MCLC: Sandalwood Death review (12)

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: Jeff Wasserstrom <wasserstromjeff at gmail.com>
Subject: Sandalwood Death review (12)
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This thread has continued and gained an added lease on life via comments
from the first post in it going up at Paper Republic, so while I had my
say earlier, I am writing again.  I want to note some differences between
general interest and specialist publications, as I've been involved in
reviewing and editorial work with both sorts, and also flag something that
I think we'd all agree we wouldn't want to happen--have a consensus take
hold that only people fully able to talk about the quality of a
translation should be tapped by general interest publications to review
works of Chinese literature in translation.

I can see the logic and value of more care being taken with any
publication to make clear when a translation is being discussed and to
credit the translator by name.  Some comments here and at Paper Republic,
though, would seem to point toward reviews needing to do more than that,
namely also to assess the translator's contribution.  Perhaps that is a
good thing to expect in specialist publications--though I personally
wouldn't want to rule out ever being able to commission an essay for the
Journal of Asian Studies that, for example, brought together discussion of
novels by female authors in contemporary Vietnam, North Korea, and China
but was by someone who could only read one or two of the relevant Asian
language.  What's clearer is that making an ability to assess the
translator's work a pre-requisite for someone reviewing a work for a
general interest publication would have a definite downside.
The implication of a gold standard expectation of ability to not just
acknowledge but engage fully with the work of the translator as well as
original author would be that Megan Shank and I shouldn't have invited
Anjum Hasan to write about Wang Anyi for our Los Angeles Review of Books
serieshttps://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/necessary-language-everyday-reading
-wang-anyi .  I'd definitely stand by our decision to turn to her.  We
invited her to contribute after reading this fascinating essay she did for
The Caravan on reading Chinese literature through an Indian
lens:http://caravanmagazine.in/books/chinese-whispers .  (I realize that
we didn't push her as editors to acknowledge the translators of the
various works she references, but I'll get to that below.)

If that same standard were applied by newspapers and magazines, it would
also mean that someone like Pankaj Mishra, who has done some very high
profile reviewing that has usefully drawn attention to Chinese novels he
has read in translation would be discouraged from doing more of this.
(I'm not sure he always named and credits translators, but think he often
does, but I know he doesn't place Chinese and translated texts beside one
another in his discussion.)  And surely we want people to learn of Chinese
literature worth reading by coming across reviews by someone like him,
which are often read by people who like his writing and hence will end up
reading his take on a Yu Hua or a Zhu Wen, even if those names meant
nothing to them before they started the review.

To use a hypothetical, we wouldn't want Amitav Ghosh or Margaret Atwood,
if invited by, say, the London Review of Books, to write about trends in
Chinese fiction to be tempted to demur, even if they'd been reading and
liking some of these works because they couldn't evaluate the difference
between the original and the translation.  The result might be that essay
either not coming out in the publication at all or being by someone that
fewer of the non-China focused readers of it would read.

More generally, while there are many things that general interest
publications try to do (and they are all different), they tend to be
focused largely on what they owe their readers and figuring out ways to
get people to read them.  If they are fledgeling publications, like the
LARB, they want to draw in new readers via their content.  Even
established ones, though, are concerned with keeping readers and getting
them to keep turn the page or, increasingly, keep clicking through.

This focus on and sense of obligation to readers of the publication rather
than the creators of other publications can frustrate not only translators
but also authors and editors of collections.  In the case of author, it
does this by having books we care passionately about and spent a long time
writing not getting reviewed, as most of the books written don't get
reviews in general interest publications.  (The different way authors and
literary editors can see this became clear at an American Historical
Association panel I helped cook up on the perils and pleasures for
historians of trying to write for broad audiences.  Jennifer Schuessler,
who was then an editor at the New York Times Book Review section was brave
enough to be on the panel, even though I warned her that most people in
the audience would be historians who felt their books were excellent and
yet had not been reviewed by her newspaper.  She noted in discussion that,
while the historians there seemed to view the paper's decision to review
some books and not others as judgments of quality, there was also an
effort being made to create an interesting section that was pleasure to
read and seemed worth reading to subscribers.  This meant that a really
good new book might not get reviewed because one on a very similar subject
had recently been reviewed, and that a reviewer might be chosen not
because he or she was the most expert on the topic of the book but because
readers would find his or her take of particular interest.)

It can frustrate editors of collections of essays when reviewers talk
about individual chapters in a book, as though they magically appeared in
the volume, without any reference to what was done to make chapters fit
together.  This lack of attention to editing could be the choice of the
reviewer, or a reviewer might have talked about it, then had his or her
editor at the publication strike it out, due to feeling that for readers
of the reviewer that wouldn't be of interest.  Similarly, I'm sure
cinematographers feel that a film review that talks about the director but
not the practitioner of their craft is not taking everything important
into account, but some who simply goes to films and is reading the review
trying to decide whether to go or because they like the reviewer's style
may no care at all.  Discussion of the film's editing might make them stop
reading the review, feeling that they couldn't understand the importance
of the point, so there were better ways for them to spend their time.

I can see how, getting back to translators, it would frustrate translators
of the Wang Anyi works that Anjum Hasan discusses to go unnamed.  Still,
an argument could be made that to keep readers reading that piece, the
effect would be more distracting than enlightening, given the nature of
the essay, if translator were named.  I've learned a lot from these
discussions about things we should stay mindful of at the LARB (but it
won't stop us from sometimes going to reviewers who can't assess
translations and being concerned about trying to focus on thinking of our
responsibility to non-specialist readers).  I'll also make sure there's
discussion within the JAS about how to address and properly acknowledge
the crucial contributions translators make and the special skill that the
best of them bring to work that is often poorly compensated yet essential.

Jeff Wasserstrom