Last week I focused on my Q & A for Salgado Maranhão's translator, Alexis Levitin. Levitin has translated twenty five books (mainly from Portuguese). He received his P.h.d in English from Columbia University and currently teaches Creative Writing, Poetry, Shakespeare and World Literature at Plattsburg University. Most recently, he translated the poetry collection, Blood of the Sun by Salgado Maranhão, from Portuguese, for Milkweed. Once I finalized my questions, Ethan Rutherford, Milkweed's marketing manager, put me directly in touch with Alexis Levitin. We haven't officially chosen a time for the interview yet, but I'm infinitely excited to pick the brain of a renowned translator. Once the interview is completed it will be featured on the Milkweed website.
Ethan asked me to revise my questions a bit after the first draft, focusing less on the poetry itself and more on the translation process. I asked about the contradictions and struggles that accompany literary translation, things I have often wondered about. I asked whether Levitin focused more often on translating verbatim or preserving the tone and style of the verse. I also asked what role he feels a translator should take; as an ambassador of someone's work or simply as an interpreter.
These questions are not only pertitent to Milkweed's publishing, but to my own interests. If I pursue my potential career as a translator my role and influence on how audiences read a certain writer's work is something that I would want to constantly question and explore. I expect to learn much from speaking with an expert like Levitin and I can't wait!
Monday, December 12, 2011
Friday, December 9, 2011
Grown Down
I wrote this in the summer after my sophomore year. I was living in a duplex in Saint Paul with three other girls from Macalester. For the first time I was paying rent and cooking purely for myself and despite the independence, I longed for a kind of lost innocence. As a young adult I feel like one often teeters on the brink of maturity and a nostalgia for an adolescence that isn't so far removed.
Grown Down
I want to be awkward with you
To read comics on the bus
To be twenty and laugh too loud
And bike into street signs
And never stare at my reflection
And think wine is sour and coffee too bitter
I want you to cough after each puff
And I’ll never inhale
And I want to laugh when you run your tongue
On the outside of my ear
I want us to sit on my stoop
Because I don’t need to invite you in
Even though my name is on the lease
I just want you to rest your hand furtively on my hip
I want us to keep our clothes on as you tell me the personality
That you ascribe to each number
I want you to laugh at me
Not with me
I want to blush
And sigh
I want to forget
The stories painfully etched on the undersides of my breasts
On the insides of my thighs
Even though they’re in a language you’ll never understand
I want to make innocence ageless
I want to smell hesitance
To taste sweet doubt
Our cynics can keep each other company all night
But I want you to remind me
Of what it felt like
I almost remember
When you stutter
When your bangs fall into your face and you blow them sideways
I almost remember when you kiss too eagerly
When your breath smells like the cigarettes you smoke to seem
cool
But I can’t find it
I know it’s in basement boxes
years from here
Girls and girls from now
I just want to chase it with you
Even if we never find it
Grown Down
I want to be awkward with you
To read comics on the bus
To be twenty and laugh too loud
And bike into street signs
And never stare at my reflection
And think wine is sour and coffee too bitter
I want you to cough after each puff
And I’ll never inhale
And I want to laugh when you run your tongue
On the outside of my ear
I want us to sit on my stoop
Because I don’t need to invite you in
Even though my name is on the lease
I just want you to rest your hand furtively on my hip
I want us to keep our clothes on as you tell me the personality
That you ascribe to each number
I want you to laugh at me
Not with me
I want to blush
And sigh
I want to forget
The stories painfully etched on the undersides of my breasts
On the insides of my thighs
Even though they’re in a language you’ll never understand
I want to make innocence ageless
I want to smell hesitance
To taste sweet doubt
Our cynics can keep each other company all night
But I want you to remind me
Of what it felt like
I almost remember
When you stutter
When your bangs fall into your face and you blow them sideways
I almost remember when you kiss too eagerly
When your breath smells like the cigarettes you smoke to seem
cool
But I can’t find it
I know it’s in basement boxes
years from here
Girls and girls from now
I just want to chase it with you
Even if we never find it
Monday, December 5, 2011
La Língua, La Lengua
When I got back last Wednesday from Thanksgiving break I finished the reading guide questions for Salgado Maranhão's poetry collection, Blood of the Sun. I came up with ten questions in total. I really enjoyed creating them. I felt like a professor trying to incite a class discussion. I asked about the imagery within the poetry, the title and contextualized the poet himself. I am still waiting to discuss them with the Marketing manager who asked me to complete the project. But eventually the questions will be posted on the Milkweed website.
It was virtually impossible to find any information or interviews on Maranhão, in anything other than Portuguese. I didn't even find anything in Spanish which was surprising, because he is well-renowned in much of Latin America. Due to my fluency in Spanish I was able to understand about eighty percent of the Portuguese entries that I read about him. However, when I listened to an interview of his I only understood at most, about twenty percent of what he was saying. I assume that this is because Portuguese is not as phonetically straightforward as Spanish. In Spanish essentially every syllable is pronounced and sounds exactly as it looks. But obviously not all languages function this way. Also, there are different regional accents that create large variations in how a language is spoken.
I am going to be taking accelerated introduction to Portuguese next semester, after I complete my internship with Milkweed, which is very inopportune timing for this project. It would be fascinating to read Maranhão's poetry in its original form because , unfortunately, I feel that something is always lost in translation. Different languages often have very different sensibilities, which usually reflect the culture from which they originate. For example, in Spanish there are three different expressions for love and in English there are numerous words to describe currency. I feel that this is very indicative of the societies from which these languages spring. Idiomatic expressions are also almost always impossible to translate. If one translated 'It's raining cats and dogs' verbatim into Spanish, the speaker would sound deranged. The nuances of language have always enthralled me, I wish I could use those skills more at Milkweed. But I'm sure that they will be very relevant in future jobs that I may have.
It was virtually impossible to find any information or interviews on Maranhão, in anything other than Portuguese. I didn't even find anything in Spanish which was surprising, because he is well-renowned in much of Latin America. Due to my fluency in Spanish I was able to understand about eighty percent of the Portuguese entries that I read about him. However, when I listened to an interview of his I only understood at most, about twenty percent of what he was saying. I assume that this is because Portuguese is not as phonetically straightforward as Spanish. In Spanish essentially every syllable is pronounced and sounds exactly as it looks. But obviously not all languages function this way. Also, there are different regional accents that create large variations in how a language is spoken.
I am going to be taking accelerated introduction to Portuguese next semester, after I complete my internship with Milkweed, which is very inopportune timing for this project. It would be fascinating to read Maranhão's poetry in its original form because , unfortunately, I feel that something is always lost in translation. Different languages often have very different sensibilities, which usually reflect the culture from which they originate. For example, in Spanish there are three different expressions for love and in English there are numerous words to describe currency. I feel that this is very indicative of the societies from which these languages spring. Idiomatic expressions are also almost always impossible to translate. If one translated 'It's raining cats and dogs' verbatim into Spanish, the speaker would sound deranged. The nuances of language have always enthralled me, I wish I could use those skills more at Milkweed. But I'm sure that they will be very relevant in future jobs that I may have.
Friday, December 2, 2011
Man v.s. Man
I wrote this piece as an exercise for my fiction class in the second semester of my sophomore year. The assignment was to use a magazine picture, that our professor handed out in class, as a prompt. My picture was of a metal or wire structure, that almost looked like a ferris wheel, located in what seemed to be the middle of a forest. It made me think about the juxtaposition between the artificial and the natural and how one day the artificial might seem just as natural to us.
They fastened the cables perfectly, wrapped the vines around the bars of the metal in decidedly wild patterns. They planted the bush just to the right of the tree to balance the composition. They were going for a long lost kind of feel, evoking the discovery of a relic in the woods. “An Existential Emptiness: Juxtaposing the Industrial with the Natural”, that was the title of the show. Once they took the photo they disassembled it all. It returned to the plot of land across the river where junkies and teenage lovers spent their afternoons, back to the broken bottles and Trojan wrappers. The camera crew covered their noses for most of the shoot, the place smelled like piss. She chose the location because it seemed deserted, there was no wilderness left. This was the closest thing.
She had taken photos in various other locations. She constructed an steel crane on a beach, the waves lapping against it. Not a soul to be found on the sand. She had traveled to peaks and plains and rocky coasts. But they always had to erase buildings out of the background, fill in the naked patches of grass, and make the sky a bit bluer. They had to have a contrast after all. The show wasn’t called “A Spectrum of Industry”. Thank god for those computer programs.
The final show would be held in an abandoned brick warehouse, on the edges of a fallen industrial area where most of the buildings were now occupied by specialty fedora shops and double shot espresso bars. She often thought about how amazingly defunct these buildings were now. How they had been replaced by glass and steel, that towered obnoxiously over everything. Weeds would spurt out of the cracks in the sidewalk, kids pointed at them, trying to pluck some of the feathery overgrown blossoms.
She vaguely remembered the parks. There used to be one not far from the apartment where she grew up. Her father would take her there to ride her bike. The hills were sculpted, rolling sweetly into an illusion of oblivion. The trees were strategically placed to block buildings. The little lakes were filled with ducks brought in from out of state and insects placed there to create an ecosystem.
“When I was growing up we had a barn, and there were woods behind the house,” her father would tell her. He always had the most outlandish stories.
When he died she spread his ashes over the ocean. Even though it was too chemically potent to swim in, at least from the surface it was pretty. The oil spills created beautiful iridescent blobs in vast swaths. She went back again and again to the place where he was from, looking for the woods. But she couldn’t find them. The shell of the barn was there. The red paint stripped off, initials and tags carved into the wood.
The opening of the show was a relative success. People even came in from other boroughs to see her work. She received a fair number of nods, fingers cupping chins, viewers squinting and pointing at the pieces as they discussed them with their significant others, always a good sign. But up against the wall with the lights shining on them, the shadows of the things that she erased were still visible. The hollowed out factories, the graffiti, shadows of them still lingered. She panicked, she thought of forcing everyone out into the street, ripping the photos off the wall and smashing them over her knees.
The next day the reviews were published. She kept glancing at the stack of papers that arrived on her doorstep. She closed and opened the door a few times to make sure they were still there. The most common adjective used was “irrelevant”.
Man Vs. Man
She had taken photos in various other locations. She constructed an steel crane on a beach, the waves lapping against it. Not a soul to be found on the sand. She had traveled to peaks and plains and rocky coasts. But they always had to erase buildings out of the background, fill in the naked patches of grass, and make the sky a bit bluer. They had to have a contrast after all. The show wasn’t called “A Spectrum of Industry”. Thank god for those computer programs.
The final show would be held in an abandoned brick warehouse, on the edges of a fallen industrial area where most of the buildings were now occupied by specialty fedora shops and double shot espresso bars. She often thought about how amazingly defunct these buildings were now. How they had been replaced by glass and steel, that towered obnoxiously over everything. Weeds would spurt out of the cracks in the sidewalk, kids pointed at them, trying to pluck some of the feathery overgrown blossoms.
She vaguely remembered the parks. There used to be one not far from the apartment where she grew up. Her father would take her there to ride her bike. The hills were sculpted, rolling sweetly into an illusion of oblivion. The trees were strategically placed to block buildings. The little lakes were filled with ducks brought in from out of state and insects placed there to create an ecosystem.
“When I was growing up we had a barn, and there were woods behind the house,” her father would tell her. He always had the most outlandish stories.
When he died she spread his ashes over the ocean. Even though it was too chemically potent to swim in, at least from the surface it was pretty. The oil spills created beautiful iridescent blobs in vast swaths. She went back again and again to the place where he was from, looking for the woods. But she couldn’t find them. The shell of the barn was there. The red paint stripped off, initials and tags carved into the wood.
The opening of the show was a relative success. People even came in from other boroughs to see her work. She received a fair number of nods, fingers cupping chins, viewers squinting and pointing at the pieces as they discussed them with their significant others, always a good sign. But up against the wall with the lights shining on them, the shadows of the things that she erased were still visible. The hollowed out factories, the graffiti, shadows of them still lingered. She panicked, she thought of forcing everyone out into the street, ripping the photos off the wall and smashing them over her knees.
The next day the reviews were published. She kept glancing at the stack of papers that arrived on her doorstep. She closed and opened the door a few times to make sure they were still there. The most common adjective used was “irrelevant”.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)