Warwick Prize for Writing

Naomi Klein this week won the inaugural 2009 Warwick Prize for Writing for her book The Shock Doctrine, a study of the rise of “disaster capitalism”, when moments of collective crisis with people traumatized, such as 9/11 or the tsunami, are used to usher in radical social and economic change beneficial to Wild West corporations. Naomi Klein is a Canadian journalist and filmmaker.

The Warwick Prize for Writing is an international cross-disciplinary award given biennially for an excellent and substantial piece of writing in English on a theme that changes with every award. The theme for 2009 was Complexity. It is awarded by the University of Warwick in England with a price tag of £50000 or $70000.

Also on the shortlist were: Mad, Bad and Sad by Lisa Appignanesi, The Art of Political Murder by Francisco Goldman, Reinventing the Sacred by Stuart A. Kauffman, The Rest Is Noise by Alex Ross and Montano’s Malady by Enrique Vila-Matas (tr. Jonathan Dunne, the only book of fiction).

The theme for the 2011 Warwick Prize is Colour.

Europa Editions Part II: The Translator

I agree that Europa Editions make lovely books and they have an excellent editor in Michael Reynolds (let us not underestimate the role of the editor in producing good books). But my experience with them as a literary translator was the worst I have had. They are the only publisher not to give the translator copyright in his work. The copyright in my translation of Death Rites by Alicia Giménez-Bartlett belongs to Europa Editions, not to me. And I never understand this, since it costs the publisher nothing (even if they grant the translator royalties of, say, 0.5%, these will never be payable since they will never exceed the fee he received and royalties are payable against that fee).

They are the only publisher I have worked for not to pay an advance, as if the translator, while working, needed no money. Half the fee was paid two months after delivery of the translation, the other half six months after delivery of the translation.

And, because I live in Bulgaria and there is no labour agreement between Bulgaria and the United States, they then applied a 30% withholding tax, so that I only received 70% of an already modest fee. I was not told about this tax until after delivery, when there was nothing I could do.

These are old values only in that they confirm the precarious position the literary translator is forced to work in! If we understand the other, we are far less inclined to want to punch them and this is something literary translators, as well as editors of literary magazines such as Absinthe, are fighting to achieve. According to WikiAnswers, a US military bomb costs $25000. How much better this would be spent on experienced translators and functioning literary magazines!

Europa Editions

The New York Times had an article yesterday about one of my favorite publishers: Europa Editions.

In the article Jonathan Galassi of Farrar, Straus & Giroux notes that Europa is "preserving the old values of it’s-all-about-the-book and connecting the book with readers."

It's too bad those are considered "old values."

If you're not familiar with Europa Editions check out their web site.

2009 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize longlist

Over at ReadySteadyBook the 2009 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize longlist has been announced.

So far I've only read two of the titles (A Blessed Child by Linn Ullmann and How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone by Sasa Stanisic--both were very good) but several others are on my to-read list.

The longlist includes:

Voiceover by Celine Curiol (trans. Sam Richard)
A Blessed Child by Linn Ullmann (trans. Sarah Death)
The Blue Fox by Sjón (trans. Victoria Cribb)
Friendly Fire by A.B. Yehushua (trans. Stuart Schoffman)
My Father's Wives by Jose Eduardo Algualusa (trans. Daniel Hahn)
The White King by Gyorgy Dragomán (trans. Paul Olchvary)
The Informers by Juan Gabriel Vasquez (trans. Anne McLeane)
Homesick by Eshkol Nevo (trans. Sondra Silverstein)
Beijing Coma by Ma Jian (trans. Flora Drew)
The Diving Pool by Yoko Ogawa (trans Stephen Snyder)
Novel 11, Book 18 by Dag Solsted (trans. Sverre Lyngstad)
The Director by Alexander Ahndoril (trans. Sarah Death)
The Armies by Euelio Rosero (trans. Anne McLean)
How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone by Sasa Stasic (trans. Anthea Bell)
The Siege by Ismail Kadare (trans. David Bellos, from the French of Jusuf Vrioni)
Night Work by Thomas Glavinic (trans. John Brownjohn)

Attila Bartis’s "Tranquility" wins 2009 Best Translated Book Award

If you haven't heard:

Attila Bartis’s Tranquility, translated from the Hungarian by Imre Goldstein and published by Archipelago Books, and Takashi Hiraide’s For the Fighting Spirit of the Walnut, translated from the Japanese by Sawako Nakayasu and published by New Directions, are the recipients of the 2009 Best Translated Book Awards for fiction and poetry respectively. The announcement was made at a special award party that took place at Melville House Books in Brooklyn, and was hosted by author and critic Francisco Goldman. Organized by Three Percent at the University of Rochester, the Best Translated Book Award is the only prize of its kind to honor the best original works of international literature and poetry published in the U.S. over the past year.

Tranquility was a good choice and definitely one of the best books I read last year. You can purchase a copy from Archipelago Books here.

While it snows and snows and snows ...

If I haven't recommended this sites in the past let me do so now. The first is the blog A Journey Round my Skull, which always features fascinating information about writers and publishers from Europe, along with a lot of great images.

Also check out Calque, an excellent journal about translation published by Brandon Holmquest and Steve Dolph. They also post interesting supplementary material (additional translations, interviews, etc.) on their web site and if you dig around you just might find an interview with an Absinthe editor.

A SHOUT FROM COPENHAGEN, THOMAS E. KENNEDY

A SHOUT FROM COPENHAGEN, THOMAS E. KENNEDY

A WALK ON THE WILD NORTH SIDE

Last night I took an icy February walk on Copenhagen’s wild north side, had a pint or three at the Blue Yard Drugstore on Blue Yard Square. Then I dined on lamb curry at Kate’s Joint on Blue Yard Street, amidst the primitive faces of the paintings, where the waitress – a striking young woman with skin the color of pale chocolate – did wonders for my self-esteem by saying she had enjoyed hearing me read my Dan Turèll translations at the Poetic Bureau the week before.

That went straight to the refurbishment of my feel-good shield which protected me in the freezing dark night as my Giglio leather running shoes led me through dark side streets. Wandering boys in hooded jackets chucked empty bottles like hand grenades which exploded against brick walls in a rain of glass. Past Eve and Adam’s by a commodious vicus of recirculation etc., I entered through the banged-up face of a serving house whose name I did not note on a street whose name I do not recall.

Here I could smoke my little cigars and enjoy bottled beer at a modest tariff – straight from the bottle since the glass provided was not something I would want near my lips.

From my table against the wall, I could see around the elbow of the bar a slender woman in a blue beret, eyes closed beatifically above her smiling mouth, dancing ethereally with her hands and arms to Eva Cassidy’s “Autumn Leaves” which seeped moodily from the juke box. Normally, I would attack a student sentence that included as many adverbs as that, but must admit at times, after all, that adverbs do assist the lonely hunter of the heart in its quest.

The juke box was just beside me, and the dancing woman in the blue beret drifted across the floor to select more tunes, speaking softly to the machine in Norwegian-accented Danish: “I am old,” she told the juke. “I must find old music.”

“You’re by no means old!” I said. And she was not.

She beamed at me. “Is my music okay?”

“Your music is perfect.” Which earned my hand a warm clasp from hers.

“I am Norwegian,” she said.

“I thought you might be.”

“You thought I might be,” she repeated, eyes sparkling, as though I had said something truly witty.

She selected Santana and Leonard Cohen and stood a little away from my table, dancing in a trance-like state which did not preclude sly glances toward where I sat, presumably (I fancied) to see if I was watching. How could I not?

“Do you mind that I dance here all alone?” she asked.

“You are a pleasure to watch.” Which she was. She had a kind of scarf wrapped alluringly about her hips, tied at the waist to fall away at the front, and she moved with grace, turning to allow me (I fancied) a view from all alluring angles, throwing in the occasional discreet bump or grind, and my mind, in analytical mode, produced the thought, She is really quite pickled.

Whereupon a tall, broad-shouldered man with large hands and a young face approached my table and plopped down in an empty chair, saying, "Mind if I..?" Tattoos showed on every exposed area of his skin. On the fingers of either hand were tattooed letters spelling out, on the right, R O C K, and on the left, R O L L. Elaborate tattoos crawled out of his shirt collar to wrap about his neck, and from the thin skin of his inner wrist smiled the cocked lip of Elvis Presley.

He lit a nonfiltered Cecil and said to me, “I'm a young rock and roller, and you're an old rock and roller.” Enough of a speech to display a hefty slur. “I got these words tattooed on my fingers when my father died. I was fifteen. He was an old rock and roller, too. So I'm second generation. I'm 25 now."

Moved, I thought to share with him one of my most cherished stories about the day in 1959 when I was taking the GG subway home to Queens from my high school in Brooklyn, and the door between the subway cars slid open; in stepped a tall black man of perhaps forty years. His white shirt was unbuttoned, shirt tails untucked, revealing the black skin of his chest, and he was carrying a white handkerchief, flapped out and dangling from one hand.

In a melodious growl, he announced to the subway car - which was full of boys and girls on their way home from two adjacent Catholic high schools, one for each sex -- "Ever' body on this train: Do rock an' roll!"

And he began to dance along the aisle to the rhythm of the train’s shuttling, screeching wheels against the tracks, the rhythms of the cars racketing against one another, dancing to the music his body made from all those sounds, and pointing to each boy or girl as he passed, directing, "You there, boy: Do rock an' roll! And you there, girl: Do rock and roll!"

Dancing, twisting, hopping, landing lightly on the toes of his black leather wingtips until he had traversed the length of the car and disappeared out the door at the far end, leaving all of us Catholic boys and girls smiling at one another and wishing, just wishing, we could rock and roll like that man, just one little piece of his infectious, hypnotic set of moves.

One of the most beautiful, unexpected interludes of my life, a gift from a stranger, a glimpse of wild beauty.

That was in 1959 -- 50 years ago. And I thought to impart this tale to this young Danish rock and roller in this wild north side Copenhagen bar where the barmaid looked like she might have done some time in the ring and the lovely pickled Norwegian woman swayed ethereally to Leonard Cohen's "I'm Your Man," treating me to shy, sly glances from her shining eyes, and the drunken young Danish rock and roller’s response to my story was, "How long you been living in Denmark? You got a fucking terrible accent! How come you won't learn to speak Danish right?!"

I shrugged, smiled, folded shut the petals of my story and shoved it deep back into my pocket, feeling sad for this young fatherless guy.

While telling my story, I was vaguely aware of last call being called, of the Norwegian woman leaning close beside me to murmur at my ear, “Last call, last music, last dance,” of people filing out, her blue beret disappearing with one last glance back through the door.

Young man, take a look at your life. You’re a lot like I was.

Greetings from this ancient kingdom!
Thomas E. Kennedy http://www.thomasekennedy.com/)

Copyright Thomas E. Kennedy

A SHOUT FROM COPENHAGEN, THOMAS E. KENNEDY

NEAR DEATH EXPERIENCE

Although the MySpace profile shows me as 100 years old, I am only 64. Only! In 1961, when I was 17 and learned that Ernest Hemingway had killed himself, I remember thinking, Well, he was 61; he lived a good, long life. 61 is not a good, long life. And 64 is what I would call the start of advanced late youth. Of course, we’re all going to die, but I say later, much later – in fact, as the old saying goes, never.

Trying to keep myself fit to fiddle, most mornings I rise at six and drag my butt over to the local fitness center to swim a kilometer. When I say “most mornings,” that is hyperbole. Let’s say two to four times a week. This week I only managed to crawl out of the sack twice – on Monday and on Friday, leaving three days in between where, due to a surfeit of social events which included a good deal of food and drink, emphasis on the latter, I slept in. When, in disgust, I finally threw off the covers and limped out to brew coffee, I felt every single year carrying me toward mortality, and later started to seem not so very much later after all.

So today, Friday, with some sense of urgency – the eternal footman’s chill breath down my neck – I sprang out of bed and hoofed it over to the pool by quarter to eight. I was the only swimmer there. I love it when I am the only swimmer. I get the lane I like, far side of the pool by the high windows and can let my mind roam free without the intrusion of splashers or erratic lane shifters or heedless back strokers who whack you on the snout, can sense the Danish winter gloam opening slowly to light the morning toward spring.

Stretch and scoop water, stretch and scoop and paddle the legs with my self-styled slow-motion crawl, I did my 50 lengths in as many minutes, then breached out of the pool, did some stretching on the wet tiles to keep my leg muscles and back from cramping and, feeling virtuous and good, jogged down the stairs to the men’s locker where I stripped for the shower.

In the shower room were two naked men with whom I have a nodding acquaintance. They were not swimmers – they used the gym, treadmill, stationery cycles, weights, machines, stuff I can’t use because it gets to my back. As I attempted to allocate the customary nod and mumbled greeting, I noticed that both of them were looking strangely at me, eyes large, mouths open, as though they might be seeing a ghost. Odd, to stand there, naked, being stared at by two naked men as though your face was hanging out.

Finally, the younger of the two said, “Good thing it wasn’t you who drowned.”

I asked, “Did someone drown?” flashing weirdly on the fact that the book I am reading at the moment is titled Drown by Junot Diàz.

“Sank like a stone,” the man said. “Bottom of the pool. There was another man swimming with him and he yelled and waved through the windows. Two other men came running from the gym, and one of them – an Egyptian guy, a writer, strong swimmer – dove right in and got him up out of the water. He was dead.”

“He was dead?”

“Yeah,” said the other guy. “But the other man from the gym knew first aid and resuscitated him. Weird. To be dead. And then alive again. We didn’t know who it was, didn’t see him. They carried him out on a stretcher. We figured it must have been you. You usually swim at that time. Good thing he wasn’t alone in the pool. He’d really be dead.”

The other man said, “Figure he must have had a stroke or something when he was swimming. He was an old guy. Seventy.”

“I’m 64,” I said.

“Still. Thought it was you. Good thing it wasn’t.”

I swallowed. I looked from the one naked man to the other, and my voice was hushed as I murmured, “Thanks.” Then I went in to shower, feeling an odd mixture of fear and elation.

Ten minutes later, dressed, headed for the door, I nodded more elaborately than usual to my two locker mates, said, “Have a good weekend.”

“Good weekend,” the one said, knotting his tie. And the other, buckling his belt, echoed, “Good weekend.”

Outside on the street I stopped to gaze in at the big pool, its surface still and glassy, no one in the water. Behind the tall broad window, beneath the high spotlight-speckled ceiling, the tiled floor empty under the dim light, water reflecting the color of the aquamarine pool bottom, the big empty space looked like something from a David Lynch film – menacing in its stillness, lifeless matter that somehow might have absorbed and smothered whatever vitality had been in its proximity, ready to absorb more – like if you looked too long, it might suck you in.

The day was cold and clear. I flung my long grey-striped woolen scarf over my shoulder and strolled off briskly, legs easy, stomach tight, still alive, wondering how I would use the day.

Greetings from this ancient kingdom!
Thomas E. Kennedy
www.thomasekennedy.com

Copyright Thomas E. Kennedy

A SHOUT FROM COPENHAGEN, THOMAS E. KENNEDY

UPDIKE & ME

Last night I learned that John Updike had died of lung cancer at the age of seventy-six – too soon to lose such a fine writer. It occurred to me that this most likely explained why I had never received a response to the last note I had sent him a few months ago. We had exchanged occasional notes over the past decade and met a couple of times, though we had never progressed beyond the Mr. Updike/Mr. Kennedy phase.

Teaching at a writers conference in New Jersey in 2000, I was delighted to learn that John Updike was the headliner. Not only that, but the organizer promised to invite me home for drinks and cigars along with Updike after the reading that evening. I had a mission; I was in the process of completing preparations for an anthology issue of The Literary Review entitled “Poems & Sources” for which I had selected a couple of dozen poems and invited the poets to provide an essay on how that poem had come to be written. I had some outstanding poets, including two or three Pulitzer Prize winners, but to include something from Updike would be a coup. I also had the miserable job of telling him that I had no budget to offer anything but copies in payment. Previously I had used a long excerpt from a review he had published in a book I wrote about Andre Dubus and got a bill from his agency which equaled about eighty percent of my advance on the whole book; I appealed to Mr. Updike and was granted permission for a double sawbuck. Now I would have to ask to use something for free and considered digging into my own pocket.

Prior to Updike’s reading at the New Jersey conference, there was a reception in his honor at the home of the president of the host college. When I arrived the guest of honor was understandably already surrounded by a double ring of academic admirers. I had met him once before, at a conference in the Netherlands, but doubted that he would remember me. I sidled up, cradling my glass of red wine close to my chest to avoid mishaps, in the hope of getting close enough to make my face visible to this great writer whose work had been a model of style for me since I was a teenager. As I penetrated the second tier of the ring of people around him, I became dazzled by the man’s aura – his stature, his bearing, his powerful smile, his great mane of silver hair.

I heard him say, in response to some comment, with a nonchalance that belied the profundity of his words, “Of course the easiest thing in the world is not to read a book.”
Instantly I recognized the truth of the statement; further I recognized that I knew this to be true but would not have had the awareness to have known that I knew it without Updike’s having said it. In the grip of this complex of truth and submerged awareness and his dazzling aura, the hand that clutched my glass of red wine spasmed, and I jostled the wine all over my tie and jacket lapels.

Clearly, the college president had hired only the most alert and alacritous servers for I was instantly taken by the elbow and spirited toward the kitchen by a woman who performed magic with a dishcloth and club soda, eradicating all trace of red wine from my best silk tie and pale grey jacket. When she was done, she gazed kindly into my horror-frozen face and asked, “Would you like another glass of wine? You’re welcome to drink it with me here in the kitchen. Perhaps you’d like to sit down?”

An hour later, Updike was on a stage reading to a theater full of some 500 persons. He read a story titled “The After Life” which I had read on the plane from Copenhagen to Newark, and its beautiful language combined with the mix of clarity and subtly and frank and honest revelation which characterizes the best of Updike fiction took my breath away.

The apres-reading autograph line wound up and down the aisles of the theater, at least 200 people, each holding several books. I waited in back with the organizers, Jean and Bob Hollander, who had recently published the first volume of their new translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy (a segment of which was to be included in my sources anthology), to drive back to the Hollanders’ for a nightcap and conversation and cigars. This would be my big chance. By the time he had signed the last of the books, however, Mr. Updike was understandably tired and asked to be driven back to his motel, where I watched him disappear inside.

The spirit had gone out of the party, and although Jean and Bob invited me back anyway, I thought it would be an imposition and begged off. From his breast pocket Bob produced a Cohiba Robusto. “Well here’s your cigar anyway,” he said. And I stood in the motel parking lot, smoking my Cohiba beneath the moon, feeling like Ferlinghetti seeing the moment of his greatness flicker while hearing the eternal footman snicker.

In the morning I entered the motel dining room for early breakfast and was startled to see Updike eating breakfast all by himself, reading a newspaper. I considered asking if I might join him, but decided to sin boldly: I swept across the room and plopped into the vacant chair opposite him, saying, “Good morning, Mr. Updike, wonderful reading last night, how did you sleep,” preparing to work into my anthology request.

He looked up from his paper and said, “Oh, you’re the guy who lives in Denmark. Why in the world would you want to live there? What’s it like?” and proceeded to ask me a hundred questions about Denmark before he took his leave without my having got my anthology request in edgewise.

His questions were not idle. I learned later that he was working on his novel about Gertrude and Claudius at the time. In fact, when I got back to Copenhagen there was a note from him, asking what sort of birds one might encounter in the Danish countryside in autumn. Which finally gave me an opportunity to request a poem for my anthology and a short essay about how it had been written, and regretting that I could only pay in copies.

He replied graciously with an original handwritten sonnet he had jotted down on an airplane, along with several further hand-corrected drafts as well as the letter from Alice Quinn commenting on it as she accepted it for The New Yorker and finally a cut-out of the poem as it had appeared in that magazine. There was no comment about the lack of fee. Incredibly, he had sent me the original hand-written copy of the sonnet! At the end of the week I spent trying to decide what type of wood to frame it in, I received another note from him, mentioning that when I was done with the handwritten copy, he would appreciate having it back.

My last letter to him was only a few months ago. I had got it into my head how wonderful it would be if Mr. Updike would read one of my books – specifically the book that I thought was the best of the twenty-five I’ve done. I had nothing specific in mind. I would not presume to request a blurb. I just thought that it would be wonderful if what I considered my best work would occupy the thoughts of John Updike for at least as long as it took him to read it. I recall years before talking to Diane Benedict about the fact that Updike, who was guest-editing Best American Short Stories that year, had selected one of her stories for the volume. I congratulated her, and she said, “What excites me most about it is that my words occupied his mind while he was reading it and that he was not displeased.” That was what I hoped for, too – to have one of our greatest living writers read something of mine before, well before it was too late.

I argued with myself whether or not it would be outrageous to do so, but finally sent him a note requesting permission to send him the book, recalling that I had once heard him say the easiest thing in the world was not to read a book, but nonetheless enquiring whether he would consider reading one of mine. He had always responded to my notes within a couple of weeks so when two or three months had passed without a reply, I cursed myself for having asked, began to feel as though I had violated the discreet perimeters of our peripheral association.

Then last night I learned that he had died, and abruptly it was clear to me how irrelevant it was whether or not John Updike had ever read anything of mine. What was relevant was that I had been privileged to read the breathtaking prose of John Updike, that I had been privy to the originality and often startling honesty and insights of his fiction, that I have been privy to sentences and stories that have taken residence in my sensibility, touchstones that remind me what fine writing can be. After all, reading an author’s book is the closest one can ever come to that human being.

Not infrequently I find myself quoting Updike, referring to specific works, stories like “Guilt Gems” and “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and So Forth” and “Your Lover Just Called” and “Pigeon Feathers” and Rabbit, Run and Couples and so many others. The story about the couple who are divorcing and have to tell each of their children, and finally the husband gets to the oldest son who incredulously demands, “Why?!” And the father cannot remember why. Or the story about the man in New York City who has to urinate and cannot find a men’s room, the description of the radiant urinal when, in agony, he finally finds one, more beautiful than even Marcel Duchamp could ever have presented it.

And I remember that cocktail reception – one of my own cherished guilt gems – and hearing him say, “The easiest thing in the world is not to read a book,” as I spilt red wine down my tie.
Perhaps that is the easiest thing in the world. And how grateful I am that I bothered to read so many of his!

Greetings from this ancient kingdom!
Thomas E. Kennedy (www.thomasekennedy.com)

Translation and Virtue

I am interested in the idea of translation and virtue and whether there is any relationship between the two. Do you have to lead a good life in order to be a good translator or is it immaterial what kind of life you lead? To understand this question better, I decided to enlist the help of some colleagues in the field of literary translation, and this was their response (thanks to them all):

Peter Robertson, UK:
I have never believed that translators can lay claim to virtue more than the practitioner of any other craft. The definition of what constitutes virtue is necessarily moot, but I am thinking that the writer – and I believe that any accomplished translator is a writer by definition – could be limited by going down too virtuous a path. After all, it is part of any gifted writer’s stock-in-trade to have a deep understanding of the sum total of the human condition, and that includes the tendency to depravity.

John Deane, Ireland:
Yeats suggested a choice, between the work and the life. But I think there is only one choice: the work. The life will look after itself… or not. Translation is an art as well as a skill and is work! But you can find a rapscallion do the work and live a weird life outside the work. Better, of course, to have work and life one and virtuous, but the impossible can be difficult to achieve. Simone Weil believed that a great work cannot come out of a wicked life, but I know some…

Nicholas Caistor, UK:
I’m not sure that a translator has to live a “good life”, but the virtues of a good translator are patience (you have to put in the hours at the computer), humility (you always have to remind yourself it is not you who is writing the thing) and determination (you have to derive pleasure from wanting to make something as good as you can).

Dimitris Allos, Greece:
We can draw some conclusions on this only if we consider the premises on which the translator bases his work: an excellent knowledge of the languages he uses together with an advanced philological culture, a feeling for the text (namely the ability to enter the different roles the text proposes), respect for the author (in other words the modesty not to overshadow the author’s presence with his own ego) and, last but not least, the patience and responsibility to dedicate to the translation all the time it needs. All these things are equally necessary to achieve a good result. Theories that underestimate the value of any of these are simply a cover for irresponsibility.

Jean Boase-Beier, UK:
If you believe there are universals of right and wrong that transcend conventional systems, then you probably have to aspire to the right in order to be good at anything. I have just been reading John Gray’s Straw Dogs, which ridicules the idea that the right and the good can ever be the same; for him, that is a myth that depends on the idea of a God. Notwithstanding this, translators assume some things are universal, so why not ethics? And translators have to be ethical. So if virtuous means being ethical (and there are indeed ethics which go beyond the local and specific), then, yes, you’d have to be virtuous in the sense of behaving ethically. Otherwise you’d be a bad translator.

Kiril Kadiiski, Bulgaria:
Translation and virtue are two linked categories that often don’t depend on each other. Good morals (to which category human virtue belongs) are not enough to give rise to great works (to which literary translation belongs). Example: countless well-mannered graphomaniacs. On the other side of the coin: Villon, Verlaine, Yesenin, the Beat poets. However, faithfulness to the ideas of the author being translated, the lack of any manipulation of the text with a view to your own understanding of things or, even worse, the pursuit of political aims, can be described as virtue and put on a level with translation.

It seems to me that translation (by which I mean all human activity) is a spiritual act in which the Spirit works through us. As the Bulgarian critic Vladimir Trendafilov said to me, we have to be open in translation, to be passive. The question is: will the Spirit reward those living a good life? On the one hand, I think not: our salvation depends not on our righteousness, but on God’s righteousness (and God’s perception of our virtue may be very different from our own or someone else’s). On the other hand, there is no denying that once we turn to Christ (the Word), our eyes are opened to things we didn’t see before (about ourselves, about the world around us, about language) in an experience that for me was akin to passing through the sound barrier. Language fell apart in my hands and was reconstructed. To go back to my old ways would be to sully that gift; forgiveness of sins is not a reason for sinning. As my wife, the Bulgarian poet Tsvetanka Elenkova, pointed out, some of the best translators in the past were monks striving to lead a virtuous life (and write is surely close to virtue).