Reflections on working with Arc Publications

Publishing poetry in translation is something of a niche business, but it is a niche that Arc Publications has successfully made its own. I was fortunate enough to be offered an internship with Arc for the duration of my MA, and it has provided me with a fascinating insight into the process of editing and publishing translations of poetry.

Under the supervision of UEA’s very own Jean Boase-Beier, editor of the Arc Visible Poets series, I learned about how submissions are received, how decisions are made, and how some authors and translators are more amenable than others to suggestions for cuts and alterations…

 
The Visible Poets series prints the original text and the translation on facing pages; visibility belongs to both translator and original poet. This allows the reader to get a sense of what the translator has done – even if s/he has no knowledge of the source language, s/he can still see how it looks on the page.
 
Arc’s understanding of and sensitivity to translation means that just as much importance is placed on the quality of the translation as on the original poetry. I saw submissions turned down because the translation was not bold enough – there is no place here for the age-old image of the translator as self-effacing plodder.
 
My introduction to the editing process began at the beginning, with some examples of what a proposal looks like, and also a couple of examples of how not to do it…

Allow me to generously pass on a few useful tips: look carefully at the website to make sure you are sending your proposal to the right person; don’t send a ready-made book of your translations of your own poetry; and in this particular case, take the time to find out that Jean Boase-Beier is not to be addressed as ‘Sir’.

 
These key tenets established, we moved on to the more difficult decisions. It will come as a surprise to none of you that publishing poetry in translation is not terribly lucrative; Arc, like many small publishers, relies on outside funding in order to pursue many of its projects. As such, it cannot take on all the excellent submissions it receives (although having funding will not be enough to get your proposal accepted if the translation is not up to scratch!). The word that came up again and again was ‘outstanding’. We were looking for something that really leapt off the page. There is, of course, no formula for this; it might be a distinctive voice, dexterity with the intricacies of language, or a dazzling solution to rendering wordplay and ambiguity. It was very exciting to be consulted on these matters, and made me think hard about what it is that makes an outstanding translation, as opposed to a merely competent one.

Another tricky issue to negotiate once a proposal has been accepted is ensuring the book makes a coherent, appealing whole. Cuts are often necessary, either because there is simply too much material, or because the book would be unbalanced. Once again, both original poem and translation have to be taken into account. A suitable title also has to be chosen – one which reflects the content as well as sounding like something people will want to read. It should not, however, sound like an existing work they have gone to considerable effort to avoid: following consultation, a forthcoming Arc book has been renamed and will not be published under the title Twilight.

Although my internship with Jean took place at UEA, I did make one trip up to Arc HQ in Todmorden to see an independent publisher in its natural habitat. I also attended several editorial meetings in Norwich, where we discussed the status of all ongoing projects, from Tamil to Finnish, and I got rather overexcited at the mention of some very well-known figures who might write an introduction for one of Arc’s forthcoming titles. Working with Arc has been a truly rewarding and exciting experience, and I am grateful to Angela, Tony and Jean for the opportunity. I am now looking forward to seeing the final published versions of some of the books I saw in manuscript form. Look out for forthcoming translations from German, Russian and Old Norse, among others, in the Visible Poets and the Classics series.

Find out more about Arc at http://www.arcpublications.co.uk

Livvy Hanks translates from French to English, with a particular interest in poetry. She can be contacted at om.hanksATgmail.com.

NAPOTRAMO

MALT student Livvy Hanks is currently translating (at least part of) a poem every day, and blogging about it, in her own twist on 'National Poetry Writing Month'. Check it out!

Poetry translators – the heavyweights of the translation world?

Before beginning the MA in Literary Translation at UEA, I hardly ever had occasion to translate poetry; indeed, I didn’t really read poetry, having been scared stiff by what was probably inadequate teaching of John Keats and William Blake at secondary school. Finding myself on the MA, and required to produce essays, poems and translations thereof seemed to furnish good subject matter, being shorter and therefore easier to consider than a whole novel, for example. Thus it came about that I studied in depth German poems by Richard Dehmel, French poems by Baudelaire, and Dutch poems by Annie M.G. Schmidt and Ramsey Nasr. And lo and behold, I now find myself looking at 20^th century German poems by women writers for my dissertation.

Since poems are characterised by condensed language that often has more than one level of meaning, with particular attention paid to diction (sometimes involving rhyme), rhythm, and imagery, poetry translation is clearly no mean feat. But how should we, as translators, decide which aspects of a poem we are going to pay particular attention to?

One area we might decide to focus on is the style of a poem: elements such as repetition, iconicity, metaphor and ambiguity. These features and devices merit close analysis because they represent choices on the part of the original author. Or maybe we might decide that what matters most is the sound or rhythm, especially if the poet sets high store by performing her or his poetry. And what should we do if the poem we wish to translate has a strict metre and rhyme - do we try and retain this, at the risk of parodying the original, or do we render it in free verse?

Maybe we might want to take the context of a poem into consideration, or not at all. If the poem is part of an anthology, we may decide it should stand on its own and that we do not need to consider the circumstances under which it was written. Again, we might want to focus on the content of a poem, if we decide this is the most important element. This could certainly be considered to be the case with some of the Holocaust poetry I am currently translating.

If the poems in question are for children, we might want to pay attention to the read-aloud quality of the original poem, and to humour. We might also be more inclined than normal to domesticate, in order to make the translations more accessible to children. Or we might side with Venuti and decide that what counts is to draw attention to the “foreignness” of the original poem, so as not to “erase the cultural values of the source text”.

Robert Frost famously said, “Poetry is what gets lost in translation”. Nonetheless, many poets and translators persist at this “impossible” task, and I have unwittingly found myself climbing into the ring and joining them.

Rebekah Wilson is a freelance translator from French, German and Dutch. For more information, go to www.oxfordtranslations.net.