book notes for a sunday

Setting aside injustice for a moment, as promised: here are some bookish things around the internets that deserve your time today, or tomorrow, or next week.

I. Translating Pamuk

Via Laila Lalami, read Michael McGaha's review of Orhan Pamuk's new collection Other Colors (an expanded version of 1999's Öteki Renkler), which comments at length upon Maureen Freely's translation. Pamuk has had 4 major English translators, but Freely (who grew up in Turkey, and is the daughter of John Freely, a professor and writer who has authored dozens of books on İstanbul) is the only one that has stuck--she's been his regular translator since Snow/Kar, does all the pieces he writes for the Guardian and New Yorker, and is now publishing new translations of some of the earlier novels, including The Black Book/Kara Kitap.

According to McGaha,

The best thing one can say about Freely's translation is that it doesn't read like a translation. If you didn't know, you would never guess this book had originally been written in a foreign language. Freely's approach to translation seems to be to think about the meaning of Pamuk's Turkish and then rephrase the idea in English as she would have expressed it.... Why not let Pamuk be Pamuk?

I haven't read much Pamuk in Turkish yet (I find it slow going) so I'm not very qualified to comment on the critique. I do think McGaha is right that Freely's versions don't read "like translation," and that quality--plus the consistency of her style and voice across several volumes of his work--has affected the way English-speaking readers view Pamuk's work. I've heard people go on about the qualities of Pamuk's prose in a manner unusual for translated fiction, and I'm always wondering if they really mean Freely's style of translation Similarly, there's a lot of talk about the stark differences in style between his books--which are more than a matter of sentence-level language, but may also be the result of an authorial voice refracted through several distinct interpreters. For what it's worth, I like Freely's translation of Kara Kitap more than the version by Güneli Gün, but also regard Erdağ M. Göknar's translation of My Name is Red/Benim Adım Kirmizi as a marvel (it's also the only one where I have read some of the Turkish to compare). I have also met several readers who find the Göknar translation completely unreadable. Your mileage may vary.

I'm reading Other Colors at the moment, but slowly, in piecemeal fashion, interspersed with other things. It's well-suited to the approach, and I hope to savor it for weeks this way. Beth just read The Black Book, and as always, she has thoughtful things to say.

Another related note--I once met an NYU grad student who had written a paper about some very strange differences in the US and UK versions of Snow. Freely was the translator of both editions, but this student found a number of odd disjunctures--and the differences were often politically loaded, for example, passages about Islamism and nationalism. In many cases, the lines in the UK edition were far closer to those in the original Turkish. We speculated about market pressure and publishers' expectations, and still I wonder if she ever found out what was behind the changes. In any case, if you're ever writing anything on Snow, you should know that the version you're quoting depends on the continent you're in, and that one of them is more faithful to the original than the other.

II. Woolf, the polemicist

In the Guardian, several women write about the books that changed their lives (and their feminisms); I was particularly struck by Natasha Walter on Virginia Woolf:

Although we all still love Virginia Woolf's fiction, her political polemics, A Room of One's Own and Three Guineas, tend to be marginalised even by her admirers.[...]At university, at Cambridge and Harvard in the late 1980s, I was influenced by critical theories that saw radical feminism as all about celebrating textual dissonance rather than political injustice. If Virginia Woolf fitted into that project, it was because her fiction showed the free play of the feminine imagination. But when I read her polemics I saw that this apparently free-flowing imaginative work lived alongside a fierce sense of injustice at women's lack of political voice, lack of economic power; it is almost painful to see how relevant her anger still is today.

Perhaps I'm an outlier in this case, then--I read A Room of One's Own at fifteen or sixteen, and I certainly embraced it as a call to arms rather than a historical document. It was another four or five years before I picked up Mrs Dalloway. So I came to Woolf the novelist via Woolf the polemicist--and I think I'll always see her in that light, as a lively, angry intelligence, poised for battle.

III. Making music from the Psalms

James Wood is earning his keep at the New Yorker. Go spend some of your Sunday reading this essay on the Book of Psalms, part review of Robert Alter's new translation, part impassioned literary exegesis. This, too, is a wonderful commentary on translation. Here he is on Psalm 137:

It is an exceptionally beautiful and complex lament, in which the poet pledges never to forget Jerusalem (“If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning”) even as he claims to find it impossible to sing of Jerusalem while in exile. And, in a further twist, the psalm itself represents just such a song of Jerusalem, a remembrance. These paradoxes combine in an electrifying moment in verse 7, when the poet reminds his readers of the awful day when the Babylonians, the enemies of the Jews, razed Jerusalem to the ground:

Remember, O LORD, the children of Edom in the day of Jerusalem; who said, Rase it, rase it, even to the foundation thereof.

A few months ago, I was reading this psalm, in the King James Version, and wondering about the powerful repetition of “Rase it, rase it,” and as I said the words out loud I was struck by the genius of the Jacobean translators, who knew, working in the age of Shakespeare, a thing or two about puns and double meanings. “Raze it, raze it” is also, in English, “Raise it, raise it.” It is inconceivable that the seventeenth-century translators did not intuit this doubleness, which is what the poem is about, anyway: even as we remind ourselves that Jerusalem was razed, we are raising it up. Even as we refuse to sing a song of Zion, we are singing a song of Zion. Even as we stay silent, we are making music.

As a result of reading this on Wednesday, I went and my head got all tangled up in online editions of the metrical Psalters, the collections that brought the Psalms into the vernacular a generation or two before the KJV team. Metrical Psalms are meant for singing aloud (indeed, church services in the Gaelic-speaking parts of Scotland still revolve around them). So the verses are rhymed, and often set in ballad meter--as in the case of the Sternhold and Hopkins psalter, translated in the late 1540s and compiled and revised in Geneva over the following decades. Here's a fragment from one of its versions of Psalm 22:

And from the sword, Lord, save my soule
By thy might and power
And keep my Soule, thy darling deare,
from dogs that would devour
And from the Lion's mouth that would
Me all in sunder shiver
And from the hornes of Unicornes
Lord safely me deliver.