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of research. I put them aside, and several years later I came across them, decided they weren’t bad, and sent them to Botteghe Oscure. I got a letter back that began “Dear Norm,” which seemed oddly informal, but it turned out to be from a woman I had known as a student. She said they couldn’t take the work because Botteghe Oscure was closing down; but, in the very same mail, I got a letter from Jim Wadsworth, my former professor — back-toback envelopes — asking me about those very translations I had done for his course years before. I took that as a sign from Heaven that I should be translating. Well, I like translating from the Middle Ages. Dead poets can’t complain if you misinterpret them or commit any of those acts we’re all guilty of, much as we try not to be. JK: How did you get started on La Fontaine? NS: I had done a collection of medieval fables, Fables from Old French: Aesop’s Beasts and Bumpkins. A dear friend of mine, Evelyn Simha, said, “That’s all well and good, but why don’t you work on somebody important?” I had taken a course in La Fontaine in graduate school, so I had read most of his work. The first one I translated, decades later, I was driving down to Middletown. I kind of worked it out in the car. It was the frog who tried to grow as big as an ox. I did that one mainly because it was short and I could work out a lot of the lines in my head before getting there. I probably shouldn’t say this, but I work terribly fast. Not in the car. But it’s a good place to think things out … And so, over the next few weeks, I did another dozen or fifteen. Soon I had enough to make a nice little collection, and Fifty Fables of La Fontaine was born in 1985. The fable is such a pleasant genre, one I have a flair for, so I thought that maybe I should look into others, the successors to La Fontaine. It would be interesting to look at Florian, for instance. Once I did that, I decided that maybe a collection of French fables in general would be interesting — I already knew something about medieval fables — all the way into the twentieth century. That turned into The Fabulists French, which came out in 1992 and won an award from ALTA the following year. The importance and influence of La Fontaine were there, even when his followers took pains to say, “I am not influenced by La Fontaine.” His influence is so pervasive that even when he was absent, he was present. The shadow of La Fontaine lay everywhere. I’ve called him “the Beethoven of the fable.” Like the symphony after Beethoven, after him the fable was never the same. So here I had two manuscripts, Fifty Fables of La Fontaine and The Fabulists French. I also had the good fortune to be in correspondence with an editor at University of Illinois Press, Liz Dulany, who had a passion for fables. I did fifty more La Fontaine, which were published in 1998. I did another sixty — Once Again, La Fontaine for Wesleyan University Press in 2000 — and thought that was the end of it. There are roughly two hundred forty-five in all, and I thought I’d done enough. There were other things I wanted to do. But Bill Regier, the editor at Illinois, said something like, “I would hate to think that La Fontaine in English is only the way Marianne Moore did him.” So I said sure, why not? And I finished up the remaining eighty or so, including the very long ones in Book Twelve, that are not really fables at all, but rather contes, like the ones in my La Fontaine’s Bawdy. We decided to put them all in one volume. John Hollander contributed a very erudite introduction, and we carried over David Schorr’s illustrations from the earlier books. JK: Do you find a difference between translating for the theater and translating for the page? NS: It’s not as major a difference as you might expect. Ideally, even poetry should be read aloud, should be heard the same way, but of course it isn’t always like that. Because all poems should be read aloud, acted, there is always the element of performance. The big 70 Translation Review
difference is in having to worry about authorial negligence, directions, at odds with what’s there in the words. There’s a lot of clearing up you have to do. Also, novels and poetry reach a reader one person at a time. This is different from theater. The translator always has to keep in mind how theater is trying to reach large audiences at one encounter. There’s obviously a difference between something that’s going to stay between covers and rarely be read out loud — although of course it should be — between that and the play that only comes to life, that is only called into life, like a musical score, in performance. It’s what aestheticians call “art in time,” and ideally it comes into “existence” again and again, each time it is performed. “But it exists on paper, on the notes of the written score,” you tell me … Not really. Only potentially. Ideally, the poem too “exists” only when read. Or at least read “aloud” in the reader’s head. I love translating plays. It’s not just translating them, it’s collaborating with the author, and a lot of myself gets put into it. In dealing with comedy, you pretty much have to take more liberties than with poetry. The original was fine for its time, but if you want to bring comedy into the twenty-first century there’s also a strong obligation to the audience — to make them laugh. A rigid fidelity to the text is counterproductive, unless what’s wanted is an archival text, literally exact — or more or less. For an audience that can be deadly. When you’re translating comedy, there’s bound to be a certain amount of liberty, but it’s all in good fun — keep ’em laughing. JK: Have you translated prose? NS: Sure. Lots. Novels. Short stories. For me, prose is harder, more difficult. Verse is much less demanding than prose, and the reason I’m sure is that verse has a certain structure that you fit into. In prose, you have to be aware of the different tones — the narrator, the speaker — but you also have to respect certain speech rhythms, and it’s much harder to do this in prose, where there’s no pre-existing grid, and make it sound right. The liberties that you take with verse are more excusable because it’s poetry, and one doesn’t expect a rigid, word-forword translation. JK: I like to say that the translator has a wider range of choices translating poetry. You can choose to alter a metaphor for effect, to play around more with the text. In prose, you have to stick too close to the literal original. NS: I think I’m saying the same thing in different words. JK: Do you think there are any works that should not be translated? NS: Things that are so idiosyncratic that to translate them isn’t really an act of translation, but of total adaptation, a gender reassignment. Like much of the verse of the Grands Rhétoriqueurs of the French Renaissance, which is all pun, all based on punning. French being what it is, a single line that is perfectly pronounceable with one meaning is spellable in several different ways, giving entirely different meanings. Unless we’re exceptionally clever, we should probably keep away from things that are based on the intricacies and complexities of the source language. I wouldn’t say that they shouldn’t be translated at all, but they should come with a caveat that it’s a work in the same style, not really a translation. I’m thinking for example of a wonderful work by Georges Perec, La disparition, a novel written completely without the letter “e.” But obviously the translator couldn’t “translate” — he had to do something in the same key [Gilbert Adair, A Void, 1994] and produced a tour de force. But I guess it comes down to the question, “Should translation be only a breaking of the shell, to get at the kernel?” Is translation just an archival thing, or a transmission of content, tone, and feeling? JK: Sometimes there’s a choice between fidelity to the feeling or to the text? Translation Review 71
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Translation Review Number Seventy-f
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TABLE OF CONTENTS Editorial: The In
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What can the translator bring to fu
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AN INTERVIEW WITH JOAN LINDGREN: TH
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greatly. I had hopes of meeting the
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grammatical rules, for example —
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NOTES ON “NOTES ON TRANSLATION”
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source, calling in. But the transla
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seem to believe, in the superiority
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FEMINIST TRANSLATION AS INTERPRETAT
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Feminist Translation in Practice To
Page 24 and 25: in the current age. The play hinges
Page 26 and 27: This sense of parody and backwardne
Page 28 and 29: attempt to translate the title but
Page 30 and 31: 18 Ibid., 30. 19 As one can see, my
Page 32 and 33: HINOJOSA’S SELF-TRANSLATION OF DE
Page 34 and 35: of this collocation means that Jeh
Page 36 and 37: linked to personal affairs and fami
Page 38 and 39: information: Noddy has flown up to
Page 40 and 41: lexicon and taxonomies; his play ac
Page 42 and 43: plowed ground); helve (275: handle
Page 44 and 45: enterprise… and you turned a deaf
Page 46 and 47: soapweed (105), piñon and scruboak
Page 48 and 49: and serapes (199). These are words
Page 50 and 51: Quiere trabajo, said the old man. Q
Page 52 and 53: dialogue, in which the captain (met
Page 54 and 55: to which McCarthy translates in Blo
Page 56 and 57: Spanished as “Nueva Orleans” (a
Page 58 and 59: he said. (90) We thought you was in
Page 60 and 61: eader becomes disoriented and often
Page 62 and 63: For each fire is all fires, the fir
Page 64 and 65: That is the way it was and will be.
Page 66 and 67: structure anticipating the presence
Page 68 and 69: translation are an integral element
Page 70 and 71: Woodward, Richard B. “Cormac McCa
Page 72 and 73: suggested that I look at Feydeau, a
Page 76 and 77: NS: You try to get both, if possibl
Page 78 and 79: All Gall: Malicious Monologues and
Page 80 and 81: momentary isle of eternity, and now
Page 82 and 83: individually, however, they are rat
Page 84 and 85: Akutagawa, Ryūnosuke. Rashōmon an
Page 86 and 87: the Japanese (“in some way, perha
Page 88 and 89: Many Latin American writers have ha
Page 90: features of American life, which Pa
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