Ilan Stavans es Profesor de cultura latinoamericana en Amherst College, Massachusetts. El Profesor Stavans tiene tres maestrías, incluyendo una de la Universidad de Columbia, donde también obtuvo su doctorado. Ha enseñado cursos sobre temas como el spanglish, Jorge Luis Borges, poesía moderna americana, música latina, Don Quixote, Gabriel García Márquez, el Modernismo, la cultura popular en Hispanoamerica, escritores internacionales judíos, la historia cultural del español, Pablo Neruda (incluyendo traducciones de sus odas al inglés), la historia del español, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, literatura en yidish, relaciones hispanohebreas,  el cine, el arte latinoamericano, y la cultura latina en los Estados Unidos.

Monique Dascha Inciarte enseña interpretación y traducción en Laney College en Oakland, California. Obtuvo su doctorado en Literatura Comparada en UC Berkeley, donde enseñó durante 10 años.Vive en Oakland, con su hijo de 12 años y su marido, David Valayre, quien enseña teatro y quien amablemente tradujo la entrevista de español a francés.

Ilan Stavans – entrevistado		Monique Inciarte – entrevistadora

Monique Dascha Inciarte y Ilan Stavans tuvieron una conversación que abarcó muchos temas variados: la situación actual en México, la crisis del humanismo y de la novela, que le cede su lugar a la película. La entrevista a continuación solo incluye uno de esos temas: el spanglish, la fusión del inglés y del español que fue la materia de un libro que escribió el Profesor Stavans  "Spanglish: The Making of a New American Language", publicado por Harper Perennial en 2004. Para los lectores que quieran leer toda la entrevista en español, incluiremos aquí un enlace muy pronto. [Entrevista Stavans-Inciarte).

 

MDI: ¿Qué es spanglish? Cómo funciona? ¿Como lengua, como dialecto, como el yiddish que se perdió en la segunda generación?

IS: El spanglish como lo veo yo es tanto el matrimonio como el divorcio, no solamente de dos lenguas sino de dos civilizaciones. Por un lado está el español con toda la herencia hispánica, y el inglés con toda la herencia anglo-sajona. No es la primera vez que estas lenguas se encuentran en la historia y en el tiempo, se han encontrado en España, se han encontrado en lugares de la América Latina, pero la convergencia en los Estados Unidos es crucial por la densidad demográfica y el hecho de que aquí las dos culturas cohabitan de manera fundacional y fundamental a muchos niveles, tanto en la frontera México-Estados Unidos como en las diferentes ciudades, como en una población itinerante que va de un lado a otro. Hay 65 millones de latinos en los Estados Unidos, de una población de 325 millones en Estados Unidos de Norte Americanos y de 128 millones de mexicanos. Es la concentración más grande de latinos en el mundo después de México, hay más latinos que colombianos en Colombia o argentinos en Argentina, etc. y para mi este es un fenómeno de mestizaje, de mestizaje verbal. El fenómeno del mestizaje durante la colonia era un mestizaje racial étnico, y hoy estamos viendo un mestizaje cultural que se manifiesta a través de la lengua en particular. No hay solo un tipo de Spanglish, como has visto en el libro, hay muchos, así como hay muchos tipos de españoles, el español de España, del Caribe, y es un fenómeno que tiene una profundidad histórica considerable. Los medios hablan de este fenómeno como si hubiera empezado en los ochenta pero uno puede remontarse por lo menos 150 años, si no más, y ver los detalles y la solvencia que ha tenido, en el Tratado de Guadalupe Hidalgo, la Guerra Hispanoamericana. A mi lo que me llama la atención en el Spanglish es el hecho de que toda lengua, toda lengua de las 6,000 lenguas que hay en el mundo, ha pasado por un estado similar al spanglish, que es la contaminación, la dispersión, y la consolidación nacional. Hay un momento en que el español pasa del latín vulgar, al castellano y el castellano se convierte en español en 1492, y también hay una discriminación por las clases educadas, "esta es la lengua de los iletrados, esta es la lengua que no va a llegar a ninguna parte, si vas a escribir sonetos escríbelos en latín, si vas a discutir temas eclesiásticos también lo vas a hacer en latín y no es hasta varios siglos después que se empiezan a escribir novelas, textos en español y es visto con más solvencia. Lo mismo pasa con el yiddish, que era la lengua de las mujeres y los niños, de los iletrados, en los siglos 13, y después se convierte en una lengua literaria, para el siglo 18, y gana el Premio Nobel Bashevis Singer en 1978. Eso no quiere decir que alguien vaya a ganar el Premio Nobel en spanglish pero no quiere decir que no tampoco. Ya alguien ganó un Pulitzer para una novela que está escrita considerablemente en spanglish, y yo creo que es importante, desde mi perspectiva, verlo como un fenómeno socio-lingüístico, que es lo que anuncia. Estamos viendo algo que nos hace pensar mucho en el "melting pot" y si es realmente un melting pot o no, si absorben las lenguas inmigrantes o se mantienen. Ha habido fenómenos similares al spanglish con el yinglish, que era una mezcla del yiddish con el inglés, o como el chinglish, o el japanenglish, etc., pero spanglish es mucho mas diversificado y mucho mas complejo. Una cosa más que te diría es que lloramos a cada rato la muerte de lenguas indígenas, su extinción, pero nos conmociona la aparición de nuevas lenguas. En lugar de celebrarlas nos enfurece porque algo está siendo destruido, o algo está a punto de desaparecer y me parece contradictorio. Así como había 2,000 lenguas aborígenes y hoy quedan 550 en América Latina y la gente llora por esas que han muerto, la gente se escandaliza cuando nace y crece el spanglish.

 

MDI: ¿˘Y cómo ves su futuro?

IS: Yo creo que el futuro ya llegó. Hoy estamos en 2016 y el fenómeno es a mi gusto e incontrolable y hay evidencia en todas partes, en los canales de radio, la prensa, las calles, los libros infantiles, la música, los menús, el cyberspanglish. Generalmente soy cauteloso. Anunciar que en 100 años se va a establecer una Real Academia de la Lengua spanglish, eso sería para mi la verdadera traición, pero toda lengua que se establece tiene que terminar con una autoridad que la cohesione, que la legisle. No todas las lenguas tienen Academias pero el mismo hecho de crear un diccionario es ya un hurto, de quitárselo a la gente y ponerlo en páginas.

 

MDI: Como un insecto atrapado en ámbar, ¿no?

IS: Claro, y te diría que quizás la muestra más tangible es que cuando yo empecé a pensar seriamente el tema del spanglish y decía la palabra spanglish, la gente se reía. Y hoy que digo la palabra spanglish lo ven como algo muy interesante, muy curioso, digno de atención. Y eso para mi ya es una transformación social. Lo mismo me pasa ahora con el interés que tengo con los selfies. Que cuando los selfies empezaron, es algo de los jóvenes, es una tontería. Yo creo que los selfies es un fenómeno muy profundo que habla sobre el narcisismo de la actualidad. Hilary se pasó toda la campaña tomándose selfies. El papa se toma selfies continuamente. Es un fenómeno que nos invita a pensar sobre el arte, el self-portrait.

 

MDI: La auto-narración a través de las fotos.

IS: Exactamente. Y la democratización de la fotografía. El hecho de que podemos curar nuestra propia imagen y difundirla . Es un fenómeno que no es muy distinto al spanglish tampoco, ¿no? Es un fenómeno popular, y con esto te llevo a esa tercera pregunta que es ¿por qué? Yo creo que son fenómenos populares, dignos de atención, que generalmente son criticados de manera acérrima y furiosa, pero que, así como la tierra es de quien la trabaja, decía Zapata, yo creo que la lengua es de quien la trabaja.

 

MDI: Yo enseño interpretación y traducción, en un contexto legal, vocacional. Teórico también pero más que nada con vías a que la gente encuentre trabajo después. Y entonces al principio en mis clases, cuando mis estudiantes estaban mezclando los idiomas, yo les decía, « tienen que separarlos porque aquí hay contaminación». Así me lo habían presentado también mis maestros en Berkeley, cuando estaba recuperando mi castellano después de vivir tantos años en los Estados Unidos. Y luego a medida que pasaba el tiempo y oía hablar a mis estudiantes, me di cuenta que no podía hacer eso. En primer lugar porque sociolinguísticamente, la cuestión de cómo hablas, toca en cuestiones de Identidad. Entonces yo, al decirles, «Hay contaminación, está muy mal, estás mal, estás cometiendo errores», les estaba diciendo que ellos estaban mal, que sus padres estaban mal y que su manera de expresarse, de una manera fundamental, estaba mal.

IS: Esos dos puntos me parecen muy importantes. Primero hablo del segundo y luego del primero . Esto de «estaba mal» yo también tuve esa impresión pero eso demuestra ya la actitud que nosotros pensamos que el conocimiento nos humaniza y la posición que nos obliga a tomar de superioridad, ¿no? Eso está mal, esto está bien, déjame decirte como las cosas pueden estar bien. Cuando en realidad es una actitud que todos tenemos que es paternalista, de legislar que es lo que está bien y que es lo que esta mal. Y lo que me lleva al primer punto que es esto de la contaminación y de las lenguas que se cruzan. Yo mismo tuve eso y lo tengo, y me pregunto por qué estamos tan obsesionados por separar las lenguas cuando el mundo hace lo opuesto. En el mundo son promiscuas, que se encimen unas con las otras, nosotros queremos que el español este aquí y el inglés este allá o que el francés este allá. Y en el salón de clase, cuando empiezas a enseñar, dices «no uses el inglés, usa solamente el español». Pero el mundo de afuera usa el inglés continuamente. Claro, uno quiere mantener una cierta pureza, integridad, pero las lenguas viven de ese contacto continuo. Esto me hace pensar en un ensayo de Amy Tan, que es hija de inmigrantes chinos, y cuya madre fue muy importante para ella en su educación. Y porque la madre no hablaba bien inglés, y ella fungía, como siempre ocurre en la segunda generación, como interprete de la madre ante los angloparlantes, ella hablaba de cómo aquellos que se comunicaban con su madre y la escuchaban hablando mal el mandarín, pensaban que sus pensamientos estaban fracturados, no solamente el habla sino…y eso es una muestra de cómo al decir que eso es incorrecto, no solamente decimos que la lengua es incorrecta sino la actitud de la vida es incorrecta, ¿no? «No estás pensando bien». Mira, con el tiempo Cantinflas se ha convertido en un ídolo , porque Cantinflas en un hombre que no acaba las frases, que malconjuga las oraciones en los verbos, y sin embargo, crea un universo increíblemente complejo y barroco, basado en la manera de hablar. Y si lo comparas, como siempre se hace, con Chaplin, que es el gran cómico del mundo anglosajón, y la gente dice que Cantinflas es el Chaplin del mundo hispánico, yo creo que es viceversa, que Chaplin es la segunda categoría del Cantinflas del mundo hispánico porque Chaplin todo lo tiene que hacer con gestos, pero no habla, mientras que Cantinflas hace gestos y habla.

 

MDI: El hablar el spanglish es navegar entre dos aguas, estar entre dos mundos y dos lenguas. Y a veces uno se traba: de repente como que uno se congela y no sabe exactamente como expresarse. Para lidiar con eso uno salta de un idioma a otro, sin encontrar su voz.

IS: Es totalmente cierto porque es el navegar no solamente de una lengua o de una serie de coordenadas y parámetros elementales a otra totalmente distinta.

 ————————–

 Algunos otros libros en inglés entre cuales que el profesor Stavans es el autor, co-autor o editor:

Quixote: The Novel and the World W. W. Norton & Company, 2015	El Iluminado: A Graphic Novel Basic Books, 2012
Becoming Americans: Four Centuries of Immigrant Writing   Library of America, 2009	The Hispanic Condition: The Power of the People Harper Perennial, 2001

                        

                                                                                       Pablo Neruda traducido por Ilan Stavans:    

Leer tambien en este blog :  2015 : année donquichottique

Otras lecturas :

How to Be Both and Outsider and an Insider; 'The Czar of Latino Literature and Culture' Finds Himself Under Attack
New York Times, 13 November 1999

 

 INTERVIEW

 

Lyda: When did you become interested in languages as an object of study?

Gaston: I think it all began when I was learned English, French, German and Latin at school. Only then did I realize that Limburgish, the vernacular we spoke in our region, the southern Dutch province of Limburg, was a language in its own right, not just some sort of informal Dutch. It was an epiphany to me that Limburgish, like English and French and the rest, had grammar rules, vocab and sounds substantially different from Dutch. I'd never stopped to think about that before. It was learning other languages that opened my eyes. Or my ears, rather.

 

Lyda: Did your upbringing play a role in developing your language interests?

Gaston: I'm sure it did. My mother is quite finicky about using le mot juste, both in Dutch and in Limburgish. My father was a French teacher, (which explains the choice of my name Gaston), my first girlfriend was German and most of the TV shows I watched, like The 6 Million Dollar Man and M*A*S*H, were in English, with Dutch subtitles.

 

Lyda: Did you become aware of the language of the elite by growing up in the upper-class?

Gaston: Certainly not; I'm from the "middlest" middle-class background imaginable. The only elitist family thing that I can remember dates to well before I was born: When my father went to a teachers training college at the age of 17 to become a teacher, my grandfather would write him letters in French. In my granddad's childhood, around 1900, French was still the elite language in our part of Limburg, and as an adult he wasn't above a bit of snobbery.

 

Lyda: You are the author of 'Lingo: Around Europe in Sixty Languages', published in the US two years ago. It's a linguistic travelogue that takes the reader through Europe, examining sixty languages. How did you plan the book? Describe for our readers the experience of writing such a book.

Gaston: It actually grew very organically, out of some purely recreational writing. Feeling that these first few pieces were quite promising, I wondered what their common denominator might be, and I settled on this 'languages of Europe' theme, which proved to be highly inspiring. The book was first published in Dutch and got excellent reviews. I then decided to be reckless and have it translated into English at my own risk and expense. That has worked out wonderfully, because thanks to my agent Caroline Dawnay and the very perceptive publisher Mark Ellingham at Profile Books, it became something of a bestseller in Britain. Other editions, including the American one, have also done very satisfactorily. There are seven different language editions now. The main gaps are, much to my distress, Italian and French. I would really love to see Lingo published in those two languages. There is a wonderful Spanish edition, so Lingo in a Romance language is definitely possible!

 

Lyda: Could you explain to our readers the influence of powerful personalities on the development of languages. In your book, you describe how often one particular person with a strong dedication saved a language from extinction, or promoted a certain variety of a language. Did you notice the politics behind the choices for promoting one language or language variety over another one?

Gaston: Yeah, it's true that, with hindsight, many languages owe a lot to one or two persons. Perhaps they fought for its recognition or their books had a strong impact on the standard language. Martin Luther has been important for German, Dante for Italian. These are household names, but further to the East, there are all these 'fathers of the mother tongues' that most Western Europeans and Americans haven't heard about. Some of those may indeed have saved their language from extinction or at least marginalization. For instance, in Lingo I tell the story of the Slovak linguist and nationalist Ľudovít Štúr. Despite his efforts, Slovak didn't attain an official status until the breakup of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, and it was only after Slovakia broke away from Czechoslovakia that the language really came into its own. These things work both ways: just like Slovak was in need of a country in order to flower, so Slovakia was in need of a language to claim nationhood. I'm simplifying things here, but nationalism and 'languagehood' are often considered to go together, especially in Europe. I'm not so sure that's a good thing. Nation and language make for a heady mix, even a toxic mix. Catalonia is the latest example of the tensions this can create, and similar conflicts have occurred all over Europe.

 

Lyda: What project are you working on now?

Gaston: I'm working on a book which is due out in late 2018, about the most widely-spoken languages in the world, from English, Mandarin and Spanish to somewhat lesser-known languages such as Tamil, Swahili and Vietnamese. Even though English is today's world language, only one in eight or so people in the world can speak it with any degree of fluency. This book will be about most of the other seven. As in Lingo, every chapter will have its own angle. For the one about Vietnamese, for instance, I'm actually trying to learn the language, and I'm going to spend a few weeks there soon. The chapter on French will be about the strong emphasis on la Norme and about Paris's dislike for minority languages. Article 2 of the Constitution says that "La langue de la République est le français", a legal fiction used to repress minorities' cultural rights. A self-confident nation that likes its citizens free and diverse would never make such an authoritarian claim. Oh boy – this is not a smart move to find a French publisher, is it?

 

Lyda: Since we're both Dutch, I can ask you whether you believe that the more laissez-faire cultural style in the Netherlands has allowed for less standardization, less push from the powers-that-be to conform to one language standard, and more acceptance of varieties in the language.

Gaston: I believe the Dutch situation is more or less like that in English: there is a standard, but except in spelling, considerable variation is tolerated today, both regional and in levels of formality. What is peculiar about the linguistic culture of the Netherlands is the tendency to be lackadaisical about the future of the language. Universities are fast becoming English-only areas. As a result, the future elites will not be able to explain their fields of expertise to laypeople – that is to people like you me, because we're all laypeople in most fields. We may well lose the Dutch vocabulary for whole areas of human knowledge and endeavor. I may not lose sleep over it – I mean, climate change is worse – but I would consider it a great cultural loss.

 

Lyda: Since your travels and your language observations are so closely tied, do you consider yourself a linguist, or a geographer or what?

Gaston: I'm a linguist, but my type of linguistics requires a lot of historical and geographical knowledge. As it happens, one of my future projects will indeed concern itself with geography – with borders, to be exact. But I'd rather not elaborate at this stage.

 

Lyda: I've been particularly impressed by the style of the writing. You must have a very good translator for English. I'm very curious to read the Dutch version to see how some of the passages were written by you in the original.

Gaston: Thank you! Yes, Alison Edwards did an excellent job. So did most of the translators into other languages, by the way. It has been an absolute joy working with most of them, not only because they're such dedicated professionals, but also because having this book about languages translated into, say, Spanish or German has forced me to look at some languages afresh, from the perspective of these particular target languages. I've even been giving talks to translators in several countries about this aspect of Lingo.

 

Lyda: Anything else you'd like to add?

Gaston: One relevant fun fact is that I performed as a singer-songwriter for seven or eight years. I think it taught me the importance of drawing in an audience. The experience has definitely changed my writing, made it more personal and I hope more engaging. It has also taught me how to give talks. I used to be terrible at them, and now they're one of my favorite things to do.

YouTube, en essayant d'en capter le ton et les tournures de phrase. Vicente est également attentif au ton et au débit de ceux qu'il lui arrive d'interpréter. Si Trump crie, il crie aussi; si le candidat chuchote, il chuchote aussi. «Il nous faut mimer, en langue étrangère, ce qu'ils font,» dit-il. Vicente a interprété le débat présidentiel dans la même pièce que les interprètes d'Hillary Clinton et que le présentateur des informations du soir de la NBC, Lester Holt, qui animait le débat. Tous étaient assis face à face, si bien qu'ils pouvaient réagir en temps réel vis-à-vis des autres et du candidat qu'ils interprétaient. «En étant assis dans la même pièce, nos voix n'empiètent pas les unes sur les autres» explique-t-il. «Mais, si les candidats parlent en même temps, alors nous interprétons aussi en même temps.» Vicente exerce maintenant ce métier depuis près de cinquante ans. Au fil des ans, il a interprété de nombreux candidats et présidents, de Ronald Reagan à Barack Obama, en passant par Bill Clinton et George Bush père et fils. Toutefois, la politique n'intervient pas lorsqu'on interprète des personnalités politiques, dit-il. D'ailleurs, lui-même interprète des gens de tous bords et à l'occasion d'événements de toutes sortes. «Il faut faire fi de toute politique et se borner à faire son boulot».

 

 We are delighted to welcome to our blog a new contributor, Juliette Scott, Ph.D. In 2011, Juliette  created the blog From Words to Deeds: Translation and the Law, with the aim of building bridges between translation and legal professionals, and between academia and practice.

As a legal linguist with 25 years’ experience in translation and training, Juliette works for law firms, national and international institutions and companies of all dimensions, and is currently engaged in a new project for the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies at the University of London.

Looking to 2017, Juliette has set herself a new challenge – to address the gap in regular events for legal translation practitioners with a conference that reflects the philosophy of the blog: authoritative content, openness, and, last but not least, incorporating plenty of smiles.

The overall aim of the conference is to bring together practitioners from translation and the law with cutting-edge academics in the field, and to provide high quality CPD (continuing professional development), as well as initiating conversations across the three groups.

WordstoDeeds Conference 2017, Legal Translation to the Next Level, is taking place on 4 February 2017 at the prestigious Gray’s Inn, London where barristers have been trained for over six centuries.

————-

Gray's Inn has been home to lawyers since at least 1388. Today, the four Inns of Court (Lincoln's Inn, Inner Temple, Middle Temple, and Gray's Inn) are responsible for the education and training of barristers before and after their Call to the Bar. [1]

 

 

    

               Gray's Inn Hall                                          The inner square at Gray’s Inn                                                     

 (1:37 minutes)

 

The Foundations of the Inn

Gray's Inn originally formed part of the Manor of Purpoole belonging to the de Grey family, the probable source of the current name. Sir Reginald de Grey, who died in 1308, was Chief Justice of Chester and Sheriff of Nottingham.

In 1370 the Manor House is described for the first time as a "hospitium" (a hostel). It seems probable that the "hospitium" was a learned society of lawyers who housed apprentice lawyers in their ‘chambers’. The students used the Hall of the Manor as an ‘Inn’ in which to dine and hold their legal debates and ‘moots’ which formed part of their training.

 

The coats of arms of the four Inns of Court

 

The Golden Age

During the 16th century, the Inns prospered greatly, attracting a broader culture – good manners, courtly behaviour, singing and dancing came to the fore. The period was known as the “Golden Age” of the Inn, and Queen Elizabeth I herself was the Inn’s Patron. At this time the Inn was renowned for its “Shows” and there can be little doubt that William Shakespeare played in Gray’s Inn Hall, [2] where his patron, Lord Southampton was also a Member.

Tradition claims that the Great Screen was built from the timbers of the Nuestra Señora del Rosario, the flagship of the Andalusian Squadron of the Spanish Armada in 1588. Diagonal rope marks can still be seen on the woodwork.

The stained glass within the Hall was moved to safety during the Second World War and thus preserved.  Some of the exquisite windows in the Hall date back to 1462.

Did you know?

Those studying to become barristers must belong to one of the four Inns of Court and, since the 17^th century, in order to be called to the Bar, students must, as well as passing their exams, dine at their Inn – today at least 12 times.

 

Another unusual fact – traditionally English barristers must never shake hands. There is much speculation as to why, perhaps involving trust and ‘gentlemanly’ behaviour. Recently, however, some members of the profession have begun to break with this tradition.

 

Famous names at Gray’s Inn

Among those linked with Gray's Inn, Francis Bacon (1561-1626), statesman, philosopher, jurist, scientist, orator, linguist, Attorney General and Lord Chancellor of England was trained at the Inn and became its treasurer.

Leading figures also include five archbishops of Canterbury, and Master of the Inn Sir Winston Churchill and Mr Franklin Roosevelt first met in 1918 at the high table within Gray’s Inn Hall.

Juliette Scott

 

Bloggers notes:

[1] Gray's Inn has a special sentimental significance for me. My mother, who was apparently the first woman barrister in Britain (a distinction claimed by a contemporary of hers who also completed her law studies in 1922) was enrolled at Gray's Inn, which is the subject of this article.
Jonathan Goldberg

[2] In Great Britain and certain Commonwealth countries there are two kinds of lawyer: barristers and solicitors. Barristers (called trial attorneys in the United States) have two roles – to give legal opinions and to represent their clients before the Courts. The word “barrister” goes back to the time when courts had a wooden bar behind which the judge sat and barristers pleaded from the other side. The expression “to be called to the bar” is used in England and elsewhere to refer to a person that earns the right to enter the profession of barrister. Although the word “barrister" is not used in the United States, all American lawyers must be members of the Bar and registered with the Bar Association in order to practice.

Solicitors, on the other hand, deal with wills, conveyancing, and other legal duties. They cannot plead in Court, apart from certain cases in magistrates’ courts. The work of a solicitor might be compared with that of a notary in France. In the United States, notaries are not lawyers. Their duties consist of authenticating signatures, a service for which they generally charge 10 dollars.

A barrister’s offices are referred to as “chambers”. A person learning the profession of barrister is a “pupil” and the final stage of training at a barrister’s chambers is called “pupillage”; those learning to be solicitors are known as “articled clerks” or “trainee solicitors”.

In England at the present time, the professions of barrister and solicitor cannot be practiced concurrently.

[3] The article “Satirical expectations: Shakespeare’s Inns of Court audiences”, published by the Société Française Shakespeare considers the relationship between two plays and their late 1590s audiences. After establishing the influence of the men of the Inns of Court as an audience “segment” in this period, it argues that both Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night and Marston’s What You Will respond to some of the shared experiences and interests of this group.

 EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW

The interviewer  Trudy Obi	The interviewee  Catriona Seth

Trudy Obi holds a PhD in English literature from UC Berkeley, where she wrote a dissertation on conceptions of intellectual labor in early modern Europe. Her research interests include rhetoric and humanist pedagogy, French literature, and neo-Latin poetry. She has worked as an in-house French to English translator on an international public health project, drafting and translating communications between U.S. headquarters and field office staff in Haiti and Madagascar.  She currently works at a translation agency in Berkeley, California, as project manager, translator, and editor. She also serves as Publications Director of the Northern California Translators Association (NCTA).

Catriona Seth, Marshal Foch Professor of French Literature at the University of Oxford, works on recovering voices that have been traditionally excluded from the canon of eighteenth-century French literature. Her major research interests include the history of ideas, medical humanities, and autobiographical writing. In July 2017, she was elected a Fellow of the British Academy. A bibliography of the selected works of Professor Seth appears after this interview.

 

T.O. When did you decide to pursue the academic study of French, and how did that come about? 

I started by studying law, which I found extraordinarily boring; I didn’t stick to it long enough for it to become exciting. I’d always enjoyed literature, so I switched to studying French and Spanish. I was given a scholarship to spend a year in any French-speaking country I wanted. I decided to go for a master’s degree at the Sorbonne. I had no intention of becoming an academic then, but a few years later—after being a translator-interpreter and a management consultant—I asked my supervisor, “to become an academic, what should I do?” Long story short, I finished my thesis and sat the agrégation, the competitive examination necessary in order to teach French in France. I taught secondary school in France for a few years and then held positions at universities in Rouen and Nancy. I moved to Oxford nearly three years ago.

T.O. How did you find the transition from teaching at French universities to teaching at Oxford? Are the university systems in England and France very different?

French universities work on a catchment area system: you enroll in the institution nearest to your family home. In the UK, most students go away to university. This means that during term British students are generally around all the time and there is a real campus life. This is much less true in France. UK universities are selective. In France, on the whole they are not. Most academics in France have been through identical paths of study, unlike what happens in the UK or the US. I think the variety of backgrounds in the British system is a huge plus—and it is fascinating to have colleagues with very diverse backgrounds and approaches. Oxford has a particular advantage over many other institutions since much of the undergraduate teaching is based on the tutorial system so students have one-to-one or one-to-two classes and can tailor their own program to a large degree. This means that they are getting a very good grounding but also beginning to learn about research methods.

T.O. Your most recent work has focused on Germaine de Staël, née Necker, an eighteenth-century Swiss woman of letters. How did you come to study her?

I’d always been interested in the period of French literature which goes from before to after the Revolution. It often gets left out of literary histories. French literary study is based on centuries, so anyone who’s between centuries, like Staël or Évariste Parny, the subject of my Ph.D. thesis, is a complicated case and often gets dropped off either end.

A couple of years after I sat the agrégation, de Staël's novel Corinne was set as a text for the nineteenth century. I read it, and it was a revelation. It is an exciting and challenging book, full of interesting ideas.

T.O. What do you think is most valuable about de Staël?

She’s very human; she was at once very strong and yet had weaknesses. And she shows that you can be very strong because you acknowledge your weaknesses, because you’re prepared to affront them. And in that respect, she’s very much a role model for lots of people.

She was despised by many contemporaries who thought it was indecent for her to write about politics, that her lifestyle was too free because she had lovers openly. But I think she is someone who is sincerely trying, in her own way, to make the world a better place—through her writing, thinking about what an ideal society would be. She thinks people should be free, but also that you have to accept the need to give up freedoms for the common good. So she’s living in this perpetual tension, and has an extraordinary way of working through this philosophical notion of freedom and what we can do, and pushing boundaries.

T.O. Could you talk about some of her political writing?

One of the texts I find fascinating is Réflexions sur le process de la Reine, reflections on the Queen’s trial, published in August 1793. Marie-Antoinette is in prison, her fate undecided. Staël is saying, “I don’t think we should put her on trial; let me tell you why.” It’s a short but powerful text which speaks to two audiences. To the revolutionaries, she’s saying: “If you condemn her to death, you’ll make her a martyr.” She’s also saying to women: “Marie-Antoinette is the wife of the King; she has no political power. She’s a wife and mother like you and me—a mother separated from her children, a wife whose husband has been taken away and guillotined. We should show her some compassion.”

And that’s something vital for her—she believes there’s a place for compassion, for generosity, for feelings. And this is at a time when people are trying to think through rational ways of approaching politics. Staël thinks reason is important above all, but it has to be a generous reason, a reason nurtured and supported by generous feelings.

T.O. You have written that for Staël, “le roman a un potentiel politique actif” [“the novel has active political potential”].[1] How do Staël’s own novels participate in the political realm?

Let’s take the example of Corinne, her second novel, on its face simply a story of doomed love. But Corinne is set in Italy, at the time a series of small states. Corinne the character shows that Italy has a common past based on its literature and history—Italy is not so much a set of fractured states as one common destiny. Corinne was read by the Italians of the generation who went on to theorize what became the Risorgimento, the unification of Italy.

Delphine, her first novel, is set during the French Revolution and takes on all sorts of questions, like the promulgation of laws allowing divorce. This political content is fairly indirect, because these are letters exchanged by private individuals who are not particularly talking about what’s going on in the National Assembly.

T.O. And she’s writing Delphine after she realizes that the Revolution is not going to be liberating for women after all.

Yes, and this goes back to her pamphlet about Marie-Antoinette. She’s warning women, “if Marie-Antoinette is put to death, then everything which women might represent in society is also being sidelined.” That’s exactly what happened. The Revolution comes up with this vision of a virile republic, which Napoleon is only too happy to continue: a society in which women are allowed to stay at home and have lots of children and that’s about it.

Staël is extremely disappointed by this outcome. Later she writes that the years around the beginning of the Revolution were the best time ever to be young. She was in the thick of things: her father was a minister under the ancien régime, and during the Revolution her lover, Narbonne, was briefly a minister. She took part in all the political discussions behind the scenes. These were heady times: it looks as though there are going to be extraordinary possibilities for reform; it looks as though there’s a brave new world out there, and Staël is one of the people who can see it being born.

T.O. She was disillusioned by the Revolution, but what did she think of Napoleon?

Like many in her generation, she initially thinks Bonaparte might offer a solution. But then she discovers that he stands for everything she can’t bear—he’s exactly the opposite of what she’d hoped for. He wants things to be normalized, he wants a one-size-fits-all Europe where everybody would have the same languages and currencies. Staël is passionately interested in difference, in diversity. For her, if you’re different, it means you’re going to teach her something; difference should be celebrated and encouraged. So the vision of someone like Napoleon is anathema to her.

Some of her contemporaries said they both set out to conquer Europe, but they did it differently: Napoleon with his sabre and troops, Staël with her ideas and books.

T.O. Her work De l’Allemagne [On Germany] seems to be aimed at countering Napoleon’s view of the way Europe should be.

I don’t think Staël set out to write a book that was anti-Napoleon. She sent it to the printer in 1810 and the head of the police had the proofs destroyed. His excuse was “Ce livre n’est pas français,” (This book is not French). But I don’t think Staël is setting out to be anti-French. She’s very pro-French, but she’s also very conscious of the fact that there are things happening in Germany—in philosophy and literature in particular—which are not happening in France. She thinks if France can welcome ideas from overseas, it will be all the richer for it.

And because Napoleon set her up as his enemy, I think she became a sort of magnet for his opponents, or those who wanted to think about different ways of running a country, or imagining what moral values to defend. And Napoleon really didn’t need to treat her this way because she had no power, no troops. But on the other hand, she had every possible power, of course, because no troop can stop ideas circulating.

T.O. You are currently Co-Investigator on a project entitled “Dreaming Romantic Europe,” which was awarded a network grant by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council. Could you talk a bit about your plans for this project?

I’m working with Nicola Watson from the Open University, trying to think about Romanticism as a European rather than a national phenomenon. We’re asking people to choose an object—in the widest possible sense of the term—that for them embodies European Romanticism, and placing these objects in a virtual museum online.[2] We are asking scholars from a diverse range of fields and countries, and hope to showcase the diversity of European Romanticism.

We organized a conference at Chawton House [3] to look at the legacies of Staël and Jane Austen, who died within three days of each other. We wanted to look at the way the canon shapes our view, considering the contrasting fates of the world-famous writer who has now dropped off the map and the very discreet woman who lived in the English provinces but has become a major figure in world literature.

T.O. Could you say more about these contrasting fates?

When Staël died on 14 July 1817, she was the most famous woman in Europe, widely read, both admired for her talents and spirit and reviled by some for what was perceived to be her improper behavior—including her outspokenness on matters political. Austen, who died four days later, was unknown to the wider world. Those of her novels which had been published were unsigned. She had lived a discreet life in the English countryside. The contrasting fortunes of both women is remarkable: Staël has suffered partly as a result of having been seen as undignified by the Victorian age. Austen, on the contrary, was marketed by her relatives as a model of female propriety and her works as harmless sentimental stories. She has also benefitted greatly in recent years from some excellent adaptations of her novels for the screen. But the way the canon has operated shows how difficult it is for women to be accepted as engaged intellectuals.

 ———————-

[1] Catriona Seth, introduction to Œuvres, by Germaine de Staël, ed. Catriona Seth (Paris: Gallimard, 2017), xxvii

[2] RÊVE: The Virtual Exhibition 

[3] Chawton House, where Jane Austen spent the last eight years of her life, is in the village of Chawton, near Winchester, in the County of Hampshire.

——————

 

 Selected Bibliography

Staël, Œuvres (ed.), Paris, Gallimard, Pléiade, 2017.

“Jane Austen and Germaine de Staël: a tale of two authors,” The Conversation, July 17, 2017, 

“Enlightenment women’s voices,” in A History of Modern French Literature, ed. C. Prendergast, Princeton, 2017, pp. 330–50.

Évariste Parny (1753-1814). Créole, révolutionnaire, académicien, Paris: Hermann, 2014.

La Fabrique de l’intime. Mémoires et journaux de femmes du XVIIIe siècle, Paris: Laffont, Bouquins, 2013.

Marie-Antoinette. Anthologie et dictionnaire, Paris: Laffont, Bouquins, 2006.

An Interview With Jean Moorcroft Wilson

By Hannah Hunter

Siegfried Sassoon (1886 – 1967) was born in England to a Jewish father and a Catholic mother. He was a satirical poet who also wrote prose but who gained prominence for his poems of World War1– a war in which he performed acts of great bravery but which he managed to survive. He converted to Catholicism, which became a central part of his life.

Jean Moorcraft Wilson lectures in English Literature at Birkbeck College, University of London. She is married to the nephew of the distinguished British writer, Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), and runs a publishing house with her husband. Dr. Wilson is widely recognized as the foremost scholar on the great English war poet, Siegfried Sassoon. Years in the making, Siegfried Sassoon: Soldier, Poet, Lover, Friend (published in May 2014) encompasses the poet's complete life and works.

In this latest book, Wilson reconstructs Sassoon's experience going into the war as a patriotic youth and coming out as a pacifist. Upon his return home from the front, he expressed his pacifistic convictions in his poetry and gave a voice to the millions of his fellow veterans who had been permanently scarred- physically and emotionally- by the catastrophic conflict.

Jean MoorcraftWilson kindly agreed to be interviewed by LMJ's correspondent, Hannah Hunter, in advance of the centenary of the outbreak of World War I, with which Sassoon's life and poems are intricately linked.

 

 

H Hunter: How was Sassoon's poetry received, and how was it affected by his growing celebrity?

To begin with it was met with almost complete indifference, only Edmund Gosse bothering to read it, and his mother: bless her cotton socks! And then [of course removed here] later on, as the war progressed and as what he was saying made more of an appeal to people and made more sense to them, then his reception was based not so much on him personally but on what the poetry was saying. But then once they saw him, and saw how handsome he was, and how Byronic he was, they took more notice; Philpot, the painter said: "you are rather Byronic, aren't you?" [1] So I think that then he was regarded as a very Romantic figure, and that helped to promote his poetry.

Celebrity affected his life deeply, although it was his poetry that first got him noticed; but then of course he was a lovely man to have around because he was handsome, because he was a very attractive personality, and because he was socially OK, he could be presented as a kind of figure head. When the pacifists wanted to fight their cause they had Sassoon up there fighting for them, didn't they. You know, because he was a soldier, because he was young and good-looking, he got a good reception.

I have a talk that I give on Sassoon and on the other war poets, and I say that he's the icon really because he's got all the qualities; the only quality he doesn't have is that he didn't die young. He's of the upper/middle classes, his men adore him, he's brave, he gets the MC: all these things he does, he's a fantastic figure! And yet inside I think he's really very young and very naive.

 

H Hunter: When do you think that Sassoon was writing his best poetry?

Well I think there were two periods when he was most affected, and produced the best poetry, and the war was one of them. Edward Marsh [2] was absolutely right, he needed a proper subject for his poetry – he needed to focus on a particular subject – I mean you can't write forever about getting up at dawn, can you? So there is this sense that when he got to the war he had a cause. Then in the twenties when he left the army, and there was nothing to fight for, you feel him losing this cause; of course, it comes back in the 1930s when he starts writing his prose because again he has a subject, more or less the same one, the war. The other period, I think, is the period when he's thinking about whether he should go into the church or not, the Catholic Church.

I think when he tries in the 1920s to write his political satires, and the social satires, that actually it's not his best poetry. His best poetry in this period is the poetry about himself; and one of my favourites is When I'm Alone, which is a lovely poem that he wrote in the twenties. I think when he starts to be political that you feel that he's not really terribly in control of his material: that it's being done as an exercise.

Once he goes into the church in the mid-fifties, the poetry seems to me poor, because the tension has gone – he's made up his mind – and poetry seems to me to rely very much on tension. I think that his conflicts before he decides on the church translate into a poetry of tension and there's something real there, there's a subject; whereas before that he seems to be writing about whatever takes his fancy, because he's a bit desperate for a subject. This later conflicted poetry is worth looking at. Not all of it succeeds by any means, but I think it's interesting, and the equivalent – well not the equivalent but a shadow, a pale shadow if you like – of what he was doing in the First World War. But in both cases he had something to write about, something he cared about. I don't believe he really cared so much about the

other subjects: those that weren't the First World War or his entry to the church.

I don't think he's the greatest of our poets. (Maybe that's because I don't terribly like satire.) I prefer his prose. I think he's a very important poet, a highly significant poet, but he doesn't reverberate in the mind in that lyrical sense. Perhaps it's because I like lyric poetry, I mean I much prefer Edward Thomas or Wilfred Owen. I think Sassoon's poetry was essential and I believe it was very powerful and as satire it can't be bettered.

 

H Hunter: Sassoon is dubbed a 'war poet' but his work predates WW1 and outlives WW2. Do you think it undersells him to associate his work so exclusively with WW1?

It obviously does undersell him, but maybe understandably so. But what I think undersells him even more is the lack of recognition nowadays of his achievements as a prose writer. I don't know whether you've read Fox-Hunting Man but it's a wonderful book: it's humorous, it's well-informed, it tells you how he's feeling as a child, it's full of wonderful insights into things. It seems to me a marvellous picture of a pre-war world plus the beginning of the war, and it is a very, very good book. I also find Memoirs of an Infantry Officer very good in terms of what it says about war. But I think that's where the real underselling of Sassoon comes, in his prose writing. And yet people did know Fox-Hunting Man because it was set as a GCSE book. [2] He was undervalued as just a war poet, that's why I originally wrote my biography in two volumes as I thought the second part of his life was just as much of an achievement as the first and equally fascinating.

 

H Hunter: Who do you see as the most authentic father figure in Sassoon's life?

Oh Rivers without a doubt, yes, Dr. Rivers. [3] I think that their relationship was complicated by the fact that Rivers was probably deeply attracted to Sassoon. Sassoon's letters which talk about loving Rivers, and Rivers would save me if I go smash or bust, or whatever he says…I think Rivers understood him, and I love Rivers because Rivers is actually affected by Sassoon's point of view. I think there may have been more than a little attraction to each other; I mean more than is normal between a father and a son, maybe. The fact that Sassoon was older when he met Rivers probably made him more aware of himself and his homosexual tendencies; whereas with his groom, Tom Richardson, for example, in his youth, that was really a kind of father-figure. His father had left his mother before Sassoon was five, a terribly sad story, and he was left without a father but with a very handsome, commanding, powerful young man to look up to in Richardson– you know, youngish!

 

H Hunter: What reasons do you think lead Sassoon to join the Catholic Church?

I think when he goes into the church he does that for many reasons. One of them is a genuine feeling of being just without anybody, without anything. It seems to me that Sassoon went into the Catholic Church partly because he found in it a largely male society. He also wanted to be under orders; he loved the ritual of the Catholic Church which was why he didn't go into the Church of England like his mother. And he loved the monks, he loved being back in that male world: he loved cricket, he loved hunting, for similar reasons.

 

What do you enjoy most about writing biographies?

I love the detail, I love the connections, I love the people involved, I love discovering those connections, which I believe reflect a great deal more about your central character: who that person is friendly with, what he cares about, how he relate to the outside world.

I find Sassoon highly entertaining: I think he's very funny, he's a nice person. People often say to me: do you like the people you write about? So far yes I have, I liked Sassoon. I started off by thinking that he was a misogynist, and wondering whether I would get on with this. But I ended up by loving him!

 

[1] Lord Byron[1788-1824],

[2] Sir Edward Howard Marsh KCVO CB CMG (18 November 1872 – 13 January 1953) was a British polymath, a translator, arts patron and civil servant.

[3] W. H. R. Rivers (1864-1922) was an English anthropologist, neurologist ethnologist and psychiatrist   best known for his work treating World War I  officers who were suffering from shell shock. 

Our guest this month, Annie Freud is a distinguished British poet and one of the members of the Freud lineage to gain fame for their intellectual achievements. She is the daughter of painter Lucian Freud, the maternal granddaughter of sculptor Sir Jacob Epstein, and the great-granddaughter of Sigmund Freud. [1]

 Freud was educated at the Lycée Français in London and then studied English and European Literature at Warwick University. Since 1975, she has worked intermittently as a tapestry artist and embroiderer, in addition to publishing works of poetry : The Mirabelles, 2010 and The Remains, 2015. 

                                                            

"Freud's poems are chaotic, hectic and witty; are a romp through London, its melancholy and beauty; are a sumptuous tumble through love, appetites and desire." (The Poetry Archive.)

 

Our interviewer, Jean-Paul Deshayes, was a certified English teacher and teacher-trainer at the IUFM (Institut Universitaire de Formation des Maîtres), having also taught French in London for 10 years at high-school and university levels. Jean-Paul now pursues a career as translator for the magazine media. Although retired, he engages in diverse activities: exchanges with other translators, assorted reading, DIY and martial arts, as well as trips to London with his English wife to visit their daughter and granddaughter. He regards translation (from and into English) as a particularly stimulating intellectual exercise and devotes himself to it both professionally and for his personal pleasure. Dedicated to poetry in all its forms, he likes  Robert Browning, Robert Frost and the English romantic poets in equal measure. By coincidence, South Bourgogne, where he resides is the birthplace of Lamartine, whose magnificent poem, “The Lake” he likes to read regularly.

 

Mr. Deshayes conducted this interview in English and then translated the questions and answers into French. French translation.

 

LMJ: You were born in Belo Horizonte (Beautiful Horizon), Brazil. When we speak about your linguistic career, it will seem to the readers that that name [1] augured a wonderful professional career, which included developing your own highly successful translation agency, and the senior interpreting positions you held at the United Nations, culminating in your present position as “Head of Conference Management Service” for a UN specialized agency.

[1]  The name of the great discoverer whom we know as Magellan was Fernão de Magalhães.

EM : Yes, the capital of Minas Gerais, a state of rich culture, history, fertile land, great weather and awesome cuisine. BH is also surrounded by mountains, which I guess makes us quite curious and inquisitive as to what lies beyond those peaks. At age six, I moved to Brasilia, where I spent most of my life. In the heart of Brazil’s central plateau, the place stood in drastic contrast to my experience in my home town: vast expanses of land, desert-like humidity, scrubby vegetation and not a rolling hill in sight. That greatly expanded my horizons and set me well on my way to the many changes I would experience in life, geographically and otherwise. I later transited through California, Washington, D.C. and Geneva, where I currently live with my lovely wife, two of my three children and the family Yorkie. 

 

LMJ : You showed an interest in reading at a very young age. I understand that your father was the driving force behind that early start.

EM: Both of my parents had a passion for teaching and literature, and the house was filled with books. Mom would often recite poetry to us at bed time, and she would often give us books for gifts. There was a lot of music around the house, too. My dad, a true intellectual who would later become a political speechwriter, let me play around with his battered Remington typewriter, and I spent endless hours punching keys at random, in hopes of stitching words or phrases together, all to no avail. One day it all dawned on me. I must have been five or six, but I still remember it vividly. I was crossing an intersection in my hometown, my father towing me by the hand, when the hazy neon light in the distance suddenly collapsed into a meaningful string of letters: “c-i-n-e-m-a.” The feeling was transcendent, as if a veil had been lifted. 

LMJ : Did you learn English at school? How were you able to acquire such a command of English as allowed you to embark on an interpreting and translating career?

EM: Like any boy, I wanted to grow in my father’s image, and speaking English was one of the many features I admired him for. So, I took any opportunity to learn the language, and went way beyond the weekly classes I had at school. Cable TV and Internet were not yet around, and I had to make do with the occasional comic books we bought at the airport and a few extra teaching aids I could find around the house. Also, travelling was not as easy as it now is. I was 26 when I set foot outside of Brazil for the first time.

At around the same time, I checked out George Orwell’s 1984 from a local library and plowed through the book in English, armed with a shabby pocket Webster’s dictionary that still sits on my bookshelf. It was a tedious effort. I spent more time looking words up in the dictionary than I did reading the book! I had read the story in Portuguese, so I knew the plot well enough not to get lost. Upon finishing the book, my level of English had increased tenfold. 

LMJ : What was your first interpreting assignment?

 

EM : My very first gig as an interpreter was in 1992, and I got to interpret for none other than Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh. I was then a clerk at the Lower House of the Brazilian Parliament, and known to some to speak good English. The visit was announced at the last minute, and they had to improvise someone in the role of interpreter. They asked me if I would do it, and I jumped at the opportunity (as Thucydides once said, “ignorance is bold!”) Before I knew it, I was squeezed between the Prince and the Speaker of the House, in a room packed solid with journalists and TV crew. At that point, I seriously doubted my judgment (what was I thinking!), but there was no turning back.

 

LMJ:  How did you manage that assignment?

I survived it mostly unscathed, but towards the end I found myself confronted with a rather delicate situation. With his proverbial sarcasm, His Royal Highness let slip an unbecoming joke that might have been regarded as offensive. I hesitated for a second, wondering whether I might have misheard him, and raking my mind for an acceptable rendering. I panicked at the thought of eventually causing a diplomatic incident that could end my career before it even started. I eventually chose to omit the unflattering remarks altogether. In retrospect, I think I did well. Diplomatic interpreting – which was what I was doing that day – requires the interpreter to intuit what is really meant through and beyond words. I took a chance, and even made a name for myself as a self-assured professional. Little did they know I was just trying to cover my back.

I thus became the de facto interpreter at the Office of the Speaker. And that’s how it all started.

Details of that first, chance encounter with Prince Philip are the first chapter in my book, Sua Majestade, o Intérprete (Parabola Editorial, 2007). 

 

 

LMJ : You began to acquire your academic qualifications relatively late in life.

In the early 1990s, in Brazil, college-level training for interpreters – or translators, for that matter – was hard to come by. You had to learn by doing and in the process run a lot of risks. I jumped into the water and, much to my surprise, I managed to swim.

After interpreting successfully for about 15 years, and running my own translation agency for about as long, I started offering intensive workshops that became very popular for aspiring interpreters in Brazil. I had built a solid reputation in Brazil, and travelled extensively in the U.S. and Lusophone Africa. I had published a book on interpreting and I was presenting myself as an authority in the field. Yet I lacked the right academic credentials.

I then decided to put my career on hold and go for the right degree. And in 2007, at the age of 44, I relocated with my family to California, to pursue an MA in Conference Interpretation at the Monterey Institute of International Studies. I was put through a series of rigorous translation exams, consecutive and simultaneous interpretation, and was finally admitted into the Advanced Entry program with English as an A language and Spanish as my B 

Soon after graduation, I started collaborating with MIIS as an Adjunct Professor, offering seminars and organizing a roundtable to discuss the prospects of a future Portuguese program at MIIS – which materialized a few years later. 

 

LMJ : Did your MA from Monterey advance your career?

EM :  Oh yes, and faster than I thought possible. On the very day I received my MA I got to perform in front of a panel of observers from the UN, the State Department and the EU institutions. As soon as I got out of the booth, I was offered the opportunity to sit the State Department conference-level interpretation tests in Washington, D.C. (by invitation only), which I passed a few weeks later, with flying colors. Soon thereafter, I started to receive offers for high-level conferences from State and other Washington-based organizations.

My credentials and hard work had prepared me for that opportunity, but I would be remiss not to acknowledge the generosity of a few chief interpreters who opened their doors to me. My colleagues were also very welcoming and assisted me greatly as I settled in Washington. 

 

LMJ: You have interpreted for many VIPs, including Presidents Barack Obama, Cristina Kirchner, Lula da Silva and other heads of State. 

EM: I interpreted at several world summits, like the G20, the Nuclear Summit, the World Bank and IMF annual meetings, to name a few. 

LMJ : From what languages to what languages did you interpret? 

EM :  I worked mostly from English and Spanish into Portuguese, and from Portuguese into English. I also had a chance to render a short speech by Berlusconi from Italian into Portuguese at one of those summits. 

 

LMJ : Did you get to meet any of those heads of state?

EM : To say that I met them is inappropriate, but I did get to shake hands and rub shoulders with a few world leaders during those summits. I also got to interact professionally with a few of them, one on one, at bilateral negotiations (e.g. former President Lula, the Dalai Lama, and Prime-Minister Paul Martin.)

 

 

 

 

 

    

 

With  the Dalai Lama (and the Speaker of the House, Mr Michel Temer — who is currently the Vice-President of Brazil), 1997.

President Lula, first Lady Marisa, and pop singer Lenny Kravitz, Brasilia, 2003.

EM: Another interesting encounter took place at the end of the Pittsburgh Summit, in 2009. Coming back from the closing press conference, President Obama ran into a large group of interpreters backstage and insisted on taking a picture with the “translators.” I was the first to shake his hand, and we exchanged a few pleasantries. The moment was captured by the White House photographers.

  

The group picture with President Obama in the back, slightly to the right, was taken at the end of the G-20 Summit in Pittsburgh (2009), as he was coming back from a Press Conference. The picture was taken by the White House photographers, at the President’s request. 

 

LMJ : You work for ITU, one of the 15 UN specialized agencies, which include the ILO, UNESCO, WHO, etc. Some of these are in Geneva but others are in Paris, Vienna, London, Rome or Montreal. www.itu.int/en/about/Pages/default.aspx

 

EM : Yes. In 2010 I was appointed Chief Interpreter of the International Telecommunication Union, the UN specialized agency for information communication technologies, with headquarters in Geneva. My job was to manage a pool of some 500 freelance interpreters who regularly assist us, in the six official languages of the United Nations. I took office just two weeks before the Plenipotentiary Conference, in Guadalajara, where I had to manage a team of 74 interpreters, most of whom I hardly knew. The most recent four-yearly cycle of UIT conferences culminated in another successful Plenipot (October-November, 2014), and in 2015 I was promoted to the post of Head, Conference Management Service. I continue to indirectly oversee the interpreting operations, as the new chief interpreter reports to me, but I now have a larger scope that includes conference logistics and room management.

ITU Plenipotentiary Conference 2014 (PP-14)
Busan, South Korea

LMJ : Portugal has a population of over 10 million and Brazil has a population of 200 million. There are five former Portuguese colonies in Lusophone Africa, and other small remnants of Portuguese colonialism in Asia.  How does Portuguese rank as an international language?

 

EM : There is no denying the geopolitical importance of Brazil’s continental dimensions and the role it plays in stabilizing Latin America. The same can be said of Angola, in Africa. Brazil has more than once been a non-permanent member of the Security Council, which bears testimony to the importance it plays in ensuring the safety of our world. I believe Portuguese will eventually become a UN language. Perhaps the Community of Portuguese Speaking Countries (CPLP) will intensify its role in promoting Portuguese, which is certainly one of the most poetic and beautiful romance languages out there. 

LMJ : To end this interview with a question relating to both your fields of expertise – translating and interpreting – would you agree that interpreters are usually extroverts whereas translators are usually introverts?

EM: I consider myself an extrovert, a true people person, and I have worn both hats (I was a translator for many years before I started interpreting), so I guess the distinction doesn’t always apply. In fact, some of the best interpreters I have worked with tend to be rather quiet and withdrawn.

E X C L U S I V E   I N T E R V I E W 

 

The following interview was conducted by Skype between Los Angeles and Cartagena, Spain. 

 

                                                              

 

 

 

             

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Geraldine Brodie – The interviewee                      J. G. – The interviewer   

 

LMJ:  You are a Fellow of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales and a member of the Chartered Institute of Taxation. Did you study and practice Accounting before you came to the humanities? Did you abandon the former in favour of translation studies?

GB: In some ways I’ve had a circular career. I read English at Oxford, specialising in Old English and Old French language and literature. I’ve always had an interest in language, translation, interculturality and how they affect the way literature crosses borders.

After graduation, I trained as an accountant with the firm that is today KPMG. It wasn’t particularly unusual to do that with an English degree – accountants have to communicate well, and be systematic and enquiring. I was able to use my language skills there, running an audit in Paris. I stayed with the firm for 12 years, including two years in New York. While there, I took the opportunity to learn Spanish, at what is now the Instituto Cervantes.

That Spanish ultimately led me back to university. I signed up for a diploma in Spanish to improve my focus on learning, which reminded me how much I enjoyed studying languages. I applied for a place on the Comparative Literature MA programme at University College London; I was intrigued by the Translation Studies element, which seemed to address the interlingual cultural issues that I had begun to explore at Oxford, and continued to interest me as I worked in different environments. From there, I didn’t look back. I went on to a Ph.D. in Translation Studies, and stayed on as a Teaching Fellow. I’m now a Lecturer in Translation Theory and Theatre Translation. I did all this part-time, as I continued to work as an accountant, and I still have business interests.

 

LMJ: Your academic field presumably rests upon two pillars – theatre and translation. How did you develop an interest in each of those and how did you go about combining them?

GB: I inherited my interest in theatre from my mother. One of my childhood treats was to go with her to the Birmingham Repertory Theatre, and I joined their youth programme (then called Theatre 67) when I was a teenager. An early highlight was a visit from Richard Chamberlain as Hamlet. My mother and I still enjoy the theatre together – we go to the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon when we get the chance.

An essay on tragedy for the Comparative Literature MA was the catalyst for me to combine theatre and translation. I decided to compare plays by Ibsen and Lorca, and when I realised how many, sometimes startlingly different, English translations were available, I wanted to investigate and understand the translation process.

Of course, I’m only describing my own journey – I’m by no means the first to notice this phenomenon. In fact, I learned a great deal from Manuela Perteghella on a short course she taught at London Metropolitan University, and she also introduced me to academic theatre translation research circles when I was beginning my Ph.D.

LMJ: Could you define your field of study and research for the 10 years you have been with UCL.

GB: I find theatre a particularly rewarding site to study translation, because, as I’ve mentioned, new translations tend to be commissioned alongside each new production, especially for classic plays. For example, one of the books I use in teaching my undergraduate module European Theatre in Translation is Romy Heylen’s “Translation, Poetics, and the Stage: Six French Hamlets”, in which the author discusses successive translations of Shakespeare’s play over two centuries. In the other direction, tickets are currently being sold in London for Molière’s “The Miser” in a new adaptation by Sean Foley and Phil Porter. “The Miser” has already been translated into English on many occasions, but for this new production starring Griff Rhys Jones there will also be a new text. What does this continual cycle of reinvention tell us about the nature of translation (and theatre)?

My research investigates this procedure: how these translations are commissioned; which plays and translators are selected; where translated productions are staged; who are the translators and other theatre practitioners collaborating in the process. I am particularly interested in the progression from the initial play in another language to the translated text that is performed, and the terminology that is applied to describe the process.

In London, translation into English for the theatre often takes place via a “literal translation”, prepared by an expert in the source language, which is then used by a writer to create a performance text. The result of this process is usually billed as a version or an adaptation rather than a translation – but not always; so it is difficult to work out how the production you are seeing has been translated. A current example of this is the work of the young French playwright Florian Zeller: three of his plays have recently been performed in London, all translated by the writer and director Christopher Hampton, who translates from French and German. And yet the most recent of these plays, “The Truth”, is billed as an adaptation. Why? In trying to answer questions like this, I am hoping to make the intercultural movements in theatre and translation more apparent and highlight the expert and very creative work of all the participants involved. That should include the literal translators, who are not given enough credit for their contribution, in my opinion. My book, “The Translator on Stage”, which I am currently writing for Bloomsbury, delves into these details.

LMJ: Were you ever able to use techniques learnt in accounting for your research or writings in translation studies?

GB: I use my accountancy skills all the time as a lecturer and researcher in Translation Studies. It’s useful to have a background in planning, budgeting and project management when organising teaching programmes and funded research activities. However, I have also drawn on my experiences investigating and documenting systems, learned when I was auditing organisations of all sizes from sole traders to multinational corporations, to research the field of theatre translation. My aim is to establish and record procedure, and then see whether I can find patterns or trends of behaviour.

So I don’t restrict my research to a particular language, historical period or genre of writing – I look at what is actually taking place on stage. With its very active and in some ways diverse theatre scene, London is a fruitful research ground for theatre translation. I estimate that around 12% of productions are derived from another language. These range from the classical plays of antiquity, such as Sophocles and Euripides, through historically renowned playwrights – Racine, Schiller, for example – to the more recent canon: Ibsen, Chekhov, Strindberg, Lorca, Brecht are all regularly performed. But there are also instances of lesser-known or contemporary playwrights being given rare or first performances in the English language. Plays do tend to come from the same languages, though -French, German, ancient Greek, Italian, Russian, Spanish. The Scandinavian languages are particularly well represented by number of productions. Of course, there are always exceptions to these generalised trends, and initiatives aiming to broaden the range.

 

LMJ: The book “Words, Images and Performances in Translation”, (to which you contributed a chapter, “Theatre Translation for Performance: Conflict of Interests, Conflict of Cultures”) demonstrates the ways in which words, images and performances are translated and reinterpreted in new socio-cultural contexts. Can you explain that concept?

GB: Anyone who has ever tried to translate knows that translation is far more than linguistic code-shifting. Replacing a word, phrase or sentence in one language with a similar unit in another is only the beginning of the communicative transfer. The book considered translation from a wider perspective, discussing how other media, such as artwork or advertising images, can be translated – and why the cultural implications of these activities are also relevant to what is traditionally thought of as translation.

My chapter on theatre translation discussed how a range of factors beyond code-shifting influenced the representation of translated theatre, which of course is a visual, aural and textual translation.

LMJ: You coedited a special issue of the Journal of Adaptation in Film and Performance on "Martin Crimp – playwright, translator, translated", with Marie Nadia Karsky of Université Paris 8. Can you tell us about the symposium that took place on which that issue was based and on your collaboration with Marie Nadia Karsky?

GB: As so often happens in academia, this collaboration came about serendipitously.

Marie Nadia was a co-organiser of a symposium at Paris 8 where I had been invited to speak about theatre translation in London. Over a cup of coffee after the event, we discovered a shared interest in Martin Crimp’s translation of Molière’s “The Misanthrope”, from our different language perspectives.

A year or so later, I was invited to apply for funding from the Institut Français du Royaume-Uni to run a series of workshops at UCL developing links with French academic organisations and exploring directions for research collaborations. I immediately thought of Marie Nadia and our shared interest, which both of us had been developing in the intervening period. Marie Nadia, together with colleagues from the French research group TRACT (Traduction et Communication Transculturelle Anglais-Français/Français-Anglais), had been working on a project with Masters students to translate Crimp’s version of “The Misanthrope” back into French. I had been investigating Crimp’s voice as a writer as it is revealed in his own plays, his translations from French and his versions from other languages where he has used a literal translation (these include German, ancient Greek and Russian).

Between us we put together a two-day workshop with presentations by academics from three French and three UK universities; a bilingual theatre workshop led by Anne Bérélowitch (director of the theatre company L’Instant Même) with French and English actors, exploring “The Misanthrope” in Molière’s original, Crimp’s translation, and the “back-translations” by the students; and finally a conversation about translation between the critic Aleks Sierz and Martin Crimp himself, to which the public was invited.

We had a very exciting two days, full of energy. Many of the students who had worked on the translations came over to London on Eurostar with the academic presenters and the French theatre practitioners. The Birmingham School of Acting provided student actors, and all mixed in with the UK academics and UCL staff and students. We drank a lot of coffee and ate substantial quantities of cheese, thoughtfully brought over by the French students.

The special issue of the journal publishes expanded versions of the academic presentations given during the symposium, and a transcript of Aleks Sierz’s interview with Martin Crimp. We hope it captures some of the energy and the range of conversations during the symposium. Marie Nadia and I very much enjoyed our collaboration, and are already discussing our next venture.

     
     Marie Nadia Karsky                  Martin Crimp

LMJ: Translation Studies are said to be expanding their boundaries. In what directions are they moving?

GB: Translation Studies has always been an interdisciplinary field. Just as translation itself adapts to fit the environments in which it takes place, the academic discipline is evolving to reflect new routes of enquiry. The fact that UCL now offers both MA and MSc programmes in Translation is evidence of the numerous opportunities for study and research.

In addition to the broadening of translation within the Arts and Humanities to include performance, artworks, images and other intercultural movement that I mentioned earlier, there is also an increasing awareness of the advances of technology in translation. This is significant for the use of digital tools for translation – how will Google Translate impact future translations and translators? Technological advances also present an opportunity to carry out new science-based methods of research. My UCL colleague Claire Shih, for example, sees translation as a cognitive human behaviour that can be investigated using digital research instruments, such as screen recording, key logging and eye tracking software.

These different areas also speak to each other: advanced digital tools can be used to translate theatre in the form of intermedial surtitles; computational software can be harnessed to investigate style in literary translation. It is this interdisciplinarity that I find exciting about Translation Studies as a discipline. Ultimately, though, it is the everyday presence of translation in our lives, mostly overlooked, that for me is endlessly captivating, and I’m pleased if I can pass on any of that fascination to my friends, family and, most of all, my students.

 
Blog footnote:

UCL is  a public research university in London.  It makes the contested claims of being the third-oldest university in England, and the first to admit women. UCL has over 100 departments, institutes and research centres.  It has around 35,600 students and 12,000 staff. Its alumni include the  "Father of the Nation" of each of India, Kenya and Mauritius, the founders of Ghana, modern Japan and Nigeria, the inventor of the telephone, and one of the co-discoverers of the structure of DNA, as well as at least 29 Nobel Prize winners.