4/29 Readings

The Hilarious Art of Book Design by Chip Kidd

I watched this video for Professor Elliott's Japanese Translation Workshop last semester and enjoyed it very much. I think what struck me at the time which I wasn't able to fully articulate was that my respect for his craft was not so much because of how much it enhanced the books as physical objects, but that his labours were in spite of the fact that likely no one would ever know the pains he took to design the book covers based on elements or the atmosphere of the novels. In that sense it feels a lot like literary translation: a casual reader who has not delved into a preface (if the translator is permitted to write one at all) will probably never know all the little decisions and challenges the translator had to overcome in their work. After all, to the one who does not or would not read the text in the original side-by-side with the translation, most translations exist as entirely independent texts. There's something both frustrating and poetic about that somehow. Watching the video, I noticed how much more interesting the covers seemed to me after I'd heard Chip Kidd explain the process by which it came to be—maybe my translations would seem more interesting to people too if they let me explain my process!

The Clothing of Books by Jhumpa Lahiri

I was surprised to hear how much she hated one of the covers of her books; did she not have any say in the design, or did she feel like she hadn't been in the position to protest? It rings true to me that a cover becomes a part of the book—when I picture books that I've read (particularly in physical form) I can see their covers as well and those designs have become intertwined with my enduring impressions of them. But I do think much like names (of people), it ends up being your experience of getting to know the entity beneath the surface that shapes your impression of their external coverings than the other way around. My copy of "The Secret Garden" by Frances Hodgson Burnett was a uniform green with no illustrations, the paper was thin and the text was small, but I loved it anyway and maybe it was because I went in with no influence on my imaginings of the characters, or the grand manor they lived in or the magnificent garden, that I enjoyed it as much as I did. 

The Paradox of the "Foreign-soundingness" by David Bellos

This very much echoes the point or at least the principles that Emma Ramadan put forth in her lecture and I extremely agree. I feel like in the past year I've been tossed around in the sea that is foreignisation-domestication discourse in translation and I have finally landed here where David Bellos is. I think leaving some of the original in translation, with enough guidance for the unacquainted reader, can give it a flavour of the original language which makes a translation worth reading for the value of cultural exploration (if all you want is a detective novel and the French have the best detective novels not on account of them being French, then I suppose it doesn't matter if in translation it reads like an English detective novel if all you want is a good mystery?) Although, of course, it then comes down to individual judgment calls translators have to make when it comes to deciding what is left in the original language and I'm sure there will be no end to that debate either.