〖 Found in translation 〗
Found in translation
Found in translation
The reader will find, seeded throughout Issue Three, some translation tales from writers in Arabic, German, Hungarian, Romanian, Spanish, Swedish and Turkish, finding their way into German, Greek, Italian, Serbian, English and more. These tales can be filed with (also in this issue) Oksana Forostyna’s parsing of « untranslatable » Ukrainian humor and with Alexander Wells’s defense of Denglisch (and Berlinglisch, and Globish).
Translation, as a topic, tends to invite polemic or lamentation. Does the ERB have a stance? Not really. Our premise is that translation finds as much as it loses. The ERB’s editorial assistants, Nienke Groskamp and Job Wester, asked nine writers not what was lost but what was found in translation, as a text is given new surfaces and new depths. What’s the rightest or wrongest or closest or strangest thing that a reader has found in a new language? What’s something you wish would be found?
An inquiry into varieties of translational experience became a series of reflections on artful error and unexpected intimacy.
☞ Mona Kareem: « Bidoon » ➞ « Bedouin »
☞ Carlos Fonseca: « Para Ati » ➞ « Para ti »
☞ Agnes Lidbeck: Why are you so cold-hearted?
☞ Defne Suman: Borrowed time is borrowed money
☞ Hans von Trotha: Judge a book by its covers
☞ Iman Mersal: Panties of the people
☞ Krisztina Tóth: « droid » ➞ « druid »
☞ Lavinia Braniște: Overalls & eyeglasses
☞ Lydia Sandgren: Read between the stripes
We asked nine writers not what was lost but what was found in translation, as a text is given new surfaces and new depths. What’s the rightest or wrongest or closest or strangest thing that a reader of yours has found in a new language? What’s something you wish would be found?
In 2003 I was invited to a poetry festival in a European city. In my first extended reading I started with one of my early poems, entitled « Respecting Marx ». A bit intimidated by the large audience, I read the poem in Arabic, in a neutral voice. A beautiful blond woman followed with a very dramatic reading in English translation. She began: « In front of bright storefronts / flourishing with women’s panties / I cannot stop myself from thinking of Marx… » The hall burst into laughter. I was left completely puzzled.
The poem was published in 1992, and I’d read it for Arabic speakers before. For me the poem stemmed from anger and sadness, not humor. Afterwards I thought perhaps the word « panties » was shocking in this context, and changing it to « lingerie » might have made the irony less pronounced. But a later translation, using « lingerie » instead of « panties », brought on even louder laughter when read aloud to a 2022 audience in New York. This time, however, I was not surprised.
My Arab audience shares the common understanding that Arab intellectuals tend to be both Marxist and nationalist, to varying degrees. They are almost all men. A young female writer searching for her voice is surrounded by them, in dialogue with them — they are her mentors, literature professors at university, older poets, younger poets. Were a young female poet to fall in love, it would almost inevitably be with one of them.
The profound discovery for me is that the poem lost the seriousness of its original Arabic through the English translation — or rather, through the non-Arab audience who transfer the association between Marxism and patriarchy from anger and sadness to a new mood: playful and ironic. Maybe it’s because anger needs to be met with a good laugh.
Iman Mersal ( مرسال إميان ) is an Egyptian poet, essayist, translator and literary scholar living in Canada. Her poetry has been translated into many languages. Her poetry collection The Threshold, translated by Robyn Creswell, was released in October 2022, and Traces of Enayat, a biography, will be published in an English translation in August 2023.