Harvard University Press Blog

Recognition for Translators

Since 1986, the French-American Foundation has awarded annual translation prizes for the best translation from French to English in fiction and nonfiction. We’re extremely pleased to see the translators of three HUP projects among the five nonfiction finalists for the 2017 prize: Nicholas Elliott, for his translation of Michel Winock’s Flaubert; Catherine Porter, for her translation of Élizabeth Roudinesco’s Freud: In His Time and Ours; and Jane Marie Todd, for her translation of Olivier Wieviorka’s The French Resistance.

The Foundation conducted interviews with each of the finalists about the path that brought them to translation, their process for translating, and the life of the translator. Elliott, who shared the 2013 Translation Prize with Alison Dundy for their work on another HUP book, Davi Kopenawa and Bruce Albert’s The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman, spoke of the “lonely business” of translation:

The translator works alone and must aim to be invisible. Some of the books I translated have received long, glowing reviews that omit to mention the translation. I have come to accept that for a translator, particularly a translator of non-fiction, not being mentioned is equivalent to a good review. Most readers would prefer to pretend there is no translator between them and the author.

And of how translating Winock’s biography deepened his sense of Flaubert’s greatness:

His sentences can be difficult, his word choice occasionally obscure to the modern reader, but once I made my way through the thicket, often by consulting a nineteenth-century dictionary, I always found him astonishingly precise. I understood the famous stories about Flaubert agonizing for days over a single word and was thankful to him for the effort—I never had to guess at his meaning, which is the worst situation for a translator to find himself in when translating a dead or otherwise uncommunicative author.

Porter offered advice to aspiring translators:

Revise! And then do it again, and again, and again… Another piece of advice I’ve found myself giving to undergraduates who think they may be interested in translating fiction or nonfiction professionally is to read the New York Times and Le Monde (or comparable target and source language newspapers) every day. This usually surprises them, but I try to convince them that it’s important for translators to be informed about a wide variety of topics and to be familiar with the terms in which they’re discussed in both languages. 

And Todd, who was a co-winner of the 2010 Translation Prize for bringing Dominique Charpin’s Reading and Writing in Babylon into English, described the fun and the challenge of translating wordplay:

There were a few plays on words, usually taken from pro-German or anti-German propaganda: for example, members of the Resistance said of Radio-Paris, the collaborationist station, “Radio-Paris ment, Radio-Paris ment, Radio-Paris est allemand,” playing on the verb for lying, mentir, and the word for German, allemand. I translated it as “Radio-Paris lies, Radio-Paris deceives, Radio-Paris is Germendacious.” On the pro-German side, it was said of those who listened to Charles de Gaulle’s broadcasts from England, “Le dingaullisme s’attrape, surtout, par les organes auditifs.” Dingaullisme is a portmanteau word, a combination of dingue, meaning “crazy,” and gaullisme, “Gaullism,” as in “de Gaulle.” I translated it as, “Dengaulle Fever is caught primarily through the auditory organs,” and was happy to learn that one of the symptoms of Dengue Fever is insanity.

This year’s winners will be announced  at an Awards Ceremony on June 8th. Our congratulations to Elliott, Porter, Todd, and the other translators and publishers recognized as finalists.

HUP Director Announces Retirement

William P. Sisler, director of Harvard University Press, has announced that he will retire at the end of this academic year. As the press’s director for nearly 27 years, Sisler provided vision and leadership during a period of significant transition in the publishing world.

“We are grateful that Bill has served Harvard with distinction for so many years,” said Harvard Provost Alan Garber. “The caliber of authors and the number of awards that the press has garnered during his tenure speak to his dedication and editorial command.”

Under Sisler’s direction, Harvard University Press published award-winning books by winners of the Nobel Prize, Pulitzer Prize, and National Book Award, as well as scholars such as Stephen Jay Gould, E.O. Wilson, Amartya Sen, Catharine MacKinnon, Michael Sandel, Charles Taylor, Bruno Latour, Mary Beard, and Thomas McCraw.

In addition, Sisler oversaw the publication of Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, a groundbreaking historical analysis of the dynamics driving the distribution of wealth in Europe and the United States. Capital in the Twenty-First Century reached No. 1 on the New York Times best-seller list and has sold more copies than any book in the press’s history.

Sisler guided the expansion of the press’s footprint in the United Kingdom and Europe, establishing an independent U.K. office and growing sales and content acquisition for a global audience.

During Sisler’s tenure, the press and its partners launched the digital Loeb Classical Library, the open-access electronic Emily Dickinson Archive, the electronic Dictionary of American Regional English, and the Murty Classical Library of India.

“Under Bill’s directorship, the press has become the model of a modern university press—modern in its management and finances while remaining true to its mission of identifying, editing, and publishing scholarship of the first rank,” said William Kirby, chair of the board at the press. “I have seen firsthand the difference Bill’s leadership has made. I and my colleagues on the board are deeply grateful to him for his contributions to the University and to the broader world of learning.”

“It’s been an honor and a pleasure to have worked at Harvard University Press for so long with so many distinguished publishing colleagues, authors, Board of Syndics members, and faculty at Harvard and around the globe, and to extend the presence and influence of Harvard University Press in the international environment,” said Sisler. “I am grateful to have been able to work so closely with so many talented, exceptional people.”

Sisler received a Ph.D. in classics from Johns Hopkins University in 1977 and a master’s degree in administrative science, also from Johns Hopkins, in 1983. After working as a senior acquisitions editor for Johns Hopkins University Press, he served as executive editor and vice president at Oxford University Press (U.S.A.) before coming to Harvard University Press in 1990.

photo by Stu Rosner

A Screen of Her Own: Gay Courter’s The Midwife and the Literary History of Word Processing

Over the years that he spent researching and writing his literary history of word processing, Matthew Kirschenbaum was publicly sharing his findings via lecture, hashtag, and blog. The process of discovery that he was documenting doesn’t simply cease when a book goes to press, though, and the publication of Track Changes in May has in fact sparked a whole new round of revelation. Below, Kirschenbaum shares a major new find for this ongoing project.

-----

In 1977 Gay and Philip Courter purchased an IBM System 6 word processor. The System 6 was brand-new that year: although IBM had first introduced the world to the term word processing, and although competitor products consisting of keyboards and screens had been on the market since 1971, the unprepossessingly named System 6 was the first IBM word processor to have a CRT display. The 9-inch screen had room for eight lines of text, deemed adequate because this was about the same amount of type typically visible on a piece of paper as it came curling out of a typewriter’s rollers, bent under its own weight.

The plan was to use the word processor for routine office work in support of the documentary film company the couple ran. The machine was temperamental, and visits from IBM repair personnel to their home atop a steep hill near the Delaware Water Gap were frequent. Courter didn’t mind, though. She had quickly realized the word processor would allow her to do something that her domestic responsibilities had made otherwise impossible: write and publish her first novel. She began work on it in earnest in early 1977, shortly after the birth of their first child, and sold the rights to Houghton Mifflin two years later; The Midwife was published in February 1981. As a first-time novelist, she knew she had to do what she could to attract notice so she also wrote up a piece for Publishers Weekly that came out at the same time about her and other authors’ experiences using early word processors.

1981 is a pivotal year in my own literary history of word processing. Lots of things had happened that year: the Osborne 1 and IBM PC both debuted; Time magazine had written about writers and word processors (a year sooner than they anointed the personal computer their Machine of the Year); Isaac Asimov had had his first home computer delivered to him as part of a promotional ploy; and the New York Times had written about Jimmy Carter’s travails with his Lanier word processor. All of that is in the book, and much more. But I had missed Gay Courter’s story . . . until she recently wrote to me.

The One King Lear

King Lear exists in two early texts: the Quarto (1608) and the Folio (1623). Each text is abridged: the Quarto lacks 100 lines which are found in the Folio, and the Folio lacks 300 lines which are found in the Quarto. Fortunately, the missing sections are different and complementary. While other Shakespeare plays have texts that differ between the Quarto and Folio, only Lear has two interdependent versions that interlock perfectly. For over two hundred years editors made the obvious decision to reunite them in one single text, the basis for all modern productions of King Lear.

Then, in the 1980s, a revisionist movement appeared, in which a group of influential scholars argued that the two texts represented different versions of King Lear, that Shakespeare personally shortened the Folio text because he was dissatisfied with his original play. The two-text theory has since hardened into a new orthodoxy.

But now, on the very eve of the 400th anniversary of the death of the Bard, one of the world’s most eminent Shakespeare scholars is challenging the two-text consensus. In The One King Lear, Sir Brian Vickers seeks to settle, once and for all, the puzzle of the relationship between the two different editions of Shakespeare’s greatest play. At stake is the way King Lear is read and performed.

Vickers argues that the cuts in the Quarto text are too insignificant to have meaningfully shortened the play, but were instead meant materially, carried out by the printer because he had underestimated the amount of paper he would need. Paper was an expensive commodity in the early modern period—indeed, the second most expensive item on a printer’s account book—and printers counted the lines in a manuscript before ordering their supply.

Through presentation of the moment-by-moment mechanics of typesetting, along with detailed analysis of other Shakespeare Quartos, Vickers reveals the methods that printers used to save space, such as setting verse as prose, replacing “and” with an ampersand, and, as a last resort, omitting quantities of text. All these methods are found in the 1608 King Lear, and many times more frequently than in any comparable Quarto. For Vickers, it follows that the passages missing there were not subsequently added by Shakespeare, as the revisionists claim, but had been cut in the printing house.

As for the Folio, whereas the revisionists made claims that Shakespeare cut the text in order to alter the balance between characters, Vickers sees no evidence of his agency. In effect, some cuts removed passages of a reflective or descriptive nature that were probably made by the theatre company to speed up the action. Others ruin important plot lines and character development: whoever cut the Folio text cropped the end of speeches, the end of scenes, and omitted a whole scene necessary to the action. It could not have been Shakespeare. What he wrote is what Vickers restores: a fully integrated and incomparably powerful tragedy.

University Press Week 2015

This year’s University Press Week draws to a close today, and as in years past the event has offered a nice chance for AAUP member presses to pipe up about what we do when our heads are down.

One thing we do as much as anyone is think and talk about the future of scholarly publishing, as evidenced by UP Week Blog Tour posts from a number of presses of varying size and focus. The University of Georgia Press sees a future of partnerships and collaboration, in which the resources of a community are brought together to support continued pursuit of projects no commercial publisher would touch. Johns Hopkins UP also highlights collaboration, along with continued innovation and a focus on interactive and multimodal projects. Oxford University Press draws attention to the variety of business models evolving in step, and an increasing need to “serve as a bullhorn for thoughtful, empirical work in an arena of public debate that has become muddled by a rising drone of white noise.” All while Indiana University Press cautions against losing sight of “the human beings behind the monograph, the stories, the designs, the editing, and marketing.”

Along with all the forward looking, the week helps us keep sight of our past, and the University of Minnesota Press—celebrating its 90th anniversary this year—put together a great timeline of founding dates for members of the AAUP along with select other publishers.

For our part we offered a little case study into the design of a book cover, and we had great company in the effort to show how a book’s looks stay true to its contents while attracting the readers who know what they want and also some of those who don’t. MIT Press shows how the presentation of brain books has seen as much change over the decades as the scholarship contained within:

And Princeton UP goes even further, launching a really lovely Tumblr to showcase their always-lovely books.

Strongmen, Statistics, and Design

This week we’re joining our fellow members of the Association of American University Presses in celebration of University Press Week, an occasion first called for in 1978 by President Jimmy Carter, and renewed in 2012 by the AAUP. As in past years, UP Week 2015 includes a blog tour, a nice way for AAUP member presses to come together offering insight into what we do. The theme for today is “Design in UP and Scholarly Publishing,” so we had a chat with HUP Senior Book Designer Jill Breitbarth about one of her recent projects, a forthcoming book from Stephen M. Stigler titled The Seven Pillars of Statistical Wisdom. Our conversation is below.

-----

Q. In some cases—biographies comes to mind—the content of a book can really dictate the design for its cover. In others, though, you probably have a lot more freedom to take the design in any number of different directions. What were your first thoughts when you sat down to work on the jacket design for The Seven Pillars of Statistical Wisdom?

“Trade-y and light-hearted” were my instructions from the Sales Department, but the author liked this engraving of Pierre-Simon Laplace and other scientists gathering to meet Napoleon at the Louvre:

Q. We do see these powdered-wig fellows on a few of your early designs for the book—was that driven by the author’s initial suggestion?

As you can see from the engraving, the book touches on the history of statistics, and the acquiring editor noted that Stigler “sets forth what he considers are the seven pillars or foundational ideas of modern statistical analysis. The history of these ideas ranges from antiquity to the early 20th century.” Looking for images of ye olde mathematicians such as Laplace—the man in both of the powder-wig portraits I started working with—was a natural progression. I was hoping to find something more colorful and dynamic than the engraving, and I liked the painting of Jean Antoine Houdon (1741-1828) sculpting the bust of Pierre Simon Marquis de Laplace (1749-1827), in the Presence of his Wife and Daughters, 1804 (oil on canvas) by Louis Leopold Boilly but we decided it wasn’t right because it made the book look solely like a work of history.

Fiona Ross Wins Typography Award

Each year at its annual TypeCon conference, the Society of Typographic Aficionados (SOTA) presents the SOTA Typography Award to an outstanding member of the type community. We’re delighted to share the news that this year’s award was given to designer, researcher, and teacher Fiona Ross, with whom we’ve had the great pleasure of collaborating on the Murty Classical Library of India (MCLI).

The MCLI—the first five volumes of which will see publication this January—makes available original texts and modern English translations of the masterpieces of literature and thought from across the whole spectrum of Indic languages over the past two millennia. Even aside from the scholarly challenges of translating and editing these works, just preparing the digitally optimized regional typefaces for the vast array of Indian languages included in the library has been as monumental a project as any this Press has undertaken.

From the beginning it was clear that the involvement of Ross, a virtuoso of non-Latin typeface design and a pioneering negotiator of the relationship of technology and typography, would be essential. And so it’s been. To date, Ross and John Hudson of Tiro Typeworks have designed typefaces for Bangla, Hindi, Panjabi, Sanskrit, Tamil, and Telugu, all of which will be made available, free of charge, for non-commercial use upon publication of the first books in which each appear.

Tim Jones, HUP’s Director of Design and Production, describes the collaboration:

There is little I can do to truly express or explain how amazing it has been to work with Fiona and John on this incredible project. Fiona has taught me and everyone else here at HUP so much about the complexities and challenges of typeface design, and has shared a great deal of her unmatched knowledge of the history of non-Latin typography. Seeing her and John go from concept to final form has made all of us better designers. Fiona’s dedication to research and fidelity is inspiring, and her artistry seems unparalleled. That she is such a delightful and thoughtful person on top of it all is extraordinary. We feel very lucky indeed to be part of this effort alongside her.

The spread below shows Hudson’s and Ross’s work on the Murty Gurmukhi typeface for Panjabi text, as illustrated by the opening pages of Sufi Lyrics.

 Photo of SOTA Typography Award © Luke Dorny, via flickr

Tracking Track Changes

In January, amidst a fairly widespread rush of media interest in the project, we took a look at Matthew Kirschenbaum’s Track Changes, a forthcoming study of how word processing software has affected the act and practice of composition. As we noted at the time, it’s a bit out of the ordinary for us to shine a spotlight on a book coming far enough in the future that we’d not yet even announced it in any of the traditional ways that publishers make things official. But this is a project that’s progressing in a more public manner than we’re accustomed to, at least at HUP.

It’s not as if scholarly projects are typically unknown prior to publication. In most cases, the work they present is the product of years of labor and countless discussions, conference papers, articles, seminars, etc. And it’s also not so out of the ordinary for a forthcoming book to be widely and eagerly anticipated well before we—the publisher—have offered details. Walter Johnson’s forthcoming study of Mississippi Valley slavery in the context of the histories of Atlantic capitalism and U.S. imperialism is likely as anticipated as anything we’ve ever had on the docket, for instance, and that’s despite our having made no public statement on the project thus far.

In the case of Johnson, though, the foreknowledge and early anticipation are largely within the academy. What’s different about Kirschenbaum’s book is the very public nature of the awareness, which, while surely a testament to his topic’s broad appeal, is mostly due to the open manner in which he’s conducting his work. In some respects this, too, is a function of the nature of the project, as when you’re seeking to answer questions about early users of word processing software it helps to have a megaphone making those users aware of your interest. But Kirschenbaum’s unveiled approach to scholarly production is also a hallmark of social-media-age academe, particularly within the digital humanities.

And, on that front, you don’t even need much personal interest in Kirschenbaum’s research project in order to benefit from his progress reports. In his latest, which you can read in full on his website, he contrasts the process of researching and writing his first book, 2008’s Mechanisms, with his approach this time through:

The backend of the [Mechanisms] project, meanwhile, was a mess. I wasn’t using citation management software. I kept drafts in bloated Word files with titles like “chapt 3 notes and fragments” that I would occasionally pick through to make sure I wasn’t overlooking anything worthwhile. I didn’t use an outliner. I didn’t use Zotero or EverNote. Online sources? PDFs sat in folders alongside of HTML scraped from the Web using my browser’s Save As function. Somehow, though, I found my footing along the way and worked through to completing the text as a manuscript (which subsequently underwent review, revision, and copy-editing). At the last minute I sent frantic emails soliciting permissions for images. Luckily my publisher took care of the index.

For this new book, on the other hand:

Everything went into EverNote: PDFs, images, Web clippings, stray URLS, notes to myself, audio files, interview transcripts, email (which EverNote can ingest automatically upon forwarding to a dedicated address)—everything. The great power of the software is, of course, that it is searchable, and so a simple string search on, say, “Asimov” (he has a particularly interesting word processing story) instantly put dozens of entries at my fingertips. I also made sure to keep up with another resource I had begun early on, a spreadsheet documenting information about individual writers and their first computer or word processing systems. For well over one hundred authors I now have data as to when they got their first computer, what it was, and what was the first thing they wrote and published on it (this will go into the book as an appendix). In LibraryThing I created a dedicated tag for trackchanges, allowing me to browse a virtual bookshelf of titles in my collection related to the project, as well as export a catalog (which subsequently went into EverNote). I started to regularly use the #trackchanges tag on Twitter, and also began a Tumblr blog (which I’ve kept up with in fits and spurts—something I wish I could be more diligent about).

The post in which he shares these details takes off from the observation that “nobody teaches you how to write a book,” even in grad school, where the task is usually presumed to be in your future. So in sharing his process and pointing out what he knows this time that he didn’t know the first—and in encouraging others to do the same—Kirschenbaum is offering a resource that could very well help young scholars plan their own projects. And he goes well beyond the nuts and bolts to also detail the freedom to more fully conceptualize an academic book when not racing against a tenure clock.

And, of course, even as he’s working on this literary history of the earliest generations of writing software, he’s producing the kind of documentation likely to be of great interest to whomever tackles a project on their descendants: the Zoteros, Scriveners, and Evernotes that are revolutionizing the way scholarly books are written.

Tempting Titles for Stylish Academic Writing

We’re at the point now in our twice-yearly publishing cycle when the editorial types sit down with the othertorial types to work with authors on deciding the most appropriate titles for their forthcoming books. There’s much to consider in each case: What’s the book about? How well known is the topic? Who is the audience for the book? What’s the author’s reputation? What’s his or her writing style? And so on. In the following excerpt from Stylish Academic Writing, which we published this Spring, Helen Sword explains the importance of considering “paratext” and “subtext” in academic titling.

-----

Like a hat on a head or the front door to a house, the title of an academic article offers a powerful first impression. Is the title dry, technical, straightforward? Most likely, the author’s main goal is to transmit research data as efficiently as possible. Does the title contain opaque disciplinary jargon? Perhaps the author unconsciously hopes to impress us, whether by appealing to a shared expertise (“You and I are members of an exclusive club”) or by reminding us of our ignorance (“If you can’t even understand my title, don’t bother reading any further”). Is the title amusing, intriguing, provocative? Here is an author who is working hard to catch our gaze, engage our interest, and draw us in. In many disciplines, however, such a move goes against the academic grain and even contains a significant element of risk: a “catchy” title might well be regarded by colleagues as frivolous and unscholarly.

Several years ago, I attended a higher education research conference at which a presentation titled “Evaluating the E-learning Guidelines Implementation Project: Formative and Process Evaluations” was offered at the same time as one called “ ‘Throwing a Sheep’ at Marshall McLuhan.” Guess which session drew the bigger audience? “Throwing a sheep” is a method of getting someone’s attention on the popular social-networking Web site Facebook; Marshall McLuhan is the educator and media theorist who famously coined the phrases “global village” and “the medium is the message.” A delegate at a conference on higher education research could thus reasonably surmise that a presentation containing the phrases “throwing a sheep” and “Marshall McLuhan” would explore the role of social-networking Web sites in university teaching and learning. That expectation was confirmed in the conference program, in which a lively abstract spelled out the main argument of the presentation, gave further hints of the author’s penchant for quoting colorful student argot (“pinch, moon, drop kick, spank, poke, b#%*! slap, drunk dial”), and asked a series of questions aimed at the expected audience of educators and educational theorists.

Matthew Kirschenbaum's Literary History of Word Processing

Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Maryland and Associate Director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, is working on a new book entitled Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing. The book will explore how the adoption of word processing technology changed the way that writers practiced their craft, a project that reflects a growing scholarly interest in how writing tools affect literary output. Kirschenbaum recently gave a talk at the New York Public Library based on the book’s first chapter, which you can listen to here.

We’re excited to be publishing the book sometime in the next couple of years, and equally excited to watch it take shape along the way. And you can help! On his website, Kirschenbaum has put out a call for assistance:

I want to know who the early adopters were, and how they thought about the new digital technology in relation to their writing practice. I am interested in both “highbrow” and popular authors alike, fiction and non-fiction. I am also following the story through to the present day: many writers now have platforms on social media like blogs, Facebook, and Twitter. Some of my best information so far has come from word of mouth. That’s where I need your help. I would be very interested in hearing from:

• authors who were early adopters of computing and word prcocessing and/or social media (also authors who made a deliberate decision not to switch to a computer);
• editors, publishers, agents, and others in the business with relevant insights to contribute;
• technologists who worked on early word processing programs;
• anyone with relevant primary source materials to loan, share, or contribute; anyone who knows of interesting fictional renditions of computers and word processing (for example, King’s short story “Word Processor of the Gods”).

Kirschenbaum, pictured at right, has also created a new Tumblr blog with which to document and share some of the coverage of and developments with the project. And, after Jennifer Schuessler wrote of Kirschenbaum and Track Changes in the New York Times late last month, there’s certainly been a spike in activity, with additional coverage in the Guardian and at the Atlantic Wire, and a follow-up piece by Schuessler. One notable response came from Jerry Pournelle, a science fiction writer and journalist who for years contributed to Byte magazine. On his own site, Pournelle took issue with many of Kirschenbaum’s statements as reported by the Times. Kirschenbaum tweeted Pournelle’s piece, noting that Pournelle was “definitely high” on his list of people to talk to, and has since reported via Tumblr that Pournelle was “much nicer on the phone” than in his written critique.

It’s interesting to see how Kirschenbaum’s research on the effects of one technological innovation—word processing—is being so shaped by his own embrace of another, social networking. Until recently, it wasn’t often that we got to watch research unfold so publicly, but Kirschenbaum’s style of transparent, internet-based process documentation is becoming more and more common, especially among practitioners of the digital humanities. Follow along for yourself via Kirschenbaum’s Tumblr or twitter, or just keeps tabs on the #trackchanges hashtag. You could also just sit back and wait for the book, but, really, where’s the change in that?