Lost in transit

T.V. Guide

Tomorrow I will be watching the funeral of Princess Juliana.

You can watch it as well, here.

A memorial site in English here.

She was a good Queen, in that very Dutch way of being a Queen.

Daffodils

Anyone who's ever moved countries or continents will know how strange it is to suddenly experience different climates and weather systems. But for those who move hemispheres, it's the seasons being out of whack that make you realise you're a long way from home. Nothing seems to make sense.

If you're from Down Under, like me, the sun doesn't shine in July, leaves don't turn colour in October and daffodils definitely don't bloom in March.

I've lived in the UK for five-and-a-half years and yet whenever I see daffodils in bloom, their flowery yellow heads popping up out of the still cold earth as they are doing now, my mind immediately thinks it's September. And then I start to shake with fear.

You see I have a weird association with daffodils. It's all because of the rural area I come from and where, after nine years of living/studying in two cities (Melbourne and Brisbane), I returned to work on the local rag.

Every August and September became a blur of reportage on the town's annual show-stopping, heart-jumping, knee-trembling, extravaganza that drew flower-frenzied people from far and wide. But for the journalists covering the Leongatha Daffodil Festival it was the biggest pain in the neck you could imagine.

Try taking "imaginative" photographs of gardeners with their prize-winning blooms in hand while asking them "interesting" questions about their "success". There's only so many ways you can ask people how they feel about winning the best bloom in section C2.

Or, better still, try getting a bunch of kids, including the Daffodil Princess and the Daffodil Prince (yes, really), to stop running amok for just 30 seconds so you can take their photograph for your front page "scoop".

I mean, is it any wonder that when I see daffodils in bloom I start having heart palpitations? But then I remember, that's all in the past. The daffodil festival is another lifetime, another hemisphere away. And what's more, it's not even September. . .

Border busting

I call the undertaking utopian in the sense intended by Ortega y Gasset when he deemed translations utopian, but then went on to say that all human efforts to communicate - even in the same language – are equally utopian, equally luminous with value, and equally worth the doing.

– Edith Grossman, Translator’s introduction to Don Quixote

There is a self-fulfilling fallacy in the Anglo publishing world that their readers (all X million of them) are not interested in works in translation.

This fallacy serves as the justification for leading publishers to offer a dwindling selection of contemporary foreign works (less than 5% of fiction published in English are from other tongues). And even then they often go out of their way to disguise that the book is a translation by relegating the mention “translated by” to the title page or even tucked into the colophon.

The only exception to the rule is when the translation is performed by a luminary such as William Weaver or Edith Grossman, and will therefore – in theory – help boost sales.

Translated works get very little hype, author’s tours are not organized (because that would involve hiring an interpreter and further challenge the dopey reading public), so the works themselves go largely unread, and the publishers’ fallacy is confirmed.

Gone are the days when all self-respecting bookworms had read the latest novel out of France, Russia or Germany, and beatniks stayed up late paring down Haiku.

So…

Hurray! Hurray! for Words without borders an online magazine focused on international literature.

Publishing since last summer, each month it offers English translations of a selection of contemporary prose and poetry from a specific region or country: this month Argentina, last month the Balkans and next month Poland.

And for those who can see the forest for the trees, the works are also broken down into landscapes (cities, plains, coasts…).

I haven’t managed to make my way through all of the works, but pleased with what I’ve read so far. Good quality translations for the most part, and the very welcome song of voices we rarely (if ever) hear… as we content ourselves with stereotypes of other cultures and the English language’s hegemony, fuelling our ignorance and isolating ourselves day by day from our fellows. Globalization indeed.

One suggestion only: a print feature for those of us who can’t read more than a few paragraphs on screen without going googly-eyed, or prefer our prose in the tub.

Noteworthy too in promoting the voices from abroad is Babel Guides which offers reviews and forums and all manner of goodies on published translations from around the planet.

Huzzah!