Translating Constraint
Translators Chris Clarke, Eugene Ostashevsky, and Emma Ramadan in conversation with C. Francis Fisher
If you’re translating the novel attentively, you’re translating the constraint, too.
“Colloquy: Translators in Conversation” is an event series based in New York City and sponsored by World Poetry Books. On March 2nd, 2023, P & T Knitwear in Manhattan hosted “Colloquy #4: Translating Constraint.” Translators Emma Ramadan, Eugene Ostashevsky, and Chris Clarke each provided examples of their translations of constrained literature. Below are excerpts from the conversation about translating constraint that followed; it has been edited for clarity and length.
C. Francis Fisher (CF): I’d like to kick off this conversation by offering an idea of what constraint-based literature can be to our audience through hearing some of the projects you all have been working on.
Eugene Ostashevsky (EO): I have been working on visual poetry by Russian and Ukrainian futurists from one hundred years ago. Me and my partner on the project, Daniel Mellis, did a reproduction of a book called Tango with Cows that came out in March 1914 in Moscow. The original was done on wallpaper. Our translation looks almost exactly the same. The main difference is that it’s in English rather than in Russian. So, it’s constraint-based translation in several senses. One is that you need to, first of all, consider the number and form of letters you’re using. They don’t have to exactly match the original, but they can’t be very different because otherwise, visually it’ll be completely askew. But then the original text is also full of puns, and you have to reproduce the wordplay, provide something like the equivalent of the puns. And then the translation also became a research project. Daniel analyzed all the typefaces that were used. There are 68 different fonts in the book. He had to find Roman Latin equivalents to the Cyrillic fonts. So, we wound up making a 300-page commentary book to go with the original chapbook, where about half of it is the typographic history of the work, and half of it is research on the poetics and subject of the book: popular culture and nightlife in Moscow in roughly January of 1914.
So, I did research on the Tango Revolution of 1913-1914, because of which the original is called Tango with Cows. The commentary talks about the different tango nightlife spots in Moscow. Also, it goes through the text literally word by word, with the aim that somebody who doesn’t know Russian would nonetheless be able to read the Russian original, because we explain how it works. So, it became this obsessive project. And the artist book that resulted is huge. I was doing research at the Columbia Special Collections recently, and they had bought the deluxe version of the book, and they told me “If we attach legs to it, we can use it as a coffee table.”
Chris Clarke (CC): The way I see it, there are two main types of constraint that I work with, or two sets into which I tend to separate them. The first are larger formal constraints that are used to build an entire text or book. Quite often, those, we don’t have to do much with as translator. Once the book has been constructed a certain way, as long as we’re doing our jobs, things are usually going to follow the same structure, stay in the same order, in the same presentation, etc.
The second type is made up of linguistic constraints, or other smaller, sentence- or word-level manipulations, and that’s where a lot of the work comes in. My first experience translating constraints ended up being the fifty additional pages that were included in New Directions’s 2013 anniversary edition of Raymond Queneau’s Exercices de Style [Exercises in Style]. If you’re not familiar with the book, it was written in the 1940s, and was originally comprised of 99 different ways to tell the same banal story. Some of them make use of tricky constraints, others are just stylistic constraints. One sounds like Poe, one is an epistolary version, et cetera, et cetera. I did twenty-eight of them, complete and incomplete, which had turned up in French after the original set had already been translated into English. After that project, I ended up getting to know a few members of the group Oulipo, which Queneau had co-founded, and I went on to try my hand at my first really difficult constraint, which was a text by the Oulipo’s Olivier Salon called “The Stations of the Cry.” Olivier refers to this as an inverse progressive lipogram. This is a text that is twenty-six paragraphs long, and its first paragraph uses all of the letters of the alphabet. The last paragraph simply reads, “Aaa!!!!!! Aaaaaaaaa!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!.” After the opening salvo, each successive paragraph loses one additional letter, after which that letter never appears again, and Salon marks the end of most paragraphs with a pun. “It is no longer time for tea!” for example, after which the “T” is gone, and it never comes back. The middle passages were actually the hardest to translate, because by the time the last paragraphs came around, even though I had fewer lexical options in English, there was very little Salon could do in the French original, either. But in the middle of the text, when I had the letters “F” through “A” left to me, there was only so much I could really do. In hindsight, the “Q” paragraph strayed the furthest from the meaning of the source text, because I had lost my “U” already, and I was also limiting myself to words that can be found in the Oxford English Dictionary and were not straight borrowings from French. Using words with the letter “Q” to produce alliteration without a “U” present is very tricky in English. So that text was kind of how I cut my teeth. Olivier was impressed with the outcome, we became friends, and we have continued to collaborate over the years. My interest in such things developed from there.
I was asked in preparation for this event to list the constrained books I’ve translated, but the problem is you don’t really see full books with these types of constraints because, well, look: “The Stations of the Cry” is four or five pages long, and it took me three weeks of eight-hour days. To do a full book of work of that sort, when we’re getting paid as translators by the word, if at all, is very uncommon.
As far as how extreme constraints can get, there’s one poem I’m working on where I’ve ended up work on one line per year, and at that rate it will last me until I’m 75. The writer was a French doomsday poet from the early nineteenth century; it’s “apocalypse writing,” and uses very strict numerical constraints. Since it’s so complicated and time consuming, I’ve decided to limit myself to a line a year; I’ve had to build a dictionary sorted into categories like the frequency of common words and their values in his system. I could do it much more quickly using machines, I’m sure, but that doesn’t seem right to me in this context. Instead, I occasionally play at plugging things in manually by trial and error until I manage to arrive at something that both respects the numerological constraints and remains semantically tied to the source text in some vague fashion. I have three lines so far, but you can’t see them yet: not until it’s all done.
Emma Ramadan (ER): Wow, I’m so glad I don’t have a project that will take me until I’m 75. But I admire that, and I can’t wait to read it.
I’ve translated three novels by Anne Garréta. Sphinx, the first one, where the constraint is that there are no gender markers for the two main characters. Her second that I translated was Not One Day, which falls into the book-length constraint category Chris was talking about, and that project is that there’s a series of chapters about different lovers that Anne had in her life, and one of the chapters is fiction, and all the rest are non-fiction, and she doesn’t tell you which one is which. The constraint is that she wrote five hours a day, every day, for a month, writing strictly from memory and never revising. So, they were supposed to just be written as they came from memory with no filter and with no going back, no erasing anything.
That was the constraint she set for herself, which as a translator, I cannot do. I can’t not edit and so that I did not follow. And then the third book I did of hers is called In Concrete, and that one is less of a straightforward constraint, though you’re not supposed to know what gender the speaker is for that entire book until you get to the very end. In that one, the speaker has a nickname for themself, and I had to be very careful about how I translated that nickname. But otherwise, that book was pun after pun, joke after joke, jokes that worked across multiple languages. So, not so much a constraint for her as the writer but very much a constraint for me, the translator, because I had to translate all of her jokes into English in a very particular way. Tons of innuendo, lots of dirty jokes, lots of poop jokes, lots of homoerotic jokes, et cetera.
Sphinx (2015), Not One Day (2017), In Concrete (2021) by Anne Garréta, trans. Emma Ramadan, Deep Vellum
CF: So many great projects! I’m curious about whether as translators you tend to prioritize the constraint over the content or vice versa?
CC: It really depends on the text. Most Oulipians will tell you that the constraint has to come first. The obvious example that tends to come up when you’re explaining what the Oulipo does is Georges Perec’s novel, La Disparition [published in English as A Void], a book written without the letter “E.” In that case, to translate the novel without also respecting that constraint defeats the purpose of the work, especially since the plot relates to the disappearance of the letter “E.” One problem with this is that you can end up focusing too much on the constraint, which in my opinion is what Gilbert Adair did when he translated it into English; he got really good at writing without the “E,” and he wasn’t necessarily paying close attention to all of the other things that were going on in the novel. So, when it’s a larger formal constraint, like with what Emma was mentioning, or in the Queneau novel I recently translated—which is coming out next winter—a lot of the constraint work came in the form of formal decisions on how to structure the novel, how the characters were going to repeat here and there, etc. For Queneau, it started out as taking the idea of the formal structures of poetry and bringing that over to the novel. So, a lot of those types of larger formal constraints work themselves out: if you’re translating the novel attentively, you’re translating the constraint, too.
However, when it’s a “hard constraint,” where the author is showcasing his linguistic dexterity, then as a translator you really have to do that yourself as well. For example, I couldn’t translate Salon’s “The Stations of the Cry” without following his constraint. If I were to do so, there would be no point to the piece. I could tell you what it’s about, what the story is, I could provide a narrative summary in English, but as all of you know, with literature, it’s not just what happens in the book, but how the writer tells it to you. And as a reader of constrained literature, one of the things that is interesting about it is the fact that there’s something else going on that you can enjoy while you’re also getting this content. So as translators, we have to follow suit if we’re able.
ER: Ditto! It would be ridiculous if I translated Sphinx with gender markers. Sometimes something really beautiful happens when you’re paying attention to the constraint in English, the changes that have to happen in English can emphasize the content as opposed to taking away from it. Sphinx was a good example of that because the whole premise of this fraught love story is that the narrator doesn’t really see A*** for who A*** is. And instead, turns A*** into a series of body parts, into a projection and an idea of a person. And in English, A*** becomes really bodily and breaks down into a bunch of body parts because we can’t use possessive without giving away gender – you can’t say her arm or his leg or whatever. So, it’s a hand on my thigh or the leg on my leg, things like that. In this way the translation of the constraint itself actually emphasizes the content of the book; something was really gained from that transference to English, as opposed to something being lost.
CC: I usually think of this idea as “elasticity” when I write critically about it and it’s similar to when you’re translating poetry. When you translate a poem, especially if it has formal qualities, you have to make choices, and you have to lean in one direction or the other. Do you go after the rhyme? Do you go after the rhythm? Do you go after the meaning? You try to do all three, but you’ll never quite manage. And any time you make one choice, you lean away from another. I think of it as if you’re tied to the meaning, but the constraint interferes and exerts pressure against you. If the constraint and your language pairing refuse to allow you to stay close to the meaning, you pull harder and you pull harder and you pull harder against it, and it pulls against you. If you have multiple constraints in play at once, you’re getting pulled in three, four, five different directions; it can get very tricky. And, as Emma says, you try to find some sort of balance that allows you, much as when translating poetry, to represent in writing all these different things that are going on at once.
EO: Well, for me, the Oulipian idea of the constraint is a very general idea. In other words, if I look at classical poetry through the lens of this Oulipian concept, I see rhyme as constraint and meter as constraint. When I translate poetry that rhymes or that has meter, the issue with these constraints is that certain kinds of effects that you could get in one language from a structure are not going to be the same as the effects that you get in another language from more or less the same structure. Why? Well, some languages, like English for example, have many more monosyllabic words than Russian or German. That means if you do a very literal translation of the metrical constraint, the effect is going to be very different. Because in Russian or German, meter is all about variation. It’s all about hitting the stress point or not hitting the stress point. But in English, you hit the stresses much more often just because the words are shorter. So, the same constraint produces very different effects. It’s the same thing with rhyming words. The pool of available rhymes, or the pool of available homonyms, in French, for example, is tremendous. French is a homonym-rich language in the way that English is not. These linguistic differences are just the beginning–to say nothing of the cultural habits about reading different types of constraint, which also maybe need to be considered or maybe don’t. So, very often when I work with a classical text, I don’t keep the constraint literally.
The basic idea for me is that a constraint in poetry makes the words feel like they belong together, because it makes the materiality of the language more intense. It brings together all these words that have similar prosody or sound alike. So that’s what I do in English, but not necessarily in the same way as the original. If I can do it in that way without being awkward, then I will do it in that way without being awkward, but I would rather not be awkward unless I want to. So, very often, instead of a classical rhyme column, I’ll have a much more concentrated similarity of sounds towards the end like assonance and consonance: repeating sound clusters, but not formal rhymes.
CF: That touches on something I’ve been thinking about a lot, which is this idea that some projects necessitate you translating the constraint itself. For example, I was reading about the Perec novel La Disparition today and it was translated into Japanese, which is a language without individual letters, so this idea of eliminating the “E” is impossible. Instead, the translator got rid of an entire sound. I think that’s a question to end on: when does the elasticity become so brittle, in these constraint-based translations, that one has to translate the constraint itself? Let’s save that for another conversation.
Chris Clarke is a literary translator and scholar. He currently teaches in the Translation Studies Program at the University of Connecticut. His translations include books by Raymond Queneau, Éric Chevillard, and Julio Cortázar, among others. He was awarded the French-American Foundation Translation Prize for fiction in 2019 for his translation of Marcel Schwob’s Imaginary Lives, a prize for which he was also a finalist in 2017 for his translation of Nobel Prize winner Patrick Modiano’s In the Café of Lost Youth. His translation of Raymond Queneau’s The Skin of Dreams is due out from NYRB Classics in early 2024.
Eugene Ostashevsky was born in 1968 in Leningrad, USSR, grew up in New York, and now lives mainly in Berlin. His Feeling Sonnets, published in 2022 by NYRB Poets, examines the effects of speaking a non-native language on emotions, parenting, and identity. As a translator of Russian avant-garde literature, Ostashevsky is best known for his OBERIU: An Anthology of Russian Absurdism (Northwestern University Press, 2006) and Alexander Vvendensky’s An Invitation for Me to Think (with Matvei Yankelevich; NYRB Poets, 2013), which won the National Translation Award.
Emma Ramadan is an educator and literary translator from French. She is the recipient of the PEN Translation Prize, the Albertine Prize, two NEA Fellowships, and a Fulbright. Her translations include Abdellah Taïa’s A Country for Dying, Kamel Daoud’s Zabor, or the Psalms, Barbara Molinard’s Panics, and a co-translation with Olivia Baes of Marguerite Duras’s The Easy Life.
C. Francis Fisher is a poet and translator based in Brooklyn. Her writings have appeared or are forthcoming in the Raleigh Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, and the Los Angeles Review of Books among others. Her poem, “Self-Portrait at 25,” was selected as the winner for the 2021 Academy of American Poets Prize for Columbia University. She teaches undergraduate composition at Columbia University and is the curator and moderator of “Colloquy: Translators in Conversation.” Her translation of In the Glittering Maw: Selected Poems of Joyce Mansour is forthcoming from World Poetry Books in 2024.
Originally published on Hopscotch Translation
Tuesday, December 12, 2023
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