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Some Kind of Beautiful Signal
In Some Kind of Beautiful Signal, the widely lauded Two Lines World Writing in Translation series continues its 17-year history of bringing readers essential international voices unavailable anywhere else. Edited by National Book Critics Circle Award-winner Natasha Wimmer and acclaimed poet Jeffrey Yang, this volume delivers dozens of poets and fiction writers working in 18 distinct languages, each representing a unique voice and perspective.
The collection is headlined by poetry from China's Uyghur ethnic minority. Though thousands of years old and incredibly diverse, Uyghur culture is increasingly threatened by geographic isolation and political oppression. Here, Westerners have a rare chance to hear from this culture in its own words. Also included in this anthology is a broad selection of vital an excerpt from Lydia Davis's new translation of Gustave Flaubert's seminal Madame Bovary; a taste of a never-before-seen essay by Roberto Bolano, translated by Natasha Wimmer; and Susanna Fied's newest translations of poems by Danish master Inger Christensen.
From Zapotec to Indonesian, Hindi to Portuguese, this testament to the expanse of voices in the world shows readers how universal the themes and struggles of humanity really are.
The collection is headlined by poetry from China's Uyghur ethnic minority. Though thousands of years old and incredibly diverse, Uyghur culture is increasingly threatened by geographic isolation and political oppression. Here, Westerners have a rare chance to hear from this culture in its own words. Also included in this anthology is a broad selection of vital an excerpt from Lydia Davis's new translation of Gustave Flaubert's seminal Madame Bovary; a taste of a never-before-seen essay by Roberto Bolano, translated by Natasha Wimmer; and Susanna Fied's newest translations of poems by Danish master Inger Christensen.
From Zapotec to Indonesian, Hindi to Portuguese, this testament to the expanse of voices in the world shows readers how universal the themes and struggles of humanity really are.
- GenresPoetry
317 pages, Paperback
First published November 1, 2010
2 people are currently reading
26 people want to read
About the author
Natasha Wimmer
33 books59 followersNatasha Wimmer is an American translator best known for her translations of Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño's 2666 and The Savage Detectives from Spanish into English.
Wimmer learned Spanish in Spain, where she spent four years growing up. She studied Spanish literature at Harvard. After graduating her first job was at Farrar, Straus & Giroux from 1996 to 1999 as an assistant and then managing editor.While there her first translation was Dirty Havana Trilogy by the Cuban novelist Pedro Juan Gutiérrez.
She then worked at Publishers Weekly, before the demands on working on Bolaño's books became full-time. "My reason for going into publishing in the first place was that I had decided in college that I would never be a fiction writer, but I knew I wanted to be as close to books as I could. Publishing was one way, and translating turned out to be a better way for me."
She has also translated Nobel Prize-winner Mario Vargas Llosa's The Language of Passion, The Way to Paradise, and Letters to a Young Novelist.
Wimmer received the PEN Translation Prize in 2009.
Wimmer learned Spanish in Spain, where she spent four years growing up. She studied Spanish literature at Harvard. After graduating her first job was at Farrar, Straus & Giroux from 1996 to 1999 as an assistant and then managing editor.While there her first translation was Dirty Havana Trilogy by the Cuban novelist Pedro Juan Gutiérrez.
She then worked at Publishers Weekly, before the demands on working on Bolaño's books became full-time. "My reason for going into publishing in the first place was that I had decided in college that I would never be a fiction writer, but I knew I wanted to be as close to books as I could. Publishing was one way, and translating turned out to be a better way for me."
She has also translated Nobel Prize-winner Mario Vargas Llosa's The Language of Passion, The Way to Paradise, and Letters to a Young Novelist.
Wimmer received the PEN Translation Prize in 2009.
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January 21, 2016This is an excellent edition of The Center for the Art of Translation’s annual translation anthology. Published in 2010, it ranges from new translations of the classics (a few pages from Lydia Davis’s translation of Madame Bovary, Kabir), to established modern writers (Bioy Casares and Ocampo, Bolano) to new discoveries for me (Anja Utler). There is a nice selection by Xi Chuan, (translated by Lucas Klein; I really enjoyed his book-length translation of Xi Chuan’s work, Notes on the Mosquito: Selected Poems published in 2012).
I read this now because it has about 65 pages focusing on Uygur poetry, and I just read and loved Ahmatjan Osman’s Uygurland (just published, translated by Jeffrey Yang, who was an editor here). This section includes both ancient and modern Uyghur poetry. (Don’t overlook the last poem, by Osman, on the back page after the index.)
Three highlights: a few paragraphs from Bolano on translation, and Utler’s fantastic version of the Ariadne legend (here are the first few lines, translated from German by Kurt Beals)
And a poem by Vinod Kumar Shukla, translated from Hindi by Arvind Krishna
I read this now because it has about 65 pages focusing on Uygur poetry, and I just read and loved Ahmatjan Osman’s Uygurland (just published, translated by Jeffrey Yang, who was an editor here). This section includes both ancient and modern Uyghur poetry. (Don’t overlook the last poem, by Osman, on the back page after the index.)
Three highlights: a few paragraphs from Bolano on translation, and Utler’s fantastic version of the Ariadne legend (here are the first few lines, translated from German by Kurt Beals)
myself: as if dethroned! by him as: if it had all
turned now am: scented, am stalked--fully: quarry my
sweat--rush: through branches, through brushwood from him
they: light into grab hook whipping--swifter--
my flanks eyes--no--(..) know: i must go through must
make it--at once--to the river, river--
And a poem by Vinod Kumar Shukla, translated from Hindi by Arvind Krishna
Dhaulagiri
Seeing Mount Dhaulagiri
I was reminded of its picture,
As I’d seen the picture first.
Among the pictures in my house
Are portraits of my ancestors.
I haven’t seen my ancestors
So whenever I think of them
It’s their portraits I think of.
But not after seeing Dhaulagiri.
Now it’s the ancestors who come to mind
And not their likenesses.
December 27, 2010
(Book review originally appeared at Isak.)
Some Kind of Beautiful Signal carries a vibrant, persistent pulse, a calling cry to readers to look up and out. Time and distance collapse in its pages; here, after all, is a re-visioned geometry. (That is, literally, "measuring the world.")
Here is the seventeenth volume of the TWO LINES annual series of multilingual anthologies of literature in translation, this time co-edited by Natasha Wimmer (famed for her Roberto Bolaño and Maria Vargas Llosa renditions) and Jeffery Yang, who is a poet, translator and an editor at the New Directions publishing house. It comes to us via the Center for the Art of Translation, featuring more than thirty writers from around the globe in both their original languages (even Zapotec!) and English translations. The collection includes more highlights than I can conveniently tick off ... but, oh hell, I'll try anyway:
* A folio of contemporary and medieval poetry from China's Uyghur ethnic minority that lives in a center of cultural hybridity at the western edge of the country and in the middle of Asia, in the midst of the old Silk Road and alternatively annexed by Russia and China.
* "A Thin Line Between Love and Hate”-- which is previously untranslated fiction by Jorge Luis Borges' best friend and collaborator, Adolfo Bioy Casares, translated by Suzanne Jill Levine (whose own book, The Subversive Scribe: Translating Latin American Fiction, I have long hankered for).
* Three poems by Danish writer Inger Christensen, who passed away last year.
* An apt essay by Roberto Bolaño called "Translation Is a Testing Ground.” (via Wimmer, naturally)
* A chapter of Lydia Davis' translation of Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary.
* Two poems by Xi Chuan, one of contemporary China's most celebrated poets.
* Two translators approach the poetry and prose of Gennady Aygum a Russian writer that was numerous times nominated for the Nobel Prize.
* Not a sideline issue: Some Kind of Beautiful Signal is just so damn good-looking. A horizontal publication with a satisfying heft, clean design, and the aesthetic spark of multiple languages printed across the white pages... as Chad Post has put it, there is something that is just cool about it.
Rather than disappear into the texts they work with, here the translators' own voices emerge in introductions to the pieces they worked on. In mini-essays, the translators provide context, a consideration of challenges they faced in transforming the originals to English, and an articulation of their purpose. Collectively, these introductions are a fascinating overview of the differences among individual translators working in different languages and traditions.
I read Some Kind of Beautiful Signal slowly, taking it in sips over the course of a season, feeling no need to rush. There were a few points where my limited Spanish led me to wonder why a translator chose a particular English rendition of a line or word, making me wish I could talk back to the work and ask it questions. (How did "La traducción es un yunque" become "Translation is a testing ground," Natasha Wimmer? Why is "la mesa de trabajo" simply "the desk," Suzanne Jill Levine?)
Most of the time, though, I enjoyed just moving along on this ride. I read this collection, incidentally, while also moving through the mammoth Best European Fiction 2011 anthology; it is a curious thing to reflect on the differences between anthologies that share a similar purpose in making more excellent international literature available in English. While I love them both, BEF is immersive, contemporary, more unified in cultural landscape, form and the idiosyncratic preferences of Aleksandar Hemon, its editor. Some Kind of Beautiful Signal is the anthology that is more eclectic, more global, more far-reaching in time and tradition, and more attentive to the process and purpose of translation.
It seems fitting to end with the final paragraph of the (curiously titled) Bolaño essay included in Some Kind of Beautiful Signal. Bolaño is hyper-alert to the limitations of translation, but has a sort of gentle smile about how great literature pulses through. (In this CAT interview, incidentally, Wimmer's offers her own response to the essay.)
How to recognize a work of art? How to separate it, even if just for a moment, from its critical apparatus, its exegetes, its tireless plagiarizers, its belittlers, its final lonely fate? Easy. Let it be translated. Let its translator be far from brilliant. Rip pages from it at random. Leave it lying in an attic. If after all of this a kid comes along and reads it, and after reading it makes it his own, and is faithful to it (or unfaithful, whichever) and reinterprets it and accompanies it on its voyage to the edge, and both are enriched and the kid adds an ounce of value to its original value, then we have something before us, a machine or a book, capable of speaking to all human beings: not a plowed field but a mountain, not the image of a dark forest but the dark forest, not a flock of birds but the Nightingale.
Some Kind of Beautiful Signal carries a vibrant, persistent pulse, a calling cry to readers to look up and out. Time and distance collapse in its pages; here, after all, is a re-visioned geometry. (That is, literally, "measuring the world.")
Here is the seventeenth volume of the TWO LINES annual series of multilingual anthologies of literature in translation, this time co-edited by Natasha Wimmer (famed for her Roberto Bolaño and Maria Vargas Llosa renditions) and Jeffery Yang, who is a poet, translator and an editor at the New Directions publishing house. It comes to us via the Center for the Art of Translation, featuring more than thirty writers from around the globe in both their original languages (even Zapotec!) and English translations. The collection includes more highlights than I can conveniently tick off ... but, oh hell, I'll try anyway:
* A folio of contemporary and medieval poetry from China's Uyghur ethnic minority that lives in a center of cultural hybridity at the western edge of the country and in the middle of Asia, in the midst of the old Silk Road and alternatively annexed by Russia and China.
* "A Thin Line Between Love and Hate”-- which is previously untranslated fiction by Jorge Luis Borges' best friend and collaborator, Adolfo Bioy Casares, translated by Suzanne Jill Levine (whose own book, The Subversive Scribe: Translating Latin American Fiction, I have long hankered for).
* Three poems by Danish writer Inger Christensen, who passed away last year.
* An apt essay by Roberto Bolaño called "Translation Is a Testing Ground.” (via Wimmer, naturally)
* A chapter of Lydia Davis' translation of Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary.
* Two poems by Xi Chuan, one of contemporary China's most celebrated poets.
* Two translators approach the poetry and prose of Gennady Aygum a Russian writer that was numerous times nominated for the Nobel Prize.
* Not a sideline issue: Some Kind of Beautiful Signal is just so damn good-looking. A horizontal publication with a satisfying heft, clean design, and the aesthetic spark of multiple languages printed across the white pages... as Chad Post has put it, there is something that is just cool about it.
Rather than disappear into the texts they work with, here the translators' own voices emerge in introductions to the pieces they worked on. In mini-essays, the translators provide context, a consideration of challenges they faced in transforming the originals to English, and an articulation of their purpose. Collectively, these introductions are a fascinating overview of the differences among individual translators working in different languages and traditions.
I read Some Kind of Beautiful Signal slowly, taking it in sips over the course of a season, feeling no need to rush. There were a few points where my limited Spanish led me to wonder why a translator chose a particular English rendition of a line or word, making me wish I could talk back to the work and ask it questions. (How did "La traducción es un yunque" become "Translation is a testing ground," Natasha Wimmer? Why is "la mesa de trabajo" simply "the desk," Suzanne Jill Levine?)
Most of the time, though, I enjoyed just moving along on this ride. I read this collection, incidentally, while also moving through the mammoth Best European Fiction 2011 anthology; it is a curious thing to reflect on the differences between anthologies that share a similar purpose in making more excellent international literature available in English. While I love them both, BEF is immersive, contemporary, more unified in cultural landscape, form and the idiosyncratic preferences of Aleksandar Hemon, its editor. Some Kind of Beautiful Signal is the anthology that is more eclectic, more global, more far-reaching in time and tradition, and more attentive to the process and purpose of translation.
It seems fitting to end with the final paragraph of the (curiously titled) Bolaño essay included in Some Kind of Beautiful Signal. Bolaño is hyper-alert to the limitations of translation, but has a sort of gentle smile about how great literature pulses through. (In this CAT interview, incidentally, Wimmer's offers her own response to the essay.)
How to recognize a work of art? How to separate it, even if just for a moment, from its critical apparatus, its exegetes, its tireless plagiarizers, its belittlers, its final lonely fate? Easy. Let it be translated. Let its translator be far from brilliant. Rip pages from it at random. Leave it lying in an attic. If after all of this a kid comes along and reads it, and after reading it makes it his own, and is faithful to it (or unfaithful, whichever) and reinterprets it and accompanies it on its voyage to the edge, and both are enriched and the kid adds an ounce of value to its original value, then we have something before us, a machine or a book, capable of speaking to all human beings: not a plowed field but a mountain, not the image of a dark forest but the dark forest, not a flock of birds but the Nightingale.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews