Shame and English Translation on The Critic and Her Publics
a week-long season on translation continues
Welcome to Season Three of The Critic and Her Publics: On Translation.
In 1999, twelve distinguished writers gathered at Casa Ecco, a villa on Lake Como, to discuss the art of translation. Twenty-five years later, their ideas are still apt and powerful. Last October, Merve Emre convened a group of translators and publishers at the same villa to return to those ideas and to examine a field at an inflection point.
In this series, you’ll hear from the translators Maureen Freely, Daisy Rockwell, Virginia Jewiss, Jeremy Tiang, and Tiffany Tsao, as well as publishers Adam Levy (Transit Books) and Jacques Testard (Fitzcarraldo Editions).
Subscribe to The Critic and Her Publics, available wherever you get your podcasts!
In these next two episodes of Hawthornden’s Como Conversazione, we explore the fraught emotional condition of translation: the sense that not only is their work shameful and grotesque but that they are too, for daring to attempt it. Translation demands a deep and scholarly knowledge of language, which never feels sufficient. Translators are often faced with a binary of either making themselves invisible or asserting their styles. Many of them are caught between identities. You’ll hear Maureen Freely, an American who grew up in Istanbul, talk about her vexed relationship with Orhan Pamuk and Tiffany Tsao, American-born, but of Indonesian heritage, confess the shame she felt when translating Budi Darma. All of the translators in this group, for reasons of temperament and structure, seem to have a masochistic relationship to their work. But as in all cases of masochism, the pain is a kind of pleasure, too.
Then, we discuss the problem of English. What happens when you bring a nation’s literature into its colonizer’s language? Is it inevitably a kind of violence? Here, we look to the field of translation studies, which provides some answers—not all of them satisfying.
For full transcripts, head over to the New York Review of Books.
_________________________________
The Critic and Her Publics
Hosted by Merve Emre • Edited by Michele Moses • Music by Dani Lencioni • Art by
Leanne Shapton • Sponsored by Alfred A. Knopf
This season of The Critic and Her Publics is a co-production between the Hawthornden Foundation, New York Review of Books, and Lit Hub.
