Coming back to Hilda Hilst, Beckett seems to be another key influence—what did she have to say about his work?
Hilst was primarily a poet, though most of what’s been translated, for market reasons, is her prose. This is where Beckett comes in: like Hilst, he was a poet, a dramatist, and a novelist. She respected him tremendously for that reason. I can’t comment very intelligently on her thoughts about his work. But Hilst often did compare herself to Joyce and Beckett in terms of reputation. She foresaw herself achieving that mythical literary status, albeit after her death.
Saramago is supposed to have said that ‘Writers create a national literature; translators create a universal literature.’ Paul Auster, meanwhile, thinks that ‘Translators are the shadow heroes of literature.’ Do either of those lines come close to your view of translation?
It was certainly with a sense of responsibility that I embarked on the translation project. The whole endeavor began when I proposed to translate Hilst as part of the Susan Sontag Foundation Prize for Literary Translation, which I shared a couple years ago with another of Hilst’s translators, Julia Powers. Hilst was untranslated at the time, except for a few poems and a segment of ‘A obscena senhora D’ translated by Dawn Jordan online. I used the fellowship to do a residency at the Instituto Hilda Hilst, at the Casa do Sol, Hilst’s residence outside Campinas, São Paulo. It was an unforgettable experience, for a lot of reasons. I had access to Hilst’s personal library and spent evenings poring over her marginalia. I also had the good fortune to meet some of Hilda’s close friends, who all impressed on me this immense sense of gravity about the translation— it was so important to them that it be done right. She was their friend, of course, but so many of her friends first knew Hilda through her writing. It had spoken to them as artists, and many of the poets and artists I met seemed to have an artistic stake in her reputation. A referendum on her was a referendum on their own art, if you know what I mean. She was an idol to them for the fearlessly raw way she lived and wrote, and gave them courage to go on. They were thrilled about Hilst making it into English, but also a bit worried, I sensed, about how she would fare abroad. By then she’d already been translated to French and Italian, but there was an expectation, I think, that translation to English was going to be the watershed moment for her.
I don’t personally feel entitled to take any credit for Hilst’s reputation. She wrote the book, not me. Nor do I feel particularly important to the dissemination of her work: there were already three translations of her work under contract, which I learned shortly after receiving the prize. The ball was already rolling, so to speak. Nathanaël really was the pioneer, with her translation of ‘The Obscene Madame D’. It’s regarded as Hilst’s prose masterpiece by some critics. I was somewhat relieved, in fact, that the responsibility for that book fell to a more experienced translator. The success of that book in 2012, and the further inroads made by John Keene’s fantastic translation of ‘Letters from a Seducer’ earlier this year, were a real boon to my translation of ‘With My Dog-Eyes’. Now we’re awaiting another full-length translation, if I’m not mistaken, a collection of Hilst’s short fictions.
My views on translation are not as grandiose as the writers you mention. I think translation is important, but so is reading literature in its original language. What compels me is more like what Susan Sontag called the translator’s ‘evangelical incentive’ to bring attention to a book and a writer that has something important to say. A good translator is self-effacing in this regard. Interestingly, this goes completely against the notions on translation expounded by one of Brazilian literature’s most famous translators, the late Haroldo de Campos. He considered translation an art of ‘transcreation’ in which the translator becomes the co-author, entitled to his or her own artistic prerogatives. I find that all a bit aggrandizing.
How does translating feed into your own writing? Have you found yourself being influenced by Hilst at all? Do you think that some writing styles more contagious than others? (For months after finishing ‘Infinite Jest’, I found it almost impossible to keep my work footnote-free.)
The way in which translation influences my writing is something I’ve considered before. I definitely think it does. Although the effect is generally short-lived. Unless he or she is a hack, a writer’s voice is singular. Its strongest inflections don’t always come from the writer’s most beloved “influences.” Translating a work requires so much attention as to how it negotiates sound and meaning. Hilst was primarily a poet, so this was a particularly fraught negotiation in ‘With My Dog-Eyes’. And it carried over to my own work, at least for a while. So I think there’s more than a little Hilst in parts of a project I’m developing that first got underway while I was translating her.
As I said earlier, the effect isn’t long-lasting. I’m already drawing on other influences and returning to my steady sources of inspiration. I have no intention to write poetry at the moment, but my shorter prose works—still mostly unpublished, though I’ve gotten around to disseminating a few of them—are certainly an effect of the obsessive attention to language required by translation. You might call them prose poems. I don’t really know what to label them, though, and it doesn’t matter to me either. They’re certainly not short stories in the conventional sense. The formal structure of the traditional short story does not attract me very much, since I’m so uninterested in plot. The project I’m developing is a series of linked shorts, or short-shorts as they’re sometimes called, that take place in a proximate future. Hilst’s ‘Ficções’, which I believe are now being translated, were one of my inspirations. Her short fictions are sort of like lost biblical parables or fragments of classical myth. Very unusual. I take a totally different tack, as I have my own interests and own things to say. But Hilst’s indifference to codified prose forms is a very liberating thing for a writer to behold.
I’m interested by projects like Asymptote’s crowdsourced Marcel Schwob translations — a kind of wikitranslate which makes the text ‘an open domain’ and asks for ‘all styles, approaches, media and interpretations.’ Is there going to be a movement towards collaborative translations? Can crowdsourced translations and work by professional translators ‘coexist peacefully’, as Bush once said of ‘the human being and fish’.
Is the internet good news for writers like Hilda Hilst? Is it easier than ever before to track down writers from countries and cultures we don’t necessarily have close connections with?
Crowdsourced translation sounds like a terrible idea to me! Having met plenty of professional translators, I regretfully admit that I don’t find them very agreeable collaborators. Translators are often writers themselves—or failed ones, or academics, or both—so there’s a lot of ego and insecurity and neurosis fueling their work. In any case, a translator’s engagement with literature is underappreciated, and this frustration sometimes gets vented by tearing apart other translators. I’ve been in working groups where translators argued endlessly over trivial differences, or staunchly opposed what was ultimately a legitimate stylistic choice. I also agree with Campos enough to believe that translation is an art form. Each translation must have internal consistency of authorial voice, which a group translation would inevitably fragment into some kind of tonal Esperanto. In general I think crowdsourcing is symptomatic of those broader trends toward flattening objectivity that Marcuse warned of in the 60s. I haven’t read any crowd-sourced translations, but the idea seems rather sterile, and in this day and age, conventional rather than innovative. The work of art is one of the few nonviolent ways an individual can oppose a hegemonic ideology, which today would be the flattened, homogenized, and aggregated culture of globalized consumerism. So it seems a shame to subject a work of literature to translation-by-consensus.
I’m not one of those who uncritically believe the internet is this liberating and democratic apparatus. Just look at what happened to journalism. I do think that it has invigorated parts of the literary community that would otherwise exist in isolation—if you grew up in rural middle-America, as I did, you’re not cut off by default from literary culture. The internet also rescued the book review as a genre that was already disappearing from mainstream journalism, which is probably the most important thing it’s done for Hilst in particular.
All that being said, I still believe the power of literature like Hilst’s derives from its lonely and hermetic origins. A truly individual voice is forged in solitude. To be original is to be unique, which requires taking risks that are sometimes alienating. Maybe this sounds like a platitude, but I feel this sort of individualism is endangered by the urge to share and be “liked” or re-posted or whatever. Literature, for me—and for Hilda Hilst, too, I think—is a way of not surrendering to that deadening groupthink.
