Krys Lee reports for PEN Atlas from the Edinburgh International Book Festival, where she appeared on the panel ‘New American Voices’. For more on the festival, please also see Daniel Hahn’s piece The Edinburgh International Book Festival is one of those rare events that bring readers, critics, and writers together in an atmosphere of comfort and challenge. Hundreds of discussions happen simultaneously during the panels, at the Edinburgh World Writers’ Conference, in cafes, and in the authors’ cozy yurt (which actually is a yurt). Many will disagree among one another; there are not many clear-cut answers when it comes to literature. But the festival is the beginning of a conversation between writers and moderators, writers and readers, writers and writers, and readers with each other, as well as a celebration of books. I don’t think there was a single panel I went to where there wasn’t at least a slight difference of opinion between panelists or where audience members weren’t contradicting one another. This colorful cacophony, perhaps, reflects the liveliness of readers and reading and mirrors the complexity of literature. But the best conversations begin in challenge and disagreement.On the panel I participated in, some of the conversations circulated around dislocation and belonging. The panel was titled New American Voices. Panelist Nell Freudenberger’s latest novel The Newlyweds braids the narrative of a 24-year old Bangladeshi woman named Amina who has left her native country for America to marry a man she corresponded with online. The Guardian sees it as an effort to translate the American experience for the 21st century. My own story collection Drifting House focuses on outsiders and survivors in the Korean diaspora, spanning South Korea, North Korea, and the United States. The books, ostensibly, have been paired up to reflect America’s roots as a nation of immigrants.The most interesting comment raised was by a young man that ended on the note that, we can live for a long time in a country and yet never really understand it. This American man had lived in Japan and never felt as if he was accepted by or quite comprehended the country, and he questioned the ability of anyone else to do so. It was a comment disguising its challenge to us, the panelists, and our ability to successfully write the stories of people whom he saw as ‘the other’. While I sympathize with his frustrations, ironically, Freudenberger’s entire body of work questions his assumption that one may not be able to inhabit other worlds through the transformative act of fiction, directly challenging such sceptics. The Newlyweds was also based on the true story of a Bangladeshi woman whom Freudenberger struck up a friendship with on a plane ride. As for myself, I had spent over half my life in Seoul, South Korea, and at this point, am more intimate with South Koreans and Korean culture than America. My everyday spoken language is Korean and Seoul is my hometown, and most likely, my hopefully distant future burial site, will be in South Korea. I was literally writing about what I know, and not the ‘otherness’ that he indicated.What he was really getting at was the question of authenticity and who has the right to speak for another. The indeterminate space between two cultures, from his perspective, disqualified one to speak for another. This was the narrative space that he was challenging.But literature, not to mention history, society, and culture, has always been about dislocation. Some of our greatest modern writers, including Joseph Conrad, T.S. Eliot, and Ernest Hemingway made it their subject, and more recently Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Yiyun Lee, Nam Le, Salman Rushdie, Yi Munyoland Xiaolu Guoall assume a form of dislocation at the heart of their narratives.We live in a time of dislocation. Perhaps we always have. The story of immigration, that great passage of people making their way to an unknown world, is only one kind of dislocation. “Displaced” is a synonym for “dislocated”; as is “to be put out of place”. Dislocation is also one form of discomfort and, in its most extreme form, alienation. In this sense dislocation is also timeless. It is the story of migrations, journeys that sometimes end badly, as well as the displacement from being one kind of person to being another.The poet Susan Mitchell says, “The world is wily and doesn’t want to be caught.” Writers attempt, or in some postmodern literature, question the attempt, to capture the elusive. This despite the challenge by the well-intended audience member: is it even possible for a writer to inhabit and understand other worlds and other voices? I suppose the next natural questions are: how do you define what is your world, and what is your voice? About the AuthorKrys Lee is the author of Drifting House recently published by Faber and Faber in the U.K. and Viking/Penguin in the U.S.. She was born in Seoul, South Korea, studied in the U.S. andEngland, and lives in Seoul. Her work has appeared in the Kenyon Review, Narrative magazine, Granta (New Voices), California Quarterly, Asia Weekly, the Guardian, the New Statesman, the Huffington Post and Condé Nast Traveller, UK.www.krys.lee.comAlso by Krys Lee for PEN AtlasKorean Women Writers, Part 1 What we don’t know about North KoreaAdditional InformationSusan Mitchell (born in 1944) is an American poet, essayist and translator who wrote the poetry collections Rapture and Erotikon.Nell Freudenberger is the author of the novels The Dissident and The Newlyweds and the story collection Lucky Girls, winner of the PEN/Malamud Award and the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, and a Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Fellowship from the New York Public Library, she was named one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists and one of The New Yorker’s “20 Under 40.” She lives in Brooklyn with her family. The Newlyweds was published in the UK by Viking in August 2012. Read more about The Newlyweds here at Curtis Brown.
Tag: edinburgh
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Scottish Translation
Sold-out duels, ninjas versus saints, and the invisible translator made visible… Daniel Hahn reports from Edinburgh International Book Festival for PEN Atlas
Edinburgh is one of the great international book festivals. There are plenty of terrific book festivals out there, but to my mind it’s the strength of the international literary coverage in particular that makes Edinburgh special. With writers this year from more than forty countries, I don’t know a literary event programmed with an eye to wider horizons. What this means, of course, is that it’s a celebration of – and an examination of – writers who produce their work in many languages, writers whose extraordinary work has come to UK readers through the skill of English-language literary translators.
This year, alongside the writers, the festival has included a strand of events putting the translators and their craft centre-stage. This series, programmed with the British Centre for Literary Translation and funded by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, isn’t just about shoving the translator onto a stage to sit next to their writer, a well-meant gesture but which is mostly about helping the original writer get by in English; rather it’s made up of events about literary translation. Typically, of course, a translator expects to be invisible (that is apparently the most desirable state of affairs) – certainly nobody’s heard of us in the way they might have heard of our authors; and English-speaking audiences, we’re always told, aren’t on the whole interested in, or perhaps just aren’t comfortable with, discussions of the subject. So if we were to programme a series of events about translation, featuring in most cases a line-up of translators nobody’s ever heard of, would anyone show up to hear what we had to say? We put it to the test.
Following a lively talk by David Bellos presenting his book, Is That a Fish in Your Ear, my own first event in the strand was chairing a discussion on translation between Nathan Englander and Etgar Keret. These two brilliant story-writers are good friends and serve as translators of one another’s work, and they promised many insights to share on the subject. We had more than fifty people show up, but that, I thought, was probably an anomaly; both Keret and Englander are big names to a book-festival crowd, capable of attracting audiences in decent numbers. It was them, not the subject, that accounted for those tickets being sold, perhaps.
Translators, we were told in that event, were surely “saints”; but also, to Keret’s mind, “ninjas”. “As soon as you see them,” he explained, “they stop being any good.” A couple of days later, however, the translators were altogether visible – front, centre and under some very hot, very bright spotlights. And they were, it turned out, very good indeed.
Both Monday and Tuesday night’s evening programmes at the festival included “translation duels”, in which a text is given in advance to two translators for each to produce their own English versions; at the event we present the two versions to an audience and discuss the discrepancies and what they tell us. We look at the ways each translator has interpreted the original differently, and how each has expressed what they want to express differently. It helps people who might not have given the subject much thought before to understand translation as both an interpretative undertaking and a creative undertaking, rather than a purely mechanical one.
The first duel featured a text from Spanish, by Basque novelist Bernardo Atxaga (who also participated in the discussion), in versions presented by translators Rosalind Harvey and Frank Wynne. We discussed mostly pronouns, commas, Don Quixote, and the difference between a stream and a brook, and between “It held its head up” and “It carried its head high.” A little recondite? A tad esoteric? Just a touch nerdy? Yep, absolutely. Shamelessly, gleefully so. The following night, Frank returned for the second duel, this time from French (with a text by Laurent Binet), matched tonight with Adriana Hunter. This discussion was about sea lions, about the air force (or the airforce), research, italics, whether that second ‘to’ was really necessary, whether ‘gutbucket’ is appropriate in the context or possibly a hint too strong, and writing in the historical present.
Frank, Rosalind and Adriana won’t mind my saying that none of them is what you might call famous. They are all, like me, like almost every translator, entirely unknown to readers. We don’t kid ourselves – our names don’t sell tickets to festival events. And both events were held in a 190-seater venue. And both sold out. So – might someone out there be a little bit interested in this subject after all?
There was more to come; on Sunday, Ros Schwartz ran a public all-day translation workshop at the festival. On Monday Sarah Ardizzone and I took the stage for a wide-ranging, general discussion about literary translation (also sold-out). And then, of course, there were all those writers from those forty-something countries. Because really, our job, after all, is to make them look good, and to make it possible for readers in the UK to gain access to them. Because, no, it’s not about us, deep down. Their books are the point. But access to those books requires a strange thing, the complex sleight of hand that is literary translation, and I can’t help but being pleased that, for a change, readers were queuing up to ask questions about that part of the process, too.
About the Author
Daniel Hahn is a writer, editor and translator, with some thirty books to his name. His translations (from Portuguese, Spanish and French) include novels from Europe, Africa and Latin America, and non-fiction by writers ranging from Portuguese Nobel laureate José Saramago to Brazilian footballer Pelé.
A past chair of the UK Translators Association, he is currently programme director of the British Centre for Literary Translation. He has won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize (with his translation of Agualusa’s The Book of Chameleons) and a Blue Peter Book Award (for The Ultimate Book Guide, the first in his series of reading guides for children and teenagers), and judged a number of prizes including the IFFP and the Booktrust Teenage Prize.