Inhospitable Conditions: Hospitality, Kinship and Complaint in Maureen Freely's Angry in Piraeus and Mireille Gansel's Translation as Transhumance (tr. Ros Schwartz)

ABSTRACT

This article examines hybrid life writing by literary translators that focuses on the interpersonal relationships between translators and other agents including authors and collaborators. Through a comparative study of Maureen Freely's pamphlet essay Angry in Piraeus (The Cahiers Series, Syph Editions, 2014), described in its blurb as ‘the story of the creation of a translator’, and Mireille Gansel's ‘half memoir, half philosophical treatise’ Traduire comme transhumer (Edition Calligrammes, 2012), translated by Ros Schwartz as Translation as Transhumance (Les Fugitives, 2017) I explore the ways Freely and Gansel present their respective translation philosophies. In the first section, ‘Hospitality’, I set out how their writing welcomes in the reader and sets out various barriers to their task. In ‘Kinship’, the second section, I look at the translators’ stories of their families and how they use séance and music metaphors to show how they conceptualise collaboration with others and the text itself. In the final section, ‘Complaint’, I propose viewing Freely's and Gansel's books as personal and political complaints respectively, drawing on the work on institutional complaint by Sara Ahmed. Taking a lead from contemporary women's writing scholarship, I make an early intervention in the burgeoning field of Literary Translator Studies.

KEYWORDS:

• Literary translation
• translation
• literary translator
• life writing

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 http://sylpheditions.com/cahier/C24 (visited 7 April 2020).

2 http://sylpheditions.com/cahier/C24 (visited 3 March 2023).

3 Freely's pamphlet is incidentally available to read online in The New York Review of Books in an adapted and excerpted form.

4 Kelly Washbourne has written on what it means to read as a translator in Washbourne (2013), as has Jean Boase-Beier in her call for a ‘cognitive turn’ in literary translation in Boase-Beier (2006, viii + 176).

5 https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5d0b3b276d608f00012635a9/t/5d5fe0d2578176000166fc9e/1566564567092/MireilleGansel.pdf (accessed 1 July 2022).

6 Carol Maier has critiqued the problematics of ‘gut feeling’ as an explanation for a translation approach in her essay Maier, Carol, ‘Translating as a Body: meditations on mediation (Excerpts 1994-2004)’ in Basnett, Susan and Bush, Peter (eds.) The Translator as Writer. London and New York: Continuum, 2016. Other translators have explored the idea of translating being a dissociative state in their own writing and talks. Ilan Stavans in his lecture ‘Translation as Hallucination’ (Boston University, 14 February 2020) talks of translation being a spiritual, quasi-religious experience; Katrina Dodson, in her essay about translating Clarice Lispector ‘Understanding is the Proof of Error (Believer magazine, 11 July 2018) shares a hallucinatory, trance-like state, stating Lispector's ‘sentences rose up like feral hallucinations as I groped at their meaning. I didn't exactly pray my way through the translation, but I often spoke to an image of her I’d tacked above my desk.’ The latter part of this quote extends this metaphorical trance-like state to where the author becomes an icon of devotion, even to where translators state they are ‘channelling’ their writers, or being ‘possessed’ by them, both where the author is dead and when they are still living. In an interview with Katrina Dodson called ‘Channelling the Language (and Spirit) of Clarice Lispector’, Dodson recalls going to a psychic where Lispector was ‘invoked’ and warned her off of trying to ‘be her’, and in an interview with Lauren Elkin in The Guardian about her translation of Simone de Beauvoir's novel, she states that she felt she had ‘gone into De Beauvoir's body’ https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/aug/28/lauren-elkin-i-felt-like-i-was-in-de-beauvoirs-body.

7 Peter Elbow (1994) also analyses the metaphor of voice in his essay ‘What Do We Mean When We Talk About Voice in Texts?. In Voices on Voice: Perspectives, Definitions, Inquiry, edited by Kathleen Blake Yancey. North Carolina: University of North Carolina.

8 We are unaccustomed to translators speaking out about unjust working relationships, and expect translators talking with reverence about the authors they translate, especially those who’ve won major awards like Nobel Prizes (Examples include Gregory Rabassa on Gabriel García Márquez in Rabassa's memoir If This Be Treason (2005) and Jennifer Croft on Olga Tokarczuk in the article ‘The Nobel Prize was Made For Olga Tokarczuk’ in The Paris Review, 10 October 2019 (accessed 14 May 2020): https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2019/10/10/the-nobel-prize-was-made-for-olga-tokarczuk/). This is due to being seen as co-promoter of the book, and also not wanting to put off prospective future commissions. Olga Tokarczuk's German translator Esther Kinsky recently spoke harshly about Tokarczuk as a writer on a major literary radio segment in Germany, while her other German translator felt compelled to defend the Nobel Prize winner (https://www.deutschlandfunkkultur.de/literaturnobelpreis-fuer-olga-tokarczuk-preiswuerdig-oder.1270.de.html?dram:article_id=465460 (in German). That Kinsky is herself a multi-award-winning author, both in the German-speaking world and internationally, who is even published by the same UK publisher as Tokarczuk, once more confirms the theory that writers who are also translators have more freedom to be honest with their opinions and about their experiences because they are viewed as peers who in some instances feel they can do better, say as much, and have less to lose in the process.

9 His wish for control over the translation of his work recalls the behaviour of Czech author Milan Kundera, who infamously complained repeatedly about his translators and their translations, even having his work retranslated within years of the first translations’ publications. In her essay ‘The Unbearable Torment of Translation: Milan Kundera, Impersonation and The Joke’ (Margala, Miriam. 2010. TranscUlturAl, Vol.1,3, 30–42), Miriam Margala explores the different regard and parameters Kundera has for his translators’ work and his own self-translation.

10 The Rumpus, 21 August 2019 https://therumpus.net/2019/10/the-mentor-series-preti-taneja-and-maureen-freely/ (accessed 07 04 2020).

11 https://tonysreadinglist.wordpress.com/2015/02/22/angry-in-piraeus-by-maureen-freely-review/ (accessed 07 April 2020).

12 https://tonysreadinglist.wordpress.com/2015/02/22/angry-in-piraeus-by-maureen-freely-review/ (Anonymous 2015).

13 In her personal essay ‘Benjamin Moser and the Smallest Woman in the World’ (Edwards, Magdalena. 2019. LA Review of Books, 16 August 2019), translator Magdalena Edwards writes of her uneven working relationship with translator and editor of New Directions’ Clarice Lispector Series, Benjamin Moser, and there is a clear kinship between this essay and Freely's cahier https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/benjamin-moser-and-the-smallest-woman-in-the-world/ (accessed 14 May 2020). Moser told Edwards that he would need to ‘rewrite’ her whole translation when he accuses her of being incompetent. The article was shared widely online, was called a ‘must-read’ on The Poetry Foundation's blog Harriet (Staff, Harriet. 2019. Poetry Foundation, 16 August 2019: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet-books/2019/08/magdalena-edwardss-experience-with-translator-benjamin-moser) and gained support from many literary translators, including prominent translators like Idra Novey, who labelled Moser a misogynist in a Tweet (Idra Novey, Twitter page, https://twitter.com/idranovey/status/1257640466654334976).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by University of East Anglia.

Notes on contributors

Jen Calleja

Jen Calleja is an author, literary translator, publisher, and PhD candidate at the University of East Anglia. Her creative-critical research project comprises an exploration of hybrid life writing by women literary translators and her own hybrid memoir Fair: a literary translator memoir. In 2019 she was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize for her translation of Marion Poschmann’s The Pine Islands. She is currently Translator in Residence at the British Centre for Literary Translation, and was previously the inaugural Translator in Residence at the British Library.