First day of classes

We started classes on Tuesday, May 27th.

We are taking Creative Writing (in English) with Professor Rufo Quintavalle, and Translation of Classics (en français) with Professor Hédi Kaddour.

I think they’ll both be useful for us as translators– because we are writing as well as expressing the message of the author.

Prof. Quintavalle gave us two quotes to ponder about writing, the other day.

“The fiction I’m most interested in has lines of reference to the real world. None of my stories really happened, of course. But there’s always something, some element, something said to me or that I witnessed, that may be the starting place. Here’s an example: ‘That’s the last Christmas you’ll ever ruin for us!’ I was drunk when I heard that, but I remembered it. And later, much later, when I was sober using only that one line and other things I imagined, imagined so accurately that they could have happened, I made a story—‘A Serious Talk.’”
– Raymond Carver

“The artist uses his reason to discover an answering reason in everything he sees. For him, to be reasonable is to find, in the object, in the situation, in the sequence, the spirit which makes it itself. This is not an easy or simple thing to do. It is to intrude upon the timeless, and that is only done by the violence of a single-minded respect for the truth.

It follows from all this that there is no technique that can be discovered and applied to make it possible for one to write. If you go to a school where there are classes in writing, these classes should not be to teach you how to write, but to teach you the limits and possibilities of words and the respect due to them. One thing that is always with the writer– no matter how long he has written or how good he is– is the continuing process of learning how to write.”
– Flannery O’Connor

Weekend in Lyon

The weekend of May 23rd, we went to Lyon to attend a seminar at the Villa Gillet and the Assises Internationales du Roman (AIR).

The city of Lyon was beautiful, sunny, and warm. A vacation within a vacation, compared to the grey of Paris. Old Lyon is filled with cobblestone streets and alleys, twisting and winding along, up and down the valley that the city is within. We were staying in a lovely hotel– it had exposed wooden beams in the ceilings of the rooms, fireplaces, rough stone walls in the passageways as well as modern amenities.

When we arrived, we went to the Villa Gillet, an old nobleman’s mansion and property that is now used for cultural events. It had a view from up on the hill looking out over Lyon, that we could see from the room where we had our seminar. It was taught by Professor Patrick McGuinness. He is currently a professor at Oxford, and had recently published a novel, titled “The Last Hundred Days”. He was also participating in the Assises because his novel had been translated into French. We had a great seminar, discussing translation with him, and we wished that we could take his class at Oxford!

We went to a number of the panels at the Assises:

Les jeunes romanciers face à la guerre with Delphine Coulin, Paolo Giordano, and Kevin Powers.

Comment redonner vie à une époque? with Ali Bader, Charles Lewinksy, and Chantal Thomas.

La littérature a-t-elle encore un rôle politique? with Martín Caparrós, Christos Chryssopoulos, Boubacar Boris Diop, and Patrick McGuinness.

All of the authors were available to speak with the audience afterwards in the tent where they were selling their books. I especially enjoyed speaking with Kevin Powers. I hadn’t heard of him or his book, but he has written a best seller called “The Yellow Birds” about the war in Iraq and it’s going to be made into a movie. He was really down to earth, and having been through the experiences that he was writing about, it sounded like his book was really authentic. When I get back to the U.S., I’m planning on reading it.

We also got to spend more time with Patrick McGuinness throughout the weekend, and it was interesting hearing him speak in the panel as well as in person.

On Sunday, we were sad to leave when we took the train back to Paris. Until next time, Lyon!

The Villa Gillet

The city of Lyon

Translation Slam

I attended the Translation Slam on May 2nd, which was an event during the PEN World Voices Festival at The Public Theater on Lafayette Street. Our advisor Emmanuelle Ertel had been asked to participate, as well as a student at Columbia University whose teacher is also our teacher (Alyson Waters) for our Translation Workshop this semester. It wasn’t supposed to be a competition (like the title suggests), but more of a comparison and discussion of two translator’s work on the same piece.
The author, Todd Colby, read his work first: “How to Look Like Everything is Okay in Photographs”. Then Baba Badji (the student from Columbia University) read his translation of it from English into French, and Emmanuelle Ertel read hers last.
Here are some differences that I found interesting between the two translations:
– Baba’s title was “Comment feindre le bien-être en photographie” and Emmanuelle’s was “Comment prétendre que tout va bien dans une photographie”
– They translated your house as « ta maison » (Baba), and « ta demeure » (Emmanuelle). Emmanuelle managed to create an internal rhyme with hers, but Baba stuck with the simple and general word.
– Colby had a term that he created, no fuck zone. Baba translated it as “zone sans baise” and Emmanuelle chose “zone hors sexe”.
– Colby had a unique description of plush degenerative offal gush. Baba translated it as “un somptueux odeur de déluges” and Emmanuelle wrote « le flot feutré d’ordures en décomposition ».
– Colby had written to discover someone is looking back at you from the adjoining building. Baba wrote as “découvrir que quelqu’un te regarde, toi, de l’immeuble voisin” and Emmanuelle translated it as « t’apercevoir que quelqu’un te renvoies ton regard de l’immeuble voisin ».
– And for the last line, they both translated it in the same way. When you ate your breakfast this morning did you think of me? Quand tu as pris ton petit-déjeuner ce matin, as-tu pensé à moi?
There was also a translation of a piece from Danish into English- and while I don’t understand Danish, it was interesting to see the differences between the English translations. The whole event was also videotaped, and you can watch it here.

L’altérité incluse, imagination, et hospitalité or The imagination, hospitality, and the otherness within by Marielle Macé

Dr. Marielle Macé is a visiting professor at NYU this semester. Elly and I are taking her class entitled “Techniques du Vertige” for our elective.

At her lecture at La Maison Française, she was introduced with a quote taken from an interview. She was interviewed by Jean Birnbaum of Le Monde in 2011. If you google Macé’s name, the following quote appears: “n’ayez pas peur de vous laisser dominer par la littérature”. Don’t be afraid to let yourself be dominated by literature. This describes her enthusiasm about her work and her fearlessness to take on literary challenges.

François Rabelais into German

I attended a lecture at Barnard College this past Wednesday evening, entitled “La traduction comme expérimentation: Johann Fischart et François Rabelais” about the first German translator of François Rabelais. Elsa Kammerer, an assistant professor at the Université de Lille 3, presented the lecture.

To start with, the translation into German was much longer that the French original. German grammar and syntax is even more complex than French, and this added some of the length.

Some of the additional words and sentences came from explanations. Fischart wanted to express certain situations and feelings to the German reader that he thought needed to be amplified or exaggerated.

There is a paragraph where Rabelais says that the best meat comes from Bayonne, and Fischart argues with him, saying that it comes from Westphalia– but he argues for several pages more than the original paragraph.

In German the title is much longer because, again, Fischart wanted to add even more details in the subtitle.

Also, the style that Rabelais wrote in was new for the times and very different from that of his contemporaries. Fischart decided to take on the work of translating this new style because he wanted to show off his own writing style and be able to do what he wanted with all of the linguistic and stylistic capacities of German. So in a way, Fischart was using Rabelais as a jumping point for his own for experimental writing.

This German translation wasn’t particularly popular. It was published right after the Thirty Years’ War and wasn’t well-received by the public. Like Rabelais’ work, Fischart’s translation was rediscovered by the Romantics.

German translators didn’t really look to Fischart, they actually branched away from his style of translation. He is seen as an untranslatable translator.

Unfortunately I don’t speak German (maybe I’ll learn it sometime in the future), so I only understood about half of the lecture. But it was really intriguing to see what common issues are with French to German translation. From English to French works expand, but from French to German they become even longer!

Rendez-vous with French Cinema

From March 6th- 16th in New York City, the Lincoln Center has run a French Film series of great films from 2013 and 2014. Yareli Servin and I were trying to see a bunch of the films, but they all sold out rather quickly, so we were only able to see one of the films that we had wanted to see. We saw “Tip Top” (the same title in English and French). I thought it was a hilarious, ridiculous, and intriguing film. It didn’t do so well in reviews, but I think it deserved more credit. After the film, we got to speak with the director who came to the movie showing!

Serge Bozon was the director, as well as one of the screenwriters for the film. He was dressed in a tan suit with a red plaid tie and a green shirt- very desert Christmas. He had no filter, in English or French, but this made him more real and genuine. He made an effort to speak English, but there was an interpreter present for when he couldn’t express something that he wanted to say.

Bozon shed some light on the making of the film.

The script was written for the stars who were cast as the main characters: Isabelle Huppert, Sandrine Kiberlain, and Francois Damiens.

The film is written in the style of B films from the 1950’s.

Bozon likes to shoot the movie on 35 mm film and then digitize it. I don’t know much about film, but what I understood was that this is not a popular or economical way to shoot film these days, but it renders a clearer picture with different lighting. Bozon said he hopes that the big, Hollywood directors like Quentin Tarantino continue to make movies in this manner so that this way of shooting film doesn’t disappear.

The movie is adapted from a book of the same name written by Bill James, but Bozon changed some aspects of it to relate to current French events. He included animosity and racism between the French and the Arabic immigrants, which has been and still is a hot issue in France. Bozon said that the French are obsessed with the Arabs and the Arabs are obsessed by the French. In the movie, all of the French women are having sex with Arab men, and the Arab’s interest in the French is represented by the “disappeared” Arab man’s paintings of important French figures: Jacques Chirac, Charles De Gaulle, Napoleon, and Jean D’Arc.

In his last movie, Bozon says that it had a soundtrack full of pop music, and he wanted to do something different for this movie. For Tip Top he used classical music for the background moments, but the main song of the soundtrack that he used was “Ve Olum” by Uc Hurel, a Turkish band. He chose it for the “garage band” feel, to continue the 50’s B film style.

I leave you with a quote from Film Comment about this movie: “[Francois Damiens gives… the show-stopping turn in Serge Bozon’s comedy thriller Tip Top: his hilariously deranged outburst of racist rhetoric at the start is one of those ‘force of nature’ outbursts that are a French cinema specialty, in the Gabin/Depardieu tradition, and horribly entertaining.”

Retranslating Literary Classics

I attended a lecture at Columbia University entitled Retranslating Literary Classics, and the panel of speakers included Edith Grossman, Wyatt Mason, and Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky, with Susan Bernofsky as mediator.

Some interesting quotes and points of view from the event:

Edith Grossman (recent translation of Don Quixote by Cervantes):

–          Don Quixote by Cervantes gets through the armor of your heart, it’s so sad yet funny. She made it a point to express how very sad it was, but that it was also funny. She didn’t see that in previous translations, and that’s something that she wanted to make accessible to English readers.

–          Translators are schizophrenic: we have to be loyal to both languages at the same time, and it’s no wonder that we’re all a little crazy.

–          You don’t do translations with tracing paper- you don’t trace the original.

Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (recent translation of Dostoevsky and Anna Karenina):

–          Dostoevsky isn’t seen as being funny or a good writer in English- this is because of the previous translations. Volokhonsky especially wanted his humor to come through- she said that she would laugh when reading his work, then ask Pevear what it said in an English translation and it would have nothing of the original tone.

–          Translators need to write what’s written, a problem that they’ve seen seems to be that translators stray too much from the original text.

–          Repeating words is necessary sometimes. An example they gave was in the Brothers Karamazov (which they also translated), where one of the characters uses the word “perhaps” a number of times, for emphasis and then comic relief. If you translate that word differently each time (which isn’t really possible in the English language), the story doesn’t come across the same way as the author intended.

–          Volokhonsky said, strongly: “If you don’t write what he [the author] says, the reader will read a different novel.”

         Pause.

         Pevear added, comically: “So there.”

–           Every great writer is an event in language.

–          The eye forgives everything, the ear forgives nothing: Read Out Loud!

Wyatt Mason (recent translation of Montaigne’s Essais, he is also a literary critic):

–          As a literary critic, Mason reads the novel at least twice. Translating is more intimate, and here he included an anonymous quote about the many times more that translators read the novel they’re translating: “Proust, il faut le lire au minimum dix fois”.

–          Literal vs. Liberal as a translator. Mason likes to think that he finds the middleground- he changes the syntax to fit English, yet he keeps the tone and the level of language.

Some topics that were also discussed:

–          When retranslating a novel, do you read previous translations (during the first draft, during following drafts) or not at all? All of them had read previous translations of works that they had done, but they didn’t really study the other translations until after they had at least translated their own first draft of the book.

–          Samuel Beckett would write in French and then translate it back into English to keep his writing from sounding like that of his former boss, James Joyce.

–          Translators have the great privilege of re-writing “greats” in their own language.

–          Footnotes and Endnotes: when they are appropriate and acceptable, and all of the panelists preferences. Pevear particularly likes footnotes, whereas Grossman preferred to use endnotes if using any type of reference note at all. Pevear likes to know the little details. Grossman thinks that they interrupt the reading on a page so she would do endnotes if she had to, so if the reader was especially interested they could find out for themselves.

–          Original vs. translation, which is better? There was a lot of conjecture, but no clear answers. I wouldn’t want to have to answer that question, either.

Charles Marville: Photographer of Paris

Charles Marville was a photographer at a time when photography was just beginning to be seen as a career- more than an art, more than taking portraits and landscapes for sentimentality. He was hired by the city of Paris in the 1860’s to document the “before and after” of the changes that Baron Haussmann was making.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art is displaying a number of his photographs until May 4^th, 2014. I went and visited the exhibit for an afternoon, and it was pleasantly quiet. Everyone perusing the photos was standing still and studying them, perhaps lowly murmuring to their friends what they thought, and then meandering on to the next photograph. They are all in black and white. Some are photographs of well-known areas in Paris, and some are of back-alleys and quiet streets along the edge of the city. There are rarely any people in his photographs- he took pictures early in the morning, before the hustle and bustle of the day had started. The kind of film and cameras being used back then were not as fast nor as clear as today’s. When there was a carriage or a person that was moving, all that appears is a blur in the photograph.

To find out more, I highly recommend going to see the exhibit- the photographs were gorgeous and made me feel like I was right there, back with the photographer in 1860’s Paris.

To read more about Charles Marville and his wonderful photographs, here are some websites:

The Metropolitan Museum of Art

 The New York Times

 Slate Blog

Untranslatable yet understandable

One of the many problems that translators have to deal with is translating words that don’t have a single meaning, a comparable cultural reference, or any meaning at all in the new language.

We’ve been discussing untranslatable words a lot lately, and while I don’t want to run the topic into the ground, I recently found another article that brings up an interesting point.

Historically, the English language has appropriated many words from other languages and it continues to do so today. The article that I found is titled: “There’s a word for that: 20 awesome words you should have in your vocabulary”, and the opening lines are: “Sometimes we have a thought we wish to express, but can’t quite find the proper word.  Here is a list of 20 amazing words you didn’t know existed that may help you with that.”

None of the words listed are in English. It got me thinking, would people actually take the advice of this article and start using foreign words in ordinary conversation to talk about those hard-to-express feelings and situations? Sometimes I use French words in my English conversation to express something that I can’t find an English word for, but that’s usually among my Francophile friends. I feel like I would sound pretentious or snobby, if I peppered my everyday conversation with foreign words that I had to explain every single time that I wanted to use them. But in English, we already have foreign words that have become common-place. The first example that came to mind was the phrase “bon appétit”. When you go to a restaurant, after the waiter has delivered your food, they say Let me know how it is, let me know if you need anything, bon appétit, or they deliver it and leave you to your meal. I rarely hear Have a good meal, or have a nice dinner. It has become part of restaurant vocabulary to use the French term bon appétit. English speakers still know that it’s French, but it no longer has the stigma of being pretentious or snobby. So perhaps if the 20 words suggested in this article were used in conversation often enough, they would become acceptable and give us more ways to express our feelings and situations.

Imagining the future of language, I am filled with vorfreude– who knows how we will be speaking and what language and vocabulary we will be using!

Event at the United Nations

                Graduate students of the French department at NYU were invited earlier last week to a ceremony at the United Nations to honor Dany Laferrière, newly elected member of the Académie Française. It was a very prestigious event. We were required to rsvp to get our names on the registration list and to get there early in order to go through security. In the room where the ceremony took place, we sat in front of desks with microphones, in heavy, leather, cream-colored armchairs. The ceremony started with the entrance of Monsieur Dany Laferrière and a standing ovation from the audience members. His admittance to the Académie Française was met with the following responses:

“His works are like stars in the skies above Haïti and Montréal”

“The words in a book are immortal”

“He is one of the greats, like Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., Frantz Fanon, Nelson Mandela, and James Baldwin”

“He is the 19^th person to sit in the 2^nd Seat at the Académie Française”

“He is the first Haitian, the first Quebecer, and the first Canadian to receive the honor of membership from the Académie Française”

“You can smell the coffee when you read his book, L’Odeur du café”

                He was honored by the following dignitaries: Nathalie Leroy, Département de l’Information des Nations Unies (representing France and Europe); Clément Mbom, Président de la Fédération des Associations Francophones d’Amérique du Nord (representing North America); Patrick Hyndman, Directeur et délégation générale du Québec (representing Québec, Montréal, and Canada); as well as other professors and officials from the United Nations.

                His biography was outlined for the audience. He was born in Port-au-Prince, Haïti in 1953. He worked as a journalist in Haïti, until 1976 when he moved to Montréal, Canada. He continued to be a journalist up to 1985, when he published his first novel Comment faire l’amour avec un nègre sans se fatiguer. He has since written 19 works, including novels and short stories, and some of them have become plays and films. He received the Prix de Médicis in 2009 for his novel, L’Enigme de retour, and on December 12, 2013 he was elected as a member of the Académie Française.

                After a reading of his biography and a literary survey of his works, two singers came out and performed a Haitian song to honor M. Laferrière. Then, an excerpt from his novel-turned-play Journal d’un écrivain en pyjamas was performed and it was very amusing as well as thought-provoking. Lastly, he was presented with a plaque and he gave thanks to his grandmother, who raised him, for teaching him how to write and observe the world around him.