Jill Schoolman of Archipelago Books asked recently if I would be interested in translating the major twentieth-century Spanish poet Jose Angel Valente.  As it happens I would, and I am grateful to her for thinking of me. Valente is a kind of platonist of the word, who seeks to ruthlessly strip bare received language and produce a vitalized text of absolute immediacy. (I’m far from an expert on twentieth-century poetry of Spain, so I’ll need to work at getting up to speed in better understanding his place in the scheme of things.)

I will select roughly eighty poems from his body of work. Unfortunately, I won’t have the sustained time to work on this project until I finish my work on 1616, but I’m looking forward to this challenge. Here’s a very preliminary example:

The wine was the indeterminate color of ash.

I drank it with residue of dark
shadows, shadows, a wet
body on the sands.

You arrived,
You came tonight.

The insidious depths of the glass
conceal an anonymous god.
+++++++++++++++++++++You gave me
blood to drink
tonight.
+++++Depths
of the god drunk to the dregs.

*

By the way, I think I finally figured out how to keep WordPress from stripping out spaces when you have to indent lines in irregular ways like this. You can insert invisible characters, with this kind of code:

<span style=”visibility: hidden;”>++++++++++++++++++</span>

*

UPDATE: Looks like the hidden style attribute doesn’t work with RSS.

*

Post from Right Reading, Tom Christensen's guide to print and electronic book publishing.
Follow me on twitter.

Another new book: Selected Poems of Jose Angel Valente

El Pais is talking about a new Dictionary of Americanisms (Diccionario de americanismos) published by the Asociación de Academias de la Lengua in Madrid under the direction of Humberto Lopez Morales, secretary general of the academies. Lopez Morales, though now a resident of Madrid, was born in Cuba and lived in Puerto Rico.

Americanisms are a more vexing problem in Spanish — the second most spoken language in the world — than in English. Travelers across the Americas have to learn new words even for simple things like straws, napkins, and avocados as they travel from Mexico to Argentina.

And of course the language is always changing. While dictionaries of Americanisms exist, there has not been a major new work in this area for twenty or thirty years. This book fills that void.

Logging in at 2,500 pages, the dictionary costs 75 euros — about a hundred U.S. dollars — but for those of us who sometimes translate from Latin American Spanish it will be an essential reference to own or at least consult.

Post from Right Reading, Tom Christensen's guide to print and electronic book publishing.
Follow me on twitter.

World Book News: Dictionary of Americanisms

According to Langenscheidt, “This phrasebook contains all of the most important expressions and words you’ll need for your trip.” In that case, what a trip it will be! Imagine yourself with no knowledge at all of Italian and armed only with phrases such as the following (which I have assembled into a brief narrative, occasionally adding my own punctuation –the ellipses, however, are Langenscheidt’s — but retaining the phrases otherwise unaltered).

Good afternoon. Please help me. The engine sounds funny — I need a pair of pliers. It’s not my fault. It’s your fault. I had the right of way. You cut the corner. You were following too closely. You were going too fast.

I don’t feel well: I feel nauseous, I’m dizzy, I’m from the United States. What is your name? Are you married? Could you repeat that, please? How old are you? Do you have children? What sort of work do you do?

It was a misunderstanding. I need someone to accompany me. I’d like to come with you. May I sit here? I like it very much. This is my address. Shall we meet this evening? I’ll take you home. I’d like to invite you to . . . What does . . . mean? I like that.

What is this called in Italian? It’s very good, thank you — satisfied! Did you like it there? Thank you for inviting me. Thank you for a lovely evening. Will I see you again? Do you mind if I smoke? I have not been vaccinated against . . .

Is there a nice bar around here?

Post from Right Reading, Tom Christensen's guide to print and electronic book publishing.
Follow me on twitter.

A universal story

Post from Right Reading, Tom Christensen's guide to print and electronic book publishing.
Follow me on twitter.

Norwegian Hell Children

This is an excellent choice. Copper Canyon has been a reliable publisher of international poetry for decades, and all of their books are prepared with care and attention to detail. Bravo!

.

Post from Right Reading, Tom Christensen's guide to print and electronic book publishing.
Follow me on twitter.

Copper Canyon to publish Chinese anthology

I’ve mentioned I’ve been helping to judge a translation award. Now that a set of finalists has been announced (although the Chronicle, true to form, omitted the translation category from their story; I’ll list the finalists later) I can say that the book I especially liked among the eligible titles was The Old Man’s Verses byIvan Divis, translated from the Czeck by Deborah Garfinkle.

Divis (1924–99) fled Soviet-occupied Prague for West Germany in 1968. He returned a quarter century later, looking at his homeland (and himself) with the jaundiced eye of sober experience. Garfinkle does a great job of capturing the distinctive voice of these poems, and making it look easy.

Here’s a sample, borrowed from Carol Peters’s site:

In memory of Pavel Plavec

Pavel and I entered the cathedral in Passau,
ill-timed, late, that is, as the services were ending.
The fortissimo tutti of the world’s largest organ
nailed me to the floor.
The institution driving lambs to the fold
with these ear-splitting contraptions, not Christ?
And where did He remain? I asked myself in disbelief,
with the character trait engrained in me,
backed up by everything I’ve known
and scrutinized through and through? And where is He?
And right there He stirred in my breast.
I was flooded with warmth. Come, he said –
and we left. It was September, the month
in which I celebrate my birth.
The pristine trees were clinging to their stiff leaves.
With a clap, a flock of doves took off
like a gunshot.

1.27.1995

.

Post from Right Reading, Tom Christensen's guide to print and electronic book publishing.
Follow me on twitter.

The Old Man’s Verses

I hope you are all enjoying The Best of Contemporary Mexican Fiction. I wanted to send along some of the press the book has received. Martin Riker at Dalkey Archive Press has done a tremendous job of promoting the book.

There’s an excerpt from the book on the PEN website as part of their 2009 Translation Feature:

http://www.pen.org/page.php/prmID/1491

There’s a review on OMNIVORACIOUS, Amazon.com’s official blog, which is read by thousands of readers every day:

http://www.omnivoracious.com/2009/02/translated-best-of-contemporary-mexican-fiction.html

Another very positive review:

http://quarterlyconversation.com/best-of-contemporary-mexican-fiction-edited-by-alvaro-uribe-and-olivia-sears

From the Latin American Review of Books:

http://www.latamrob.com/?p=663

And there have been numerous bloggers singing the book’s praises. Here are a few of those:

http://ofblog.blogspot.com/2008/11/short-fiction-sunday-lvaro-uribe-and.html

http://www.keirgraff.com/

http://blog.shelfari.com/my_weblog/2009/02/translated-best-of-contemporary-mexican-fiction.html

Advance reviews are also positive, such as this one in BOOKLIST (a publication that goes out to libraries around the US):

http://www.booklistonline.com/default.aspx?page=show_product&pid=3139485

Feb. 2009. 562p. Dalkey Archive, hardcover. REVIEW. First published January 1, 2009 (Booklist).

Short-story fans hungry for something that doesn’t taste like it was cooked up in an MFA program workshop should take note of this anthology of contemporary Mexican writers. There’s great variety here, but what all 16 stories have in common are distinctive voices. For the most part eschewing realism, these stories are exuberant, playful, informal, and experimental, and may make some readers nostalgic for the years before U.S. fiction got so institutionalized. Standouts include Álvaro Enrigue’s “On the Death of the Author,” a metafictional account of the author’s attempts to tell the story of Ishi, the last Yahi Indian; Jorge F. Hernández’s “True Friendship,” about a man’s perfect but probably fictional best friend; and Juan Villoro’s hilarious “Mariachi,” the tale of analysand El Gallito de Jojutla, “the only mariachi star who has never sat on a horse.” Stories are printed in both Spanish and English on facing pages; bilingual readers will be able to judge the translations for themselves, and readers who only know English will at least be able to see the shape of the originals. — Keir Graff

I’m sorry to say that individual translators are only occasionally mentioned by name in these reviews, but given that this is often the case in reviews of novels (in which there’s only one translator to keep track of), I’m not terribly surprised they didn’t try to keep the 15 translators straight. I hope you will take the positive comments about your individual translations to heart. Thanks for being a part of this project.

.

Post from Right Reading, Tom Christensen's guide to print and electronic book publishing.
Follow me on twitter.

The Best of Contemporary Mexican Fiction

Remember the restaurant known in English as Translate Server Error? Well, be thankful the directions for finding it were not in Welsh.

According to the BBC, road signs in Wales are now supposed to be bilingual, in both English and Welsh. The signmakers dutifully sent the English from the above sign to a translation service. Unfortunately, the Welsh that arrived in the return e-mail says “I am not in the office at the moment. Send any work to be translated.”

.

Post from Right Reading, Tom Christensen's guide to print and electronic book publishing.
Follow me on twitter.

Out to lunch

Meanwhile, I’ve agreed to be a reader for this translation award. Books translated in calendar 2008 by writers based anywhere  between Fresno and the Oregon border are eligible. So far these are on my reading list:

• Castellanos Moya, Horacio, Senselessness, translated by Katherine Silver (New Directions)
• Do, Nguyen, and Paul Hoover, eds., trans., Black Dog, Black Night: Contemporary Vietnamese Poetry (Milkweed)
• Holderlin, Friedrich, Odes and Elegies, translated by Nick Hoff (Wesleyan)
• Holderlin, Friedrich, Selected Poems, translated by Maxine Chernoff and Paul Hoover (Omnidawn)
• Nobuo, Ayukawa, America and Other Poems, translated by Shogo Oketani and Lez Lowitz (Kaya)
• Peri Rossi, Christina, State of Exile, translated by Marylin Buck (City Lights)
• Rodamor, William and Anna Livia, eds., trans., France: A Traveler’s Literary Companion (Whereabouts)
• Rojas, Gonzalo, From the Lightning: Selected Poems, translated by John Oliver Simon (Green Integer)
• Saba, Umberto, Songbook, translated by George Hochfield and Leonard Nathan (Yale)
• Talebi, Niloufar, ed., trans., Belonging: New Poetry by Iranians around the World (North Atlantic)
• Toussaint, Jean-Philippe, Camera, translated by Matthew B. Smith (Dalkey Archive)
• Zambra, Alejandro, Bonzai, translated by Carolina de Robertis (Melville House)

This is a pretty strong group of candidates. It makes me feel encouraged about the state of literary book publishing today (but notice all were published by independents or university presses — corporate publishers have abandoned the the kind of publishing that built houses like Knopf).

.

Post from Right Reading, Tom Christensen's guide to print and electronic book publishing.
Follow me on twitter.

Northern California Book Reviewers Translation Award

You might have heard about the restaurant in China that, in preparation for the Olympics, decided to translate their name into English. I guess the translation program was down and, well …

Here’s a picture from tenz1225′s photostream.

.

Post from Right Reading, Tom Christensen's guide to print and electronic book publishing.
Follow me on twitter.

Translate server error — yum!

Here’s the text, in case the strip is hard to read at this size.

Jon: Garfield, I retrieved a pair of slippers
Garfield: I am sorry, the cat is not worth a pair of slippers
Garfield: I will, however, capture extract

.

Post from Right Reading, Tom Christensen's guide to print and electronic book publishing.
Follow me on twitter.

More marvels of machine translation

Enjoy this short video with babelfished dialogue.

Post from Right Reading, Tom Christensen's guide to print and electronic book publishing.
Follow me on twitter.

How I always say it: this hole is quite fine good!

At issue is I Corinithians 6:9, and whether two Greek terms allude to homosexuality or prostitution or something else. (The King James version of the passage gives “Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind.”)

The case is reported at Language Log, where the lively discussion it provoked included the following comments:

JACK COLLINS: Biblical scholars are actually pretty stumped about what exactly ???????????? were, since the term appears nowhere in the Greek corpus before Paul. Considering that there were quite a few terms for various sorts of male-male sexual practices in Koine Greek, it is curious that Paul chose to coin a whole new word. Literally, it would translate as “man bedders” or “bed men,” but that doesn’t really narrow it down. It is possible that Paul meant to allude to the Greek (Septuagint) translation of Leviticus 18:22 (??? ???? ??????? ?? ????????? ?????? ????????…, lit.”and with a man you will not sleep a woman’s bed…”). Whatever Paul’s intent, it probably was not to condemn male-male sexual relations between men of equal age and social status, since such relationships were rather uncommon in the Hellenistic world.

GORDONOZ: Maybe rich men should sue Bible translators, claiming they have been embittered and disappointed by their failed efforts to fit camels through the eyes of needles.

CRAIG RUSSELL: My opinion is that Fowler is barking up the wrong tree here. Paul probably did want to single out men who engaged in sexual activity with other men-especially given the context. “Pornoi” (as seen from the English derivative) and ‘moichoi’ are unquestionably sexual terms. Paul probably did consider it a sin for men to have sex with each other. For Fowler to insist that the Bible must mean what he already believes it to mean is no different from a fundamentalist insisting the same-it’s putting the answer before the question.

.

Post from Right Reading, Tom Christensen's guide to print and electronic book publishing.
Follow me on twitter.

Reader sues over translations

Post from Right Reading, Tom Christensen's guide to print and electronic book publishing.
Follow me on twitter.

Language Wars

Post from Right Reading, Tom Christensen's guide to print and electronic book publishing.
Follow me on twitter.

Madam Mayo

Post from Right Reading, Tom Christensen's guide to print and electronic book publishing.
Follow me on twitter.

New Worlds / New Words book launch

Post from Right Reading, Tom Christensen's guide to print and electronic book publishing.
Follow me on twitter.

The Dirty Hungarian Phrasebook

Google says their approach was to “feed the computer billions of words of text, both monolingual text in the target language, and aligned text consisting of examples of human translations between the languages. We then apply statistical learning techniques to build a translation model. We’ve achieved very good results in research evaluations.”

This approach sounds a bit naive on the face of it. Could it work? Let’s try a sample translation on both Babelfish and Google Translate. To keep things fair, I consulted my Yi jing page, which randomly produced hexagram 39, “Stumbling” (hmmm). The lines go like this (those after the asterisk are the commentary portion of the text):

Stumbling forth and strutting back
Porters stumbling under loads
Stumbling and turning about
Turning back to join with friends
Friends appear for welcoming
Stumbling forth and riding back

*

Water over mountain. Hard to get a foothold.
Choose the easier path.

Okay. We’ll translate into French and then back into English and then into German and then back into English. We’re using two languages that contributed heavily to the development of English rather than languages that are unrelated to it, so this should be a piece of cake, right?

Babelfish results first:

Stolpern in front and pavanement the back luggage cart-loads, those under the loads stolpern and turns around revolution again with stolpern, connects to the friends to assemble those the friends for the Stolpern of the admission in front and after looks * finished Montagne of the water. A balance strongly reach. Select the simpler way.

Gibberish, although I do like the way a Chinese flavor is creatively introduced by rendering “hard to get a foothold” as “a balance strongly reach.” Now let’s try Google Translate:

Stumbling block strutting back and forth
Owners stumbling block under strain
Stumbling block and
To return to connect with friends
Friends at the reception
Stumbling block fourth and riding back

*

The water on the mountain. Hard to get a foot.
Select the way.

Somewhat better — at least all of the words are English — although most of the sense is still wrong (how in the world did “forth” become “fourth”?). Still, while I’m not eager to add to the Google world information monopoly, it looks to me like the Google engineers have indeed surpassed Systran. The Google translation is not only a bit more intelligible and closer to the original but it also retains the format of the original. And the web interface was cleaner and easier besides. It’s not the result I was expecting, but I have to say, comparatively good job, Google.

With the caveat, of course, that both results are nearly useless. Bottom line: if you really need something translated correctly, hire a human.

Post from Right Reading, Tom Christensen's guide to print and electronic book publishing.
Follow me on twitter.

Google Translate, no longer using Systran software, goes head to head with Yahoo’s Babelfish

Post from Right Reading, Tom Christensen's guide to print and electronic book publishing.
Follow me on twitter.

Call for translations

An excerpt from del Paso’s Palinuro of Mexico, translated by Elizabeth Plaister, is included in New World / New Words: Recent Writing from the Americas, A Bilingual Anthology, now at the printer.

Post from Right Reading, Tom Christensen's guide to print and electronic book publishing.
Follow me on twitter.

Fernando del Paso to receive FIL Literature Prize