Translator Elizabeth Tanfield Cary

Some time back, there was an article on the BBC website about Elizabeth Tanfield Cary, a sixteenth century girl who was a writer and translator.

The article notes, “She grew up in the village [Burford Church, Oxfordshire] and wrote the piece - a translation from French of the text of the early world atlas of Ortelius - when she was aged 12 or 13.”

Dr Lesley Peterson is quoted as saying that her translatorial decisions are revealing: “For instance, she was just a little girl, but she was an only child and she was her father’s heir…She met Queen Elizabeth I when she was just a little girl, because her parents hosted the queen at her house. So she has these very strong female role models, and in her translations, every time the original text says something complimentary about a woman, little Elizabeth sneaks in an extra adjective.”

What a fascinating piece of translation history.

Medieval Hebrew Poetry Translated into English

I originally published this review in the Wales Arts Review.

Into the Light: The Medieval Hebrew Poetry of Meir of Norwich

introduction by Keiron Pim, translated by Ellman Crasnow and Bente Elsworth

“Exalted Lord, cherub-borne on high,/in your created heavens/you inspire awe.//My Lord is mighty to uphold./It befits us to serve him/for he is a holy God.” (p. 50)

So wrote Meir ben Eliahu in the late thirteenth century in his long poem “Who Is Like You?” And indeed Meir “serve[s]” this “holy God” through his poetry. He closes the poem by asking “Who is like you among the gods?” (p. 84)

One might ask who is like Meir among the poets.

Not much is known about Meir. He was a Jew in Norwich (or Norgitz, as the Jews called the city) during the Middle Ages, and lived through the expulsion of the Jews from  his town and from England at the behest of King Edward I in 1290. As Keiron Pim, a writer who put in motion the translation and publication of Meir’s long unknown poetry, puts it in his introduction to this bilingual edition of poems, in his work, “Meir captures the Norwich Jews’ psychological tumult: the oscillation between hope and despair, devotion and doubt, pride and humiliation; the infighting, the confusion, the terror. He catalogues his people’s predicament in ‘the land of the heavy-hearted and exhausted’, where they are scorned and labour under an ever-heavier yoke.” (p. 13)

You can forgive Meir for sounding angry and defiant in turns in his poems (as in “His foe will meet him in his filth/with the rod of his oppressor,/only evil lurking, in warp or woof.” (p. 38)). But despite his justified pain, he still “steadfastly/ declare[s] the kindness of the Lord./We, his beloved, trust in Yahweh/and in his holy servant, Moses.” (p. 84)

This work is important both because of the quality of the writing itself and also for what it can tell us about a period in time that is quite distant from today and about which not much is known. As Pim writes, “Meir’s is the only confirmed Anglo-Jewish poetic voice known from the far side of that lengthy hiatus [i.e. from 1290 until 1656, when Jews were readmitted to England] to describe the social conditions of the time. It is of considerable historical and cultural value.” (p. 10)

This publication includes 16 short poems and four long ones. The original Hebrew – complete with vowels – is printed alongside the English translations by Ellman Crasnow and Bente Elsworth (the former has worked on Walt Whitman and the latter has written textbooks on Danish and also translated poet Michael Strunge from Danish to English). The book might appear scholarly, given the historical context, the detailed introduction by Pim, the note from the translators, and the other paratexts, such as explanations of some of the poems and the poetic features, but in fact it is a work that is for any audience.

In many ways, the poetry feels fairly modern. For example, Meir writes, “Afire with longing for the rains of Love,/here I am, thirsty in my inner heart;/with dew drops of desire the folk are fed,/I too, perhaps, will sip a lover’s cup.//My true Love threatens; faith shrivels in drought,/withers, like reeds, from want of water./O sprinkle upon it healing balm/that impure man may be made clean.” (p. 90) Although Meir often refers to his god an dhis faith in his work, the romantic overtones might remind a reader of Rumi, and surely these sentiments are ones that many can relate to.

The final lines of Meir’s poetry are “Take pleasure in my precious meditations,/these songs of exultation and of awe.” (p. 118) A reader doubtlessly does take pleasure from Meir’s writing. 

Translation and British History

Since I’ve lived in the UK for over six years now, I thought I ought to learn about British history. And when I was in the library, I just happened to see “British History for Dummies” on the shelf, so I grabbed it.

Interestingly – and not surprisingly – translation comes up as an issue through British history. For example, Alfred the Great, who lived in the ninth century, not only Beat the Vikings, but he also created legal codes, commissioned the writing of the Anglo-Saxon chronicle, and got many important Latin works translated into Anglo-Saxon.

Then, King Henry VIII, who drastically re-shaped religion in England, also influenced translation, in particular of the bible. He had William Tyndale put to death for translating the New Testament into English, but then he distributed Miles Coverdale’s full translation to all parishes just a few years later.

But, of course, it was really King James I who got the bible translated into its best-known English format, which is generally referred to as the King James bible.

Did you know British history was so intertwined with translation?

Archaeology and Language by Colin Renfrew

Archaeology and Language by Colin Renfrew is a dated but still relevant book that serves as a good introduction to the idea of using archaeology as a way of tracing the history of language. As he states at the beginning of the book, we need not look at just economic developments to explore the history of humanity because national, ethnic and linguistic identities are important too. Thus, people study ruins, documents, pottery, language, and more as a way of understanding the development of languages.

Renfrew admits how “extraordinary” it is that languages in Europe and Asia (India and Iran, for example) are related, and then asks “But what is the historical reality underlying this relationship? Where did these languages come from? Did they derive from a single group of people who migrated? Or is there an entirely different explanation? This is the Indo-European problem, and the enigma which has still not found a satisfactory answer.” (11) Many scholars have attempted to understand this by a) trying to construct a Proto-Indo-European (PIE) language that is the parent of all the other languages and b) by trying to figure out where the so-called Urheimat, or homeland, of PIE was.

Renfrew feels we must question “the extent to which it is legitimate to construct a Proto-Indo-European language, drawing upon the cognate forms of the words in the various Indo-European languages that are known.” (18) As an example of how far wrong we can go with this method, he uses the example of Latin. He quotes Ernst Pulgram, who tried to reconstruct Latin based on the Romance languages and to thereby make sense out of “Latin” culture, without actually looking at Latin that we know, and he found that what we would construct is actually different in many ways from actual Latin and what we know of ancient Roman culture (85). Hence it is argued that we cannot reconstruct languages in this way.

As for the Urheimat, Renfrew runs through the various theories, such as that the people who spoke PIE came from north-central Europe, or that they came from eastern Europe and the steppes, and some scholars have even suggested northern Europe, such as Lithuania. But he argues that this idea of a homeland is problematic and that many who have suggested it have fallen into “dangerous traps. They have placed too much faith in the idea of some reconstructed Proto-Indo-European vocabulary, from which some kind of word-picture of the original homeland might be put together. They have too readily assumed that a given pottery form, or an assemblage of items of material equipment can be equated directly with a group of people and hence supposedly with a particular language or language group. And they have not adequately explained why all these languages, or the speakers of all these languages, should be wandering around Europe and western Asia so tirelessly, in a series of migrations, thus setting up the pattern of different languages which we see today.” (75)

Renfrew discusses the idea that the similarities in the Indo-European languages came from contact, not common ancestors with one homeland, and he offers the various models that might work for this idea (replacement models, colonization, or continuous development).
In sum, this book is an interesting exploration of the history of the Indo-European languages, with some sections that read almost like mystery novels, because of the excitement (for example, when he discusses the discovery of Hittite or explores the history of the Celts). It’s not the most recent book on the subject, but it’s an important one.

Translation on QI

On Stephen Fry’s wonderful QI, on the episode about “Inequality”, he recently mentioned that Louis Pasteur so hated the Germans after the Franco-Prussian war, that he would never allow his work to be translated to German. That then influenced the beer industry. See how translation crops up in the unlikeliest of places?

Happy International Translation Day!

Today is International Translation Day, which is celebrated annually on the feast day of the patron saint of translators, St. Jerome.

So today is a great day to appreciate the art of translation and the translators who make it possible.

Creating a Dictionary during the Holocaust

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum sent me a calendar for 2011. It has quotes from diaries written during the Holocaust and is very moving. The quote for December 2011 caught my eye because it is from a Dutch Jew, Selma Wijnberg, who fell in love with a Polish Jew, Chaim Engel, and together they created a dictionary so that they could communicate with one another. In other words, during World War Two, as they were in a concentration camp, they were still living and loving and thinking about language.

The quote from her diary, written on 21 June in 1944, says: “This little book is for me…about the time that my man and I are hidden in a hayloft somewhere in Poland. I have the hope that I will live free again.”

The information about Ms. Wijnberg (happily, later Mrs. Engel) says: “Selma Engel, a Jewish woman born in the Netherlands, met her future husband, Chaim, a Polish Jew, when they were imprisoned in the Sobibór killing center. Young and in love, they made a daring escape with other prisoners during the camp uprising and found refuge with a farmer until liberation. In her diary Selma writes about Sobibór and her deepening relationship with Chaim, with whom she created a translation dictionary so the two could communicate with each other.”

Bowdlerizing

Most of us aren’t lucky (or unlucky) enough to get a concept named after us. Thomas Bowdler, however, gave his name to the idea of cutting out any pieces of a work of literature that are not appropriate for women and children. Most famously, Bowdler bowdlerized Shakespeare.

My reason for posting about him is twofold: he lived in the same city where I currently live and I am very interested in the ways in which authors, editors, or translators change texts for children (or, as in Bowdler’s case, for women!). Some people might say that Bowdler was a product of his time; that may be true in part, but the fact is that bowdlerizing takes place today too, hence the continued popularity of the eponym.

We translators and editors have to be aware of the target audience, obviously, but we also need to be careful that we don’t abuse our power and underestimate what readers can handle and should have access to.

A Lovely Tree

Not long ago, I read Ett Träd Med Vida Grenar: De Indoeuropeiska Språkens Historia by Ola Wikander. In case you don’t know Swedish, the title is A Tree with Wide Branches: A History of the Indoeuropean Languages. And in fact, the only problem with this book is that as of now, it’s only in Swedish. I hope it will be available to readers in other countries soon, as it is quite interesting.

Mr. Wikander is a young Ph.D. student and translator in Sweden who is already the author of several books on “dead” languages, as well as co-author, with his father, of a novel. In this book, he discusses the science of reconstructing what is called proto-Indoeuropean (PIE), or the language from which stem all the Indoeuropean languages, including Swedish, English, Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, Romanian, and many more. The purpose of this field, as he thoroughly explains in his book, is not just to reconstruct this language for the fun of it (although he includes some examples of writing people have attempted to do in PIE in modern times), but is in part to understand the cultures and languages that have helped shape Europe, Asia, and other parts of the world.

Mr. Wikander is a talented writer who manages at times to make this science seem like a mystery, in that it is exciting to learn about how the reconstruction work is done and how Indoeuropeanists can use the reconstructed vocabulary, and other evidence, such as archaeology, come to conclusions about where those who spoke PIE lived (probably the south Russian steppes) and what their culture was like.

If you can read Swedish, I recommend this book and also Mr. Wikander’s blog. If not, you’ll have to wait for a translation!

A Smooth Lawn, Not a Volcano

Yesterday’s Writer’s Almanac featured the following information on a productive, if not “faithful”, translator, who apparently didn’t have a problem with changing source texts to fit the target culture:

“It’s the birthday of Constance Garnett, born in Brighton, England (1861). She gave us many of the first English translations of famous 19th-century Russian novels. Garnett could translate 5,000 words a day, scattering piles of pages at her feet as she wrote. She finished Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina in six months, and translated a total of 80 volumes, including Dostoyevsky’s complete works, which alone add up to about two and a half million words. But Garnett had a habit of skipping phrases that she didn’t understand, she often missed the humor of the original Russian, and she altered sexuality in the novels to reflect her Victorian ideals. Critic Kornei Chukovsky compared her writings to “a safe blandscript: not a volcano... a smooth lawn mowed in the English manner — which is to say a complete distortion of the original.” Constance Garnett’s translations held up as the standard for decades, but now most of them are replaced by more nuanced versions of the Russian works.”

Dictionary Day

Today is yet another language-related holiday, Dictionary Day. I’m one of those people who finds that when there is a need to look up one word in the dictionary, I notice other interesting words on the same page, and then I start turning pages and reading more definitions, and before I know it, a lot of time has passed during my dictionary-browsing. So I certainly am a grateful and enthusiastic dictionary-user and I appreciate all the hard work that has gone into creating them. On Oxford University Press’s blog, they write the following:

Commemorating the anniversary of Noah Webster’s birth in 1758, [October 16 is] largely an opportunity for US school teachers to organize classroom activities encouraging students to build their dictionary skills and to exult in the joy of words. Those of us who are out of school can celebrate too, of course.

Then the post continues by discussing other lexicographers, and it is worth a read.

So pick up a dictionary today and learn a new word in honor of this holiday and all the lexicographers who made English dictionaries!

St. Hieronymus Day

And for the third holiday this week, today is St. Hieronymus Day, in honor of Jerome (or Hieronymus), considered the patron saint of translators. Jerome translated the Bible to Latin from Greek and Hebrew, in a version that is known as the Vulgate. He studied Hebrew in order to translate the Old Testament from it, although most people at that time used the Greek Septuagint. Jerome also wrote commentaries on the Bible, sometimes explaining his translatorial choices.

So today is the day to celebrate and appreciate translators! Happy St. Hieronymus Day!

The First Printed English Translation

According to the Writer’s Almanac, yesterday was the birthday of the man who first printed a book in English, William Caxton. We translators can be proud of the fact that the book Mr. Caxton printed was a translation! This means that English translations have been printed since 1475.

Here is the quote from yesterday’s edition of the Writer’s Almanac:

Today is believed to be the birthday of the first man ever to print a book in English, William Caxton, born in Kent, England (1422). He was a wealthy trader and merchant, and also a part-time linguist and translator. He was living in Cologne, Germany, when he translated a book about the history of Troy. The printing press had been invented about twenty-five years earlier, but it had only recently started to spread beyond Germany. Caxton realized that the new technology of printing would make the job of distributing his books a lot easier. So instead of copying the book by hand, he printed the book he had translated about Troy in 1475. He eventually went back to England, where he established the first English printing press. He printed all the available English literature, including Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (c. 1478). For a long time, people in England called printed books "Caxtons."