Some Kind of Beautiful Signal carries a vibrant, persistent pulse, a calling cry to readers to look up and out. Time and distance collapse in its pages; here, after all, is a re-visioned geometry. (That is, literally, "measuring the world.")
Here is the seventeenth volume of the TWO LINES annual series of multilingual anthologies of literature in translation, this time co-edited by Natasha Wimmer (famed for her Roberto Bolaño and Maria Vargas Llosa renditions) and Jeffery Yang, who is a poet, translator and an editor at the New Directions publishing house. It comes to us via the Center for the Art of Translation, featuring more than thirty writers from around the globe in both their original languages (even Zapotec!) and English translations. The collection includes more highlights than I can conveniently tick off ... but, oh hell, I'll try anyway:
- A folio of contemporary and medieval poetry from China's Uyghur ethnic minority that lives in a center of cultural hybridity at the western edge of the country and in the middle of Asia, in the midst of the old Silk Road and alternatively annexed by Russia and China.
- "A Thin Line Between Love and Hate”-- which is previously untranslated fiction by Jorge Luis Borges' best friend and collaborator, Adolfo Bioy Casares, translated by Suzanne Jill Levine (whose own book, The Subversive Scribe: Translating Latin American Fiction, I have long hankered for).
- Three poems by Danish writer Inger Christensen, who passed away last year.
- An apt essay by Roberto Bolaño called "Translation Is a Testing Ground.” (via Wimmer, naturally)
- A chapter of Lydia Davis' translation of Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary.
- Two poems by Xi Chuan, one of contemporary China's most celebrated poets.
- Two translators approach the poetry and prose of Gennady Aygum a Russian writer that was numerous times nominated for the Nobel Prize.
- Not a sideline issue: Some Kind of Beautiful Signal is just so damn good-looking. A horizontal publication with a satisfying heft, clean design, and the aesthetic spark of multiple languages printed across the white pages... as Chad Post has put it, there is something that is just cool about it.
Rather than disappear into the texts they work with, here the translators' own voices emerge in introductions to the pieces they worked on. In mini-essays, the translators provide context, a consideration of challenges they faced in transforming the originals to English, and an articulation of their purpose. Collectively, these introductions are a fascinating overview of the differences among individual translators working in different languages and traditions.
I read Some Kind of Beautiful Signal slowly, taking it in sips over the course of a season, feeling no need to rush. There were a few points where my limited Spanish led me to wonder why a translator chose a particular English rendition of a line or word, making me wish I could talk back to the work and ask it questions. (How did "La traducción es un yunque" become "Translation is a testing ground," Natasha Wimmer? Why is "la mesa de trabajo" simply "the desk," Suzanne Jill Levine?)
Most of the time, though, I enjoyed just moving along on this ride. I read this collection, incidentally, while also moving through the mammoth Best European Fiction 2011 anthology; it is a curious thing to reflect on the differences between anthologies that share a similar purpose in making more excellent international literature available in English. While I love them both, BEF is immersive, contemporary, more unified in cultural landscape, form and the idiosyncratic preferences of Aleksandar Hemon, its editor. Some Kind of Beautiful Signal is the anthology that is more eclectic, more global, more far-reaching in time and tradition, and more attentive to the process and purpose of translation.
It seems fitting to end with the final paragraph of the (curiously titled) Bolaño essay included in Some Kind of Beautiful Signal. Bolaño is hyper-alert to the limitations of translation, but has a sort of gentle smile about how great literature pulses through. (In this CAT interview, incidentally, Wimmer offers her own response to the essay.)
How to recognize a work of art? How to separate it, even if just for a moment, from its critical apparatus, its exegetes, its tireless plagiarizers, its belittlers, its final lonely fate? Easy. Let it be translated. Let its translator be far from brilliant. Rip pages from it at random. Leave it lying in an attic. If after all of this a kid comes along and reads it, and after reading it makes it his own, and is faithful to it (or unfaithful, whichever) and reinterprets it and accompanies it on its voyage to the edge, and both are enriched and the kid adds an ounce of value to its original value, then we have something before us, a machine or a book, capable of speaking to all human beings: not a plowed field but a mountain, not the image of a dark forest but the dark forest, not a flock of birds but the Nightingale.
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