MCLC: Sandalwood Death review (10,11)

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: E Goodman <eleanor.goodman at fulbrightmail.org>
Subject: Sandalwood Death review (10)
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If I might add my voice to the fray, Professor Denton's point about
crediting the translator(s) is absolutely key. It has long struck me as
odd that journals whose raison d'être is to publish translated work -
including wonderful ones such as WLT, CLT, and Pathlight - do not print
their translators' names on the cover or in some other prominent position.
This is a disservice not only to translators but to readers, who are
encouraged to float in the hazy misapprehension that literary works in
other languages come to them by some divine miracle, or, even worse, that
everything ever written was written in English. We might all take a lesson
from Asymptote, which, at least on its title page, lists the translator
and original language along with the title of the piece and the author's
name. Why isn't that standard practice?

Eleanor Goodman

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From: jonathan stalling <stalling at ou.edu>>
Subject: Sandalwood Death review (11)

Dear all,

I apologize if my posts have at any time focused too pointedly on the
issue of Xiao’s book review, though I certainly hope my post did not
constitute a “struggle session” as I had only meant to signal an occasion
to reflect on the general need to do more (on most every level) to promote
a greater awareness of the theoretical (hermeneuitic/semiotic), social
(cultural capital), and financial (living wages) elements of translation
etc (and I think that this is the underlying messages of others [Lucas,
Canaan, etc] as well). Although I did explore these issues through the
opportunities made available in the LARB review, please let me state that
I am unequivocally grateful for LARB’s reviewing Sandalwood Death, and I
am also grateful for Professor Xiao’s work more generally. I feel it is
essential to stress that CLT’s mission is to advocate for not only Chinese
authors and translators, but literary critics as well (that is to say, all
critics who spend their critical lives inside the study of contemporary
Chinese literature), and so I do want to be clear that my “review-review
comments”  should have been more rigorously developed within this broader
context of Chinese literary advocacy that I believe wholeheartedly in.

I am, however, quite glad to see the MCLC list discussing the role of
translation in what we do (in writing and teaching). Perhaps we could
share tips about how we explore translation issues in our classrooms and
other arenas. But as an editor, I also wanted to acknowledge Kirk’s
insightful and helpful comment about placing translator credit lines at
the beginning of an article, alongside the authors’. CLT decided three
months ago to move translator credit lines to the heading, a change that
will be adopted in our next issue. But I cannot take credit for this
shift. CLT Assistant Editor Julie Shilling sent me this email in Nov.

----------
From: Shilling, Julie A.
Sent: Wednesday, November 06, 2013 4:20 PM
To: Stalling, Jonathan C.
Subject: Re: letter to potential translators draft.

[. . .]

I don't know if you want to mention anything about the fact that we always
give translators a credit line (and a bio, in fact). It's been a hot topic
on most things I've seen lately. In fact, it's started to make me wonder
why we give the translator by-line at the end of a piece. We do that only
because that's what WLT was doing. If we're really trying to make efforts
to elevate the position of translators, why don't we start putting
translator by-lines in our headings (for the magazine)?
----------

So we have established this change for future issues of CLT, and
recommended the change to WLT (our parent journal, World Literature Today)
as well.  But Kirk’s comment was the kind of discourse I had hoped for
when I brought up this subject. What kinds of changes (some smaller than
others) could we make to bring about greater recognition of translation,
more rigorous metacritical insights, and ultimately a greater support
system for the translation of literary texts across the board?

One other tactic CLT is employing toward the goals mentioned above is to
raise our pay rates for translators. This is something I have been
doggedly trying to raise new funding for, and am now able to move forward
with it. I will send an announcement before long posting CLT’s new rates
of pay for translators and contributors. Finally, we are building an
archive of translator papers and documenting our editorial process which I
hope will support greater visibility of translation by helping provide
scholars with more than the finished commercial products to research.

Again, I am very grateful to Dr. Xiao and hope she will forgive my using
this moment in this way. I feel it was, in fact, wrong to wait for such an
occasion to bring up these issues, and I wish I had simply done so
beforehand without hitching them to the LARB review, as I suspect it has
cost some lost hours that cannot be easily recovered. So I hope we can
keep talking about this issue, but not necessarily in the context of a
single review.

Sincerely,
Jonathan Stalling