Chad Taylor

All we'll ever have is now


The French government has moved to seize copyright on books published prior to 2001. From the UK blog Authors Rights:
"The Bibliothèque Nationale de France is to compile a freely accessible online database of all works published in France before 1 January 2001 that are not being commercially distributed by a publisher and are not currently published in print or digital form... Once a book has been listed in the database for more than six months, the right to authorize its reproduction and display in digital form will be transferred to a collective management organisation approved by the Minister of Culture."
The French government has been struggling to control the internet. The Hadopi agency has complained about the workload of tracking pirates (18 million complaints; 10 users charged) and the three-strikes law was suspended in 2011 when the contractor administering the system failed to protect its data.

Four of my novels have been published in France -- Shirker, Electric, Departure Lounge and The Church of John Coltrane -- all after 2001, and all still in print (Coltrane is still French only). It will be interesting to see if the Ministry of Culture initiative reaches a compromise similar to the one made for the Google Library Project.

And Stanza has been crashing on my iPod. Stanza is the e-reader I use when I want to strain my eyes on my very battered iPod touch (iOS 4.3) reading Sherlock Holmes, Aristotle's Poetics, Edgar Allan Poe and other Gutenburg Project favourites. More importantly I used it to teach myself about e-publishing and re-issue some of my early short stories on Kindle.

After Amazon bought Lexcycle in 2009 there was chatter on the boards that they had killed the e-reader, one of the best for iOS. But it seems Stanza has been fixed -- if only for iOS 5. Another incentive to upgrade to an iPad, then. Or to just keep reading them on paper.

(Pictured: Alphaville. Still one of the best movies, ever.)

Translation

I've yet to meet every one of my translators. Strangers assume that the process of having your words swapped into a different language is intimate but I've found it's almost the opposite. The publisher gives the translator the novel and the translator comes back to the author with questions, and even then only sometimes. My French translators have had many questions, the Italians a few and the Germans hardly any. The biggest sticking problems with language have been those between editors in the UK and the US but even these have been merely a matter of a few words or a local phrase. In such cases the most important language becomes that of the printer, "STET" and "COLLOQ" being two useful examples.

Overall the experience of having my work transformed so efficiently and without fuss has been a nice reality check. No matter how much you sweat over a novel, in the end that's all it is: just another book.

My French translators Anouk Neuhoff and Isabelle Chapman speak English as well as I do plus a few other languages besides. I blame them for my dismal French because they are excellent conversationalists and even better hosts. Whenever I've attempted a few phrases in their presence their comments are nothing but kind. Anouk translated Shirker and Electric for Christian Bourgois in Paris, and Isabelle translated Departure Lounge. It's my impression that each has imparted her own style to my work but I don't know what that might be. I do know that in France even readers of popular fiction can pay as much attention to the translator's name as they do to the author's. Which is logical if not sobering.

The effects of translation on a writer's work can of course be radical. A good modern example is the Japanese author Haruki Murakami whose novels lurch in accessibility depending on whether his translator is Jay Rubin or Alfred Birnbaum. Rubin's English language version of Murakami is poetic and calm but Birnbaum's, I'm told, is "more Japanese." If readers of Lugenspiele (Pack of Lies - Aus dem neuseelandischen Englisch von Dietmar Hefendehl) or Fuori dal tempo (Shirker - traduzione di Massimo Ortelio e Annamaria Raffo) are experiencing a similar disjunction I can only be thankful to be in such company.

As a writer I owe a great deal to works in translation. When I was growing up in south Auckland the local cinema screened Italian spaghetti westerns and Hong Kong martial arts pictures in which the overdubbed dialogue or subtitles was an integral part of the viewing experience. Similarly the local library held an oddly comprehensive collection of French and Japanese novels which I enjoyed as much for the clarity of the translator's prose as I did for the stories. There were doubtless gaps in meaning but like scratches in a favourite vinyl LP or reflections in a painting's glazing the disjunctions seemed a natural part of the work.

Subsequently the thought that a novel might be translated has encouraged me to focus not on the details of language so much as the broader story. Even if my words will be changed I know the brute narrative will survive. The first question an author is always asked is "What's it about?" so it helps to be able to say in English or any other language. Travellers to foreign lands know how far they can spin out simple phrases such as "Do you have a table?" and "What time is the ferry?" Authors likewise could do well practicing the sentence beginning "My novel is..." Try it some time. Translating the words is easy: finding them in the first place is hard.

(Sunday Star Times, 2004)