Um, so apparently the French translation for the Barbie poster did not go to plan.
According to one Twitter user, the film’s already iconic tagline, “She’s everything. He’s just Ken,” has been made even more beautiful with some creative translation of the French poster. The literal translation of “Elle peut tout faire. Lui, c’est juste Ken.” still holds up: “She knows how to do everything. Him, it’s just Ken.” As for how it sounds, with a bit of knowledge of slang and words that sound alike, well … “She knows how to do everything. He just knows how to f***.”
Ever the comedians, the people of Twitter went off in the replies. One user wrote, “Duolingo is not teaching me this?!” while another said, “This is actually 100% my understanding of their relationship.”
It wasn’t only one person who noticed the connection, either. Twitter is alive with people loling at it.
Interesting choice of words on the French poster for Barbie. Translated literally it means 'She can do anything' and 'Him, he's just Ken,' buuuuuut 'Lui, c'est juste Ken,' sounds like 'Lui, sais juste ken' which in French slang means 'Him, he only knows how to fuck.' pic.twitter.com/Cc7bTJsFmQ
— Cath Pound (@catherine_pound) June 17, 2023
The french #Barbie poster is genius marketing cause "ken" in french slang means to have sex ?
"she can do everything…. he can only ken" kinda bold if you ask me pic.twitter.com/w3n0KcCDGC
— Gigi ?? ?️? (@French_Gi) June 16, 2023
To be fair, this is quite on brand, considering in the trailer there’s that scene where Ken implies he wants a sleepover that will entail things that go slightly beyond the PG-13 rating the movie has been given. This, I imagine, is only the tip of the iceberg and Barbie will just be filled with adult humor that will leave kids going, “Why are you laughing?!” when it arrives on July 21, and I just love it.
The poster also adds to the Barbie mania that is now sweeping social media platforms. The release of the posters that announced who would star resulted in a trend of people creating their own posters. (I never did, but if I had, mine would say something like, “This Barbie is an anxious mess.”)
Every day, this film brings me joy, and I can’t wait for July 21.
“Als Gregor Samsa eines Morgens aus unruhigen Träumen erwachte, fand er sich in seinem Bett zu einem ungeheuren Ungeziefer verwandelt.”
This sentence, the first of Franz Kafka’s 1915 story The Metamorphosis or Die Verwandlung in German, has puzzled translators for over a century.
In 1933, Edwin and Willa Muir settled on the following: “As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.” Stanley Corngold’s 1972 translation replaced “uneasy” with “unsettling” and “gigantic insect” with “monstrous vermin.” Joachim Neugroschel (1993) kept “monstrous vermin,” but changed “unsettling” to “agitated.” Joyce Crick (2009) changed “agitated” back to “uneasy” while turning “monstrous vermin” into “some kind of monstrous bug.”
Unlike the words Bett or Träumen, neither unruhigen (a state of unsteady movement, according to Oxford Languages) or Ungeziefer (an animal that causes damage and is unwanted) has a direct translation. In their prefaces, each of the aforementioned translators makes a case for why they think their choice of words most closely captures the meaning and feeling of the original.
Kafka with his sister. (Credit: AnAkemie / Wikipedia)
Looking beyond The Metamorphosis, Kafka’s seemingly untranslatable writing shows that — although there may not be such a thing as a perfect translation — translators can get closer to the source material by studying the author’s native language, as well as the life experiences that shaped them as artists.
Strange German words
Fluent in Czech, German, and Hebrew, Kafka knew there are certain things you can express in one language that you simply cannot in another. “I have not always loved my mother as much as she deserved and as I could,” he wrote in his diaries, “only because the German language hindered me from doing so. The Jewish mother is no ‘Mutter,’ the designation Mutter makes her a little odd.”
Though he himself had been raised speaking Czech, Hermann Kafka encouraged his children to learn German as, in the Austro-Hungarian city of Prague, German was the language of the ruling class: a gateway to prosperity, influence, and respect. Kafka grew to like it for its poetry and not its politics. Exposed to authors such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Franz Grillparzer, and Heinrich von Kleist, he developed a deep appreciation for those aspects that made German unique — aspects that went on to shape his own writing style.
“German syntax can be rather complex and intricately nested with clauses and subclauses,” Ross Benjamin, whose English translation of Kafka’s diaries was published in January 2023, tells Big Think over Zoom. Subject, object, and verb, always close together in English, tend to become spread out in German, so much so that you often have to read until the very end of the sentence to see where the author is going — a quality Kafka uses time and again to play with tone, irony, and suspense. “It’s like a fuse from those Looney Tunes cartoons, that starts way outside, then sneaks through the window, under the table, and over some furniture, and finally detonates.”
Prague: the setting of Kafka’s life. (Credit: Archive Team / Wikipedia)
One well-known cliché about the German language is that it’s full of long, intimidating compound words like Arbeiterunfallversicherungsgesetz, but it’s the smaller discursive words such as doch (but) or übrigens (by the way) that tend to trip up translators, and that is because their inclusion in a sentence completely alters its inflection. When translating the diaries, Benjamin had to figure out how to translate these words without sacrificing Kafka’s elegance and momentum.
Last but not least, there’s the question of what to do with untranslatable words like Ungeziefer. “We don’t have a word with all those connotations in English,” Benjamin says. “When you look at its origin, it had to do with an animal that’s not fit for sacrifice.” The word itself starts with a negation — an un — which pushes Benjamin toward the translation “insect,” if only because it sounds similar. Conversely, he is not a fan of vermin. “Vermin can mean a lot more than just insect,” he explains, “and in The Metamorphosis, we’re clearly dealing with one.”
Understanding Franz Kafka
When the limitations of language force translators to take creative liberties, understanding the author’s life — their experiences and worldview — can help produce a more accurate translation. Kafka’s worldview seems to have been greatly influenced by anti-Semitism in Habsburgian Prague. “Prasive plemeno — filthy brood — is what I heard them call the Jews,” he wrote of a demonstration. “Isn’t it only natural to leave a place where one is so bitterly hated?… The heroism involved in staying put in spite of it all is the heroism of the cockroach, which also won’t be driven out of the bathroom.”
Equally oppressive was the presence of his father, whose hypermasculine physique and character made Kafka deeply insecure about his own. He dreaded asking Hermann for water in the middle of the night, or going to the beach and changing in the same tent. At the same time, he grew to love swimming and, as an adult, would travel to picturesque lakes whenever he had the chance. Kafka’s insecurity might explain his obsession with Lebensreform, a 20th century health craze that convinced people they could boost their immune systems by sleeping under open windows and chewing their food until it had liquefied inside their mouths. Kafka boasted he went on walks around the city until he could no longer feel his fingers, but he was also a hypochondriac who feared even the slightest ailment would prove fatal. Then again, he did eventually die of tuberculosis at age 40.
Hermann Kafka. (Credit: Klaus Wagenbach Archiv, Berlin / Wikipedia)
Despite everything we know about him, it’s difficult to say what kind of person Kafka really was. This is, in part, because the already enigmatic contents of his diaries were heavily edited by the Bohemian Max Brod. Kafka asked Brod, his closest friend, to burn his diaries as well as the unfinished manuscripts of his novellas The Trial and The Castle following his untimely death. Brod famously refused, saving and publishing Kafka’s diaries — but not without doctoring them first. In addition to cleaning up unpunctuated passages and forcing them into a linear mold, Brod also omitted mentions of “beautiful Swedish boys,” among other homoerotic lines, to protect both their reputations.
The original, unedited diaries, now available in English thanks to Benjamin, offer fresh insight into Kafka’s personality. As Becca Rothfeld wrote in a review for The New Yorker, Kafka, long presented as a neurotic hermit by mass media, was actually “a surprisingly functional person, subject to the usual vicissitudes of mood.” He went to plays, lectures, and movies, and liked to spend time with Brod. Once, he joined him on a trip to Paris, writing, “How easily grenadine with seltzer goes through one’s nose when one laughs.” This different, more nuanced version of Kafka warrants a different, more nuanced interpretation of his fiction which could inform future translations.
The unabridged diaries not only teach us about Kafka’s personality, but also his writing style. Unlike Brod, Benjamin told Slate he “resisted any temptations to tidy up the prose, reproducing his misspellings, sparse and unorthodox punctuation, slips of the pen, and occasionally muddled syntax.” To that end, his translation offers a largely unedited, unadulterated impression of Kafka’s style. That style is spontaneous, disorderly, and indecisive, even more so than his fiction. Sentences are left unfinished and, at times, broken off mid-word — just like the ending of The Castle. One wonders: what would the first sentence of The Metamorphosis read like if it was translated using this approach?
SAN FRANCISCO, June 21, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Intento, the Enterprise Machine Translation Hub, and e2f, a language intelligence pioneer, teamed up to study the Machine Translation and Generative AI market and present the State of Machine Translation 2023 report (the seventh consecutive year for Intento).
This edition analyzes the performance of 37 MT Engines across 22 language pairs and 9 content domains, providing the latest overview of the rapidly evolving MT landscape. Key highlights include:
Out of the 37 Machine Translation Engines evaluated, 23 are best-performing in some language pairs and domains
5 Large Language Models from AI21, Anthropic, and OpenAI, including ChatGPT and GPT-4, have risen to the first tier in MT capabilities
All of the 48 existing MT vendors cover 654 unique languages and 190,000 language pairs
Few MT vendors perform at the top level for Arabic, Japanese, and Ukrainian languages
Legal and IT domains require careful MT vendor selection, while Entertainment and Colloquial domains may require customization for optimal results
The report spotlights the MT landscape transformation with new features, expanded offerings, and language pairs from several vendors, including Alibaba, Amazon, Baidu, Google, Microsoft, Naver, NVIDIA, and Youdao – all demonstrating significant progress in technology and innovation. Drawing from Intento's expertise, businesses can use this shift to enhance language capabilities, improve global communication, and stay competitive.
It also identifies top-tier LLMs like ChatGPT and GPT-4, which surpass other models in various MT evaluation metrics and provides insight into the potential of GPT-3, Anthropic's Claude, and AI21's Jurassic-2 models for businesses exploring emerging language technologies.
Download the full PDF report here
"We launched our inaugural MT report in 2017, at a time when there were only eleven stock models available. Fast forward six years, and the MT landscape has exploded, with six-fold growth in MT platforms and 15x more language pairs," says Konstantin Savenkov, Intento CEO and co-founder. "In addition, we see new automated customization possibilities such as domain adaptation and custom glossaries, and the emergence of Large Language Models, which can handle translation among other tasks."
"We're excited to work with Intento, providing the best linguistic data to drive exceptional MT evaluation results in the latest report," says Michel Lopez, CEO of e2f. He continues, "The human effort to create this linguistic data is essential to generating these golden datasets. Top AI companies who need the best language and data science expertise are increasingly turning to our workforce of linguists and data scientists as they grapple with the challenges of quality, cost, and domain expertise in this era of generative AI."
About Intento
Intento enables global companies to translate 20x more on the same budget and makes their customer and employee experience instantly multilingual in 650+ languages through Machine Translation and AI.
Intento Enterprise MT Hub augments best-of-breed Custom NMT platforms with Source Quality Improvement, Automatic Post-Editing, and Translation Quality Estimation. Combining Machine Translation with Generative AI models (like GPT) enhances traditional translation workflows and achieves accurate, in-context translation.
Intento Enterprise MT Hub also integrates with existing software platforms, such as Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Translation Management Systems, to share MT/AI models across the enterprise and improve them based on feedback.
For more information, visit https://inten.to or book a demo with an Intento expert.
About e2f
Established in 2004, e2f helps people and machines communicate naturally, regardless of language, content, and culture. e2f solutions empower Fortune 50 brands to monitor, objectively assess, and improve communications on a global scale.
e2f delivers world-class translation and training data with its proprietary technology stack for AI services, translation, and quality review. e2f offers a global resource pool of skilled professionals in virtually all countries and languages.
Il-Frammenti ta’ Saffo (The Fragments of Sappho) encompass joy and longing, passion and desire. Writer and translator Warren Bartolo speaks to Lara Zammit about what survives of the elusive poet.
The translator Warren Bartolo. Photo: Megan Andrea Poon
LZ:Il-Frammenti ta’ Saffo − a new publication by Warren Bartolo published by EDE Books − is the complete translation into Maltese from the original Ancient Greek of the poetic fragments of the enigmatic lyric poet Sappho. What drew you towards these fragments and the woman behind them? What insights have you gained into the poet herself by translating her work?
WB: Probably what drew me to her work is the fact that Sappho had the desire to tell her story. And it was a girl’s story − a girl who loved girls (cf. Audrey Wollen’s ‘Sad Girl Theory’). I mean, she had the desire to use the first-person pronoun “I”. Very Annie Ernaux, perhaps.
I was never really interested in those classical texts about armies, battles or elephants. The first time I read one of her poems was when I was 16, and I felt some sort of ecstasy. I felt the same thing when I recently read Pietru Caxaro’s Il-Kantilena… I couldn’t go to sleep.
I found my way into her life quite with ease. She was very infectious to me. Her fragments are proto-fragments d’un discours amoureux – I loved that they were broken poems, which spoke about her love for girls in a girly microcosm.
I think one of the things that is so interesting about her poetry is that it manifests the queerness of the lonely ugly girl (Ancient commentators frequently remarked upon her appearance).
I wish I could speak about Sappho in the same way Chris Kraus speaks about Kathy Acker, but we don’t know much about Sappho. But, in a way, I feel like I have learned a lot about her – I think Gayatri Spivak said something like ‘translation is the most intimate act of reading’, and I felt very intimate with her. But I think I’m a bit heartbroken too.
LZ:The British poet Christina Rossetti remembers Sappho through heavy sighs. Her fragments encompass joy and longing, passion and desire and touch on religion, aristocratic life, aging and the passage of time. What in your view are the most striking aspects of her surviving poems and fragments?
WB: Perhaps the most striking aspect is the survival of her poetry itself. Much like Jean Genet’s manuscript of Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs, burned by a prison guard, or Sylvia Plath’s black-ledger diaries, burned by her husband, or Simone de Beauvoir’s recently discovered manuscript Les Inseparables (which speaks about her relationship with Zaza), Sappho’s poetry has a long history of death, destruction, survival and discovery.
Sappho’s poetry has a long history of death, destruction, survival, and discovery
Sappho is vulnerable, and she has an absolute openness to the annihilation of the self. She speaks of a wide range of subjects, including philosophy, she really is the Girl-As-Philosopher. She muses about the passage of time; in a way she desires perhaps to become posthuman, or is sad that she’s not one, (Imma x’nista’ nagħmel?/ Jekk int bniedem ma tistax tkun bla tmiem. Fr. 58ċ).
She also mentions her hair a lot. I was translating Sappho while I was reading the works of Hervé Guibert and I remember I had a document where I was listing instances where both Sappho and Guibert mention their hair.
She also theorises on beauty and aesthetics in a powerful fragment where she boldly announces that what is beautiful is what is absent (Fr. 16).
LZ: Can you speak about the task of translating Sappho into Maltese? What has the Maltese language brought out of these poems that, say, an English translation might not?
WB: Understanding and translating Sappho is a project, a process, really and truly − a perpetual engagement with what she means. It’s always ‘trying to translate’. At many points, I thought that maybe I should never put an end to this project – leave it as an open document on my laptop. When I started the project, I would immediately start sweating with anxiety when I would open the 1971 Eva Maria Voigt volume of her poetry and see a page crammed with Ancient Greek words and symbols, gaps and diacritics.
It was an overwhelming sight and it took me a while to get used to looking at this sort of text.
Often I would only work on her poetry for five minutes, close my laptop and go to sleep. But very often, I would wake up in the middle of the night and open my laptop again.
Little by little, there began to be an incredible friction of feeling between Sappho’s self and mine. I was getting more comfortable as I got more familiar with her dialect, language and style.
I’m not sure what my Maltese translation brings out that an English one doesn’t. But perhaps growing up in a postcolonial country, and speaking a language that is so minoritised, translating into Maltese and not into imperial languages, becomes a necessity.
Il-Frammenti ta’ Saffo was published with financial support from the National Book Council.
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THE TRANSLATIONS OF SEAMUS HEANEY, edited by Marco Sonzogni
Over the past few years, Joe Biden has made much of quoting from Seamus Heaney’s luminous translation of Sophocles’ play “The Cure at Troy”:
History says, don’t hope On this side of the grave. But then, once in a lifetime The longed-for tidal wave Of justice can rise up, And hope and history rhyme.
Hope and history don’t actually rhyme in any known human language, past or present. However, Sophocles’ words (carried over into modern English) resound for many people, reverberating against our own great longing. They provoke in modern readers what Heaney, in the same translation, calls a “double-take of feeling” — that moment when actors in a distant play become “self-revealing” — that is, when they become figures by which we come to know ourselves.
Heaney translated the poetry of others in large part to discover this self-revealing double-take. Among the most important things that we learn in Marco Sonzogni’s newly collected “The Translations of Seamus Heaney” — an immense and informative gathering of the late Nobel Prize winner’s translations — are the ways that Heaney, as translator, thought less of carrying over the so-called literal, and more of finding the pitch and resonance that help an audience receive a poem.
Sonzogni peppers both introduction and notes with liberal sprinklings of Heaney’s comments to this effect: “Verse translation is not all that different from original composition,” and “In order to get a project underway, there has be a note to which the lines, and especially the first lines, can be tuned.” In the same vein: “Until this register is established,” Heaney writes, “your words … cannot induce that blessed sensation of being on the right track, musically and rhythmically.”
Heaney, to his credit, repeatedly induces that blessed sensation, fast. Having done so, he introduces us, his latter-day readers, to poets from far-flung times or places whom we might not have otherwise met.
As a translator, Heaney was an omnivore, reading across time and culture, finding poets he carried over to English with a freshness and diversity of tone — voices ancient and contemporary, male and female, Romanian, Spanish, Dutch, Old Irish, Czech, Greek. Sometimes he forged projects for a small eon: His most ambitious, like “Beowulf,” spanned decades, and his work on the medieval Irish folk tale that became “Sweeney Astray” spanned at least 10 years. Bits of translated poems would get woven into books, echoing against poems he cast in his own voice: A sequence of elegies for those lost to the sectarian violence of Heaney’s Northern Ireland would be quickly followed by a bit of Dante’s Guelphs and Ghibellines, suffering in their own underworld. Heaney’s translations would thus triangulate and echo his contemporary elegies back through their mythic proportions.
Which is to say, all along, translation was a parallel career, a parallel track, that marched alongside Heaney’s long practice of writing poetry. In my mind, I imagine them as two horses, pulling the same huge cart of Heaney’s literary imagination.
It might not sound tremendously fun to read 600 pages of someone else’s translations, but Heaney’s voice is so unusually lucid that his translations are a triple gift. There’s the ravishing selection of poems, picked by Heaney, the shrewd curator. There’s the chance to hear Heaney again — almost as if we’re being given new poems by Heaney himself. There is also the chance to see how translation and poetry reverberate across a career.
Here for instance is Heaney’s translation of a short, vital verse by the Romanian poet Marin Sorescu:
ANGLE
Overhead, the traditional lines Of cranes: Sonnets for countrymen.
This image is fast and radiant. Though the poem is Sorescu’s, “sonnets for countrymen” also fits Heaney, who wrote more than a few sonnets for countrymen. (Indeed, this translation chimes against Heaney’s earlier poem “Requiem for the Croppies.”) Again and again there’s a congruence, even a covalence, in the subjects Heaney picks for his own poems and those he picks for translation. One enormous example: Heaney begins his career with “Digging,” which introduces a lifelong theme of excavation. “Digging” is about watching his father dig potatoes and about the way Heaney will and will not follow his father’s path. He ends his career by translating Book VI of the “Aeneid” — the very section in which Aeneas goes underground, to the underworld, to follow his father.
Between digging potatoes and digging the dead, Heaney resurfaced material from various literary underworlds, helping make them known in his voice and dialect and time. To understand just how much he did so, it can be instructive to set two translators against each other. In Richard Howard’s translation of Baudelaire’s “Le Squellette Laboureur” (a somewhat gory poem about admiring anatomical drawings at a bookshop on a Paris quay), the figures are “mannequins” that resemble “skeletons, digging bone on bone.” In contrast, Heaney’s translation adds a precise (and very Irish) angle of anguish to the over-labored bodies. For him, the figures are “navvies” with “red slobland” around their bones.
Sonzogni’s notes situate not only the poets Heaney chose to translate, but also the moments he chose to translate them. We learn that Heaney began his embrace of translation during 1970-71, when he’d been given reprieve from emergent violence in Northern Ireland to live as a guest professor at the University of California, Berkeley. There, he read translations that Robert Hass and Robert Pinsky were making of the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz. He felt what he called “the impact of translation,” and upon his return to Ireland this worldly practice became one way that he faced a troubling era of national violence.
To the benefit of us all. As we face down our own troubling era, this book is a potent reminder of literary possibility and literary imagination on a large scale. I was glad to have the most ambitious translation projects gathered, “The Cure at Troy” among them. I felt grateful for the small ones, too — including a particularly lyrical take on the 19th- and 20th-century Greek poet Constantine Cavafy, the 18th-century Gaelic poet Eoghan Rua O Suilleabhain’s poem “Poet to Blacksmith” and a beautiful poem called “Inhabited by a Song,” by the still-living Romanian poet Ana Blandiana, whose verse begins:
The song isn’t mine, It just passes through me sometimes, Uncomprehended, untamed, Lightly dressed in my name; The way the gods in the old days Would pass among people Dressed in a cloud.
Here, Heaney dresses old songs in new clothes. He frees them to pass through us, too. “An original work exists not in order to be perfect but in order to engender itself repeatedly in new translations,” he is quoted as saying. Of course, for any new translation to be heard, to keep engendering, it paradoxically requires a perfect disguise of its own. Over and over again, to many varied verses, Heaney, with a touch both sure and shape-shifting, offers exactly that.
Tess Taylor’s most recent book of poetry is “Rift Zone.” An anthology she edited, “Leaning Toward Light: Poems for Gardens and the Hands That Tend Them,” will be released in August.
THE TRANSLATIONS OF SEAMUS HEANEY | Edited by Marco Sonzogni | 687 pp. | Farrar, Straus & Giroux | $50
With Greta Gerwig’s Barbie movie coming out in about a month, everyone is excited for any and every update they can get about the film. Ever since the first round of posters dropped, fans were so excited to see all the little Easter eggs and the iconic one-liners! However, apparently, the creators of the new French Barbie poster made an error that French Twitter can’t stop freaking out about!
On June 16, a Twitter user by the name of @MathildeMerwani posted the French-translated poster of Margot Robbie on Ryan Gosling’s shoulders, telling Twitter why people are freaking out. She said, “French twitter losing its mind right now because they translated the Barbie poster literally and accidentally made a pun that reads ‘She knows how to do everything. He just knows how to f**k.’”
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The line in question is “Lui, c’est juste Ken,” and what they probably meant to say was the now-iconic line of “He’s just Ken.” However, Ken means something different in France, and as you can gather, it apparently has an NSFW translation.
As Merwani said, Twitter is freaking out over this realization. Her tweet has already gotten over eight million views and gone viral, and if anything, it’s only made people more excited for the film.
Click here to read the full article.
For those that don’t know, Robbie stars as Barbie and Gosling stars as Ken in the topsy-turvy adventure following Barbie’s existential crisis. It’s set to be released in theaters on July 21, 2023.
Before you go, click here to see feel-good movies that we promise will make you smile.
'When Harry Met Sally' Feel-Good Movies We Promise Will Make You Smile'
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The writer and translator who won the 2022 International Booker Prize talk about their relationship as interpreters of words and feelings, and about the alchemy of translation itself.
This essay is part of a series called The Big Ideas, in which writers respond to a single question: Who do you think you are? You can read more by visiting The Big Ideasseries page.
Our book, “Tomb of Sand,” is a translation by one of us, Daisy, of the Hindi novel written by the other, Geetanjali. The original novel, “Ret Samadhi,” was eight years in the making, and the translation another two and a half. The novel deals with the absurdity of boundaries — between people, genders, countries — but also between languages. With that theme as the backdrop, it stands to reason that in a translation, the border between writer and translator, between Hindi and English, is, at best, porous. After all, our first rule of translation is that those boundaries must dissolve.
Earlier this year, we were onstage at the Kolkata Literary Meet with last year’s English-language Booker winner, Shehan Karunatilaka. The moderator accidentally referred to the three of us as “both of you,” and Geetanjali quipped that she was glad he understood that the two of us were one.
What follows is a series of meditations on our state of being two in one, or, as we like to joke, “both of the one of us.”
On whom we are as writer and translator
Geetanjali Shree: Every writer is necessarily a translator. She articulates — translates into words — that inchoate, amorphous pre-word which jostles within her for expression. The translator, similarly, is also a writer. During our collaboration, I, the writer, tried to become the other — Daisy, the translator. I imagined her, and in that imagining I tried to be the process that made one text into the other. Then I could recreate, or reimagine, the process, learning more about both of us. At times our two identities merged in some kind of erosion of egos, but not fully — never fully! We always made it somewhere worthwhile. The writer, a translator, and the translator, a writer.
I remember an exchange I once witnessed, a mix of languages, feelings and the nonverbal, rendered here into English. A man saw his friend some distance away and called out in enthusiasm, raising his hand in greeting: “How are you, I hope?” The friend replied, expressing his not-so-good state in an unhappy gesture: “Somewhat, I think.” It is funny but profound, and illustrates our endeavor, where words in their literal meaning are only a part of the show.
Daisy Rockwell: We think of translation as a set of binaries — a journey between two texts, two languages, two writers, two places — but in actuality it is a continuum between these points. Loss is the immediate outcome, and discovery occurs over the long term. Where does Geetanjali stop, and where do I begin? Are we one author, or two?
Geetanjali Shree, the winner of the International Booker Prize in 2022, and her translator, Daisy Rockwell, share a look at their process for translating a passage in Shree’s novel, “Tomb of Sand.”
On the act of translation
DR: The translator is a ventriloquist throwing a voice, but the voice is not her own. The translator is a medium receiving transmissions, but the transmissions come from another person whom she must become and write as.
GS: Each of us became the other, but the definition of the other was always elusive. And we sometimes reveled in the game by deliberately eluding one another. A deity in a temple is inert clay until devotion and passion enliven it. When that deity moves to another temple it is reinfused with energy and becomes something else, even if its form remains the same.
DR: What of the original is truly lost in translation? Everything. All of it. Translation is what happens next.
GS: Yes, rhetorically or philosophically speaking, everything is lost. Every articulation is a new translation. And where am I in all of this? Constantly needing to inhabit new shapes emerging in the text, constantly becoming another voice and being, another character in the novel — the crow, the door, the road! I write, and then Daisy and I write vis-à-vis each other, trying to become each other, so we can draw each other out, respectfully, lovingly, admiringly.
On the life of a text after printing
GS: A translation is always in process. A conversation. Writing is translation and vice versa. Both of us are interested not just in words and their meanings, but also in catching the nonverbal and articulating that. And we are forever incomplete as we simultaneously pursue some elusive original and constantly move away from it. I, as a writer, am forever trying to give word-shape to a pluralistic, polyphonic, messy world emerging from the storehouse within me and around me, made up of things I cannot list in their entirety — things like memory; imagination; cultural, historical, philosophical heritage; and more.
DR: The ink has dried, the deed is done, the book lives in the world. It seems the death of the author and of the translator, and yet the process continues. The moment we have a chance, our debates continue. Does “tomb” belong in the title? How can you bury the complexity and depth of the Hindi word “samadhi” within the text? What about this? And what about that? The conversations continue outside the printed book, because translation is the gray area between two texts and two people.
Geetanjali Shree, a writer, and Daisy Rockwell, a translator, won the 2022 International Booker Prize for their novel “Tomb of Sand.”
