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celebrating the impossibilities

Like most passionate readers, I’ve developed my own habits of critical reading. Younger, I read for the intensity of the experience, for a seamless drop into an alternate universe. Later, when I became serious about writing, I began to read to understand technique. I read to admire and analyze and mimic, keeping a part of my brain focused on the mechanics of the story as well as the emotional reaction it prompted. And then I started translating, and realized that my reading method had undergone another subtle shift.

When I have a piece of writing in front of me that requires translating, the larger issues of story and structure are obviously important, but they begin to surrender to the tiniest elements of each sentence. Why did the author choose to call her character maussade instead of morose, why did she split her sentence with those commas in exactly that way, or how does the rhythm of the text affect the reader and should I maintain it at all costs? All of a sudden, the smallest building blocks of a text, those pieces I would usually allow to integrate into the overall work if I were simply reading for pleasure or study, become vital to my understanding of the piece. To my ability to recreate it.

Now, textual building blocks are not all equal. They all bear careful consideration, of course, but some are more startling than others. Some are what I like to call blips – moments when something wholly original surges forth from the arrangement or rhythm of the words, from the introduction of an unlikely image or the unexpected movement of the narrator in any given direction. These are what I’m really reading for, because they will make my job a lot harder.

Two years ago I began translating some of the work of a celebrated Swiss writer. Judging from the miniscule amount of his sizeable oeuvre which ever made its way into English, Charles Ferdinand Ramuz (1878-1947) is relatively unknown beyond the shores of Lake Geneva. I leapt at the chance to correct what I considered a shameful literary discrepancy and have been happily absorbed ever since.

In one sense, Ramuz is a translator’s dream. His novels and stories are rich with detail and distinctive characters, they often pose unusual emotional or psychological questions and they all rely heavily on the natural world to offset or highlight any internal conflict. In short, these are engaging, fascinating works of art and therefore it should follow that they would be a delight to translate.

This is only partly true. Once I’ve finished the first read of whatever text I’m working on, and I start looking at the text as something to be translated, things begin to look more complicated. Slowly, I worry that were my dear C.F. in the general vicinity, I might have some pointed questions for him. Why, for example, did he change tense in the middle of that paragraph? Why did he choose that particular metaphor instead of a more familiar, comfortable one? And why, please tell me why, did he choose to use three different narrative points-of-view to tell one short story? I have spent countless hours reading and re-reading his stories and novels, and now I see that these are all the things which give his work such incredible depth and texture, such distinction. These little Ramuzian blips are like textual fingerprints, almost invisible but undeniably unique.

In this way, translating has taught me to read for what makes a piece of literature inimitable. All the moments when the stylist behind the story raises a tiny, discreet little flag to say pay attention, look what I’ve done. So now, even when I’m not reading in a professional translator’s capacity, I love discovering the elements of a text which I know will make it almost impossible to convey that text faithfully in another language. I feel a little pang for the translator who might someday work on the piece, but I celebrate the author for playing with language until it almost breaks, for daring an image, for pushing and tearing at the edges of conventional rhythms, structures and frames.

I began this month-long project here at Necessary Fiction with the assertion that the best apprenticeship for writing is reading. And I hold to that. In my own little reading universe, translation has made me work to become a better reader. So I take what I learn, and I work and I read and I work and I read, hoping that with each new day I will write just a little bit better than the day before.

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Thank you readers and thank you Steve Himmer for having me this month as Writer-in-Residence. I’ve had a great time discussing translation and “translation.” It was also a pure pleasure to introduce the prose of Céline Cerny, Laure Mi Hyun Croset and Pauline Blatt to a wider audience, not to mention include such talented artists as Margaret Fletcher Saine, Nancy Freund and Claude Bailat in the overall project.

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