Hi! Where have I been? Last time we heard from me, Miss Translation, I was on a rocket blasting out of Iowa. I hosted two events, one in New York and one in Chicago. Was I forced into hiding because of how well they went? No, although I could have been. Did I write a novel this summer? Nuh-uh. Do I have a boyfriend now? Maybe. There is a Gen Z term about this, “official.” I don’t understand what it means, I just turned 41.
As a gift, the puzzle this month is less impossible than usual, although the results of the last column’s very impossible puzzle (below) turned out amazing. This column’s theme turned out to be: Everything is Bulgarian (Unless it is Taiwanese). When I realized this, I was forced to watch Bulgarian popstar Galena’s “ChatGPT” music video, which has been going around on Twitter. TW: canid and humanoid robots—and those unstoppable Balkan riddims!
Party Report
The mixers were fun and I’m going to do more this winter and spring, one in NYC and one in Chicago, during AWP. The Bulgarian theme began in New York, where I proudly mixed two Bulgarians after one of them told me that she had never met anyone from Bulgaria who was into the same things as her. A friend of mine overheard us and pointed out that she’d just talked to somebody cool and Bulgarian. Hello my Bulgarian xisters! Why is Bulgarian popstar Galena telling her boyfriend that he should ask ChatGPT how she feels about him? How would ChatGPT know?
Of all of the problems we worked on between the two cities—in Tamil, Romanian, Portuguese, Mandarin, Ukrainian, German, and so on—my favorite was from Chicago translator Alta L. Price. Alta is translating a novel called Tongue Mother, by Italian writer Maddalena Fingerle, which is set in South Tyrol, a cultural borderland linguistically situated between Italian and German. Toward the end of the novel, it is revealed that each of the protagonists’ names is actually an anagram that makes a significant statement about their character, and is central to the book’s themes and narrative.
I.e.:
Biagio Prescher / crepai, borghesi \ I croaked, you bougies
Or
Luisa Prescher/ capire Husserl \ to comprehend Husserl.
Could, Alta wondered, these anagrams be reproduced in English? If you are interested in how Alta ended up solving her problem and, more importantly, whether she’s found a publisher for this book yet, you should write to her.
Reflecting on “Women” “in” translation: an autotheoretical investigation (and not a contrarian listicle)*
It is Women in Translation month. Or it was when I started writing this. I looked it up again, like I do every year, because the name always tricks me, and I once again learned that it isn’t about women translators but women writers. The books do NOT have to be written AND translated by women and we are not celebrating women who translate men (WWTM). WIT (no one is brave enough to call it WITM) started in order to counter the fact that people in the Anglophone world don’t publish or read very many translations, and of the ones that are published, not enough are written by women. It is from Planet 2014. Why am I being a bitch about it? Oh I remember: I am a woman I am annoyed that it’s about writers instead of translators.
This is a stupid complaint considering the fact that women make up the majority of translators, both into English and in all other languages—in other words, women have translated most of these books anyway. But if we are celebrating people for being marginalized, translators are so much more marginalized! (We are not celebrating people for being marginalized, STOP IT.) Also, at this point, about half of the translated books published in English are written by women, a number that rose precipitously in the past decade due to initiatives such as Women in Translation Month and the feminist turn after #MeToo—more specifically, thanks to the listicles written/generated in Women’s honor. When it comes down to it, the only problem I have with WITM is that I myself am annoying and contrary. I get anxious about who gets excluded—what is a woman? I think it’s because, per the Gervais Principle of Management, I am a Loser and not a Sociopath. I have too much solidarity, and I take silly games like contending for recognition, numbers, and identity markers seriously. Meanwhile, I am permanently enslaved to the Sociopaths at Penguin Random House, et cetera. I guess my wariness also comes from my fundamental inability to accept the distinction between “literature in translation” and “literature” that has been forced on us/me via the compartmentalizations of marketing and academia, which I reproduce and reinforce to earn my crumbs, also. Ugh, yuck. Some more please!
*JK
This semester, I am teaching a class about queerness in translation. It’s kind of abstract, kind of niche. Am I having an aneurysm? Basically, there is this concept that comes up in translation studies called “queering translation” and I do not understand it. I’m trying to. The idea has to do with: a) Understanding that language carries cultural concepts; b) Understanding that language and literature disseminate cultural and social concepts; c) Understanding that language is related to sexuality/gender, which is in itself cultural and social, and thus thinking about “queerness” in translation forces us to contemplate the constructed and mediated nature of the self and the mystery of language. That is the theory. And then there’s the stuff that’s more practical: Who are the queer people writing and being translated in other languages? What are the political implications of these translations? What choices are the translators making on the line level, and how are they shaping culture on the level of canon-creation/ambassadorship? And are they doing it because their brains are gay? This is the sound of my hands wringing under the weight of one thousand PDFs with one million footnotes.
I am still new to academia and I maintain my suspicion that talking and theorizing about translation does not actually help anyone translate. Not that it matters. Don’t tell anyone I think that. What helps people write and translate is having jobs with summers off. There’s nothing wrong with a little talking and theorizing.
Looking back into the blind fog of fours months ago when I proposed my course, I’m fairly sure that I meant to teach a class on experimental and “transgressive” literature, but I went in this direction because so much of that literature is written by queer authors, at least the books I am interested in. Really, I want my students to experiment; putting our conversations into practice will still be our focus. We’re still reading Margery Kempe (Robert Glück)—technically not a translation (or is it?). Also, in light of all the bullshit that goes on in places like Iowa, I thought I would give my students, many of whom identify as queer, a space to think and meet each other. I stand behind this. I am reviewing my motivations because, in these past weeks, as I have prepared for school and broken out into hives about WITM while catching whiffs of Woke 1 discourse, I suddenly remembered my own self in 2012, 2014, and my political coming of age, which started in this very magazine. The rise of feminism in Russia, which I amplified through translation, beginning with the Pussy Riot trial closing statements, has defined the Russophone work published in English for the past decade. I’ve been a part of that. Why am I now so confused about whether or not I like “women”? The closest I’ve gotten to understanding myself in this moment is that my feminism was/is defined negatively, by hating the patriarchy. It is Big Woman that scares me. More Loser shit probably—I am afraid of power.
Anywho, regardless of stated affiliation, internal contradictions, gender, sexuality, and so on, when it comes down to it, what everyone really wants are listicles and novellas. I serve the people. Here are just two slender volumes (a, :( , listicella) that did not make it onto my syllabus but that I am really excited to read. That’s right: I have not read these books, and I am not linking to where you can buy them, either.
The Membranes by Chi Ta-Wei, translated by Ari Larissa Heinrich
The Membranes is about a 22nd-century dystopia in which a lonely transfemme named Momo, a “dermal care technician,” grapples with her lifelong isolation and abandonment by her mother. At the heart of the story is her sexual coming of age, which took place in a hospital, through a playful and violent relationship with a female android named Andy whose organs were ultimately harvested to replace Momo’s. (I didn’t finish watching the video—is this what ends up happening to Bulgarian pop star Galena?) Every summary that I have read of The Membranes makes me feel like it was my organs that were harvested, like I am a transfemme who lives underwater following ecological collapse, facing my anger at my estranged mother. The story is universal. We are all Momo. Although, actually, some of us are Andy.
Before I started working on my syllabus, I didn’t know anything about the Taiwanese queer literature boom of the ’90s, which The Membranes was part of. It came on the heels of the dissolution of the KMT military dictatorship in 1987. I find it particularly exciting to come upon a community of writers like this, many of whom wrote with a tragic affect, responding to the depressurization of liberation by speaking openly of the danger, dread, and despair that was unmitigated by the new political situation. Chi Ta-Wei told the Paris Review that he had “no interest in writing feel-good representations of queer life”—“I was and am simply too cynical.” Take note, Zohran’s New York: your novellas better be hopeless. Not that you need any more encouragement.
Last Words from Montmartre by Qiu Miaojin, translated by Ari Larissa Heinrich
By the time I started writing this, I had forgotten that both The Membranes and Last Words from Montmartre had the same translator. Heinrich is a professor of Chinese Literature and Media at the Australian National University. He has published books on translating medical illustration between China and Europe, and on biomatter in art—most recently, a pamphlet called Ejecta, an essay on geology, race, metaphor, and the use of melanin in the work of the artist Jes Fan. I am deeply attracted to the way that Heinrich’s translations align with his intellectual, aesthetic, and personal preoccupations, not to mention that most of them seem to be very sad and/or disgusting.
Qiu Miaojin’s first novel, Notes of a Crocodile, was so influential that the protagonist’s name, Lazi, became the standard nonderogatory slang for “lesbian” in ’90s Taiwan. Last Words from Montmartre is written in fragments that can be read in any order—what Heinrich called a “Lesbian I Ching” in their mimetic essay that is also composed of fragments that can be read in any order. The book’s loosely connected chapters, writes Heinrich, “form what is essentially the author’s extended suicide note . . . [the book] ends with the narrator’s reaffirmation of her commitment to kill herself, a commitment that Qiu honored: late in the summer of 1995, the 26-year-old author stabbed herself in the heart in her Paris apartment.”
Style
In my last column, I asked about style, whether it’s possible to change and improve your writing style and how you may go about it. Then I took fellow Bulgaria-phile Garth Greenwell’s Zoom class on Style in aims of reporting back, but I didn’t retain very much of it because it was a Zoom class with 200 people. There was a very nitty gritty discussion of parts of speech and a lot of reflective prompts. He’s a great lecturer, and I bet that the Henry James class he is doing will be more informative. I remember he said that the kind of style that is promoted in MFA programs and American letters at large—Strunk and White’d, spare, muscular—is cishet masc, while he and James Baldwin write in a florid gay way, but did he actually say that? The transcripts and Zoom recordings have been locked and so I can’t fact-check my memory. Either way, I found the idea compelling. Eager to find anything Garth may have written on this subject that I could share with my students, I broke down and subscribed to his substack where, lo and behold, there is a post called “How to Become a Better Stylist.” In the spirit of fostering artistic community, I would be happy to share what it says with you if you send me $5.
This Month’s Puzzle Is Called Traveling in the Direction of the Shadow
Iana Boukova’s Traveling in the Direction of the Shadow is coming out this month in a translation (from the Bulgarian) by Ekaterina Petrova. Set in the Balkans during the 19th century, the novel’s eight sections tell the life stories of eight characters in intricately rhythmical, serpentine prose. Petrova worked on this translation for almost a decade. She also co-translated a collection of Boukova’s poetry.
The book’s title is emblematic of Boukova’s sentences: long, complexly structured. The puzzle this month is one of these sentences. It has eighteen clauses and simultaneously describes the deep past and both the middle and immediate present. What are you going to do with the tenses? What is the order of all this action? Feel free to play with the verbs and adjectives, adjusting for musicality and rhythm. You can read an excerpt of the novel here to get a taste of it.
Original:
И трябваше да минат години, преди да стъпи отново човек в къщата, пробивайки път с ножа си през ръждивите тръни, които бяха превзели двора и не пускаха никого, да изкачи черната от влага стълба, да блъсне вратата един път, два пъти с цялата си сила, докато се посипаха люспи ръжда от пантите и едва се открехна, и през този тесен отвор, странешката и с усилие, влязоха в дома си младоженецът и невестата му, зашеметени от вонята на гнилоч и мишовина и задавени от гъстата прах, която вдигаше из стаята, блъскайки се в стените и трошейки костите си, една птица, подплашена от влизането им.
| Broken down into clauses | Trot |
| 1 И трябваше да минат години, | And there had to pass years |
| 2 преди да стьпи отново човек в кьщата, | before a person would step again into the house |
| 3 пробивайки пьт с ножа си през ръждивите тръни, | piercing (his) way with his knife through the rusty thorns, |
| 4 които бяха превзели двора | which had conquered the yard |
| 5 и не пускаха никого, | and were not letting (in/through) anyone, |
| 6 да изкачи черната от влага стълба, | to climb the black from humidity staircase, |
| 7 да блъсне вратата един път, два пъти с цялата си сила, | to push the door one time, two times with all his strength |
| 8 докато се посипаха люспи ръжда от пантите | while flakes (of) rust sprinkled from the hinges |
| 9 и едва се открехна, | and (it) barely came ajar, |
| 10 и през този тесен отвор, странешката и с усилие, | and through this narrow opening, sideward and with effort, |
| 11 влязоха в дома си младоженецьт и невестата му, | entered in their home the groom and his bride, |
| 12 зашеметени от вонята на гнилоч и мишовина | dazed from the stench of rottenness and mouse droppings |
| 13 и задавени от гъстата прах, | and choked from the thick dust |
| 14 която вдигаше из стаята, | that (it) raised around the room, |
| 15 блъскайки се в стените | slamming into the walls |
| 16 и трошейки костите си, | and breaking its bones |
| 17 една птица, | a bird, |
| 18 подплашена от влизането им. | scared by their entry |
Send your solutions to [email protected]by September 29.
Optatian
The last puzzle, “Deeply I groaned,” was no joke. As a reminder, Roman poet Optatian’s “Carmen 23” was a visual poem in Latin, written out as a grid, with a secret message in it, in homophonically transcribed Ancient Greek, shaped like the letter M, standing for “Marcus,” the poem’s addressee. The results, I am sad to report to the haters, were spectacular.
Column 2 puzzle author John R. Sesgo took an oblique and conceptual approach. Talk about deeply I groaned.
Homage to Optation (Carmen 23)
HIGHLIGHTHEMIN10LINESAND37CHARACTERS
HIGHLIGHTTHEMIN10LINESAND37CHARACTERS
HIGHLIGHTTHEMIN10LINESAND37CHARACTERS
HIGHLIGHTTHEMIN10LINESAND37CHARACTERS
HIGHLIGHTTHEMIN10LINESAND37CHARACTERS
HIGHLIGHTTHEMIN10LINESAND37CHARACTERS
HIGHLIGHTTHEMIN10LINESAND37CHARACTERS
HIGHLIGHTTHEMIN10LINESAND37CHARACTERS
HIGHLIGHTTHEMIN10LINESAND37CHARACTERS
HIGHLIGHTTHEMIN10LINESAND37CHARACTERS
John said, “At first I titled it ‘The/M’ or ‘The…M’ but then I thought any Optatianite out there would want no help with the pun.” I like “The…M.” Unfortunately—and it goes without saying—conceptual poetry is welcome, but it’s still cheating.
Bulgarian translator Nikola Denkov rendered the secret message на български while the rest of the poem is in English. Now we’re talking! I love how it sounds in the grid format, no punctuation:
“HOWAWFULABETRAYALHASSTRUCKMYBULGARIANFRIENDSEXWAS-ALWAYSAPIECEOFCAKEFORYOURWIFE”
The secret message reads:
НАКРАТКО ХВАНАХ АНА СТРАСТНО УСУКАНА С МАРК
In short, I caught Ana passionately tangled with Mark.
The Bulgarian is transliterated into English.
Nicky writes,
I COULDN’T make Neilos and Hymnis work, those names just don’t have letters that match, which pissed me off, so the saga continues with new names (a contemporary polyamorous interpretation? Maybe someone new will recognize themselves) and a little Balkan twist, a different nod to the mountains. I also refuse to talk shit about Helen.
And if that isn’t impressive enough, here is KR Emmanuel, who translated from Latin into, that’s right, a Shakespearean sonnet in iambic pentameter, complete with footnotes explaining his decisions (and not how he even managed to do this).
Got unjust deeds t’unfold, ciphers poufed out;
Uncov’ring these in private, then rage smarts.
Oh yes, it smarts. The secret message is rendered in Latin, since “it is the closest thing England has to a cultured/academic language.” “Honestly,” Emmanuel admitted, “I think a Japanese translation, with Chinese for the hidden message, would have been more apt for this particular poem, but my Chinese isn’t good enough to attempt this.” The secret message, which is also in dactylic hexameter, appears in the shape of a stag’s head with horns, “which (I am told) is the universal symbol for a cuckold.”
“Pictographically,” Emmanuel concludes, “calling somebody a ‘cuck’ is a tiny bit more interesting as a stinger than drawing boobs in your poem.”
Here is Emmanuel’s “Carmen 23” in its full glory, footnotes and all. Has the translation bested the original?!
Optatian, Carmen 23(i)
Crestfallen on this clever(ii) friend’s account, |
Ingemui grauiter, Graecum miseratus amicum, |
Hidden message: conjugem et, O Johannis, Farwco Mariam aufert,
Transcribed back to Latin: CONIVGEM ET, O IOHANNIS(v), FARVVCO(vi) MARIAM(vii) AUFERT(viii)
Translation: “Oh John, Faruq’s even carrying off your spouse, Mary.”1
-
(i) In lieu of a companion essay, I will be using endnotes to explain some of the more obscure choices. My translation is a Shakespearean sonnet in iambic pentameter, with thirty-seven letters to a line. While the line length matches the Latin, I decided to change the meter and number of lines to what is most recognizably formal verse in English to match the feel of the hyper-constrained Latin.
(ii) Clever: Used for ‘Graecum’ to privilege the allusion to Greek sophistication. The allusion isn’t particularly complimentary. Latin poetry often added foreign elements when discussing moral wrongdoing to distance themselves—and the supposedly louche Greeks came in for it often. The notion that being cultured was connected to handling more practical matters poorly is also alive and well. Though it does lose the hint that the hidden message is Latin. See note 4.
(iii) Kant: He does double duty for me here. Firstly, as a sort of antiphrasis for the idea in “nihil…deposuisse…gratia…maior”—“deprived of nothing, (but) benefitting more”, which I don’t directly translate: Kant was famously severe about rejecting material calculations when deciding how to act, the opposite of Optatian’s suggestion about Helen. Secondly, Line 8 in the Latin ends with “binis” (twice), which is relatively uncommon. It’s used mainly in poetic contexts to fit scansion, but also here because, especially as a line ender, it’s homophonic with the Greek “βινεις (bineis)”—literally translated as “you’re having adulterous sex. The sexual pun would have been blatant at the time, but my version might be more childish.
(iv) Son of George: The equivalent Latin phrase, “Fryx coiux” was a literary stand-in for Aeneas, and references to Aeneas stood in for all Romans. English isn’t so flexible, but “Son of George” attempts the same kind of link to St George, the patron saint of England, whose flag is the English flag/a nativist symbol. St George was also supposed to have been a Roman soldier, indicating the language of the hidden text.
(v) Iohannis: “Μαρκος (Marcus)”, the hidden addressee in the original poem, likely isn’t a real person. But even if he was, it wouldn’t matter, as the name was so common, and so Roman, it also stood in for Romans generally. Hence John, for English speakers. The Latin for John is “Ioannis” normally—the “h” in the name is an affectation Roman speakers used when they wanted to sound smart, but (Catullus tells us) it also sounds pretentious. It seemed appropriate here.
(vi) Faruuco: “Νειλος (Nilus)” is a puzzling name for Optatian to use at first glance. It’s a Greek mangling of an Egyptian word for (the mouths of) the Nile, and was used metonymously for Egypt. Optatian was possibly African-born, and may have been writing with Constantine the Great as part of his intended audience. So at the risk of reading modern mores into an ancient text, Optatian may have been utilising ethnic tensions to add some frisson to his poem. The trope of the foreign man stealing the native woman is very old, after all. Interestingly, Cicero, who was extremely widely read by Romans in this era, mentions an Egyptian-born Heracles (using the word Nilus) that stole the secrets of the Phrygians—maybe a textual link Optatian was working with. My translation of all this is Faruq (Latinised as Faruuco), which is not only a name that allows the mimicry of these dynamics, but also a title given to the second Rashidun caliph, Umar ibn al-Khattab, who is (slightly apocryphally) said to have had a letter thrown in to the Nile so that it would flow again.
(vii) Mariam: “Υμνις (Hymnis),” with its suggestion of ‘hymen’ or virginal, was possibly snide, but also a generic wife character. ‘Mary’ does similar work in English.
(viii) I chose Latin for the language of the hidden message as it is the closest thing England has to a cultured/academic language (maybe German is an alternative, given the history?). Honestly, I think a Japanese translation, with Chinese for the hidden message, would have been more apt for this particular poem, but my Chinese isn’t good enough to attempt this. The message then had to be in dactylic hexameter, favouring the original poem and suiting Latin poetics, rather than the iambic pentameter of English. In Optatian, the secret text is transliterated—but Latin only lacks J, U, and W compared to English, so I simply made sure to use all three of these letters. My message is arranged in the shape of a stag’s head/horns, which (I am told) is the universal symbol for a cuckold. To get the thirty-seven letters of the message, you must use the “o” in the middle of line 8 twice (imagine drawing a line from the top left of the grid to the “o”, then a loop back to the “o”, before going up to the top right). I chose this image because, well, either Optatian is actually addressing a real person, in which case the poem is in bad taste and Marcus is the joke, or he isn’t, in which case the hidden message functions like a general punchline to the set-up of the poem entire. In either case, pictographically calling somebody a ‘cuck’ is a tiny bit more interesting as a stinger than drawing boobs in your poem. Well, if you’re hiding a Latin message in a sonnet, you probably aren’t worried about the most demotic option anyway. ↩
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