Something Is Written in Denmark

There’s a touching story in Jackie Wullschlager’s wonderful, illuminating biography Hans Christian Andersen: The Life of a Storyteller. In it, a seventeen year old H.C. Andersen enters a school in the town of Slagelse where all his classmates are six years younger. When asked by the headmaster to locate the city of Copenhagen on a map—a town just 57 miles away and where he had recently lived for three years—he is unable. Imagine that. Andersen, probably the single most recognizable Danish author of all time, was for a time the class idiot to a bunch of eleven year olds.

But it’s that story of the iconic figure of H.C. Andersen which I find compelling in a discussion of contemporary Danish (and American) literature. The question, you see, is where is it? Who can locate it on the map? It’s alive and well, of course, this thing called Danish literature. Denmark supports its authors and its publishers, and it has its individual champions here in the states—Garrison Keillor and Paul Auster come to mind. Jonathan Rich of The Paris Review. Or Jeffrey Frank of the New Yorker (who recently, together with his wife, produced new translations of Andersen’s work). Then you have your regular posse of translators, a noble breed that’s too often overlooked by academics and media alike. Without translators, there would be no. such. thing. as. world. literature.

Every now and again, a Danish author will break through in the United States. Think Peter Høeg (Smilla’s Sense of Snow) or, more recently, Morten Ramsland (Doghead) and Peter Fogtdal (The Czar’s Dwarf). But like so much of international literature, it’s backburnered in favor of the homegrown stuff. It’s been a while since a Danish author broke through in the way that, say, Swede Stieg Larsson (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) or Norwegian Per Petterson (Out Stealing Horses) has broken through.

Why is that? It’s certainly not for lack of quality authors. Part of me wonders whether it’s a reverse Andersen effect: it’s now us who can’t locate Copenhagen on the map. Historically speaking, Denmark has always been a powerful force to be reckoned with in Europe—and especially in Scandinavia. But since the end of World War II, when globalization’s engine really started to heat up, Denmark has lagged behind in the self-promotion department. Swedes and Norwegians—much larger land masses to the north—tend to usurp visibility in this area. Perhaps the lesson here is that when you think you’re small, you are small.

Denmark is a nation of only around 5.5 million people, but it’s a leading cultural light in western culture (the cartoon fiasco notwithstanding), very much on par with all of Scandinavia. With its self-sustaining environmental policies, its copacetic, slightly more relaxed way of life and its brilliantly altruistic social welfare programs, Denmark is a role model to other nations. (Sadly, I can envision that privatization will strip the country’s social welfare programs bare in another generation. Am I being cynical?)

In such an environment, it’s no surprise that Danish authors have produced—and continue to produce—terrific material. Stuff worthy of world circulation. According to Open Letter Press’s blog Three Percent (although it’s not original to them), only, that’s right, “3 percent” of the total number of books published in the United States are translated. That’s a whoppingly low number—and perhaps proof that U.S. literature is indeed “insular,” as Horace Engdahl of the Swedish Academy notoriously suggested?

A special thanks to Scott Lindenbaum at the fabulous new Electric Literature for requesting this piece originally, and for posting it on their awesome new blog The Outlet. They are also responsible for the clever title of this post.

What Will Become of The Literary Translator?

Back before I went off to graduate school, an earnest literary-minded guy who really wanted to make the most of his studies, I earned enough money to attend a language school in Zurich where I would get to live with a host family. That host turned out to be Frau Annaliese, an amazing Swiss woman who'd once worked as a cook for a Minnesota politician.

Learning German in Switzerland is actually not that easy, but it's what I wanted to do. I'd always wanted to visit that country. Upon returning home six weeks later, I was better able to converse in German, but I wasn't great. So I enrolled in classes at my local university in western New York. (Okay, it was Geneseo.) By the time I launched my graduate "career," I knew German pretty well. I'm a fast learner. Once there--at Kansas State--I continued to take German classes and even won a scholarship to attend Justus Liebig University in Giessen, Germany. I'd had a notion in my head that if I was interested in comparative literature, as I was, and if I was in graduate school, as I was, then doggone it I needed to know another language.

Which turned out not to be true, to my great, great disappointment. Though I would've learned Germany in either case. I'd wanted to learn it from the time I was small--my name is Semmel, after all, and my father's interest piqued mine.

But all was not a loss. I also happened to meet my future wife in Kansas. She happens to be Danish. After Giessen, I finished up my graduate studies and together we moved to Denmark. Thankfully, my German studies really helped me learn Danish. After taking some classes with a bunch of other international students--an experience that was unbelievably funny, worthy of another blog post some day--I picked it up. Nowadays, in between doing my own creative work and working at The Writer's Center, I translate fiction from Danish to English. (You can read an interview with me here.) It's not easy to do, translate, but I enjoy it. Often, I do it on the bus or Metro on my way to work. And I've discovered there's a hunger for translations here, and many of the stories I've translated have been published in literary journals like Hayden's Ferry Review, Redivider, The Brooklyn Review, The Bitter Oleander, Aufgabe. And I'm certain now that more will come--it's an interesting creative endeavor.

Where am I going with this? Let's flash forward to Sunday, May 25, 2009. I'm reading the Washington Post. There's this article on a new program Google is making called Google Translate. Google's truly amazing. Seems they're developing a tool to translate text from one language to another just like that. Great. But I have to confess I'm pretty disheartened by the thought that all a future person might have to do to "translate" is use this program, click a few keys, and voila, a translation. In the same way I was disappointed that I didn't actually need to know a language to finish graduate school.

When I told Pia about this she pooh-poohed it. They've been doing this for years, she told me, you know that.

That's true. You can translate text from one language to another pretty easily on the Net using programs like Yahoo's Babel Fish. But what comes out is usually silly and needs repair. Human repair. But what if they fix the problems and it truly becomes a near-perfect machine?

Don't worry, she said, they're not interested in literary translation.

I'm not sure that's a comfort. But I wonder enough about it to write a longer-than-expected blog post about it when surely there's something else I can do. Electronic translation. Nonhuman translation. What will become of the literary translator?

The Joys (and Challenges) of Translating Poetry with Guest Instructor Yvette Neisser Moreno

Exactly 4 months ago Yvette Neisser Moreno blogged on the topic of translation right here on First Person Plural. Yvette's a translator and workshop leader at The Writer's Center, and she and Luis Alberto Ambroggio, the poet whose work she translates, will be reading this Sunday at 2:00 P.M. at The Writer's Center. They'll read along with C.M. Mayo, who posted here yesterday. Scroll down to see that post, if you didn't get the chance already.

Yvette's book of Ambroggio translations, Difficult Beauty: Selected Poems, will be out this month. Learn more about Sunday's event here.

Now on to Yvette.

Kyle


It's funny. Nearly every time I tell someone (a non-translator) that I translate poetry, the response is inevitably the same: “That must be difficult.”

Well, my friends, I’m here to tell you that first and foremost, translating poetry is a pleasure. This pleasure—like all forms of creative writing—is accompanied by challenges and sometimes frustrations. But isn’t this true of any life passion?

Two of my great passions in life are poetry and languages. For me, reading poetry in foreign languages is a great pleasure. So translating poems into my native English involves many pleasures: the linguistic pleasure of learning new words; the creativity of creating a poem; the pleasure of looking for a way to express a foreign phrase in my own language; and perhaps the deepest reward is the intimate relationship I develop with the original poem.

I had to say all that to preface the actual question posed to me for this blog—how does one handle the difficulties of translating poetry? Well, the “difficult” parts are what make translating poetry interesting. Occasionally, I have run into such a simple poem that I was able to pretty much do a word-for-word translation. That’s easy, but not particularly rewarding! The joy is in the word play, trying to figure out those linguistic puzzles, how to take something particular to one language and transport it into another.

I’ll give a brief example. One of the first poems I translated from Pablo Neruda ["Sonnet 64" from 100 Love Sonnets] included the following line: “Fui de rumbo en rumbo como las aves ciegas”. Literally, something like: "I went from one direction to another like blind birds." The word rumbo means direction, like a compass direction, but the phrase "fui de rumbo en rumbo" would usually be translated along the lines of “I wandered aimlessly”. But this is poetry—in poetry, sound is equally important as sense, particularly with an incredibly rhythmic poet like Neruda. The repetition of the word rumbo seemed important to me. I looked in Roget’s thesaurus for an English phrase with a similar meaning/effect: hither and thither, for example. Captures the sense and repetitive effect, but for the sound of this poem—flat.

Ultimately I decided to take a risk of doing something that poetry translators are cautioned against: I added a couple of images that were not in the original, in order to stay faithful to what I felt was the sentiment, the sound, and the rhythm of Neruda’s line: “I tumbled from limb to limb like a blind bird.” Believe me, I spent many hours pondering possible variations of that line, playing with the “mb” sound from rumbo, considering English verbs to use in place of the simple Spanish fui. But for a poet, what could be a more pleasant way to spend one’s hours than trying to mimic the style of one’s favorite poet?

This line was very difficult to translate, but I thoroughly enjoyed the process. May the adventurous among you find as much enjoyment in your own translations.
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Yvette Neisser Moreno is a poet and translator whose work has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, including The International Poetry Review, The Potomac Review, Tar River Poetry, and Virginia Quarterly Review.

Her translation (from Spanish) of Argentinian-American poet Luis Alberto Ambroggio's Difficult Beauty: Selected Poems will be published in 2009 by Cross-Cultural Communications. In addition to working as a professional writer/editor, Yvette teaches poetry and translation at the Writer's Center in Bethesda, Maryland, and in public schools in Maryland, Virginia, and Washington, D.C. The next workshop she will lead at The Writer's Center is Poetry Translation: Spanish/English.

Her translation Web site can be found here.