ALTA 2024 dispatches

Every year, the American Literary Translators Association hosts a multi-day conference gathering literary translators from around the globe for a program of events, seminars, awards, and speeches.

Enjoy these insider notes and reflections from MFA in Literary Translation students at the University of Iowa.

Fabienne Rink

One of my ALTA highlights was the panel “Are We Literary Unicorns? Translating Out of Our ‘Mother Tongues’” on Saturday morning, October 26th. As a non-native English speaker translating into English, I sometimes do feel special – and often in very different ways depending on the situation. While reactions are mostly positive when I tell my friends from Germany that I translate primarily into English, some also remain skeptical – is that what publishers look for? Wouldn’t it be smarter to translate into your mother tongue? The popular opinion. Being in workshop with a lot of native English speakers, I sometimes do seem to feel less confident about my choices in translation. But is this reason to give up? Not if you would ask the women in this panel.

                Bruna Dantas Lobato – a writer-translator who recently published her debut novel Blue Light Hours – sensitively led through this panel, while also adding her view in translating from Brazilian Portuguese and incorporating questions from the audience. Alongside her were three women translators, Izidora Angel, Denise Kripper, Jenna Tang, working from Bulgarian, Argentine Spanish and Taiwanese Mandarin, who are also writers currently in the process of authoring or having published their own books in English. The women challenged the discourse by telling their own stories, presenting “a case for why existing in the liminal space between geographies by translating from our native languages into our adopted ones is a privilege that grants us powerful creativity, while giving our audience a unique and powerful perspective.”

                In their statements and essays, Dantas Lobato, Angel, Kripper and Tang were very clear, their message powerful. The unique perspective as people translating from our mother tongues doesn’t lessen our importance as translators and writers, but rather strengthens it. The United States have been a hotspot for immigration for a long time, and with that, language always changed and transformed naturally – Denise Kripper stressed that it was her intention for people to hear her accent through her writing. Izidora Angel mentioned the question of belonging that arises for many people living “between” two or multiple countries, not only because they are unsure themselves but also because they are being seen as different, as “the other,” no matter where they reside. Our stories, our understanding of the world, can only be beneficial for our writing and our readers.

Ida Hattemer-Higgins

Saturday, October 26 – Morning

Spend much of the morning trying to avoid a man I’ve recognized from his Facebook page as a German to English translator who was rude to me once (in the course of making a territorial play for an Austrian novel), but in the end I’m plopped down in a group right next to the same man, and it turns out it’s not the Germanophone at all, it’s the great DANIEL HAHN. And he couldn’t be more lovely in real life. All promises kept. Everyone chats about Catching Fire, which makes Danny blush (he’s never been sure of the book, he explains), and then Bela* comes and talks about the children of Iowa as “the sweetest fruits of the moist, throbbing heart of the Empire” (or what were her wonderful adjectives?…wish I could remember exactly).

Shortly after: triumphant workshop led by our own Jan* and Diana* on writing translation reviews, at which a surprisingly large number of people are in attendance, all of them interesting. I feel more alive now. Across the room from me is the charlatan who’s made a pretty big name for himself peddling strawman fallacies—to see him in action you feel pretty sure he knows it himself, i.e. it’s careerism, not idiocy: always a curdled, injured expression on his face, a coy reticence coupled with inflexibility of thought (becomes apparent when he speaks). The work of standing up to the sourpuss is taken up by others: I am relieved.

Come out of the workshop feeling like a lot of liquid/amorphous thoughts and feelings about reviewing have solidified for me, and talking to others, I see I’m not the only one. The group seems to have reached consensus or near-consensus on one or two points: 1) if the reviewer feels the translator has misinterpreted the original work, and can show this effectively, a ‘negative’ review can be an interesting and important contribution to the eco-system, and it’s actually not as hurtful to the translator as we generally assume (a lot of us who have had our work viciously panned by reviewers (and not minded) spoke up about this point.) 2) We all need to write more reviews. We all need to talk more, and talk more publicly.

Lunch in a kind of food-court place with ALL the University of Iowa MFA in Literary Translation Alum—kind of amazing to see what significant translators everyone made themselves into, post-graduation. Long waits in line for the food.

Saturday, October 26 - Evening

Evening awards ceremony. The reception is catered. American cuisine fashions have evolved during my 23-year absence from this country. The food lay-out is a massive charcuterie table (what the French call planche, but it’s American, thus much, much bigger) where a great mess of Russian-style salamis, gorgonzola crumbles, almond slivers, and raw vegetables have been heaped into a vast montage that very soon begins to spill onto the floor. The parent in me has a hard time not spending the evening down on the ground picking up sundried tomatoes and chunks of edamer before they get mashed into the carpet. Some people drink Milwaukee beer, others drink red wine. I enjoy the artichoke humous. We sit at an array of round tables facing the stage, à la Golden Globes.

People take the stage and give out prizes. Most of them seem uncomfortable and good-hearted. Several things soon become apparent: you can win a pretty hefty chunk of change if you win one of ALTA’s translation prizes – from two to six thousand dollars. 2) Lots of areas of the world -- the Middle East, Scandinavia, the continent of Africa -- have no prizes devoted to their regions. This plays out more than a little unfairly. Books translated from the Italian take home two prizes while the rest of the world is mostly left out in the cold. Both the Italian Prose in Translation Award and the National Translation Award in Prose go to works translated from Italian.

Only the recipient of the ALTA First Translation Prize is actually in attendance (everyone else has representatives accept the awards in their stead), for a book called The Enlightenment of Katzuo Nakamatsu (Archipelago FTW! University of Iowa alum FTW!) by Peruvian-Japanese author Augusto Higo Oshiro, translated from Spanish by Jennifer Shyue, who uses her acceptance speech as an opportunity to talk about solidarity with Palestine. Diana, who is wearing a superb shade of red lipstick and beaming, accepts a prize on behalf of Jenny McPhee who has won for her translation of an Elsa Morante novel. She reads a hilarious excerpt that makes me choke on my drink, although no one else seems to be laughing. (Why not?) It is the first time I have ever admired Elsa Morante.

At first, I’m at a table up front by the stage. Later, I go to the restrooms. But on the way back I think I’d better not create a disruption. So instead, I sit on the floor near the exit, eyeing the fallen vegetables and listening to the final speeches. It’s at this point I spy Kaija Straumanis, who is on her way back to her hotel room to check on her son—the only child at ALTA. The two of us share a surprisingly genuine embrace, and all of a sudden I long for my children terribly.

Sunday, October 27 – Morning

I missed the free breakfast buffet at my hotel. 

And I didn’t even sleep in. I wrote a dispatch, thought the breakfast went until ten. Actually, they lock it up already at nine.

A tremendous blow. Now what do I eat? Already late for the first panel. Luckily the man who works at the front desk gives me a plastic bowl of Cheerios.

First panel is about translating flora and fauna. There are a bunch of Russians on it, and they end up doing this spontaneous polyphonic choral performance of the Russian text (which happens to be song lyrics involving botanical terms). It seems Russian trees, in literature and folk culture, have assumed genders, personalities, and approximate ages. A birch is a woman. An oak is apparently a man.

At lunch I meet a woman who watched two Duke medical students murdered by a mob of KKK in downtown Greensboro, NC in 1979, accused of being n-word-lovers. She tells me about the sexism at her law school there, about Wallace Stevens’ work as a lawyer for the insurance industry, and Ezra Pound’s daughter’s memoir of her childhood farmed out to Tyrolean peasants. She eats only banana bread.

After lunch: head over to a workshop on performing experimental poetry (just because of Bela). They make us divide into groups and put together a performance of experimental poetry. We are given ten minutes. The performances are generally mediocre but some are fantastic, and not for the first time I think about the curiously perspicacious executive function of Russian women in particular, who are so much more likely to summon unexpected, gleaming internal resources when they’re called upon to perform publicly. They don’t seem to have the same deer-in-the-headlights reaction that makes so many of us fall to pieces with stage fright. (My brain, for example, often stops working when I feel I’ve been put on the spot.) Why would this be a cultural thing? Why?

I feel ill-suited. But I do notice, as I leave the workshop, a shift in my relationship to the idea of performing poetry. Previously I’d have fled the idea in terror. Now I think it might be an important enough restructuring of how the text is digested that it would be worth trying to stage a poetry performance in my living room.

Still on a Russian kick, I try to go to a workshop on translating 19th century Russian poetry. But it seems my luck has run out: the young workshop leader has a wooden, pedantic, literalist sense of poetry, a hectoring and abrasive tone, and a knack for misunderstanding questions. Pretty soon she’s hemorrhaging audience. I leave midway. I go back to the hotel and bite into an enormous chunk of cheese (because no knife), the only thing I have left in the mini-fridge.

Monday, October 28 – Midday

Sometimes it seems like writing about ALTA is actually a matter of writing about all the things at ALTA that I’m missing.

1. I didn’t make it to the keynote speech with Kaiama Glover (overslept). I have no excuse.

2. I didn’t know people were going bowling Sunday night. By all accounts it was the most fun thing that happened at ALTA 2024, with David Smith (translator from Norwegian) bowling so well (he won) that he made himself sick and missed his panel the next morning, and Jordan Barger throwing gutter balls until he miraculously turned it around in the second half and threw only strikes. Abby Ryder-Huth, too, dazzlingly in attendance.

3. Didn’t know that a panel with the cryptic title “Translation as a Writing Paradigm” was actually about translation pedagogy. Dozens of suggestions of exercises to do with students—something it goes without saying I would have been intensely interested in. (Luckily Gleisson was there and took notes like the wise man he is.) 

4. Most acutely painful: I miss the “panel on theory” (I still don’t know what cryptic title it had on the official schedule) at which the legendary Jan Steyn and the beloved Aron Aji apparently had a showdown, with Aron coming out guns blazing anti-theory and Jan pro, and everything about my translation MFA program’s internal contradictions at last made luminously manifest—AND I MISSED IT ALL.

5. There’s more. I could keep going. But I’ll stop. It’s too bitter.

Here’s what I do do. Make a nuisance of myself by accidentally opening a wheelchair-accessible door too loudly while fleeing a boring panel on political translation mid-way through. Try to make my way across the lobby to get to another panel run by Bela, but suddenly overhear the following words:

“Well, yes, of course there are people who translate dactylic hexameter into dactylic hexameter, but we don’t talk to those people, and we never will.”

I am immediately intrigued. Insert myself into the conversation with uncharacteristic social boldness and pretty soon get schooled by three prosody champions who take my ideas for my essay on Celan and Mandelstam in hand within two or three minutes. They actually explain everything. One of them (young, Princeton, brilliant, snarky) recently published a new translation of Ovid’s Metamorphosis; one (older, kinder, mysteriously omniscient) translates from Russian and runs a small but prestigious literary press, and the third (brilliant, Indian, political) is able to compare ancient Greek and Latin meter to Sanskrit metrical forms in dizzying detail. It turns out prosody possesses a vast vocabulary beyond what they teach you in university courses on the subject, and much of what they say is somehow both mind-blowing and yet also slipping through my grasp in real time (I try not to show this, but I can feel my face turning into a tomato). However, ALTA 2024 has a highlight beyond bowling, for this correspondent at least: an unsuspected glimpse into prosody’s sweet abyss.