Profitless Printing Through the Ages

The Genesee Country Village and Museum is awesome. 

Just putting that out there. 

I finally got to go see the historic village yesterday for the Smithsonian Magazine Museum Day , and I learned so much in three hours about life in the 18th and 19th centuries in Western NY. The most interesting bit to many people (including Mr. C) was the Civil-War-era replica of the Intrepid, a helium balloon used by the army.

The most interesting bit to me was the printing press.

Courtesy of the Genesee Country Village and Museum

Of course it was fascinating: the history of an industry that led to my own career, the typeset itself, kerning...everything. (On a side note: search Google for "kerning" and enjoy. You won't be disappointed.) 

But something the printer said surprised me...and then again, it didn't. He explained that being a printer was a white-collar job, much like a doctor or lawyer of the day. But unlike those other white-collar jobs, there was no profit in printing. A printer did his work out of a sense of duty to his neighbors and fellow townsfolk, to bring them the local, national, and even international news that they would never otherwise receive.

Huh. Sounds a bit like today's publishing and journalism, doesn't it?

Something really cool happened last night.

I showed up to Open Letter's first fall event in their Reading the World Conversation Series (more info about the next free event on Oct. 1 here, if you're in or near Rochester) . Chad Post, Open Letter's director and soccer aficionado, had warned me that his guest, the French author Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès, spoke English fine, but might need a little help.

I hadn't realized that was code for "Allison, you should grab a mic and sit on stage with us to interpret as necessary." 

It's no secret that I will never be a professional interpreter. I'm too much of a perfectionist, and I don't think quickly enough on my feet. Both well-known facts. At least to me. The world at large must have missed that memo. 

Because there I was, sitting on a little elevated platform with a warm, funny, and world-renowned French author, trying to keep up with Chad's rapid-fire English and catch any sudden switches of Jean-Marie's speech from halting English to fluid French, fielding questions from the audience. And none of it was perfect.

But it was good enough. 

It didn't matter that I gave two or three English choices for the one French word Jean-Marie queried me on. It didn't matter that I didn't have more context than "La preuve est...?" because the odds of "preuve" being "proof" were heavily in my favor.  It didn't even matter that I couldn't perform as a professional interpreter would, because in the end, he didn't really need me. I was there as a crutch, a cushion, a smiling safety net. And if that provided enough comfort for him to tell his wonderful stories of falsified biographies, hypocritical publishers, and thinly-veiled dick jokes, then I did my job right.

Still, I'm not ever going to add "interpreting" to my list of professional skills. I have too much respect and awe-filled admiration for interpreters to do that.

Change of Scenery

One common tip for freelancers, translators included, is to get involved in your local community. Nothing beats meeting people in person, putting your name and face out there, whether through business organizations, volunteering, social committees, whatever floats your boat. 

Moving, then, is a blessing and a curse. You have to start again from scratch, but there are so many new opportunities. And as it happens, moving out of a huge city to a more modest one actually works out in your favor. Highly.

In New York City, I got lost in the crowd. Even within the professional translator's association, I was just another face. And so was everyone else. People moved away, got busy, and fell off the face of the earth so often that no real community was ever built. There are too many groups, too many organizations, with thousands of people flowing freely between them.

But now, I have flowed definitively up to Rochester. Out of the big bad metropolis to a smaller city, full of small-town feel and village charm. There are lots of things for a translator to do, but each organization is the only game in town. The Rochester Young Professionals. The New England Translators Association. A strange being called Plüb that has spawned a matching Book Clüb. A university with an MA program in Literary Translation.

And because of these singular organizations, I've practically doubled the number of people and agencies that I work for. Already. I live out in the countryside, for goodness' sakes, and I've met more people -- more of the right people -- in three months here than I did in three years in NYC. This has been a most productive change of scenery.

An apology, an excuse, and a plug

Apology: I'm very sorry the entries have been few and far between recently.

Excuse: I've started grad school. 

Plug: Three Percent.  I've said before that it's quite possibly the best blog in the literary translation industry, and that's still true. Now I have even more of a reason to spread the word. As an MA candidate in Literary Translation Studies at the University of Rochester, I'm a de facto intern at Open Letter.

*swoon*

One of my wildest dreams is coming true.

Forays and Larks in Translation

Or: Oh, how I wish this could work!

There's a French verb, méduser , that means "to astound, to stun, to stupefy." An adjective, médusé , is similarly defined. But if the careful reader looks closely, the root of the word comes from a very well-known Gorgon in Greek mythology with snakes for hair.

So in a recent translation, I drafted the following: 

[He] stood in the narrow path that wound in between books, paintings, and stacks of unknown content, the chaos holding my gaze like Medusa the Gorgon.

It's so fun. I so wish it would work.

It so doesn't. 

All of a sudden, I'm back to writing bad high school poetry. Darn. 

Still, it's fun. Yay, brain exercises! 

Practical Life Lessons

Compiled from the lives of fictitious characters from Allison's current translation projects. (Sometimes, you can learn from other people's mistakes. Even other fake people.) 

Be careful of promising a girl that you'll get her a new kitten exactly like the one she just had to get put down. It could lead to a marriage proposal.

Don't switch clothes with your best friend at age eight. You'll end up in a convent for life. Until she feels bad, comes to rescue you, and then dies after being hit by a cannon that's snapped loose from its ropes on a ship you're not supposed to be on in the first place. Seriously. 

Be wary of women who tell you that you've been brainwashed into forgetting that you were once a wise man atop a camel. She may just be trying to lure you out to the desert in a sandstorm.

If something's too good to be true, it probably is. No, the President cannot sign a decree to turn you into your favorite fictional character. 

Don't throw dead people down a dried-up well. They may not be dead. Also, they have friends. 

BONUS: Never tickle a sleeping dragon. (As the Doctor says, good ol' JK!) 

Selective Writer's Block

Is there such a thing? Because I sure as all heck feel like I have it. 

Yesterday, I blew through translating the end of a chapter in probably around half the time it normally takes me. Smashed my own personal page-to-hour ratio record in the process. No particular reason for working so quickly besides everything just gelling really well.

On the other hand, I haven't written hardly a word of solely my own creation in a couple of weeks. This blog has ground to a halt; a currently in-progress original short story is just sitting there, waiting for inspiration that isn't coming. And I want to pull my hair out. (Maybe not my hair. I love my hair. Maybe a fingernail or two instead.)

A lack of creativity isn't the issue. I've been possibly overly proud of a couple of sentences I've translated, and a number of workarounds to tricky translation problems that I've dreamed up. But I hadn't been able to think up a new blog topic in...(hang on, counting)...sixteen days. Not a ton, but all the same, whoops .

Sigh. 

Granted, I thought August was going to be my month to work up some of my own writing (and finish editing some summer-produced translations), but then a sample popped up for my favorite ladies. And a contest which I just have to enter, if I can track down rights for the story I want to submit. And another sample, upon request, for a publishing house. Those might just be getting in the way. Maybe. Perhaps. A little. Around the edges.

Ever so slightly.

A tad. 

History must not repeat itself. But it is.

I have a new book in the editing phase right now, but that's not important. The story it tells, however, is extremely important.

Once upon a time, there was a Jewish girl born in Erfurt, Germany. When she was five years old, her family decided to flee to Belgium, because they thought it would be far enough. They had family there. Later, they were all forced into refugee camps in the south of France. The family was separated, reunited, separated, and reunited again. And then the roundups came in Nice. A police officer who knew they were sending the Jews to their deaths gave any parents a choice: leave your children here, and an NGO will come to pick them up. They'll have one more chance at survival. This girl was left behind with her younger brother. She never heard from her parents again. 

The children managed to get to an Italian relative, a high-ranking diplomat who was secretly brokering the armistice between Italy and the Allied forces in neutral Vatican City. When news of the armistice broke early, the children were forced to flee into a remote Ligurian village with the diplomat's butler. They spent the final two years of World War Two sheltered there by Italian Catholics through countless raids by and firefights with German soldiers. And they survived. 

After the war, the girl, now a teenager, moved to Paris. 

She still lives there today. 

And I got to meet her. 

This was a difficult and perplexing meeting for me. I'm a young woman from the United States. That war was not on our soil. (We haven't had one on our soil since...a long long time ago in a seceding country not so far away.) My grandparents were too young to enlist; my great-grandparents were too old. I've never had a one-on-one conversation with a veteran, let alone a survivor of the Holocaust.

And yet, I had been writing this woman's story, in her voice, for three months before meeting her. What other questions could I ask? I didn't have many left, so I just let her talk.  And I learned more.

This woman lost everything in her life, multiple times. Her home, her parents, then her life's work in middle age. Her best human and non-human friends in the same week, just last year. She is saddened and burdened by all of this, yet she keeps living. She speaks no words about the unfairness of life, she does not complain about how hard it all is. There is just a moment of silence and reflection to accept such things, and then life continues. She is quite the formidable force.  A force of normalcy.

And yet her heart aches, because the world is not changing. It is not learning from her story, nor from the millions of others like it. Hitler and the Nazis killed Jews, and cripples, and gypsies, and homosexuals. Anyone who wasn't like him. But that same thing kept happening. And is still happening, in Syria, in Africa. 

These stories must be told, loud and clear and over and over again, until such things, such atrocities, stop happening. 

So I will be a storyteller. Otherwise, I just feel helpless. 

Networking Works

It also nets you profit. (Sorry. Couldn't resist. Anyway. Back to serious business.)

The Internet is a wonderful tool for freelancers. You can find and court new clients, work jobs, get paid, and talk about everything, all without leaving your desk.

But in the era of email, Facebook, Skype conferences, webinars, Twitter, scans, texting, all the connections you could possibly ask for...one is missing. One connection, the face-to-face human connection. It gets lost in the ease of doing business. And it's a shame, really.

I took a trip to NYC last week to reconnect with old and make new contacts, but the most important part of the trip was the the five different meetings I had with colleagues I've already been working with for months, or even years, solely through email. Maybe the occasional phone call, if we're lucky. And it's so hard to read emotion and personality via email.

For all the work I've done with these people -- a project manager, a publicist, even my editor -- I didn't really know anything about them. Not how they smile, not even how they speak. And it's hard to feel secure in a business relationship without that personal connection. It's hard to trust someone's judgement with your creations if you can't look them in the eye when asking questions. 

After meeting in person, that trust builds up the other way, too. Five wonderful meetings later, I got numerous offers of "how can I help you as we move forward?" or "here's a good editor, should I pass your name along?" or "you are on our list for this type of job, right? no? I'm putting you on." So much future potential from the people I was already working with, just because we finally got to look one another in the eye and have a lovely conversation over a cup of tea or a glass of lemonade. (It was hot last week.)

So yes. Do it. Try to meet everyone you work with in person, at least once. Set up a meeting if you pass through their city. Go out of your way to end up in their city, if you must. It'll be worth it. 

In Which My Favorite Magazine Perpetuates a Terrible Stereotype

The debate is still raging over how best to review literature in translation (see this Words Without Borders collection for a primer), and the struggle continues to even get it reviewed in the first place. In the meantime, though, everyone seems to have agreed on one thing:

Good translations don't read like translations.

The highest praise you can give a translation right now, if you don't read the source language, is that reading it feels like you're reading something in English (or whatever language it's been translated into), not an awkward, grammatically-identical rendering of the original language.

This stereotype, this easy criticism, that translations generally read badly in the target language, is one of the main reasons that mainstream publishers are so hesitant, even averse, to publishing works in translation. It's an opinion that we're trying to get changed.

So I suppose I was surprised, as I reached the April 1st issue from my backlog of The New Yorker magazines, to read the Shouts and Murmurs humor/satire column, Gavin Shulman's "Taxicab Conversation," subtitled, "The important call that every New York City cabdriver is on: a translation." It begins:

Driver: Hello.
Caller: Hello. What is up? 

Oh dear. Please, don't tell me. By writing "What is up?" instead of "What's up?" or "How're you doing?" or even "How are you?," this is automatically a translation. Right?

Maybe that's how your stereotypical cabdriver, who speaks English as a second or third or fourth language, might speak in English. But even if their native language's greeting translates directly into "What is up?," without any conjunctions, no translator in their right mind would render any character using such stilted phrases in their native language. Now, this is either trying to poke fun at non-native speakers' broken English, or it's showing a "normal" translation. A bad translation.

But weirdly, the piece is not completely free of conjunctions. Both the caller and the driver occasionally use them. And the writing isn't completely littered with awkward phrasing. This exchange is rather natural:

Caller: Are you listening to music?
Driver: Yes. The prayer mix you made me. Everyone loves it.
Caller: Good.

Instead of saying something stereotypically awkward, like "Yes. I am listening to the prayer mix that you made for me," the driver sounds more conversational here. Still, with the amount of "That is good"s and "You are right"s and "Is the city very pretty?"s, the reader can't help but be biased towards negativity.

Let's take a step back, though. The New Yorker is known for its remarkably finicky and stringent rules of style. For comparison, then, here are excerpts from three other recent Shouts and Murmurs columns.

"Apologies," by Cora Frazier, 4/22/2013:

I know I shouldn't have pointed at you from across the room, saying, "Isn't that guy hot?," ignoring the instructions of my teacher, Jason. (I'm sorry, Jason. You make it burn, and I love you.)

"Most Gwyneth!," by Paul Rudnick, 5/13/2013:

I ran to my therapist, and I begged her, "Can I really have it all? Most Beautiful and Most Hated?" She paused and then said, "You know, I've treated Jennifer Lopez, John Mayer, and the entire Kardashian family, along with a supermodel who refers to overweight people as sofas. So I know what you're up against."

"J-Day," by Yoni Brenner, 5/6/2013: 

Hitler: Is there no way to suppress it?
Göring (shaking his head): I’m afraid not. It’s just too catchy. We’ve had reports of humming and unsanctioned falsetto singing along the front lines, from Finland to North Africa.
Jodl: To be honest, if I were alone I’d probably be humming it right now.
(Suddenly, Hitler has an epiphany.)
Hitler: I’ve got it: we’ll kidnap him!

All perfectly conversational, while still retaining enough readability and stylistic clarity to be published in The New Yorker. Thus, Shulman's cabdriver really is the outlier.

But it gets worse. "J-Day" sets its scene in Germany, 1942, with Generals Göring, Himmler, and Jodl. A note mentions the following: "In keeping with Nazi protocol, they speak in sinister, heavily accented English."

So. Fictionalized, satirized German generals are speaking English as a second language with grace and fluidity, even as they retain a higher tonal register (e.g. "unsanctioned falsetto"). A month earlier, in the same column of the same magazine, a fictitious, satirized cabdriver speaks English as a second language in fits and starts, haltingly. Exactly as the general public incorrectly expects translations to read.

Or perhaps I'm just paranoid.

But most people wouldn't give that much thought to the matter. Readers of The New Yorker are, by in large, highly intelligent and widely educated, but the stereotype of bad translations is too prevalent. Highly intelligent people who aren't involved in the translation industry are apt to miss that part of the satire, the part where it makes fun of how translations are viewed. Because that's just how everyone knows them.

Maybe it's even worse. Maybe I'm even more paranoid. Mr. Shulman may not have even been trying to inject satire into those two words: "a translation."