Category: Literary Translation

Films, Literary Translation, Recommendations, Translation, TV series

New Words #9: Meet My Pal Hyacinthe

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Folks, it’s high time I introduced you to this fine fellow.

A nineteenth-century lithograph depicting an older man with a large white mustache sitting on the floor and playing a small stringed instrument. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Merimee_Hyacinthe_Maglanovich_la_Guzla.jpg
Lithograph of “Hyacinthe Maglanovich” by F. G. Levrault, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

There he is, in all his glory: Hyacinthe Maglanovich, outlaw turned cowherd, renowned poet, virtuoso of the gusle, the finest bard in all of Dalmatia, and my unlikely companion through the early days of the Covid pandemic.

Hyacinthe is a central figure in La Guzla, a notorious collection of “Illyrian” folklore and travel narratives published in France in 1827. It was not, as originally claimed, the product of an anonymous translator’s effort to share what he’d learned while traveling in his mother’s homeland, but an early work of fiction by French author Prosper Mérimée, whose familiarity with the Balkans was . . . well, “minimal” would be putting it generously.

I first read La Guzla in grad school and was charmed by the sheer audacity and improbable success of Mérimée’s endeavor. These stories are melodramatic to the point of absurdity, and they rely heavily on Western European stereotypes of an exotic and unknowable “other” living beyond the Alps, yet readers bought it. I don’t mean people literally bought the book—it was far from a popular success—but certain folks who ought to have known better fell for the hoax. Scholars of Slavic literature attempted to translate the tales back into their “original” language, and Pushkin translated a selection of them into Russian. Even after the volume’s claims of authenticity had been disproven, Mary Shelley translated a few of the tales into English and wrote glowingly of the author’s depiction of “the rustic and barbarous manners” of the region’s inhabitants, their “wild energy,” and the near absence of “any vestige of civilization” in the narrative. (Yikes, Mary.) Aside from short excerpts, however, La Guzla had never been published in English.

Three years ago this week, I hurriedly returned home from an ill-timed trip to France and figured I’d use my two weeks of quarantine to get started on a project that had been on the back burner for too long: revisiting La Guzla with a view to translating it. The book was both more fun and more complex than I’d recalled. I still found the phony folklore and Hyacinthe’s convoluted biography enjoyable, but I was most intrigued by the copious footnotes provided by the alleged translator, whose often erroneous explanations of the tales’ history and their cultural and geographical context reveal more about him—the book’s anonymous and nearly invisible main character—than about his supposed area of expertise.

As La Guzla made its way into English as Songs for the Gusle, I had to contend with the existence of the internet, which presents both a resource and a challenge that Mérimée couldn’t have anticipated, especially when it comes to proper nouns. When Mérimée’s narrator told nineteenth-century readers that he traveled to a village called Poghoschiamy, they had no reason to question it, but a reader today can google that name and easily discover that it does not exist outside the context of La Guzla. Likewise, Mérimée’s contemporaries would not have balked at the Frenchification of character names like Hyacinthe and Jeannot, but an English-speaking reader today would find it more believable that Hijacint and Vanja (rather than Hyacinth and Johnny) were cavorting around the Adriatic coast in the early nineteenth century.

My goal, then, became to present character and place names that would feel plausibly authentic (Croatian-adjacent?) to most English-speaking readers without, of course, actually being authentic, which is impossible. (At one point in the translation process, I had a Post-it at my desk that read: “Don’t put more effort into this than Mérimée did.”) Was “Poghoschiamy” a French spelling of the actual village of Pakoštane? I don’t know. Maybe. It’s plausible enough. Googling it won’t spoil anyone’s suspension of disbelief. Mérimée probably threw a dart at an old Italian map and misspelled what he saw on it. Stop thinking about it! Just say Pakoštane!

The official release date of Songs for the Gusle is this coming Tuesday, March 21, and pre-orders are available at a discount through Monday. In the meantime, feel free to read an excerpt here and watch me read one of the fake folktales (minus the all-important footnotes) here. And please spread the word to anyone who might like to spice up their bookshelves with some tragic elopements, historically questionable assassinations, and practical tips for dealing with the vampires in your neighborhood.

A Humble Suggestion

In each newsletter, I offer at least one recommendation for your reading, watching, or listening pleasure.

An Cailín Ciúin (The Quiet Girl) is the first Irish film ever nominated for the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film, and that milestone hardly seems sufficient. As David Fear noted in his review for Rolling Stone, “In a just world, it would be up for a dozen other categories as well.” The film is full of sensitive performances and gorgeous cinematography, and the screenplay is a brilliant adaptation of Claire Keegan’s story Foster. Check out this interviewwith director and screenwriter Colm Bairéad about the process of adapting an English-language story into an Irish-language film, then watching it find a global audience.

The Reluctant Traveler (Apple TV+) follows Eugene Levy to some of the world’s most unique hotels, which his producers force him to leave so he can interact with the locals and have adventures he finds terrifying. (“The words seaand plane,” he notes during his stay in the Maldives, “only make me think of the words plunge and debris.”) Along the way, he befriends an orphaned elephant, steps into a typhoon simulator, and brushes up on his guitar skills to accompany a fado performance. The whole thing is delightful. And speaking of delightful . . .

Here, Look at My Cats

The world is a mess, your eyes are puffy because you’ve just sobbed your way through An Cailín Ciúin, and you might welcome a pleasant distraction. For what it’s worth, here are my cats, who provided invaluable editorial assistance on Songs for the Gusle.

A dilute tortoiseshell cat is sitting, more or less like a person, on a couch. She is holding a black ballpoint pen between her toes.
Alexis is a paws-on line editor.
A tuxedo cat sits on the photographer’s lap, on which a manuscript printout is partially visible. The cat looks over his shoulder up at the photographer with adoration.
David thought this draft was the most beautiful thing he’d ever heard. To be fair, he says that about everything I write.

Thanks as always for reading! See you back here soon.

Laura

Literary Translation, Translation

New Words #7.5: It’s (Almost) a Book!

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My first book-length translation will be released in exactly one month. It’s time to get excited!

Text: SONGS FOR THE GUSLE / Prosper Mérimée / Translated by Laura Nagle. Image: A person clad in a blue garment with gold embroidery is holding a narrow stringed instrument. Snow-capped mountains are visible in the distance.
Look! It’s got a cover and everything!

It took nearly 200 years for this French classic to be available in English translation in its entirety, but it’s available for pre-order (at 20% off the cover price) now.

From my publisher, Frayed Edge Press: First published in 1827, La Guzla purported to be a collection of folktales, ballad lyrics, and travel narratives compiled and translated into French by an anonymous traveler returning from the Balkans. Before long, though, it was revealed that both the stories and their “translator” were the fictional creations of a young civil servant, Prosper Mérimée, who would later become one of the most accomplished French writers of his generation. In these dramatic tales of love, war, and encounters with the supernatural, Mérimée has given us both a treasure trove of “fakelore” and a satirical portrait of a self-appointed expert blissfully unaware of how little he understands the cultures he claims to represent.

From me: Folks, this deeply weird book has a little bit of everything. It’s got vampires! It’s got ghosts! It’s got the evil eye! It’s got a world-class nincompoop for a narrator! You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll say “YUCK” out loud!

Sometime between now and publication day, I’ll write about why I chose to work on this project and how I approached it, but for now, I’ll just add my voice to the chorus of authors and translators on the internet chanting the magic words: Please pre-order my book.

Articles, Fiction Writing, Literary Translation, Recommendations, Translation, Writing

New Words #5: A Pep Talk for Everyone Except the Late Muriel Spark

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I invite you to get the new year off to a hilarious start by watching Muriel Spark describing her creative process in this 35-second interview clip, which makes me howl with laughter and/or frustration every time I watch it.

I can’t be the only one who finds that video maddening. Are we really supposed to believe Muriel Spark would just sit down, write a book, and then be done writing the book?

a GIF of Frollo from Disney’s animated The Hunchback of Notre Dame shouting, “Witchcraft!”

The implication is that Spark told her stories to herself multiple times, essentially drafting entire novels in her head over a period of weeks or months, before she ever set pen to paper. (As she once put it, “I do all the correcting before I begin, getting it in my mind. And then when I pounce, I pounce.”) If that sounds like a plausible approach for you, go for it! To me, it sounds like torture.

Both my writing and my translation skills improved once I’ve accepted that, for me, the purpose of a first draft is to be a mess. I don’t just mean it’s okay for a first draft to be “bad”; I mean the more cluttered the pages are with notes I’ve written to myself, the better the second draft is likely to be.

I’m just starting now to look at the 50,000 words I wrote during NaNoWriMo in November. Did they get me 50,000 words closer to the end of my story? Absolutely not—and I’m glad! For me, the real benefit of that challenge lies in the prioritization of quantity over quality. If I’m trying to accumulate words for NaNoWriMo, I’m not tempted to delete an awkward bit of dialogue or an unwieldy phrase; instead, I add a bunch of alternatives and plan to figure out what works when I come back to the draft with fresh eyes.

I do the same thing with the first draft of a literary translation; my notes might include links to resources I’ve already checked, but they consist primarily of alternative options for word choice or phrasing. (That said, I recently found a couple of comments I’d left for myself that simply said “nope” and “THIS IS NOT IT,” which might not be great for bolstering confidence but did give me a laugh.)

Sometimes I decide my first instinct was the right one, but the third or fourth idea I had is often my best option. My second thought virtually never turns out to be the best one, but it’s still worth putting on the page; without it, the third and fourth versions wouldn’t exist.

Anne Lamott’s famous “shitty first draft” advice notwithstanding, I think a lot of us privately fear we’re the only ones struggling through messy drafts while everybody else simply sits down with a fresh notebook and writes the title and then their name and then “Chapter 1” and then the first sentence of Chapter 1 and then the second sentence of Chapter 1, à la Muriel Spark. The thing is, even Muriel Spark didn’t actually write that way. The process she describes in that interview clip is transcription; she had done the real work of writing before she sat down. She didn’t have a preternatural capacity for summoning a novel out of thin air, but she did have the self-knowledge to develop a method that worked for her. That—not the bit with the christening of a new notebook—is worth emulating.

Self-Promotion Corner

For the last few years, I’ve looked forward to Iron Horse Literary Review’s annual PhotoFinish issue—a compilation of very brief prose and poetry based on the same photo prompt, released at midnight on New Year’s Eve and free to read online. The 2022 edition is here, and I’m thrilled to say it includes a flash fiction piece of mine. The photo prompt is on page 4, and each contributor provides a statement at the end of the issue saying how they drew inspiration from the photo. Please do take a look!

Songs for the Gusle, my translation of Prosper Mérimée’s 1827 hoax, La Guzla, will be published in March by Frayed Edge Press, and I’m excited to make this unique collection of fake folklore and bogus travelogues available in English for the first time. Come for the vampires and ghosts, stay for the trenchant critique of cultural imperialism! I’ll have information to share about pre-orders soon.

A Humble Suggestion

In each newsletter, I’ll offer at least one recommendation for your reading, watching, or listening pleasure. This time around, I’m highlighting two recent articles that focus on increased interest in (and demand for) translated literature in traditionally insular Anglophone publishing markets.

Fiona O’Connor wrote last week in The Irish Times about a dramatic surge in sales of translated fiction in the UK and Ireland. O’Connor points to small presses as a particular driver of a “disruptive swipe on big publishing houses” but also notes that Brexit has threatened UK-based small presses’ business models.

In her introduction to The Best Short Stories 2022: The O. Henry Prize Winners, Valeria Luiselli presents the common threads in the twenty stories she selected for inclusion, fully half of which were first published in languages other than English. Works in translation only recently became eligible for the O. Henry Prize, and Luiselli notes that this change was a deciding factor in her acceptance of the invitation to serve as guest editor.

Here, Look at My Cats

The world is a mess, and you might welcome a pleasant distraction. For what it’s worth, here are my cats.

Two cats napping on a sage green blanket. On the left is a tuxedo cat; on the right, a dilute tortie. They are facing each other and holding paws.
Sometimes they get a little territorial, but then again, sometimes they hold paws in their sleep.

All the best for a joyous start to the new year!

Laura

Irish, Language Acquisition, Links, Literary Translation, Translation, TV series

New Words #2: Complicated as 1, 2, 3

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Has there been an uptick lately in clickbait about “untranslatable” terms? Maybe the algorithms are just increasingly determined to lure me in. Either way, I’m not falling for it.

I suspect this focus on untranslatability leads people to believe that the challenges of translation are concentrated in a handful of terms per language, which isn’t the case at all. In fact, the grammatical impacts of simple, everyday concepts in a given language can affect its syntax, rhythms, and sounds in ways present as much of a challenge to translators as they do to language learners.

To illustrate this, let’s imagine we want to describe in Irish what we see in the photo below.

two bees on a pink flower
Photo by Esperanza Doronila on Unsplash

First, we’ll need some basic vocabulary.

bee: beach

small: beag

small bees: beacha beaga

This might seem reasonably straightforward so far. As is the case in many other European languages, the adjective follows the noun, and both words are made plural, in this case by adding -a. Simple enough! So if we want to say exactly how many small bees, we’ll just state the number and follow it up with “beacha beaga,” right?

Not so fast. English speakers are accustomed to thinking of singular vs. plural as a binary concept; any quantity greater than one is plural. (“This recipe calls for one and a quarter cups of sugar.”) But many languages treat small quantities as their own separate category.

In Irish, if we’re talking about anywhere from two to six bees, we’re going to use the singular form of the noun with the plural form of the adjective. Yup! Oh, and they’re also getting lenited; that means the “b-” becomes a “bh-” (pronounced v). So no, “two small bees” aren’t “dhá beacha beaga”; they’re “dhá bheach bheaga.”

But wait! That was for numbers two through six. What if we have seven, eight, nine, or ten bees? Well, the adjective is still plural and lenited. But the noun? It’s still singular, but instead of lenition, we’ll use eclipsis, which means the “b-” becomes “mb-” (pronounced m). So “seven small bees” are “seacht mbeach bheaga.”

To summarize:

Come on, Laura, counting in Irish can’t be all that complicated. Surely these rules still apply even if you’re working with quantities greater than, say, nineteen? Not exactly. Well, do they apply if you’re counting people? LOL, no.

At this point you might be wondering what difference this makes when it comes time to translate. Two small bees are two small bees, right? Well—translators, say it with me!—it depends on the context.

If you’re working with a factual, informative text, such as a caption for that photo of two small bees on a flower, then yes, the thought process is fairly straightforward. The goal is to state the idea of “two small bees” so that it is clear and comprehensible to readers of the target language. That might not be quite as simple as it sounds; perhaps the target language has multiple words for “bee” or the target readers are most familiar with a bee species that conjures a different image in readers’ minds than the source text intended. Even so, the options available to the translator are likely to be few in number, and the decision-making process shouldn’t be especially draining.

If you’re working with an expressive text, such as poetry, fiction, or personal essay, things might get more complicated. Let’s say we’re translating a picture book from Irish into English. The author’s choice to include “dhá bheach bheaga” in the story might have been motivated by the alliteration. Maybe that’s the whole reason why there are two of them rather than seven—because “seacht mbeach bheaga” wouldn’t be alliterative! Maybe the whole book is organized around alliterative phrases! That sounds delightful for the reader and nightmarish for the translator. If you need to translate the text so that the same illustrations can be used, it’s unlikely you can translate those phrases directly while maintaining the spirit and purpose of the book. So perhaps you’ll decide those are “baby bees” or “itty-bitty bees.”

All this for three words that will never show up on a list of “untranslatable” terms—and a similar challenge awaits on every page of that picture book.

A Humble Suggestion

In each newsletter, I’ll offer at least one recommendation for your reading, watching, or listening pleasure.

If the writers in your life are crankier than usual, that might be because November is National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) and they’re trying to write 50,000 words in thirty days. I’m technically a NaNo rebel this year because I’m trying to use the positive peer pressure to finish the first draft of a novel already in progress rather than starting from scratch on November 1. Either way, it’s tough! NaNoWriMo is a nonprofit that works with writers of all ages; if you have K-12 teachers or students in your life, check out their programming for young writers.

The Hulu series Reboot has finished its first season, and it’s brilliant. The premise: Hulu greenlights an edgy reboot of an early 2000s network sitcom. The original cast members’ reunion is not exactly joyous, a generational conflict is playing out in the writers’ room, it’s anybody’s guess who is actually in charge of this production, and everything is hilarious. Seriously, go binge-watch the whole season right now. (Unless you’re doing NaNo, in which case you should be writing.)

Here, Look at My Cats

The world is a mess, and you might welcome a pleasant distraction. For what it’s worth, here are my cats.

Cat mór i mbosca beag / A big cat in a small box
My assistant lends a helpful paw as I review Irish grammar

That’s all for now. See you when these 50,000 words are done!

Laura

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Books, Fiction Writing, Links, Literary Translation, Podcasts, Recommendations, Translation, Writing

New Words #1: Rejection, Shmejection

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Welcome to New Words, a newsletter about writing, translation, and language acquisition.

I am a freelance writer and translator, an adult language learner, and a former high school world language teacher, which means that these topics are inescapably intertwined in my career and creative pursuits. This newsletter is intended to offer a peek behind the scenes as I work, and I hope it will appeal to folks who are interested in blurring the lines between these fields: writers and language teachers curious about translation, for instance, or translators wondering whether to pursue an interest in teaching or writing.

To get us started, I’ll share a bit today about how my experience as a translator prompted me to reengage with fiction writing. There is a practical aspect to this; my schedule as a freelancer can be unpredictable, but it also enables me to reserve time for creative work at moments of the day when I am focused and energetic for creative work. It wasn’t until I started translating literature and submitting it for publication, however, that I began to get past the mental block I’d had for years. I stopped limiting myself to the verbal equivalent of doodling; I started finishing drafts of short stories, revising them, and submitting them to literary magazines.

Judging by my Twitter feed, which is littered with writers offering each other advice about how to handle rejection, I’m hardly alone in finding that last step to be the toughest. This is not a matter of hypersensitivity but a reflection of the sheer difficulty involved in placing a poem, essay, or short story in a literary magazine. Few publications are open about the number of submissions they receive, but the handful of acceptance rates that are common knowledge are well below those of Ivy League schools. Case in point: Taco Bell Quarterly, a magazine devoted to—you guessed it—prose and poetry about Taco Bell, accepted about one percent of submissions for its forthcoming issue. Submitting to lit mags is such a universally demoralizing experience that Chill Subs, a new database and online community designed to make the process less intimidating, offers a rejection bingo game for users of its submission tracker, turning “we often have to reject great work” from a platitude to a collectible.

Because rejection is the norm, every acceptance I have received has taken me by surprise. I treat emails from publications like horror movies; even if the subject line is “CONGRATULATIONS,” I still peek through my fingers at the message in case there’s a jump scare ahead.

As it happens, I’d put rejection letters into the same category as jump scares: I dislike them, but they don’t have the power to hurt my feelings.

It isn’t just that I’ve had the experience of receiving a rejection from a lesser-known journal and an acceptance from a prestigious one for the same piece on the same day, although that certainly helped me get some perspective on quirks of the process. It’s also a principle that became clear to me as soon as I started submitting as a literary translator. When I’m translating a work that was previously published and well-received in another language, I know I’m not alone in thinking the story is worthy of interest. Since I’m also confident in my skills as a translator, I have no doubt that the story’s quality is up to the level of the publication’s or editor’s expectations, yet more often than not, the outcome is a rejection.

That’s because the question is not Is this work good enough to appear in this publication? but Is this story the right fit for this publication’s current needs, and if so, is it landing on the right editor’s desk at the right moment?

That framing has given me a healthier attitude toward submitting my own fiction. A magazine’s decision to publish or decline a piece isn’t an up-or-down assessment of the writer’s talent or effort; instead, an acceptance marks the convergence of talent, effort, and (crucially!) a considerable degree of luck. It became a lot easier for me to let a piece go in search of a home once I recognized which parts of this process I can control and which I can’t.

My first short fiction publication is scheduled for the end of this year.

A Humble Suggestion

In each newsletter, I’ll offer at least one recommendation for your reading, watching, or listening pleasure.

  • Novelist Rebecca Makkai has launched a personal/public reading project on Twitter, using the hashtag #AroundTheWorldIn84Books. (You can read about the origin of the project in this thread.) The first book she selected was The Door by Magda Szabó, translated from Hungarian by Len Rix—a stunning novel that I can’t recommend highly enough. I’m currently reading The Piano Teacher by Elfriede Jelinek, translated from German by Joachim Neugroschel, in anticipation of Makkai’s discussion on Twitter in early November. This project has provided a great incentive for me to move a couple of classics to the top of my to-read list, and I’m excited to see what’s next.
  • The podcast Everything Is Alive is back for a new season, and it continues to be delightful. Each episode features an in-depth interview with an inanimate object. Does a rental car care which airport it’s returned to? Does a baguette remember the hopes and dreams it harbored back when it was dough? At long last, we have answers to the questions we probably never knew we had.

Here, Look at My Cats

The world is a mess, and you might welcome a pleasant distraction. For what it’s worth, here are my cats.

Two cats are shown reclining on a sofa. In the foreground, a dilute tortoiseshell cat is leaning against a green pillow, looking directly into the camera. In the background, slightly out of focus, a tuxedo cat with a black-and-pink nose is also looking toward the photographer.

If David and Alexis ever decide to record an album as an indie folk duo, their album cover is ready to go. Their rider demands, however, will be a nightmare.

That’s all for now. See you back here soon!

Laura

To receive new posts in your inbox, subscribe (for free!) at lauranagle.substack.com.