Harvard University Press Blog

"Translation - It's a Living"

Last month Jane Marie Todd was awarded the annual Translation Prize for Nonfiction by the French-American and Florence Gould Foundations for her translation of Dominique Charpin’s Reading and Writing in Babylon. For HUP she has also translated Aviad Kleinberg’s Flesh Made Word, Maurice Olender’s Race and Erudition, Anne-Marie Eddé’s forthcoming Saladin, and many others. What follows below is the speech she delivered upon receiving the award.

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I would like to thank the French-American Foundation and the Florence Gould Foundation for this award, and for recognizing a group of people who do not ordinarily get a great deal of recognition. Translation is not an easy way to make a living; nor is it an easy way to make a name for yourself, since you are always writing in someone else’s name.

I have been a full-time, freelance translator for about twenty years. For the most part, I translate scholarly works for university presses and art catalogs and other publications for museums. I do not have a position at the university. That means, on one hand, no titles, no promotions, no regular paychecks, no travel funds from my home institution, no paid vacations, no sabbaticals. I do not even have library privileges at a university library, so I cannot order books from Interlibrary Loan or access JSTOR when I need a quotation from a scholarly journal. On the other hand, I spent enough years in academia not to be envious of academics.

Is it any wonder that translators are a modest and unassuming lot? We are happy just to have regular work, to get interesting projects, and to be paid promptly and relatively well. I therefore want to thank Sharmila Sen, my editor at Harvard University Press who commissioned the translation of Reading and Writing in Babylon, for supplying me with all those things for a number of years.

Despite its drawbacks, translation is a wonderful way to make a living. I work at home in comfortable clothes, with my little dog dozing at my feet. From my desk chair, I journey through time and space and explore the most diverse disciplines imaginable: from Old Babylonia to the Byzantine Middle Ages, from the early days of cubism to contemporary Afghanistan and Iraq, from the Chinese literati painters to the gods of ancient Egypt, from Fra Angelico’s monastery to Toulouse-Lautrec’s Moulin Rouge, and from Mme de Pompadour’s opulent château to the tiny Gan kingdom in Burkina Faso. One day I might be following complicated arguments from Kant or Spinoza, and the next day I will be asked to translate advertising copy for a milliner’s shop in Paris: “Chez Katharina M, the hats twist into arabesques and whorls... They whirl and pirouette, so airy that—on seeing them—you imagine a bird in flight or the sweep of a rippling gown…” I have always had wide-ranging interests: my degree is in Comparative Literature and I wrote my dissertation on a psychoanalyst and a philosopher. But I can’t think of any other profession where I could learn so much about so many different things.

I am a language nerd: I love learning new words, new specialized vocabularies, and even new diacritical marks (did you know that the Turkish alphabet has a letter “i” with no dot over it?). Translation is extreme close reading, and one of the pleasures it affords me is to be able to follow an author’s thought processes, to see how a mind works with and through language.

Here are two things I learned while translating Dominique Charpin’s Reading and Writing in Babylon. The first is that, when compared to the task of the Assyriologist, translating from French to English is a breeze. Let me read a longish passage from the book to serve as an illustration and to give you a feel for the writing. The section is entitled “How to Read a Cuneiform Tablet”:

Journey Through the Afterlife

In partnership with the British Museum, we've just published a North American edition of John H. Taylor’s Journey Through the Afterlife: Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead. The book is the companion to a major exhibition of the same name, curated by Taylor and running at the British Museum through early March 2011. As Taylor explains in a British Museum blog post, “Book of the Dead” is a term we use now for “a collection of magical spells that the Egyptians used to help them get into the afterlife. They imagined the afterlife as a kind of journey you had to make to get to paradise – but it was quite a hazardous journey so you’d need magical help along the way.”

The video below explains the exhibition:

 

There was no one standard Book of the Dead. Rather, countless customized variations existed, elaborately decorated and filled with different spells. Though the British Museum has one of the world’s largest collections of artifacts related to the Book of the Dead, many of the items included in this exhibition have actually never before been displayed. “This is an extremely ambitious exhibition because we've never been able to look at this subject in such a comprehensive way,” Taylor told the Guardian. “We've wanted to, but so much of this material is so light-sensitive. It's also a question of space – you do need a lot of it to do it properly.”

The exhibition has been a very hot ticket since opening in early November, but a couple of representatives of HUP managed to gain entry while in town for meetings at our London office last month. HUP Director William Sisler was among those visiting the exhibition, and he reports that it drew him into a world unfamiliar to most of us in the West: “In a way, both the exhibit and the book demonstrate that there was in ancient Egypt a continuity between life on earth and life ‘after death.’ The spells inscribed in the Book of the Dead represent maps to guide the departed along the path toward eternal joy and happiness, and away from the risk posed by having one’s heart weighed in the balance and possibly found wanting, subject to destruction by the Devourer, a beast composed of elements from the lion, crocodile, and hippopotamus.”

Our book, like the exhibition, affords a greater understanding of ancient Egyptian belief systems and reveals the hopes and fears of mortal man about the world beyond death. Journey Through the Afterlife contains contributions from leading scholars and detailed catalog entries that interpret the spells and painted scenes of these ancient treasures.  It’s illustrated in full color throughout, with specially commissioned photographs of these exceptional papyri and an array of contextual funerary objects—painted coffins, gilded masks, amulets, jewelry, tomb figurines, and mummy trappings.

To accompany the exhibition, and as a fitting teaser for the book, the British Museum has even produced an app on the Book of the Dead, available for free from the Apple App Store. In the app you are led by Anubis, ancient Egyptian god of embalming, through the netherworld, and asked 7 questions. Answer correctly and you'll reach paradise, but get them wrong and you'll meet the Devourer, who’ll gladly eat your soul.  Rest easy, though: Journey Through the Afterlife has the answers.  

"In Search of Holy Dirt" - Gary Vikan on Early Byzantine Pilgrimage Art

Since 2006 the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection has been a publishing partner of Harvard University Press. The publications of Dumbarton Oaks present the scholarship in Byzantine, Garden and Landscape, and Pre-Columbian studies to which the Washington, D. C. institute is dedicated. This fall, as part of its Byzantine Collection Publications series, Dumbarton Oaks has released a revised edition of Gary Vikan’s Early Byzantine Pilgrimage Art. By day, Gary Vikan is the Director of the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, where he stewards an internationally renowned collection and works to promote the city’s art scene.  Below, he describes how his work at the Walters and his own scholarship relate.

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My invitation to Dumbarton Oaks came by way of a telegram to the US Embassy in Bucharest on Valentine’s Day, 1975. I was spending that academic year in Romania, under Ceausescu, with a stipend from the International Research and Exchanges Board to do research on my Byzance après Byzance dissertation topic, for Kurt Weitzmann and Princeton University. That telegram offered me a two-year contract position at DO; my job would be to research and write a catalogue of the sculpture in the collection – everything from Ptolemaic Egypt to Renaissance Germany. What luck! Not only had I always wanted to be at Dumbarton Oaks (I was turned down for a Junior Fellowship two years earlier), but also because my post-Romania job prospects were very dim.

As it turned out, I would spend the next ten years of my life occupying a variety of staff positions at DO, all the while lapping up the heavy cream of Byzantium in the company of some of the most wonderful Byzantinists the world then had to offer. This was an enormous privilege for me, and I loved it.

Though from the beginning, I felt a certain tension. I was born a Midwestern populist, and while I enjoyed the lunchtime conversation at DO that would typically wander from such arcane topics as Byzantine epithets for the Virgin Mary to regional etymologies for the orange (portocale, in Romanian, reflecting the fruit’s origin in Portugal), I craved connection with the real world – with things that were meaningful to those ordinary folks who walked past the brick walls of Dumbarton Oaks without a care for what was going on inside. Moreover, I was married and had a small child, and I could barely afford to pay my rent. So by night I began a second career, in adult education, with the Smithsonian Residents Associate Program. This was as close to Byzantium for the masses as I then thought was possible, and it felt right.

As I taught, I sought out topics that would get my students’ attention. Imperial porphyry sculpture of the Tetrarchy was a tough sell, and for most, icons were just too abstract. But what nearly all my grownups seemed to relate to pretty easily was Byzantine pilgrimage: traveling to holy places, leaving votives behind, and taking away something sacred and powerful. What they all got especially excited about was “holy dirt,” the sanctified soil form loca sancta that pilgrims took home with them to use, when needed, to cure their ailments. When I called these pilgrim tokens the “Aspirin of the Middle Ages,” faces would light up, and I knew that I had connected. And it was this sense of connection that drew me to do a small exhibition at DO in 1982 with curators Susan Boyd and Carol Moon called Byzantine Pilgrimage Art. And with that exhibition, to write a booklet of the same title that I typed, pasted together, and drove to the printer myself.

I could not then have guessed that this homemade publication would sell out, and help to nourish what was becoming a cottage industry of pilgrimage studies among Byzantinists of my generation. And I certainly could not then have dreamed that nearly three decades later the tables would be turned. I left DO for the Walters Art Museum in 1985 because I felt I needed more fully to engage with the public, through art, and because I wanted to be part of a real city, its on-going struggles and its occasional triumphs. This, for sure, was and remains the Walters, and Baltimore. So now, my day job is art and people, and my night job is scholarship, as I revisit my DO life of the ‘80s in the form of this new, expanded edition of that pilgrimage booklet. The tension is still there, though now I welcome it, since it has drawn me to two great institutions that have, each in their own way, nourished a different part of who I am.

What’s next? SAINT ELVIS: From the Holy Land to Graceland – a book-length study almost completed. After all, what could be a more logical sequel to Early Byzantine Pilgrimage Art for a populist like me?

On humans, dinosaurs, and Sarah Palin

When we read this LA Times story on Sarah Palin's apparent belief that humans and dinosaurs walked the earth together a mere 6,000 years ago, we wondered, despite acknowledging how patently awesome it would be to pet a dinosaur, where exactly such a belief comes from (hint: it's not from modern science). To that end, we asked our friend Ronald Numbers, who has made a calling out of tracking the origins and development of modern creationist thought, to fill us in on Young Earth creationism, where the idea came from, and whether or not, as its proponents claim, it can truly be called "science." Numbers is the author of the near-canonical The Creationists: From Scientific Creationism to Intelligent Design, released in an expanded edition last year, and is editor of the forthcoming Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths about Science and Religion. So, a pretty good person to ask! Below is what he had to say.

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According to a recent article by Stephen Braun in the Los Angeles Times (September 28, 2008), Sarah Palin, the Republican candidate for Vice President of the United States, believes that the earth was created about 6,000 years ago and that humans and dinosaurs once lived together, a belief supported, she has claimed, by evidence of human footprints inside of dinosaur tracks. A conservative Christian with strong Pentecostal and Fundamentalist leanings, Palin favors teaching creationism along with evolution. "Teach both," she once urged during her race for governor of Alaska. "You know, don’t be afraid of information. Healthy debate is so important, and it’s so valuable in our schools. I am a proponent of teaching both."

I don’t much care, and I don’t think other voters should care, about the religious peculiarities of candidates for public office—so long as their views don’t impinge on public policy. It makes little difference to me whether Joe Biden, a Catholic, subscribes to the doctrines of transubstantiation or the Immaculate Conception, or whether Mitt Romney affirms the divine inspiration of the Book of Mormon, if these doctrinal idiosyncrasies remain privately held convictions. But we have every right as voters to express concern about a Pentecostal being in charge of protecting the environment (think James Watt, President Reagan’s Secretary of the Interior) who believes that we are living in the Last Days before the total destruction of that environment; or, say, a Christian Scientist, who denies the efficacy of modern medicine, being appointed Secretary of Health and Human Services. In such instances, examining the religious beliefs of political candidates is not bigotry.

Mary Beard interview--Part 2

BLDGBLOG has posted Part 2 of the interview with Mary Beard, editor of the Wonders of the World series and author of the forthcoming The Roman Triumph. Also, don't miss Mary's Times Online blog "A Don's Life."

The Rosetta Stone

In Sunday's Washington Post Book Review, Jonathon Keats reminds us of what the Rosetta Stone meant to the generation that discovered it while reviewing John Ray's new HUP book on the subject, The Rosetta Stone and the Rebirth of Ancient Egypt.

The lost fort at Jamestown

The Washington Post has a new article up in their Jamestown series--this one about archaeologists' unearthing of the settlement's long-lost fort.