Asta and Vala post- talk & Julia Sanches pre-talk responses - Lianbi

 So sorry my post was late! I got sucked into “Slash and Burn” and didn’t finish reading earlier.

I liked Ásta and Vala’s talk last week! It was refreshing and inspiring to see more female translators after Huda, and see the relationship between the poet and the translator. (They have a lovely relationship, although also one that’s hard to duplicate for many of us, since Vala was first Ásta’s publisher/editor and then her translator.) I felt that Vala did an impressive job preserving many of the exact formal elements of the original, but she was more reserved in speaking about the task and her own creativity involved in it. With Ásta’s presence Vala seemed more shy and serious. I was very happy to see her open up more and more throughout the day (she was even more reserved during the MFA student Q&A) and eventually read the hyena poem out loud. To be honest, I didn’t understand why she would never read it out loud. She should be proud of what she achieved! As for Ásta, she is talented, amusing, and very fun to talk to. Since I don’t write poetry, I don’t have more to say about her creative processes. I was thinking about whether my academic, critical, logical side had at some point suppressed my creativity. I am also intrigued by the tension between the academic/research-based tendency and the creative impulse in translation. I personally love that translation involves both, but in the case of translating avant-garde poetry, the two tendencies can contradict.

I loved reading Julia Sanches’ translations. When I started reading “Slash and Burn,” I was a bit critical. I felt like the switch of perspectives was sometimes confusing, the tense was slightly odd, and the free indirect discourses made it even harder to keep track of who’s head we’re in. Yet I was able to figure out the subjectivities as I read on. I believe Julia was being faithful to the original’s stylistic features, and I find these features effective. The more I read on, the clearer the prose got. I feel like I was getting a lot of nuance out of the characters’ feelings and thoughts, even the opponent soldiers’. It seems like Julia, while translating into perfectly smooth English, is willing to occasionally go out of idiomatic usage for stylistic purposes and cultural references. For example:

“Minutes later, the soldiers set fire to everything. To all the men’s work, all the women’s hours, all the children’s chores, the recently done-up doors, the passed- down walls. Everything they had sowed and that still stood tall after the invasion was turned to the ash she found when she came looking for them.”

She delayed the sentence stem “she found” until the end, which is unusual for English but works very well to foreground her subjective experience in this sentence.

Although she successfully kept some words in Spanish, the entire piece reads very intimate and relevant and not “foreign” at all. 

Julia’s translation of Andrea Abreu is a different kind of project. She seems to be comfortable switching registers, doing word plays, using non-standard English spelling to emphasize sound or dialect, and code-switching. They are very fun to read and demonstrate Julia’s versatility as a translator.