Frustrations

At the recent ALTA conference, many people were griping about rights. And it makes sense. It can be the hardest part about being a literary translator. Trying to work through the system to find out if anyone is allowed to translate this story, let alone if you personally can get permission. One publisher talked about their encyclopedia-esque phone book of foreign rights departments, full of tiny, out-dated information that you could only read with a magnifying glass. Another publisher said that tracking down proper rights was akin to (pardon our language) a "f***ing goat rodeo." Apt.

So, I suppose it really shouldn't be surprising that two months after first reaching out to a small French publishing house, after filling out their website's contact page and emailing their general address and emailing their rights address and sending their foreign rights manager a message through LinkedIn, I still haven't heard a thing. I'll be calling them today.

If there's still no response, well, I'll be in France early next year. Maybe I should just go knock on their door.

I'm blogging today, just not here...

I'm here! Lisa Carter over at Intralingo was wonderful enough to invite me to guest post about my experience at ALTA. It's a different and expanded take from what I wrote here last week, and her blog is just marvelous, anyway. Get thee hence!

How Do I Procrastinate?

Let me count the ways...

1. Reading the New Yorker.
2. Facebook.
3. RSS blog feed.
4. Funny things on the Internet.
5. The Internet. Period.
6. Singing along to the radio.
7. Staring at a blank Word document.
8. Staring at a French document I'm supposed to be translating.
9. Reading all the novels I'm currently enthralled in.
10. Eating yogurt and kettlecorn and fruit and hopefully not too many Reese's.
11. Composing a blog post.

How do I deal with procrastination, let me count the ways:

1. Standing up and stretching.
2. Shutting down the Internet.
3. Going for a quick walk.
4. Making a to-do list to cross things off of.
5. Feeling guilty that I'm not working.
6. Doing laundry.
7. Spreading out my workweek to fewer daytime hours, more evening and weekend hours. (It still averages 40-45 hours/week, or more.)
8. Picking one of those long-term business tasks to work on (mostly marketing and grant applications).
9. Composing a blog post.

Good. Now it's time for a walk.

Everyone Is Just Like You – A Report from the 2012 Annual Conference of ALTA

I’m showing my age, and not in the way it’s normally meant. Lunch on Saturday, with a group of literary translators, was punctuated by that song from Barney and Friends: “You are special! Special! Everyone is special, everyone in his or her own way!” (Yes, the exclamation points belong there. Kids’ songs buzz with energy.)

But one thing I learned at the American Literary Translators Association conference, to my delighted relief, was that everyone is not, in fact special and individual and completely different from everyone else. Everyone is, in fact, just like you. Everyone thinks just like you. Everyone has the same fears, the same dreams, the same uncertainties, the same wishes.

• Everyone wants to be published and widely read.
• Everyone wants to get paid for their work.
• Everyone dreams of having the latter two wishes intersect in every job.
• Everyone has had to deal with that editor who insisted on a long-winded, frankly boring introduction.
• In a bookstore, everyone bemoans a lack of money for books. And then buys books anyway.
• While dealing with a particularly tricky passage, everyone has been smothered by the sense that they can’t translate, can’t speak French, can’t even speak English properly.
• Everyone struggles with procrastination, or not dedicating enough time to their passions, or the overwhelming guilt when procrastinating gets in the way of passion.

So yes, everyone is just like you. At least among literary translators, that is.

Happy International Translators Day!

From Saint Jerome to Chris Durban and all translators in between, thanks for everything you do to bridge cultural gaps, further our noble profession, and bring the corners of the globe a little closer together. (No corners on a round object, I KNOW. Just go with it. It's poetic.)

Behind the Scenes of Walking the Walk

Setting:  Doing a translation of a French cantata libretto for a chorus' December concert, for program insert and possible supertitles.

What they see:

After a conversation in which I try convince them that a more complex (read: not as literal) translation is preferable, citing poetic flow and the like, I offer to do a sample of the well-known lullaby-like section to prove my point, that the rhyme scheme can kept intact without sounding forced.

They receive the sample shortly thereafter, and see that yes, indeed, the rhyme scheme makes it easier to read, without sounding disjointed.

What actually happens between the two events:

Oh FRACK rhyming is hard, I mean I knew this already but it's still hard, where's that rhyming dictionary gone to, oh FINE now which of these rhyming websites works best, WHY isn't there a rhyme for "angel" besides "archangel" because that just defeats the purpose, this doesn't make any sense anymore, I've completely lost the original meaning, well crap, start over, okay, now here's a list of all the words that could possibly be at the end of this line so do ANY of them match up with ANY other words that could possible be at the end of the NEXT line? no? okay, square one, right then, time to MAKE UP WORDS, English is stupid anyway, it's so freaking hard to rhyme in English, I mean, mother and father are fine feminine rhymes but that sounds so WEAK and the original libretto is so simple here so why is it so HARD in another language? oh right. translation. hard. fun, yes? fun? I guess, sometimes, maybe, so wait, can you make "lowly" rhyme with "woe" and "grow," maybe if it's at the end of the first line which runs into the second so you can fudge a bit and say that the second syllable really belongs to the second line not the first because that obviously makes TOTAL SENSE (sarcasm) (but maybe not, because Shakespeare did that, or did he only do that with different words of the same sentence, not different syllables of the same word) oooooh, hey, "abhorred" is a good word, but maybe it doesn't work in context, maybe it's too complex of a word, but WHY is it too complex? the "b" next to the "h" is unusual? it doesn't look English? or just that no one uses it ever, even though it's only two syllables, so maybe it's not that complex after all...hmm, I wish I knew more about linguistics, because there must be a way to quantify if a word is complex or not, and I wonder how many variables there would be, and if they take its usage in common speech into account -- STOPIT. you're rhyming, not leading a research on word complexity, you chose THIS field, not computational linguistics. okay. translation. ooooh, "Lord" rhymes with "sword," and "abhorred" actually DOES work in context, this could be kinda cool.........

That happens.

On a loop.

For three days straight.

I love my job. :-)

Pirates!

Pirates are infinitely more interesting than common sailors. Society supports this as fact. We have "Talk Like a Pirate Day" (last Wednesday, for those playing at home), not "Talk Like a Sailor Day."

Random?

Not really. You see, I'm doing research on 18th century nautical terms, in both French and English. There are a few glossaries and dictionaries out there, as well as meticulously labeled diagrams, but it's easier to learn and understand the terms in a context.

Looking for such historical context, one can turn to a few different places. Textbooks (can be dull), ship's logs from the era and other primary sources (excellent, but the old-style spelling can be hard to wade through), or historical fiction and non-fiction stories. Interest-peaking AND historically accurate!

After all, pirates sailed on the same ships as everyone else.

Real Life Gets in the Way

It does. It's not "if," it's "when." Life interferes with EVERYTHING from time to time.

For example, I was planning on writing so many things on this blog for the past month. And then we had to move, kind of suddenly, to a temporary apartment on the third floor of a friend's parents' house in the suburbs, and the two-day move stretched into five days, and Mr. S got an interview in Rhode Island, and Labor Day weekend family visits happened, and now here we are, just over two weeks from the ALTA Conference in Rochester, and I've just finished my to-do list to prepare for the conference, and we're trying to figure out which boxes we should be unpacking so we can actually live a normal life and which we should just leave in storage. And yet, through all of that, I've been working. I've taken my paying jobs, and I've done some volunteer work for my favorite NGO in Switzerland, and I've even started a new pet project (it's a French comic book about an awesome cross-dressing heroine who can win knife and gun fights on a merchant ship in the late 18th century, thank you for asking). The conference is coming up so quickly, and I'm so excited about it -- I've even got a meeting lined up with the adviser for the University of Rochester's MA in Literary Translation program, which may be my next destination.

Life gets in the way, and pushes you forward at the same time. But only if you work at it.

Things I've Learned: Ask the questions that need asking

This starts with the contract. So many questions that you'll have along the way can be answered while discussing the contract. Feel free to start with the offered contract, or with the PEN model contract, and work from there. Figure out WHY things are done the way they are. For example, if your contract is a work for hire contract, that actually means that you'll most likely have little to no say in the editing process, for better or for worse. But ask up front. "How involved will I be expected and allowed to be in the editing process?" Will I ever see my translation between the final draft and the published book?

Another thing: payment. Maybe you're going to get paid upon final delivery. Great. But is that payable on receipt? Is it Net 30? You'll feel better if you know when your money is coming in, and if you know it sooner rather than later.

Next, before you even start translating, talk to the editor. After you've read the book send her/him a list of stylistic questions. "How do you want me to handle the historical present tense?" "How much slang are you comfortable with this character using in English? There are equivalents to XYZ in the original."

Just ask. Ask your editor, the admin assistant, anyone who's involved. Don't be afraid of asking stupid questions, because chances are, they'll all be important at some point.

P.S. This was a tough love letter to myself. Dear Allison, I'm writing to you. Fix your mistakes. Learn from them. Do better next time. I know you can.

Into the Woods

I'm a winner!! Last night, I won tickets to Shakespeare (actually, Sondheim) in the Park's production of "Into the Woods", a musical that I have loved since high school. It's a mash-up of fairytales, and what happens after they live happily ever after. I was the one, in grade school, that was already writing a script for what I called "Pocahontas 2: The Search for Flit," and a version of Little Red Riding Hood where the Narrator gets involved. Sondheim's musical is one that I was destined to love.

This particular production, originally staged at the Regent's Park Open Air Theatre in London, struck two amazing balances, very important for a restaging of a beloved show. First, the directors found a way to both remain faithful to the original production and find intriguing new innovations. To my ear, one which memorized the original score, nothing in the show was changed, yet they made the Narrator a little boy playing with his toys in the forest instead of an old man watching over his characters. This made for a very interesting twist in the second act when the characters start fighting with the narrator...which I won't spoil.

Another balance, one that the Public Theater seems to hit in many of their summer shows, is in the casting. Theatre nerds were titillated about Donna Murphy as the Witch, and giddy about Chip Zien as the Mysterious Man. Mr. Zien played the Baker in the original production, and his distinctive voice has been etched onto the collective theatre hivemind as that role. But the Baker and the Mysterious Man sing a duet near the end of the show, and to hear Mr. Zien in the other role, that was pure magic.

But fear not, those with other interests! Surely, you've seen a movie recently. Thus, presented for our pleasure, was Amy Adams, of Enchanted and The Fighter and Julie and Julia fame, as the Baker's Wife.

Oh, Public Theater, how well you have achieved what translators aspire to every day! A brilliant balance between fidelity and finding your own voice, a way to simultaneously appeal to the experts and the masses. Thanks for the showing us how possible it is.