The AALITRA Review A JOURNAL OF LITERARY TRANSLATION No. 10, May 2015 Website: http://aalitra.org.au Translation Plus: On Literary Translation and Creative Writing Nicholas Jose To cite this Article: Jose, Nicholas. “Translation Plus: On Literary Translation and Creative Writing.” The AALITRA Review: A Journal of Literary Translation 10 (Melbourne: Monash University, May 2015): 5-17. Translation Plus: On Literary Translation and Creative Writing NICHOLAS JOSE Adelaide University Abstract How do the disciplines of translation studies and creative writing relate in an institutional setting or in current practice more broadly? What role does translation play in the creative writing workshop or classroom, especially for students writing in English as a second language? What benefits are there in the interchange? What can translation add? The article considers these questions in a wide-ranging discussion of writing processes that recognize translation as both a constraint and a highly elastic and enabling concept. Reference is made to writers such as Juan Pablo Villalobos, Ben Lerner and Merlinda Bobis whose work is thematically concerned with issues of translation, and the author’s own novel, The Red Thread, which adapts a Chinese text, as well as pedagogical experiments in creative writing involving literary texts from languages other than English. This contributes to an argument that translation is an integral part of contemporary creative practice in a world characterized by mobility, multiplicity and transculturalism. Did she say Ivanhoe? All around those parts is where the man lived who was right meat for her. A long time ago it must be, they took a fancy to one another. I suppose she’s getting an old woman now. My epigraph comes from Tamsin Donaldson’s essay “Translating Oral Literature: Aboriginal Song Texts” and is her version of a Ngiyambaa song from Western New South Wales that “was composed by the late Jack King, father of Archie King, the lone survivor of those who were ‘made men’ in 1914”, by going through the last initiation ceremonies held in their country (Donaldson 64). Her essay “offers a sprinkling of examples from an extensive oral literature whose full range remains unknown, and [which is…] for the most part disappearing” (63). Her “‘translations’, in the sense developed here” are scrupulous, and also creative, and survive as a resource for later learners of, and creators in, Ngiyambaa. I dedicate what follows to Tamsin Donaldson (1939-2014), linguist, translator, scholar and friend. Translation and. Translation plus1 Translation adds value, bringing other creators and creations into being, in ways that reflect the mobility and multiplicity of our world. If we are experienced students of literature in the twenty-first century, we welcome the opportunity translation gives us to read in this way, with inquiring criticality and a theoretical toolbox to match, excited by the extra steps that come with translational reading and writing, as measures of how far we have travelled. The 1 I’m grateful to the Australian Association for Literary Translation (AALITRA) for the invitation to speak at the forum called “Translation and…” held in Melbourne in November 2013. This article enlarges on that presentation. 5 adding may be a kind of stripping away, too. Hubad, “translation” in Cebuano, one of the languages of the Philippines, for example, connotes undressing. Translation reveals. In the creative practice that seeks to express and critique the world in new ways, illuminating its better potential, there is almost always a process of translation, where translators are called on to be collaborators and commentators, interpreting and exposing others and self. I wish to focus specifically here on the “and” that happens when creative writing combines with literary translation, but this is just one case of what occurs in the world at large when the practice of translation is folded into other callings, as David Bellos observes in his well-informed and witty discussion of contemporary translation, Is That a Fish in Your Ear?, where he considers the “lawyer-linguists” of the European Court of Justice and the “journalist-translators” of the wire services: “in the work of many international organizations, no precise boundary can be drawn between translation, on the one hand, and drafting […] a text […] on the other” (Bellos 245). We’re all clerks. How, then, does it work? If we accept that literary translation is a form of creative practice, how do the disciplines of translation studies and creative writing relate to each other in an institutional setting? Literary translators work with other languages, but so, often, do creative writers. Sometimes literary translators are members of authors’ associations, sometimes they have their own association. Sometimes they are eligible for literary grants and prizes, sometimes the rules are different, as are the terms and conditions for their work. In academia, where the literary translator is often a teacher and scholar in area studies, a work of translation struggles for recognition unless its “research component” is demonstrable through its scholarly apparatus or its classification as a “non-traditional research output” (to use Australian Research Council language), a creative piece in its own right. These arguments reflect the tightrope that translators walk, a similar high wire to the creative writer’s. In terms of recognition and remuneration, literary translators struggle. The “and” that joins their work to creative writing can be helpful, as Brian Nelson and Rita Wilson argue strategically: Translation still elicits widespread distrust or disregard. In recent years, however, there has been increasing recognition of the creativity of translation. Translation is rightly seen as a form of writing (or, more precisely, re-writing) just as all writing, however original, involves processes that are a kind of translation. […] The activity of the writer and that of the translator are indivisible. (Nelson and Wilson 35, 38) The argument for literary translation as creative practice has more often been made by the translator than the creative writer. It is sometimes presented as a new phenomenon (which it’s not), as if to recognize a response to a new kind of situation. New writing emerges in contemporary contexts that are unprecedented – writers work from their own unique experiences and perspectives – and the expanded zone that translation marks is indeed part of that, especially now, in the twenty-first century. It’s linguistic, but also personal and cultural, familial, migratory, hybrid, heterogeneous. As Nelson and Wilson put it: Translation denotes not only the art and craft of the “literary” or “professional/technical” translator, but also a larger cultural formation that emerges through the global flow of migrants and refugees. (Nelson and Wilson 41) 6 That makes it worthwhile to ask what creative writers, in particular, can get from literary translation. Which aspects of translation are relevant to the workshop where writers develop their craft and vision? Literary history shows that writers who translate find an “elective affinity” in what they translate that emerges as a formative presence in their own work, both in style and content: Dryden translating Virgil, Eliot Mallarmé, or Pound with classical Chinese poetry, Elizabeth Bishop translating Carlos Drummond de Andrade. Many of the best writers are sometime translators, and the best translators are valued for what their words give us: good writing. Translation doesn’t exist in isolation. It is always a turning from one thing to another, a doubling partnership between languages and between writers and writing roles, including the role of reader. Translation is available for more than one relationship or form of transmission too, open to variants, always provisional. The apparent singularity of a final version is deceptive. Sometimes we can read between the lines, hear echoes, read back. Creative writing is like that too, in different ways. As the medium for world literature, translation is an active participant in emergent writing and cultural exchange, allowing us to cross borders, to go beyond our boundaries, to hear those stories we would otherwise miss. Those other stories that extend, challenge and overturn what we know. “And Other Stories” happens to be the name of a new UK press whose mission is to publish “the types of stories” that other publishers “would consider too risky to take on”: a collaborative undertaking that creates its own community through a subscriber model. New translations of contemporary literature make up a defining part of And Other Stories’ list. That the publishers of literary translation are so often small, non-mainstream and innovative, committed to literary values in an interventionist way, is part of this other story too. A restless curiosity and desire to destabilize the institutions and conventions of literature, in a spirit of lively experiment, appreciative receptiveness and reciprocal hospitality, make the business of translation an engine of generation: a means of entry to unknown spaces, where you break out and break in. And Other Stories has joined with the London Review of Books World Literature Series for translation master classes and events, including with Juan Pablo Villalobos, the Mexican author of Down the Rabbit Hole (2011) and Quesadillas (2012), both translated into English by Rosalind Harvey. Villalobos is himself a sometime translator, from Brazilian Portuguese into Spanish; Harvey honed her practice through a Master’s in Literary Translation from the University of East Anglia, renowned for its creative writing pedagogy. Here literary translation joins with creative writing and new literary flows in energizing, elliptical curves. Born in 1973, Villalobos is one of the contemporary writers who foreground translation as a way of presenting a polyglot, polyvalent world that both demands and resists interpretation. Down the Rabbit Hole is a miniature novel narrated by a young Mexican boy whose father is a drug lord. The kid is called Tochtli, the word for “rabbit” in Nahuatl, Mexico’s main indigenous language.