Pub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/07374836.2023.2179314
A. Levinson-LaBrosse
The modes of creation and preservation of nineteenth-century Kurdish poetry reveal the fallacy and short-sightedness of the definitive and the singular. No text is static. Each text is many. Each text contains and requires communities. I have come to think of this as a terrific metaphor for the subtle truth of all text, even where a poet’s handwriting exists, and contemporary readers contend that they can verify the poet’s intent. If as translators, we treat each text, no matter its point of origin or host language, as dynamic rather than static, we humble ourselves about any one translation we may make. We open ourselves and our translations up to the strengths and contributions of others. Co-translation can continue becoming a practice born not of what we lack, but of what we are curious we can make when a translation begins in multiple perspectives. We help ourselves and our readers remember why the proliferation of translations for any one text remains continually necessary and exciting. Translators—all readers—can let go of the definitive in favor of the iterative, even infinite, process that is understanding. Over the last ten years, more than forty cotranslators and I have published over sixty poems, short stories, interviews, and book-length collections of Kurdish literature in English-language translation. Many of the authors we worked with had never before been translated into English. We collaborated because we both wanted and needed to work together: poetry—and all Kurdish literature, from horoscopes to theology, was poetry until the early twentieth century—demanded translators of various specialties working together. A single poem often included up to four languages (Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Kurdish), with at least three different dialects of Kurdish (Kurmanji, Sorani, and Gorani) that have since diverged into distinct, at times mutually unintelligible, entities. Beyond that, these historical poets grew up in the Islamic educational system (at the time, the only one), so they drew heavily on the Islamic sciences, Islamic numerology, and nowobscure theology. To even begin to understand these poems was already a process of translation that took place between Kurdish speakers who had grown up in various dialects, with varying levels of Islamic education and varying understandings of the Kurdish, Arabic, Persian, and Turkish literary traditions. To bring these poems into English was yet another translation. And that specific act of translation, from Kurdish to English, even now has very few dictionaries or thesauruses. Each word we couldn’t find in a dictionary required we create a community that could agree on its meaning/s. For each poem, we built out an individuated glossary and integrated comments from multiple expert readers. Community was where we began. Community was where any attempt at translation had to begin. Each translation team thought through how much cultural translation they wanted to do, how many references they fo
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Pub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/07374836.2023.2179295
E. Fishman
David was sitting in the corner of our small classroom library when Isabel called him over to her small group. “David, we need you! In Guatemalan Spanish, what does ‘miran’ mean?” David sat down and quietly talked with the group as they worked on a translation of Rosa Chávez’s poem “Ri Ti’ Tuj / La Abuela de Temescal.” I overheard snatches of conversation about syntactical differences in Spanish and English. “We have to change the word order when we translate,” Isabel explained to Victor, another member of the group. Three of the four students in the group were heritage Spanish speakers, with a multitude of relationships to the language; their families were from El Salvador, the Dominican Republic, and Guatemala. For this poem, David was the expert. A few minutes later, he tried to leave again, but the group called him back with a question: “What do you think would match more here for ‘visitarnos’? Visit us, or we visited?” When I consider the idea of translation as community, I think of this moment in my fifthand sixthgrade classroom. In this conversation between students, there were also the echoes of many other voices, both heard and unheard. To begin, there were the words of Rosa Chávez herself:
大卫坐在我们小教室图书馆的角落里，伊莎贝尔把他叫到她的小组里。“大卫，我们需要你！在危地马拉西班牙语中，‘miran’是什么意思？”大卫坐下来，与团队安静地交谈，他们正在翻译罗莎·查韦斯的诗歌《Ri Ti'Tuj/La Abuela de Temescal》。我无意中听到了一些关于西班牙语和英语句法差异的对话片段。“我们在翻译时必须改变语序，”伊莎贝尔向小组的另一名成员维克多解释道。小组中的四名学生中有三名是传统的西班牙语使用者，与西班牙语有着多种关系；他们的家人来自萨尔瓦多、多米尼加共和国和危地马拉。大卫是这首诗的专家。几分钟后，他试图再次离开，但小组给他回了电话，问他一个问题：“你认为什么更适合这里的‘访问者’？访问我们，还是我们访问过？”当我把翻译视为社区的想法时，我想到了在我五、六年级教室里的这一刻。在学生之间的这段对话中，也有许多其他声音的回声，无论是听到的还是闻所未闻的。首先，罗莎·查韦斯自己说过：
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Pub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/07374836.2023.2179290
Shene Mohammed
Alana Marie Levinson-LaBrosse and I have worked together for more than eight years translating Sorani Kurdish poets of the eighteen hundreds. We’ve experimented with poets, approaches to translations, and readings of literary works. The pedagogical effects of co-translation over the years created gradual, significant changes in my learning; it gave me a formative education in literature and literary translation. This project informed my knowledge of how language interacts in the Kurdish regions of Iraq and what these interactions create. The educational system of the eighteen hundreds being Arabic and religious, the literary influence traveling in all directions across Arabic, Turkish, Persian, and all the dialects and sub-dialects in between, built a very complex creative impetus for the poetry at the time that was unrestricted in literary influence and restricted in language and form. By reading these poems, we asked ourselves what kind of restrictions the writers placed upon themselves and whether to follow or defy those restrictions. When texts create an interactive world like this, they are open to new and changing interpretations as well as translations. The relationship Alana and I have built together working with these texts is constantly redefining the collaborative nature inherent in the literature and the educational nature inherent in co-translation. Translating alone is often a silent practice, at least for the beginning stages of translation. But the one clear distinction in our work together is that it starts with talking, and discussion is the main drive. Speaking in English starts the translation process, and it’s the act of speaking that not only amplifies the experience but also makes it educational. Hearing our minds while thinking, hearing thoughts formulate readings, transforms the drift of ideas in a mental effort into an embodied practice. We speak about the experience and at the same time experience the speaking. Sound is an essential device in the form and meaning of the poems we’re translating. We read the poems to each other and listen to our impressions on what the sounds are doing in each language. We transfer the sound from the text into the narrative of our discussions to assess how it travels back to us, in sensations and in images. In one instance of translating Nali, an eighteenth-century poet, when discussing a poem dedicated to his “room,” it became very clear that the contrast between the sound of words and the overall tone of the poem that Nali creates is at the core of understanding and recreating the poem. The original Arabic title hujra signifies a space, but its purpose varies from one region to another. This room was given to poets for spiritual practice and religious education and became a permanent space for their teachings, reflections, and writings, an intimate space that was solitary and communal at the same time depending on the hour of the day. Sometimes, in the poets’ home cities, the rooms beca
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Pub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/07374836.2023.2179823
Hong Diao
{"title":"A Literary Translation in the Making: A Process-Oriented Perspective","authors":"Hong Diao","doi":"10.1080/07374836.2023.2179823","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/07374836.2023.2179823","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42066,"journal":{"name":"TRANSLATION REVIEW","volume":"115 1","pages":"51 - 53"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43808510","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/07374836.2023.2179298
F. Gander, Shook, A. Levinson-LaBrosse
{"title":"A Conversation Between Forrest Gander, Shook, and Alana Marie Levinson-Labrosse on Translation, Art, and Communit(ies)","authors":"F. Gander, Shook, A. Levinson-LaBrosse","doi":"10.1080/07374836.2023.2179298","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/07374836.2023.2179298","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42066,"journal":{"name":"TRANSLATION REVIEW","volume":"115 1","pages":"13 - 17"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45598055","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/07374836.2023.2179794
Clare Sullivan
Natalia Toledo writes poetry in Isthmus Zapotec, a language spoken in Mexico’s Oaxacan Peninsula that belongs to the Otomanguean family. She has published five volumes of bilingual poetry (Zapotec-Spanish), and her verses have been translated into languages as varied as German, Slovenian, and Chinese. Like many poets who write in the indigenous languages of Mexico, she translates her own writing into Spanish. The vast majority of indigenous poets are their own translators because no professional cohort exists to provide such services. Mexico in particular, with more than sixty languages, each with its own variants, has no infrastructure to translate texts for educational or artistic purposes. Thus, poets who write in originary languages must often translate themselves if they want to be read beyond their own language. Toledo has sometimes created the Spanish text first or even written both at the same time. (When translating into Spanish, she often replaces Zapotec words with Nahuatl because this language, with many more speakers, has permeated Mexican Spanish.) This creation process undermines fixed notions of an original text, because the poems are in flux as the author works back and forth between Zapotec and Spanish. In her book Literary Translation and the Making of Originals, Karen Emmerich explains that, given the many iterations any work undergoes via edition and translation, there really is no such thing as an original text. She proposes that we “replace an outdated understanding of translation as a transfer or transmission of some semantic invariant with a more reasonable understanding of translation as a further textual extension of an already unstable literary work.” In this way, she frees translation from the limiting idea of one text/ one author/one translator and recognizes the process of creation and recreation that actually takes place. Working with the bilingual poetry of Natalia Toledo provides an example of this dynamic and varied process.
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