Translators used to be secondary characters in the publishing industry. An issue of The New York Times Book Review aims to put their craft in the spotlight.
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The art of translation was on Gregory Cowles’s mind.
It was the beginning of 2023, and Mr. Cowles, a senior editor on The New York Times Book Review, noticed the section was assigning more reviews of translated books than usual. He had also just finished “Catching Fire: A Translation Diary,” in which the literary translator Daniel Hahn details the challenges and pleasures of rendering a work of art in another language. Mr. Cowles was fascinated by the nuances; it seemed that a thousand translators working with the same passage would most likely yield a thousand different translations.
He approached Juliana Barbassa, the deputy editor for news and features on the Books desk. “There’s this whole question: What is translated? Who decides that? Are we getting a full picture of what’s out there?” Mr. Cowles said.
Both editors saw the potential for a project that would bring attention to the craft in a new way. The first part of their monthslong effort appears as a special issue of The New York Times Book Review this weekend. In it, readers get a glimpse of the world of literary translation. The translator emerges as part expert, part curator and part magician, poring over a book and transforming it into new sentences without leaving fingerprints.
“For a very long time, translators were very much secondary characters. Their names weren’t on the cover, there was little recognition, they had few rights over the work. The pay was, and remains, not great,” Ms. Barbassa said.
The issue aims to show the wealth and diversity of translation work. It includes 13 reviews of translated books from across the globe, including a collection of translations by the famed Irish poet Seamus Heaney, who left an indelible imprint on the works he interpreted. There is an essay on Constance Garnett, who translated more than 70 Russian texts into English and believed deeply in the political ideals she was bringing to English-speaking readers.
The Book Review’s children’s editor, Jennifer Krauss, reached out to Mr. Hahn, whose translation diary had inspired the issue in the first place, to write an essay on the intricacies of translating children’s picture books. For the Book Review’s roundtable discussion, Ms. Barbassa led a conversation with five recognized translators who spoke about their craft in a 21st-century context, tackling thorny questions of funding, access and diversity.
Ms. Barbassa thinks of translation often; she has lived in several countries and speaks English, Portuguese, Spanish and French. “I’ve always lived between languages,” she said. “I think the act of literary translation is this incredibly creative, deeply layered craft and art. But I think that many people, even people who read books in translation, won’t have the opportunity to think about it.”
A feature from the Book Review explores the variety of interpretations that are held in a text. The classicist Emily Wilson, who published a new translation of the “Odyssey” in 2017 and will release one of the “Iliad” later this year, presents a passage from the “Iliad” translated five ways. In renditions from 1611, 1715, 1898, 1990 and 2023 (Ms. Wilson’s), each is marked by a distinct time period, translator bias and style.
The next phase of the project will be published in the coming weeks. Two digital interactive features will give readers an opportunity to follow translators as they work out the puzzles inherent in their work.
The first analyzes passages from two Spanish-language novels, one from Fernanda Melchor’s “Hurricane Season” and another from Alia Trabucco Zerán’s “Clean.” Sophie Hughes, the translator for both books, writes out what the original text intends to convey, and then takes a stab at converting it into recognizable English. The reader follows along as Ms. Hughes goes back, starts again, pauses and reworks the words until each line resembles what feels to her like the most faithful interpretation.
“Quite often we resort, with good reason, to metaphor: Translators are bridges, translators are spies, translators are like musicians. They’re all really helpful,” Ms. Hughes said. “But this was the first opportunity that I have ever had where a visual, illustrative, supplementary hive mind was able to extrapolate what I do when I translate,” she said of the project.
The second interactive feature focuses on the visual history of translating Japanese manga into English. Pitched by Gabriel Gianordoli, a design editor who worked on the project and reader of the Japanese comics, the article demonstrates how initial manga adaptations in the 1980s catered to English readers with extreme modifications and how, over time, modern manga translators have learned to extract more faithful renderings.
Throughout the issue and the digital components, the translators step into the spotlight, shining new light on the thousands of decisions they make that go into the works we read. Mr. Cowles said he hoped readers could begin “thinking a little bit like translators themselves: to be aware of what’s in the world beyond English.”
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