Parks' ﻿Parado﻿x

Parks' Paradox

3/17/2016

A few months ago (November 19, 2015), on the occasion of his review in the NYRB of the new translations of the collected works of Primo Levi, I took exception to Tim Parks’ failure to address the quality of the translations. I am happy to report that he has now done just that, quite comprehensively and insightfully, in three posts to the online version of the NYRB, the most recent of which is at http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2016/03/15/translation-paradox-quality-vs-celebrity/. I doubt that Parks chose to write theses critical essays in response to my comments, but I am grateful, as I imagine most translators are, for his having done so.

Parks also uses his posts on the Levi translations to offer some valuable observations on literary translation in general and the treatment reserved to translators by book reviewers and the literary marketplace. One of his comments, however, strikes me as oddly off the mark. Parks notes that some translators’ organizations argue that translators should be paid a royalty and share in the commercial success of the book “as if the translator had the same impact on the work as the author. This is nonsense.” Well, no, what’s nonsense is this clumsy mischaracterization of the argument for translators’ royalties.

True, no translator should, and no doubt ever would claim to have had the same impact on the work as the author. It is undeniable, however, that the translator is the author – “one that originates or gives existence to” – of the translation. It is the translator’s authorship that gives rise to the claim for royalties as, of course, is true for the author himself. The claim to royalties, by author or translator, is based not on the their contribution to the commercial success of the work, which only determines the amount of the royalty, but on their ownership of the property, irrespective of whether the property is the original work or the translation.

So translators have every right to negotiate for a royalty. Where the negotiation gets touchy, naturally, is when it comes times to decide if the translator’s royalty will be paid from the publisher’s receipts or deducted from the author’s royalty. One can understand why novelists might object to giving up part of their reward for the commercial success of their novels, but one would expect novelists who are also translators to know better.

7 Comments

Jane K.

3/17/2016 05:35:08 am

nicely and succinctly put, Greg!

Marco Margolius

3/17/2016 06:30:51 am

Bravi tutti!

Karen Parker Lears

3/17/2016 10:13:35 am

Careful distinctions, generously made. Thank you, Greg!

Frederika Randall link

3/18/2016 08:24:21 am

I agree about royalties. Perhaps what Parks meant, though, is royalties offered in lieu of a better fee, however. Royalties in addition to a decent fee are great, but in an era where publishers are looking to chop what they pay for every element that goes into a book, translators ought to be wary of promised rewards that imply a risk. Btw, I linked your comment on my own blog

Gregory Conti

3/18/2016 11:22:43 am

Thanks

Elvira Lato

3/30/2016 04:15:45 am

It seems to me that Tim Parks is a bit confused about the role of the critic in our society. That commercial success should not be, as it is, the criteria for picking up a translator, is self evident. And if it is true that “many readers, many critics, don’t notice” if a translation is good or bad, it is also true that some critics do notice and they should bear the responsibility of speaking up. That is precisely the critic’s role: to be free to be the spoilsport – who else otherwise?
Commercial success, most of the time, has nothing to do with quality – that is something we all should know by now. Since the world we live in gives less and less importance to the written word and literature in particular, those who do care - critics, publishers, readers - should summon up the courage to defend it. Costi quel che costi.

John Penuel

9/17/2016 04:58:37 am

I missed Parks's pieces when they first appeared and as a result have read them only in the past few days. I take the liberty of posting my reactions to them on your blog since the NYRB doesn't let us plebeians post our thoughts on theirs and since someone going by your name once sent me an email (clearly meant for someone else) proposing, I think, that we meet for a coffee at the Turin Book Fair, an event I have never had any intention of attending. I believe we also admire and have translated some of the same Italian writers (Rigoni Stern, Giuseppe Berto).

To get to some of my points, then, I share Parks's utter indifference to having my name mentioned by the reviewers of the work I've translated. Nor do I really care whether publishers put my name on the cover of the book. I simply don't understand why so many translators and their allies have made such a big fuss over those two issues in recent years. What's important to me is to be paid fairly (which almost never happens). And speaking of pay, I didn't even find Parks's comments about royalties objectionable. Why indeed should someone who does a bad job translating a book that sells well be paid more than someone who does a good job translating a book that sells poorly?

One of the many trenchant observations Parks makes in his pieces on the Levi translations is the following:

"Credit or self-esteem now attaches itself to reading translations; it is something that intelligent, broad-minded people do. Above all, it is understood that the books will be literary and challenging, perhaps with something of their exotic origins still clinging to them."

I would go perhaps even further and say that this is the understanding not just of readers of translations but also of most American publishers of translations. It's the reason they bring out translations of the likes of Clarice Lispector (Brazil) or Juan José Saer (Argentina), whose books are definitely an acquired taste, while neglecting writers that thousands of readers would find far more engaging: Beppe Fenoglio, for instance, or Mario Rigoni Stern and Giuseppe Berto, to mention only a few from Italy. There is no sound reason, aesthetic or commercial, for publishing an English translation of the complete stories of, say, Clarice Lispector before publishing translations of those of Julio Ramón Ribeyro (Peru), Siegfried Lenz (Germany), or Roger Grenier (France), writers whose stories are a miraculous combination of simplicity, depth, and humor.

There's a lot--starting with their decisions about which books merit publication and heavy promotion--that American publishers of translations do badly wrong, and Parks, as far as I can tell, is the only reasonably prominent person of letters even to begin to address it. I don't mind putting my name to these comments because (a) nobody cares what I think and (b) I've started working for a large international organization in Geneva and have basically given up the utterly pointless task of trying to interest American publishers in translations of books whose broad potential appeal they are too dense to see.

God it felt good to get all that off my chest, though a stranger's blog probably wasn't the right place, now was it?

Parks' Paradox