Tell me if you’ve heard this one before: I am having an event. Just kidding everyone, I’m having two. One in New York and one in Chicago—on Tuesday, May 19 and Saturday, May 23, respectively.

I’m calling these events mixers because there will surely be mixing, but they are also collaborative mini-workshops for translators and the translation-curious. Bilingual participants are invited to bring what I call “nasty, brutish, and short” selections of text along with an interlingual translation—just a few difficult sentences or lines of poetry—and together we will work on collaboratively solving your most twisted translation problems. Examples of difficult texts include: slangy dialogue, contorted sentences, rhyming poetry. Come empty-handed and monolingual, or send me your brutish selections by Monday, May 18: [email protected].

The event in NYC will take place at the n+1 office in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, and the one in Chicago will be at Mouse Arts and Letters Club, a new space in Bridgeport run by Morley Musick and Blair Paddock whose offerings you should really check out if you live in Chicago. We can get drinks at Capri Social Club after the Greenpoint event, and, if the weather is good, I will definitely go swimming after the Mouse one. I’m sure to be nice and toasty from DJ Slugo at Smartbar the night before. Please RSVP and please send me your difficult sentences/stanzas as soon as you can. I promise that coming to these events will solve your problems, but first, I have to know what your problems are.

Now, with that out of the way, on to: my mailbag, my reverse mailbag, the results of the old puzzle and, of course, an eye-popping new puzzle.

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The Mailbag

A Story

In response to my open request for stories about translation, comics critic Brian Nicholson wrote to me recommending something I would have never read otherwise, a short story called “‘a pit full of teeth’” by the Hungarian horror author Attila Veres, from his latest English-language collection, This’ll Make Things a Little Easier. “‘a pit full of teeth’” is about a Hungarian horror author who is invited to submit a story to an anthology that will be translated into what turns out to be a very dangerous language. Not only is the story intelligent about translation and fiction, Veres is funny and self-aware. Describing the author choosing among his old stories:

[One was] about a middle-aged man and his son who eat the greasy Hungarian specialty lángos right after the funeral of their wife/mother. It’s supposed to be a contemplative story about memory, grief, and family issues. Strictly non-horror, so I could sneak my way into one of those mainstream literary magazines and gain some attention and respect. Unfortunately, I couldn’t resist my nature, and the deceased woman may or may not return from her freshly dug grave in the last line of the story. This ruined my chances of becoming a literary author; but for a simple local horror story, it contained too much sour-cream-and-cheese-type soulfulness and the obligatory sentences that drag on forever without punctuation; a feature that has defined our high-end literature since the ’80s.

Given his natural, idiomatic prose, it is impressive that Veres also translates his own writing into English—of course he understands how multilingualism can destabilize reality. From what I’ve read about Veres, the story is exemplary of his humor and his concern with the economics of cultural production. Here are two morestories by Veres, translated by Luca Karafiáth and Austin Wagner, respectively, from hlo.hu, an English-language website dedicated to Hungarian literature. I am excited to read the rest of the book and to click around on this site. Veres’ American publisher, Valancourt Books, also does these internationalhorror anthologies that look very cool.

A Question

[Anonymous] sent me several questions about translation. She worried that they were somehow “too remedial,” but they were actually something worse: ancient, unanswerable debates. Take this one:

“How much ‘editing’ of an author when translating is considered permissible? What is the outer limit of acceptable on that score?”

Her question brings to mind several things. The first of them is ye olde Vegetarian scandal, in part because I recently read a fun short story inspired by it by Don Lee. The scandal was that Deborah Smith, the first-time translator whose version of Han Kang’s The Vegetarian became a bestseller and won both women the Booker Prize, mistranslated or rewrote a lot of the text. According to one scholar, “10.9 percent of the first part of the novel was mistranslated. Another 5.7 percent of the original text was omitted. And this was just the first section.” (Never mind that the author, Han Kang, collaborated on Smith’s translation.)

The figures in Lee’s short story are even more dramatic. In “The Partition,” a professor’s translation of a Korean novel is subjected to a humiliating quantitative analysis. “Only about 37 percent of her translation of the original was accurate. There were 18.3 percent of straightforward mistranslations, and 6.1 percent had been omitted. . . . The remaining 38.6 percent included infidelities so extreme, they were tantamount to wholesale fabrications.”

I love the numbers, because they are so clearly absurd. I know from personal experience: I was once forced by a publisher to undertake a similar quantitative analysis of my own translation, to tally what I thought someone else would consider a bad enough mistake to warrant my being fired. (I ended up getting fired.) The truth is that what is permissible is whatever you can get away with. Unless your book is peer reviewed, becomes a bestseller—or, as in my case, a literary agent’s demonic husband is dogging your ass—there is nobody clocking your crimes.

*Writes and deletes 1500 words*

It’s not that this question is too remedial or fully obviated by the Triple Cop-Out (“it is subjective,” “don’t blame the translator!!!!!” and “it depends”), it’s that I feel like I am in an Attila Veres story when I try to answer it, one where a translator turns into a farkasember (Hungarian for wolf-man) in the full moon of her unresolved rage at the dearth of real editing in the publishing industry.

What I actually want to do is show you a couple of books that take the opposite tack, in which translators radically transform originals, consciously and intentionally taking “editing” too far. The technical term for this is transcreation (they really have to do something about that). By making the translator’s interventions the focus of the work, these willing and unwilling collaborations expand the possibilities of what writers do across languages, demonstrating how such efforts might bring the reader closer to both the text and the truth about the nature of translation. I am really interested in this genre, so if you know of any more examples that belong to it, please please please send them my way:

1. Uljana Wolf and Christian Hawkey’s Sonne From Ort, in which the poets place Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese (Browning’s own poems that she passed off as translations) alongside Rilke’s translations of Browning into German. Wolf and Hawkey perform mirroring, dialogic erasures of both texts to illustrate how they speak to each other.

2. Sawako Nakayasu’s (with Chika Sagawa) Mouth: Eats Color, “translations, anti-translations, & originals.” As Saehee Cho writes, “The flow between [Nakayasu’s] poems and Chika Sagawa’s offers up questions of where translation ends and collaboration begins, or if the act of translation is even possible—posits that even if content were able to sync perfectly between two completely different languages it might not survive the desire to insert authorial perspective.”

3. Jacqueline Feldman’s On Your Feet: A Novel in Translations, which, as Cary Stough writes, “collapses the generic distinction between the translated work and the translator’s note into such proximity as to deeply reveal the material conditions of this work. . . . foregrounding process-over-product, [illuminating] a new path for the dusty old, conventional codex.”

4. I also highly recommend this essay by Kit Schluter, in which he writes about experimental translation and New Narrative, reviewing Bob Boone and Robert Glück’s translations of La Fontaine. I would be remiss not to mention that Kit’s latest Copi translation, City of Rats, is also coming out this month. The Queen’s Ball was amazing.

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Reverse Mailbag: I’m Asking for Your Advice

How do I improve my prose style? Maybe not for the purposes of e.g. this column, I’m fine with my “voice,” but generally, for when I’m trying harder to impress people like Lydia Davis or Claude? I read other people and their sentences are so elegant, their clauses twinkle and weave together like harpsong, words reveal syllable after syllable. Is this even possible? Is prose style too linked with the shape of one’s thoughts and one’s personality and thus formed too early to truly improve in middle age?

I don’t want to hear theoretical answers or disputations: I want to know if you’ve ever managed to do it or have seen it done. I’m afraid it’s impossible because of how closely language and thought are connected, and because I didn’t read enough theory or lofty turn-of-the-century prose in college (my theory being that prose style is developed by reading theory and lofty turn-of-the-century prose when you are 20 and then immediately writing some really transcendent emails inspired by these works). Naturally, the thing that comes to mind is imitation, copying other writers and getting infected by them, but has this actually worked for anyone? Can you remember learning to write better sentences generally? How did you do it? Proust? Henry James? Thomas Mann? Have you managed to have a consistent practice for learning new words as an adult that you then employ without sounding like an asshole? Just like, slip them in so organically in your already subtly sophisticated style that nobody notices? Is there an OED widget I can use for free that doesn’t somehow use my bad writing to kill children? Am I just asking whether it’s possible to become smarter? And if so, is it? For me?

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The Winners of Last Month’s Puzzle

Per John R. Sesgo: “Of all the entries that came in, one version alone solved the entire puzzle. Judged purely on sonics, its vowel patterns met every challenge.”

Love

Like the wind that finds
a gap
and infiltrates the room
and upends everything
books
bills
verse
          so life
is visited
by love.

Nothing afterward is the same.
The disorder
is bliss.

But the time will come to put things back.

Just hope it doesn’t fall to you.

Congratulations to Chinese translator Adam Lanphier, whose LinkedIn describes him as “a little bit Buddhist, a little bit bad boy,” but who admits that he may be “more of a bad man now.” Among other projects, mostly anthologized shorter works of sci-fi and historical fiction, Adam has translated a number of children’s books, including one called The Peanut Fart. It is about a snail who eats a peanut. That is fucked up. Adam is currently working on two books by Ma Boyong. He lives in Takoma Park, MD, where he is learning to make Chinese crepes, called jianbing, which he hopes to sell at farmers’ markets.

The assonance puzzle led to a lot of interesting choices, and a large variety of them. Take just the first three lines in these versions:

Like wind that finds
a crack
and cuts into a room

Like the wind that encounters
a slit
and slips into the room

Translators seemed to become sound-sensitized beyond simple assonance. I also loved the new kinds of movement invented for wind created by the constraint:

As the wind goes through
a loophole
and sneaks into the room

A new kind of movement in “sneaking,” and a new architectural feature: Where is the loophole in your room?

John also cited the “largely metrical version” submitted by translatorSimon Leser as “the most adventurous.” He quoted the closing lines, which rendered Iribarren’s “slangy idiom” in tetrameter, which I thought was funny because I had encouraged Simon to finesse these lines a bit more (I’m a bully :)) and he came up with this lovely list of the unsatisfying versions he’d tried before landing on

And when [ . . . ] the scraps need picking up
trust the work won’t fall to you.

Here were Simon’s Maddening Alternatives:

Trust [that] that work will be another’s to do.
Trust [that] this work won’t be assigned to you.
Trust [that] this work will not be for you.
Trust [that] this work won’t be yours to do.
Trust [that] it won’t be your turn to do the work.
Trust [that] another will do the work.
Trust [that] it won’t be your work to do.
Trust [that] the work won’t fall to you.

Luckily, that/this/the work wasn’t anybody’s but John’s in the end. Here is his version, from You’ve Heard This One Before. Thank you to everyone who attempted the puzzle.

Love

The way a gust of wind
will find a little crack,
slip into your room
and turn it inside out
—books
bills
drafts—
              that’s how love
comes
into your life.

Nothing is the same anymore,
and that chaos
is joy.

One day though, someone has to tidy up.

Just hope it’s not you.

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New Puzzle

Latin translator Muhua Yang turned me on to the carmina figurata, or shape poetry, of 4th century poet Publilius Optatianus Porfyrius, also known as Optatian, whose works have been described as “specimens of perverted ingenuity.” Muhua sent me a PDF of a 530-page long book called Morphogrammata: The Lettered Art of Optatian, regretting that this was “more of a show and tell” thing, too complicated for a puzzle. Unfortunately, I was dazzled.

All typographical representations by Aaron Pelttari, Michael Squire, and Johannes Wienand, from Morphogrammata. 

How could I not be? Using grids of text as a ground, Optatian inscribed acrostic patterns as well as figures into metered poems, inserting commentary, secret messages, and swirling mantras. Some of these patterns can be read palindromically or in multiple directions, all while maintaining their meter.

This one’s a ship, and you can read the verses that make up the picture in various orders to make various poems. Wormhole incoming (see footnote).¹

After six hours of looking through these poems, searching for one simple enough to explain and emulate, I have emerged somewhat victorious. Here is the puzzle: Optatian’s Carmen 23.

In the grid of the text, Optatian bemoans the fate of his friend Marcus, whose wife is cheating on him. He writes that he wants to tell his friend the man’s name so that Marcus can get his revenge. Optatian hints that the muse inspiring him to do so is singing in Greek. So, in the M-shaped text, the poet transliterates his secret message into Greek using Latin letters. It reads: “Marcus, Neilos is fucking your wife Hymnis.”

How do you translate a poem like this? According to DouglasGalbi, the author of the purple motes blog, the M shape not only refers to the M of Marcus, but also to Helen, who is named in the poem. When Menelaus discovered that Helen was cheating on him, just as he was about to kill her, she flashed her breasts at him, “blunting his weapon.” Galbi argues that the M shape is also supposed to be Helen’s breasts.

So your solution can have: 80085 (if you know what I mean), a warning, a transliteration. It should be a carmina figurata, a grid poem with a message inscribed in it, and mirror as many of the elements of Carmen 23 as possible. Can you do something in the same shapes, with the same number of lines? Can fake Ancient Greek be replaced by, say, Pig Latin? Is there a letter better than M to depict the twin peaks? Would it work better if you translated it into a language other than English? How close or far will you stray to/from the meaning? I can’t wait to see what you come up with. Maybe if you make something especially beautiful, it could end up in print! Anything is possible.

In the translation of classicist and art historian Michael Squire, the Optatian reads:

Deeply I groaned, in sorrow for my Greek friend.
Distressed at what has been done, my mind wants
to tell him everything, so that, reading this secret
message on his own, he will rouse himself in anger
and be able to beat the guilty man and throw him
in chains. But avoiding the many witnesses to his
shameful quarrel (which a husband will not want),
and for fear that the fair woman will blunt the Greek
by and by with her lovely weapons, seeing as she
does—wicked woman!—that the swan’s daughter
Helen lost nothing, but acquired greater fame by her
double adultery, I gladly give all the names: the muse
sings to Greeks; Phrygian husband, believe the song!

Deeply I groaned!

Here is the Latin:

Ingemui grauiter, Graecum miseratus amicum,
cui mea mens, admissa dolens, cupit omnia fari,
solus ut haec occulta legens se concitet ira,
unde queat plexum uinclis sontemque tenere,
sed uitans multos, quos foeda ad iurgia coiux
noluerit testes, neu candida femina Graecum
mox caris hebetet telis, nihil improba cygni
deposuisse uidens Helenam, cui gratia binis
maior adulteriis. do nomina cuncta libenter:
musa sonat Graecis. Fryx coiux, crede canenti.

And here is the secret Greek in the M:

MARCE TEHN AAOXON THN YMNIDA NEIAOC EAAYNEI.
Mάρκε τεὴν ἅλοχον τὴν Ὑμνίδα Νεȋλος ἐλαύνει.
Marcus, Neilos is fucking your wife Hymnis.

HINT: Start with a blank grid and a secret message. Send your solutions to [email protected] by June 8.

1. Here’s how to read this poem, via the scholar Michael Squire:

   “Beginning with the N, which opens v. 16, for example, one option is to navigate a reading that moves vertically down and then horizontally across the grid, proceeding from the top of the prow to the top of the stern. The result is this time a hexameter, and one which overtly develops the naval theme: nigras nunc tutus contemnat, summe, procellas (“let him now defy the black storms in safety, o great one”). Another possible ‘navigation’ might instead begin with the zigzagging word nauita (v. 16-21). If we begin with this dactyl (instead of the spondee nigras), we can continue in the same direction, arriving at a related hexameter, and one which this time specifies its subject: nauita nunc tutus contemnat, summe, procellas (“let the sailor now defy the storms in safety, o great one”). . . .

   “A third option is to begin the hexameter neither with nigras, nor indeed with nauita, but instead with the word tutus in v. 22: If we then allow ourselves to take a diversion via either one of the criss-crossing symmetrical X letters, we end up once again at the ship’s stern—and with a different corresponding verse (albeit one ending up with the same letter S in v. 17): tutus contemnat summis cumulata tropaeis (“let him defy in safety even that which is piled high with greatest trophies”). Alternatively, of course, we might begin lower down, with the make-believe ramming-spike at the ship’s prow (v. 25): If readers trace a path up either one of the X letters, they once again trace a hexameter: pulsa mente mala contemnat, summe, procellas (“with ill intent cast aside, o great one, let him defy the storms”). At the same time, there is always the option of instead proceeding from the ship’s outer oars.

   “From a semantic point of view, these figurative letters may at first look nonsensical (read the lines from left to right, for example, and we arrive at a puzzling OMABONOQUERNSPEON). But as audiences shove and heave in their efforts of viewing/reading, they eventually strike upon a hexameter: If the reader instead moves from right to left (following the ship’s own imagined course of motion), and likewise from imagined sea to hull, he finds spe quoque Roma bona contemnat, summe, procellas (“with good faith, let Rome also defy the storms, o great one”).

   “Whichever poetic-pictorial itinerary we choose, our response to this poem must in turn navigate between different representational registers. As we have said, Optatian begins his poem by talking about signa, returning to the same language in v. 71 and 29 (signis, signa . . . laetissima; compare also the reference to the insignia fata of Constantine’s descendants, themselves arguably ‘signalled’ in the naval picture). And yet the ‘signs’ of this poem take on numerous forms, occupying a visual-verbal spectrum that stretches from the mimetic to the symbolic and back again, always figured through the literal arrangements of its letters. If words do double duty here as images, those images can also be read as words: This holds true of all the hidden verses which make up the poem’s figurative characters, but especially so of the words concealed in the alphabetical shapes V O T and X. In each case, we are made to experiment with different modes of verbally interpreting the visual patterns, and of visually interpreting the verbal words: Responding to these fabricated signs means thinking, in every sense, ‘outside the box.’ It is from this perspective that we should approach the poem’s most extraordinary feat; for we have so far overlooked the cryptographic chi-rho emblazoned at its upper centre . . .”

   Michael Squire, “Patterns of Significance: Publilius Optatianus Porfyrius and the Figurations of Meaning,” Images and Texts: Papers in Honor of Professor Eric Handley CBE FBA (ed. Richard Green and Mike Edwards), Institute of Classical Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London 2015. ↩

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