meant xozneber in Kurdish, a word used by elders during the 1980s. […]
Finally Nemir has to flee Turkey for the Netherlands:
The Dutch Foundation for Literature had accepted Nemir as a resident in the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam. Around this time, Nemir met Aylin Kuryel and Fırat Yücel, a couple from Turkey who would later direct Translating Ulysses, a documentary about Nemir. Their film weaves the proofreading process of Ulysses into Nemir’s struggle to find an apartment during the housing crisis in Amsterdam. In Turkey, the International Istanbul Film Festival refused to screen Translating Ulysses, which features footage of the violent suppression of the 2014 Kobanî protests. Kuryel, the filmmaker, jokingly described Translating Ulysses as a “censored documentary about the translation of a book censored for its obscenity into a language that remains banned a century later.”
Nemir is most interested in what Kurdish authors will make of his translation. Özlem Belçim Galip, a scholar of Kurdish literature at the University of Oxford, said she believes Nemir is “one of the translators who see the Kurdish language as an ocean of flexibility and creativity where there is no limit.” According to Özmen, the Kurdish Ulysses marks a “starting point for all Kurdish writers, novelists and short story writers.” […]
Nowadays, in his apartment in Amsterdam, Nemir is writing a 900-page Kurdish readers’ guide to Ulysses, with references, photographs and a 200-page preface. As for his next translation, he said, he’s hard at work on “something even bigger” than Ulysses: Finnegans Wake.
That’s what I call a life well spent. There’s more at the link, including a trailer for the film. Thanks, rozele!
I’m about through reading Ulysses for the third time, and the lasting impression this time around is that I am completely skeptical that this book can be decently translated as a whole. So much of the basic plot material depends on English puns.
At the same time, the translator in me does muse on the approaches that one could use to translate the bits that feel translatable. For example, in “Oxen of the Sun”, have any translators replaced Joyce’s imitation of successive generations of English writers with imitations of their own language’s writers?
I’m curious about that too.
Kurmanji, I presume?
How familiar is it as a literary language to speakers of other Kurdish varieties?
Another good question!
No idea, but I’ve seen this kind of thing done in German elsewhere.
A probably bigger barrier is the script: Latin (Atatürk + q w x as quoted in the OP) in Turkey and Syria, Arabic in Iran and Iraq.
@Christopher Culver: And even if Ulysses manages to be meaningfully translatable, Finnegans Wake almost surely isn’t.
Wonderful!
Kuryel, the filmmaker, jokingly described Translating Ulysses as a “censored documentary about the translation of a book censored for its obscenity into a language that remains banned a century later.”
And there are indeed trenchant parallels between the continuing plight of the Kurds and the situation of pre-Israel Jews when Ulysses was in gestation. (Self-)exiled Irish Joyce, of course, wove that alienation theme tightly into his masterpiece. One for Hatters, from the “Circe” episode:
Kurdjewgreek is greekjewkurd is irishjewkurdgreek is …
“For Nemir, translating Ulysses into Kurdish was a way to draw attention to a language that had been the victim of nationalist politics in Turkey”
So it doesn’t matter whether any actual readers are going to like the book?
Impressive as this certainly is in intellectual terms, there is something very depressing to me about the idea of translating a book hardly anyone reads into a language hardly anyone reads in. All the modernist classics have been translated into Arabic, but for a lot of them I always wondered why they bothered; anyone deeply enough into English literature to get any enjoyment out of them speaks English anyway.
Oh, come on. I’m surprised you would fall into the common trap of talking as if translators (or authors, for that matter) had utility as their main, perhaps only, goal. No one — at least, no one with any artistic capability whatever — translates a book on the basis of the perceived target audience. The guy loves Joyce and wanted to bring him into his own language; what’s wrong with that? The alternative would not have been for him to translate Dan Brown (which would presumably sell more), it would have been for him not to translate anything at all. It’s not as though there’s some limited reservoir of Translation that, if expended on Joyce, will not be available for more “useful” authors.
Özlem Belçim Galip calls the translation a “starting point for all Kurdish writers, novelists and short story writers,” and that’s presumably a more meaningful measure. Or perhaps you think that even Kurdish writers have no interest in reading Joyce in Kurdish? Yes, presumably many of them could read him in English, but the point is to see how similar effects can be achieved in unexpected ways in their own language. Not to mention the recovered vocabulary, now available to all.
Lameen:
there is something very depressing to me about the idea of translating a book …
You could stop right there, couldn’t you? And hardly anyone reads Ulysses? I think not!
Translating can be considered the highest form of reading. Kudos to anyone translating any literary production into any language. Even if no one else reads the result, it is a sequestered monastic struggle that expands the reach of all humanity.
A translation can become a classic on its own, especially when the readers are starved for written matter in their language. Certainly it was like this for me with Hebrew when I was a monolingual kid, and I’d read multiple translations of the classics — silly Biblical-styled 19th century ones, beautiful early 20th century ones, boring late 20th century ones — and I thirsted for them all.
Nabokov, Pnin:
Well, clearly at least one Kurdish writer has an interest in reading Joyce in Kurdish!
I love the idea of someone scouring rivers and prisons to find just the right words, and I certainly agree that nothing worthwhile results from focusing on potential sales figures. What I don’t love is the idea of anyone writing anything just to “draw attention to a language”. That’s the kind of cart-before-the-horse thinking that, in the context of Kabyle or Breton, produces neologism-stuffed works full of awkward calques that no one except a handful of fellow language activists can make sense of – a description which, now I think of it, is not entirely unreminiscent of Joyce’s later works anyway 🙂 Hopefully that’s not what’s going on in this case.
Nabokov, Pnin
Which reminds me of Irina Mashinsky’s remark about how she still desperately loved the translation of Pnin she read as a young woman in Russia, even though she’s long since come to value Nabokov’s style in English (see this 2021 post).
Lameen, the 19th-century translators I was alluding to, the Hebrew language enthusiasts of the Haskalah, sound like they were much like the Kabyle or Breton activists you are talking about. They attempted Biblical Hebrew (before that variety was given up for the much more practical Mishnaic Hebrew), for a readership which often was familiar with the source texts in the original. They used neologisms and bad calques and purposeful antiquarianism, which now look hilarious at best. But beginnings are hard, and they pushed as hard as they can, and showed those that followed what not to do, and subsequnt translations were much better. The same also goes for novelists and journalists.
I admit I don’t know the specificities of the Arabic market (which is often reported to be difficult for belles-lettres), but I don’t share Lameen’s pessimism that translation is useless and undesired at least for other languages. In my experience living in Romania among a circle of highly erudite friends, I have been struck time and time again by how C1 speakers of English choose to read classic English literature in Romanian. I’m not sure it is even a matter of the reader feeling more comfortable with something in his native language, it could be out of mere habit to buy whatever is sold locally (which is usually a lot cheaper than an imported original).
Ferhenga Biwêjan a mezin appears to be three volumes, Tirkî-Kurdî, Kurdî-Tirkî, and Kurdî-Kurdî. I can’t quite make out how this breakdown works, though.
The (second) Turkish translator of Ulysses, Armağan Ekici, has a chapter in the studies edited by the (second) Polish translator, Jolanta Wawrzycka. I don’t think it would be a total exaggeration to say that translations of Joyce and the translators’ self-reflections form their own productive branch of Translation Studies.
Joyce himself had specific ideas on how Morel’s work should go. There are some letters from Nabokov on a proposed Russian version in the James Joyce and Paul Leon Papers in the NLI.
For example, in “Oxen of the Sun”, have any translators replaced Joyce’s imitation of successive generations of English writers with imitations of their own language’s writers?
Evidently Ekici explicitly rejected that idea (but Erkmen less so), because Ottoman is too different for modern speakers, admitting, “In my translation, Sterne parodies read like the translation of Sterne by Nihal Yeğinobalı.”
Lameen’s pessimism that translation is useless and undesired
I certainly don’t believe that. I do think that some works lend themselves to translation much less than others. Heavy intertextuality is a particular issue there; you can only translate one book at a time, not an entire literature that it’s in dialogue with.
To go from the sublime to the banal – I don’t think most of my linguistics articles would translate well into Arabic; Arabic academic readers would take for granted points that I had to explain at length, and know little about other points I took as common knowledge. The desired effect of the paper would often be better achieved in Arabic by a rewrite. No such issue exists for translating them into French, where the cultural gap is much narrower.
Impressive as this certainly is in intellectual terms, there is something very depressing to me about the idea of translating a book hardly anyone reads into a language hardly anyone reads in.
Yeah I’m with Lameen here. This very much reminds me of Slovak and Czech book markets (except, thankfully, for the “hardly anyone reads in” part). The intertwined intellectual cultures have been obsessed with translations since the very beginning of the national revival. It made sense back then, but it has turned into a weird obsession where books are translated (usually badly) just for the sake of being translated.
Only if you pretend that the effect on other writers is irrelevant, like economists pretending that “rational man” is an existing thing. As was said about The Velvet Underground & Nico, while it didn’t sell much, everyone who bought a copy started a band. Really, this idea that “intellectual culture” is some sort of effete excrescence on real life is something I’m surprised to see here at the Hattery, which is just as niche as a Kurdish translation of Joyce.
This is just prolegomena for the Kurdish version of Pound’s Cantos, which the world may not know it has been waiting for.
Lameen said “depressive”, not that translating for the sake of translating is harmful…
Though I’m not sure I agree about translating sceintific articles into Arabic.
Yes, rewriting is a good idea, but if the choice is: “an Arab linguists reads them in English, and also reads in English other articles necessary to understand them”, and “an Arab linguists reads them in Arabic and also reads in Arabic other articles necessary to understand them”, I don’t see why the former is better.
Translating scientific journals looks like a good idea, and is extremely cheap and is an opportunity for many university graduates to earn some money.
PS extremely cheap: 1, 10 or 100 million euro annually is decisively nothing compared to (a) the impact (b) scientific/educational (or better military) budget of Arab countries. Even Tunisia alone spends billions, not millions on edication.
The idea is obviously to get other people to read – not necessarily “English literature”, but that particular book in any case.
Maybe that’ll get some people to be into English literature who can’t just read the original. Pete Buttigieg was into one particular Norwegian author before he decided to learn Norwegian so he could read that author’s one untranslated book.
Shakespeare in particular has famously been a German classic since Schlegel & Tieck’s translation (1789–1833). Sein oder nicht sein, das ist hier die Frage.
Scientific journals are almost exclusively read by people who publish in scientific journals. Almost all of them know English well enough to publish their scientific papers in English. Indeed, native speakers of major European languages often don’t know the scientific vocabulary of their own languages – in their own fields – well enough to feel comfortable publishing in those languages and would prefer doing it in English even if that wasn’t de facto the only option anyway.
The one journal I know that translates all its articles translates them into English; the originals, which are published simultaneously with the translations, are in Russian and written by the last 2 or 3 generations that can’t write their papers in English right away.
All right, then every Arabic-speaking reader of Lameen’s article is already familiar with English literature, because all Arab linguistics students all fluent readers in English.
Which is not the case.
My understanding is that in the natural sciences, almost everyone publishes and reads in English. It’s the same in Economics; only if you write for a lay public or on purely German topics like German economic policy, tax law or accounting standards and practices you still publish in German. Linguistics, especially Historical linguistics and language-teaching related topics, are an exception in that publication and reading in non-English languages are still fairly common. Other such fields seem to be Theology and Religious studies, at least according to a friend who works in that area, and History.
All right, then every Arabic-speaking reader of Lameen’s article is already familiar with English literature
What does English literature have to do with anything? We’re talking about the ability to read international/scientific English, which is indeed expected of anyone who reads scientific journals. I studied IE back in the day when its basic language was German, and I could read German linguistic articles with relative ease. I couldn’t read German literature to save my life.
@LH, I mean, English linguistics.
Lameen did not say that availabiliy of Arabic translations of his publications would not expand the audience. There are people who will read them in Arabic or Russian and won’t read them in English.
David M.: Indeed, native speakers of major European languages often don’t know the scientific vocabulary of their own languages – in their own fields – well enough to feel comfortable publishing in those languages and would prefer doing it in English even if that wasn’t de facto the only option anyway.
That is actually a good argument for drasvi’s idea of having articles translated by, if not graduates so graduate students. One of the main purposes of a university is to make world class science available locally, to students, schoolteachers, and a wider audience. To do that you need to maintain and develop a scientific vocabulary in the local language(s).
As DM said, scientific journals are almost exclusively read by people who publish in scientific journals. Do you really think there’s a meaningful audience among students, schoolteachers, and a wider audience for articles on Calabi–Yau manifolds or ergative verbs in the Kartvelian languages?
I am pretty certain Hans Wollschläger attempted something like this in his translation of Ulysses into German.
@LH!??!
Excuse me, students need to read scientific publications.
Exactly which students need to read about Calabi–Yau manifolds or ergative verbs in the Kartvelian languages? How many of them can’t read anything but Arabic? I appreciate the generosity and inclusiveness of your philosophy, but I don’t think you appreciate the extreme specialization of modern science. Sure, there may be one or two random outsiders who might benefit from a translation of some random article, but 1) the cost-benefit ratio of translating thousands of articles in the hope that some random person might benefit is very small, and 2) there is such a thing as Google Translate (and now competitors).
…In the UK, and seemingly everywhere outside the English language, student means “university student” exclusively. I even managed to overlook the schoolteachers for that reason.
It still catches me out when Americans say “student” when they mean “school pupil.” Have they always done that, or is it a relatively recent case of grade inflation/calling binmen “sanitary engineers”?
As JC said here:
It’s certainly been used that way all my life.
Ah, and later in that thread AJP and Breffni pointed out that the use was not just American; AJP said “In England, ‘pupil’ is only used by me.”
Exactly which students need to read about Calabi–Yau manifolds or ergative verbs in the Kartvelian languages?
I’d settle for Arabic-speaking students being able to read about ergativity in Neo-Aramaic, even…
The scientific literature today is too vast to translate, or comprehend, or fix. It’s so enormous that “we” are apparently willing to pay publishers extortionate fees at multiple stages just for stamping a limited subset of it with an imprimatur suggesting that it might be worth reading; so enormous that almost everything written not just in other fields but even in one’s own field will be of little or no interest. A bit more effort put into publishing long accessible state-of-the-art summaries, rather than increasing the number of publications that can be claimed as original research, might be no bad thing in many contexts. Those are what it would make sense to translate. It would be great for Arabic-monolingual students to be able to learn about Calabi–Yau manifolds or ergative verbs in the Kartvelian languages, and summaries like that would make it possible; but, like I said in a slightly different context above, you can’t translate an entire literature.
One of the main purposes of a university is to make world class science available locally, to students, schoolteachers, and a wider audience. To do that you need to maintain and develop a scientific vocabulary in the local language(s).
Definitely. Writing only for an international specialist audience is not enough.
for articles on Calabi–Yau manifolds or ergative verbs in the Kartvelian languages?
I originally misread that as referring to something to the effect of “articles in Kartvelian languages on Calabi-Yau manifolds”. Treatises on high topology written in Svan or Mingrelian sounds like something that really should exist in some better universe but sadly probably doesn’t and wouldn’t exist in this one.
(Georgian very likely already has it, though offhand I can’t tell for sure one way or the other.)
It is said that the unfortunately late Paul Erdős had once considered publishing a mathematical article in Kurdish, but was unable to find a journal that would accept it. He did publish in something like half a dozen other languages.
It still catches me out when Americans say “student” when they mean “school pupil.” Have they always done that, or is it a relatively recent case of grade inflation?
Previously on LH (the discussion goes on for a while after that point). Apparently it goes back to the 19th century.
I pointed out in that thread that Hogwarts is a weird exception to the “not in UK” thing – the pupils of Hogwarts are unaccountably called “Hogwarts students” most of the time. Reportedly there are a few instances of “pupils” but Rowling appears to treat the two words as synonymous.
On “students”: it’s confusing. I saw a corner grocery near a high school, far from any university, with a sign reading “no more than four students at one time”. I couldn’t figure it out for a long time. But “pupils” would have looked strange.
(Ed.: Inflated from 3 students, last I told this.)
On translations: if you want to know the state of the art on Kartvelian ergatives, you better know some Russian and Georgian too.
Back in the (60s? 70s?) there were US journals of physics, mathematics, and some other things, which were all English translations from Soviet journals, which otherwise would not be read on this side. I don’t know their history. Maybe Brett or jack morava do?
In Danish, elev is anybody enrolled in school up to high school grades. (There are vocational curricula that formally range as equivalent to high school, but I don’t know if the old bias remains that you’d only choose those if your 9th grade teacher hadn’t recommended you for high school). Student (now) means high school graduate, while studerende is someone enrolled at an academic institution. Make of that what you will.
(Institution of higher learning: Universitet eller højskole, though anxiety about what Americans will think has led to most of the latter being renamed as universities or swallowed up as departments of larger institutions [that were already called universiteter]. What I called high school above is called gymnasium in Danish).
A bit more effort put into publishing long accessible state-of-the-art summaries, rather than increasing the number of publications that can be claimed as original research, might be no bad thing in many contexts. Those are what it would make sense to translate.
Yes, exactly!
I always wondered why they bothered
i can’t speak for anyone else, but i do about as much translation into yiddish as i do from yiddish to english, and the reasons vary widely.
some things will have a different, and interesting, effect in yiddish (like this “eydlvays”, which i had nothing to do with). some things only lack a yiddish version for accidental reasons, and providing it is fun (like the orsinian folksongs that i got some help with here). some feel like they’re already in dialogue with yiddish works, or could be translations from yiddish themselves, and i want to make that audible (poems by muriel rukeyser, for instance). and some just feel like they’d be awesome in yiddish (poems by judy grahn, among others).
(a lot of what i do in that direction, though, is adaptation more than straight translation, whether by shifting images to draw on yiddish culture or more elaborate shifts (i’m working on a sort of anti-translation of baudelaire’s “Obsession”, for instance, which i’m pretty sure must have a yiddish translation already).
Baudelaire’s works exist in a strange kind of space where you feel that they must have been translated into every language in existence, each in some parallel dimension of its own …
No? Just me then …
I was lamenting that I had no copy of Les Fleurs du mal with me during our early days in Ghana, whereupon my wife got me a second-hand paperback copy for my birthday from a grocery stall beside the road to Bolgatanga.
All together now: “La sottise, l’erreur, le péché, la lésine, Occupent nos esprits et travaillent nos corps …”
Lameen: A bit more effort put into publishing long accessible state-of-the-art summaries, rather than increasing the number of publications that can be claimed as original research, might be no bad thing in many contexts. Those are what it would make sense to translate.
Hat: Yes, exactly!
I was working slowly on a comment to that effect, but arriving there from the other end: I first thought that compiling general overviews may be better than translating actual articles. It followed that the lesser the language the more general the overviews. And the afterthought would be that there might be demand for those compilations in English too.
(A few minutes after midnight at lille julaften. I finished this year’s batch of krumkaker, exactly at midnight, so barely on time.)
rozele: adaptation more than straight translation, whether by shifting images to draw on yiddish culture or more elaborate shifts
There’s not one right way. It’s partly about imagining how the original author would have expressed themselves in another language, but also about discovering how the language and its culture lends itself to the ideas and images of a foreign author. I’m a bloody amateur at this, but that need for — I want to say translation in the mathematical sense — may be exactly what triggers me to try. That, or a meter.
“The scientific literature today is too vast to translate, or comprehend, or fix.”
@Lameen, it is just not true.
Translating several thousands monographs a year takes (a) several thousands translators (b) several millions dollars.
Tunisia is full of highly qualified jobless people. I think the same is true for Algeria and many other countries.
Pay 4k per a book, then you need 4 times several millions. Pay 1k per a book – and you still will find many people willing to work, because it is still better than what you will have as a school teacher.
The point is that several millions is a small sum. And… it is not “lost”, it supports hungry jobless specialists.
Now journals. If all “worthy” publications are (in the number of pages) more than ten times “several thousand books”, then we translate ten times several thousand books. We translate some worthy journals and not others. If less, then we translate all worthy publications.
What we need now is several times 10 millions.
You can’t be serious. Where do you think these “several millions” are coming from? People with money don’t share your philanthropic views. And nobody gives a damn about hungry jobless specialists except the hungry jobless specialists and their mothers (who do not have millions).
And even if Ulysses manages to be meaningfully translatable, Finnegans Wake almost surely isn’t.
That turns out not to be the case. There are at least 16 complete translations into at least 8 languages, including French (at least two translations), German, Russian, Italian, and Turkish. Here’s a bit of French: “Sir Tristram, violer d’amores, transpirate la mer courte, était passencore réarrivé d’Armorique du Nord sur ce côté de l’isthme efflanqué d’Europe Mineure wieldrefatailler sa guerre pénisolée ; ni ne s’étaient les rochers de topsawyer sur le cours de l’Oconee exaggéré autreux-mêmes aux gorgioses du Comté de Laurens tandis qu’ils allaient doublinnant leur pompe mandite en permernance…”.
The original (3.4-9) reads “Sir Tristram, violer d’amores, fr’over the short sea, had passen-core rearrived from North Armorica on this side the scraggy isthmus of Europe Minor to wielderfight his penisolate war: nor had topsawyer’s rocks by the stream Oconee exaggerated themselse to Laurens County’s gorgios while they went doublin their mumper all the time…”.
@LH, “several million” (sorry for -s) dollars is a small sum. If we are discussing translations at all, then – unless we are discussing people who translate books for free – we assume that someone (a state or a rich guy from a gulf country or…) is funding them.
1. Several million dollars is a very small sum compared to annual educational spendings in Arab countries.
0.3% * “several” for Tunusia (and about the usual annual fluctionation)
less than 0.01% * “several” for the Arab world.
2. Several million dollars is a very small sum compared to what various Arab philanthropes spend on philanthropy. They DO spend a lot of money on this.*
3. It is a tiny sum compared to what countries like Tunisia and Algeria spend on maintaining literary Arabic in their countries. As you know, it has been a priority for local governments.
4. the impact of such a project would be enormous.
* Also I wonder what do you count as “philanthropy”.
I suppose, when Gulf countries fund their universities it is not “philantropy” because you approve this, and when I speak about translations it is “philanthropy” because you don’t.
If they actually start funding translations, you again won’t call it “philanthropy” (as you don’t call so Algerian spendings on promotion of fusha among locals).
“Oxen of the Sun”, have any translators replaced Joyce’s imitation of successive generations of English writers with imitations of their own language’s writers?
Yes. Russian translation by Hinkis and Khoruzhiy does it (I think, by that time it is just Khoruzhiy). Here’s how the translator describes his efforts (DeepL with my assist):
“Most of the prototypes are immediately recognizable, without hesitation; but some are not so obvious, and there are still discrepancies in the lists of specimens in different studies and commentaries (although the total number of specimens is usually 32). The degree and accuracy of adherence to the patterns varies greatly. Joyce took many of them from anthologies, very imperfect from a modern point of view, and in a number of cases his language is disputed. However, these philological subtleties are nothing to the questions and impasses that arise in translating such a text. There is no general principle to choose from – history can only convey history, style and language must change from ancient origins to modern jargon. And, thank God, the history of the Russian literary language, from Kiev and Bulgarian origins to symbolism and jargon of the beginning of the [20th] century (the further does not concern us), by the variety of styles and vocabularies, by the range of changes that took place, can be compared with any of the new languages of Europe. The main problems are as follows: how can their history be mapped, projected onto ours? What “corresponds” to what? Is the modern incomprehensibility the same in the “Tale of Bygone Years” and in what is called “the language of King Alfred and Bishop Aelfric”? Only sometimes there are reliable parallels: say, “Mandeville” – a work from the category well known in Russia as “Physiologists” of Indicopleustes, or the XVIII century, when we did not have, of course, the great school of the novel, but the fabulously expanded (though partly spoiled) language allows us to convey almost anything…. As a general principle (but not without exceptions) the translation tried to maintain the coincidence of centuries, as well as the proportion of archaisms and “obscure” words. But arbitrariness, of course, was inevitable; many layers of language, because of their too specific Russianness or specificity of associations, were excluded – as, for example, local colloquialisms (although Joyce himself, in his youth, translated the Silesian dialect in Hauptmann’s play with the Irish village dialect!) – in short, the presented experience by no means excludes other solutions. Fans of linguistic weightlifting are invited.”
Christopher Culver said: I am completely skeptical that this book can be decently translated as a whole. So much of the basic plot material depends on English puns.
I don’t understand what you mean by plot here; what’s an example?
I’ve seen a translator’s commentary somewhere saying that the eye/I pun was very important in the Cyclops chapter, and didn’t have an equivalent in other languages. But I still wouldn’t count that as a plot point.
You’d think Alice in Wonderland would be a book where the translator absolutely must come up with an equivalent density of puns, and yet one commenter on the Alice thread found it compelling even without them:
Lameen said: Heavy intertextuality is a particular issue there; you can only translate one book at a time, not an entire literature that it’s in dialogue with.
And I’d think it would also be harder to find an audience for Ulysses in a given language without an existing translation of at least Portrait of the Artist, and probably Dubliners. (Are there any other languages where that’s the case? I couldn’t find a list of translations.) But maybe that’s a wrong assumption, since Ulysses is the one with the biggest reputation. Anyway, it’s the one that Nemir is excited enough about to translate, and as languagehat said, that’s not fungible.
Is there a Kurdish translation of the Odyssey? Personally, I don’t think it’s necessary to have read it in full before Ulysses; knowing the plot outline is enough.
Hamlet is also important, and I see from Nemir’s Wikipedia page that he’s already translated that.
J. w . brewer (sic) said: This is just prolegomena for the Kurdish version of Pound’s Cantos
Nemir’s already tackled Pound! From a list of his work at KurdîLit:
Ji Çîn û Maçînê + Hemû Berhemên Helbestî yên T. E. Hulme (From China + The Complete Poetical Works of T. E. Hulme), poetry by Ezra Pound and T. E. Hulme. Bajar Editions, 2005.
kt:
Yes. Compulsory reading to precede Ulysses: Dubliners (though I’m ashamed that I find it tedious going); Portrait (a delight from start to finish); the Odyssey; selections from the book of Genesis; Hamlet. And have Gifford’s annotations handy.
O, and Exodus. And the first few pages of the Laws of Manu.
You’d think Alice in Wonderland would be a book where the translator absolutely must come up with an equivalent density of puns,
I have a Kabyle translation of it; must check…
@LH, “several million” (sorry for -s) dollars is a small sum. If we are discussing translations at all, then – unless we are discussing people who translate books for free – we assume that someone (a state or a rich guy from a gulf country or…) is funding them.
If it’s such a small sum, then just pay it yourself! And if we’re “assuming,” then why stop at funding some translators? Let’s assume world peace and plenty for all.
@LH, several million dollars a year is a small sum for the whole Arab world.
But the whole Arab world isn’t paying it, and they’re not going to pay it. You know that as well as I do.
Sorry if I seem grumpy, but I have little patience for starry-eyed optimism in this not-best-of-all-possible-worlds.
@LH,
Lameen said ‘too vast’.
The sum required for translating 1000 books is 1 million. We can argue about the sum. “Some will work for a smaller sum”, “but the cost of translation as such is not everything”. 1 million or 2 million changes little.
There is an army of young people who graduate from universities in Arab countries and can’t find a normal job. If you’re a Tunisian boy, you can consider working in a hotel. For girls it is worse (in terms of salaries). Some translate, and they are not terribly well paid for this.
Many of them are qualified for such a job.
No, it is not optimism, I just think we should keep the sum in mind when discussing this.
To tell whether such an effort is reasonable you need to know three things:
(a) desirability of the expected effect/change
(b) effectiveness
(c) doability (cost).
If you estimate (c) as “impossible” you are making an arithmetic mistake of enormous magnitude.
In 1968, when I was 20, I read a book comparing translations of Alice in Wonderland. The author noted that the Japanese translation seemed to miss all the puns and wordplay, and concluded that Japanese must have a very different “logic” from Western languages. Years later I realized the much more likely explanation: The translator had no idea what he (?) was doing, having picked up Alice in the belief that a children’s book would be easy for someone without the English to tackle, say, Melville.
Sara Teasdale ? Who she ? <* browses *> Hmm, not bad at all:
In 1968, when I was 20, I read a book comparing translations of Alice in Wonderland.
Perhaps Alice in Many Tongues (1965), which oddly enough doesn’t get a mention in that earlier Alice discussion as an earlier attempt at cataloguing them.
the Japanese translation
There are more translations into Japanese of the Alice works (hundreds) than any other language. In fact, there is a whole book on adaptations (including other media), plus decades of theorizing elsewhere about why this is so, varying from timing of the Meiji Restoration to female social roles.
I remember when the first complete translation of Ulysses into Bulgarian in 2004 was released — Dubliners and Portrait long before.
If you estimate (c) as “impossible” you are making an arithmetic mistake of enormous magnitude.
Nobody’s saying it’s impossible, whatever that means, but if you think it’s going to happen you are making a real-world mistake of enormous magnitude.
“Possession”, ick.
It seems to have been wrong to assume that translators/audiences in general want to have Portrait before Ulysses; it’s hard to tell which is the exception and which the rule, though I still haven’t found a convenient list of translations for either of them.
Some languages where Ulysses was translated earlier: French, Italian, Hungarian, Japanese
Some languages where Portrait was translated earlier: German, Spanish, Danish, Bulgarian (thanks, V)
Additions or corrections?
An interesting thing about Alice in Wonderland is that the jokes are not evenly spread out. Different chapters focus on very different kinds of humor. Puns are only the main focus in the conversation with the gryphon and the mock turtle. (The juxtaposition of those two chimeras is itself a distinct kind of joke, but there doesn’t seem to be a term for it.)
Alice has parodies of now forgotten light verse; do modern translators unearth equivalent forgotten verse to parody?
It’s funny how “Humpty Dumpty” is still a well-known nursery rhyme, but “Tweedledum and Tweedledee” seems to be forgotten except for its inclusion in Through the Looking Glass. Or is that true in Britain too? The Lion and the Unicorn is otherwise unknown in America for obvious reasons, but I have heard suggestions that it is not wholly forgotten in England.
@LH, you remind me a conversation with my friend about textbooks in dialect in Morocco. “Ridiculous”.
@Stu:
Not bad at all. In fact, one’s immediate critical response to the poem is, Too Fucking RIght.
Lover of the also-remarkable Vachel Lindsay. Poets who make you understand why God created Americans (there have been heretical mutterings impugning His omniscience in this matter. I discount them, myself. His ways are not our ways.)
[Also, Nadolig llawen i bawb.]
Lindsay’s star in American poetry has waned for many decades, in spite of whatever kick Dead Poets Society might have given it. But I have seen multiple discussions among American academics to the effect that Vachel Lindsay is now viewed as completely and unacceptably racist, beyond the pale for scholarship.
Congo is (as I have remarked before) a poem that nowadays (maybe always) it is only safe to read with backward mutters of dissevering power; it’s also brilliant.
They’ll be telling us that Ezra Pound was only a doggerel-maker next ….
(I am unfamiliar with this Dead Poets’ Society of which you speak, and plan to remain so. The gruesome words Patch Adams seem to occur in similar contexts.)
When I heard Vysotsky’s own versions of songs for Alice in Wonderland – the audioplay which I will name if anyone asks me what is my favourite musical piece in Russian – I was shocked to find that several of them are based on The Two Guitars, the famous “gypsy” tune (I don’t know how well it is known among English speakers). Someone else* performs most of songs in the disk, and I could not recognise the two guitars even thought words from there are cited.
Only when I heard Vysotsky’s versions of Vysotsky’s songs, they emerged.
the input
the audioplay
*actually the most famous Soviet seiyu:)
Sara T.
I know her There Will Come Soft Rains from Bradbury’s There Will Come Soft Rains where it is read since I was .. I don’t know, first-grader?
It’s a poem I often think (rather than just remember), in Russian. Not because of my hatred to humanity, just because I love the smell of the ground after rain, like everyone.
@David Eddyshaw: There are things to dislike about Dead Poets’ Society, but it is nothing like Patch Adams.
“I am James Joyce. I understand that you are to translate Ulysses, and I have come from Paris to tell you not to alter a single word.”
Alice has parodies of now forgotten light verse; do modern translators unearth equivalent forgotten verse to parody?
The Russian translations I’ve seen had either 1) translated the original verse as an accompaniment, or 2) used non-forgotten verse to make the parody clearer. (I think in a few cases those poems had also since been forgotten.)
Most of the non-Demurova translators went with option 2, but the Demurova translation happens to be by far the most popular. (I do love it for how closely it manages to represent the original, and sometimes I use it as a stand-in for the original when talking about the choices of other translations.)
It might be relevant that AFAICT Carroll did not intend for the parodies to be non-obvious as such; this had only happened due to the passage of time. So it feels natural for the translator to use parodies of known-to-the-readers works instead of random 19th century works [in the Russian case, conveniently, there’s a lot of famous 19th century stuff available – Pushkin and Lermontov in particular – if you’re trying to at least not be anachronistic].
IIRC, in the original, the parodied verse is explicitly called out a few times (either by Alice herself, or as something that Alice messes up), and a few more times Alice mentions that she recognized it as familiar.
“in a few cases those poems….”
Like птичка божия не знает (God’s bird does not know…), the replacement to “how doth the little busy bee.” (not light verse though).
To understand the humour compare GT:
God’s bird doesn’t know / No care, no labor; / Doesn’t
curl[weave] laboriously / Durable nest;In debt the[during the long] night slumbers on a branch; / The red [beautiful] sun will rise, / The bird listens to the voice of God, / He perks up and sings.and “Against Idleness and Mischief”.
The bird verse (also a song!) was so popular in pre-revolutionary Russia that in my childhood I occasionaly encountered references to it… without having a slightest idea of what it is about (apart of Nabokov’s parody). I thought it is a piece of religious propaganda (our spiritual propaganda celebrating Idleness, not an obnoxious Protestant hymn to toil) which of course was replaced in Soviet childhoods by obnoxious Communist hymns to toil. What I did not know up to this moment is that it is a fragment of a famous (really famous) Pushkin’s poem which I think I read:/
Perhaps I just forgot it?
Different chapters focus on very different kinds of humor. Puns are only the main focus in the conversation with the gryphon and the mock turtle.
As I think about it, I seem to remember that it was really the logic jokes that the Japanese translator in question tended to flub. And yes, the book was almost certainly Alice in Many Tongues.
Well, if they explain with different logic the translator’s failure with the logical jokes, that is logical.
(but maybe because of Japanese logic the English reader simply can’t understand translated jokes?)
P.S. Warren Weaver seems to have co-authored “The mathematical theory of communication” (with Shannon). WP: “Ever the scientist, even in the area of literature, Weaver devised a design for evaluating the quality of the various translations, focusing on the nonsense, puns and logical jokes in the Mad Tea-Party scene. His range of contacts provided an impressive if eccentric list of collaborators in the evaluation exercise, including anthropologist Margaret Mead (for the South Pacific Pidgin translation), longtime Jerusalem mayor Teddy Kollek, and Nobel laureate biochemist Hugo Theorell (Swedish). The book Alice in a World of Wonderlands (2015) continues and updates Weaver’s endeavour, analyzing Alice translations in 174 languages in a similar vein.[14]“
@drasvi: Вариации на цыганские темы is my favorite Vysotskiy song. I didn’t know that it was a pre-existing song (although with hindsight, it makes sense) and that a version by Aznavour exists. Thanks for that!
…and all I remembered of that five years later was a vague feeling of doubt. 🙁
@Hans, I’ll correct myself then.
I think this song (indeed very famous) is based more than one “gypsy” tune/song.
I write “gypsy” (quotemarked) because on the one hand numerous “gypsy” romances were written by people who are not gypsies… and on the other hand it went both ways: actual gypsy musicians too could perform such “gypsy” music:) Dmitry Pruss knows more about this.
I compared it to The Two Guitars because it has a similar refrain – and not only refrain, but I think you can compare them on your own – and also Vysotsky recorded a version of The Two Guitars in about the same time (WP: “shortly before”). And also because at least some Westerners know Aznavour’s version. But I suspect this refrain appears in many others songs.
In my head the tune I’m speaking about (in the context of Alice) is “that gypsy tune that V. likes so much”… with due understanding that the tune in question mutates and is slightly different in different songs. When I equated them, I was sloppy of course.
But all the songs seem to me “more than just sharing similar ‘influences'” even if “less then versions of the same thing”.
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Deux_Guitares_(chanson)
https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Моя_цыганская
I think that in AmE, pupil is the right term for someone (of any age) who studies with a private teacher (like a first-grade after-school tutor*), or a semi-private one (like a master class teacher at Juilliard). It’s a rare context, and so the word is rare. Elsewhere, no.
* I am now self-conscious** about hyphens or lack thereof.
** *.
“My name is Masha, I live in Moscow. I’m a disciple.”
“Nice to meet you, Masha. My name is Ahmed, I’m a guru. How are you, Masha?”
“Like shit. You?”
“Me too.”
@Y: Certainly, pupil sounds more natural for that kind of one-on-one teaching than in other situations. However, even there I think it’s still much less common than student in American English.
Y, you need to become unselfconscious. (At the link, Stan Carey may or may not help.)
I have seen multiple discussions among American academics to the effect that Vachel Lindsay is now viewed as completely and unacceptably racist, beyond the pale for scholarship.
I don’t know why a racist poet would be beyond the pale of scholarship. But I wouldn’t perform The Congo to a high-school class (though in fact it’s how I first heard it ca. 1960, in a very white town).
I just read an article in Ha’aretz on a new collection of Hebrew translations of poems by the American Yiddish poet Jacob Glatstein, and on the challenges which the translators (thirteen in all) faced. A commenter on the article writes: “Twenty years ago, on Yom Kippur at a synagogue in Göteborg, I happened to have a long and interesting conversation with a translator about translation. I remember his saying on translating poetry: ‘a translated poem is like a person, if it’s beautiful it’s not faithful; if it’s faithful it’s not beautiful.’”
I don’t know if I categorically agree, and maybe that translator didn’t either, but it’s a cute thing to say.
Now I see that that chestnut is attributed to Edmond Jaloux: “Les traductions sont comme les femmes – Quand elles sont belles, elles ne sont pas fidèles, et quand elles sont fidèles, elles ne sont pas belles.” Ah, those charming sexist poets.
So it doesn’t matter whether any actual readers are going to like the book?
This week, when catching up with the always delightful “Poemas del Rio Wang”, I came across a photo showing the Kurdish “Ulysses” for sale at a book shop in Diyarbakır. So at least one book seller has hopes of selling some copies 🙂
Nomen est enim omen.