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Photographs by Richard Nichols
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The art of literary translation is famously underappreciated. But as Susan Caba discovers, St. Louisans Philip Boehm and Pamela Carmell are feeling a little more love lately, not least from the NEA
Consider the Polish word szafa—in English it could be called a wardrobe, a cabinet, a type of closet or even the French armoire. Now consider that you are translating into English a Polish novel in which a refugee from Warsaw finds such a piece of furniture in an apartment vacated by Germans, who would have called it a schrank. Got that?
And, of course, you want to preserve the flow of the novel, to make it as compelling in English as it is in Polish. Which word do you choose?
Welcome to the world of literary translation, where the task can be as minute as choosing the perfect word for a piece of furniture or as large as conveying the facts of a narrative, as well as the rhythms. The aim is to translate a piece of literature into English so artfully that all a reader notices is how well the original author writes.
That’s the world of Philip Boehm and Pamela Carmell, St. Louis residents who will each receive the top award of $20,000 from the National Endowment for the Arts this year. The NEA awarded just 14 of the hotly sought-after grants, the most prestigious in the world of translation. Boehm’s is for translation of a best-selling German novel and Carmell’s for a novel by a renowned Cuban author.
“You have to hear the voices of the original and translate them into language your audience can recognize,” says Boehm, a playwright and theater director. His translations of Polish and German novelists—as well as Kafka—have won many awards. “This book is entrusting itself to you. You want to be true to the text, but also true to the nuances of the author’s meaning and rhythms.”
(And by the way, in his translation of Death in Danzig by Stefan Chwin—in which the refugee from Warsaw finds the German’s schrank? Boehm used the word armoire.)
Boehm pursued languages—he speaks German and Polish with near native fluency and “gets along” in others—out of an interest in international theater, specifically to study at the State Academy of Theater in Warsaw, Poland.
Normal daily life was highly limited, as the military tried to crush the growing pro-democracy movement. Telephone lines were disconnected, mail was censored and curfews were imposed. Despite the restrictions—or perhaps because of them—Poland’s theater scene was vibrant.
“Theater was meaningful in Poland then in a way that Arthur Miller plays were meaningful in the U.S. in the 1950s,” Boehm remembers. “At a time of great material want, there was a great spiritual need for theater.”
Now a playwright himself, Boehm is founder and artistic director of Upstream Theater. Its mission is to bring an international perspective to the St. Louis cultural scene—and Boehm says the skills he uses in staging plays are similar to those required to translate a book.
“There is definitely an overlap. Each one is an interpretation of another person’s work,” Boehm says. “In translating a novel, knowledge of the original language is just the first step. It’s the ability to write in your own language that can make or break the success of the original work.”
His NEA grant is for translation of Settlement, by German playwright and author Christoph Hein. The novel is the story of one man—and through him, the story of East Germany—told in the voices of five narrators. Boehm also translated Hein’s 1992 novel, The Tango Player.
Boehm took up German in high school in Houston, then studied both history and German at Wesleyan University. He met his Polish-born wife, Elzbieta Sklodowska, during graduate school at Washington University (where she is now head of the department of Romance languages).
He has translated, or is in the process of translating, a variety of novels, many of them involving World War II, the Holocaust and their repercussions. Words to Outlive Us is an anthology of eyewitness, contemporary accounts of Jews in the Warsaw ghetto. “They are very gripping, very hard to read and very hard to translate,” Boehm says. And he’s working on a novel by Gregor von Rezzori, set in a prewar corner of Europe, in a world that no longer exists. Boehm is almost as familiar with the prewar topography of some central European settings as he is with the locations as they are now.
“If you’re interested in amassing encyclopedic facts that have very little bearing on daily life in St. Louis, become a translator,” he says. But that knowledge is vital. “Too often, translators don’t recognize references to famous facts, names or places—and they make the most embarrassing blunders.”
Language skills are, of course, important. But translation is more than finding the correct word. “You have to hear the voice in the original language and then rewrite it in English.” He offers a reverse example, a line from Sam Shepard’s play True West, which Boehm staged in Poland. One character utters this immortal line about a 1940 Ford, for which there is no exact translation: “Sucker hauled ass, didn’t it?”
Boehm says he rarely works with a living author: “The great ones … show great trust in their translators. But now and then you’ll meet up with one armed with just enough English to make life difficult.”
“My writer is Cuban. He’s dead,” says Pamela Carmell, who teaches Spanish at Webster Groves High School.
She’s referring to José Lezama Lima, the patriarch of Cuban letters. A poet, essayist and author of two novels, Lezama Lima ranks among the greats—Mario Vargas Llosa, Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel García Márquez—of Latin American literature. The Argentine novelist Julio Cortazar called him “the father of us all.”
His second novel, Oppiano Licario, was published in Spanish in 1977, but until now, no one was willing to take on the job of translating it into English.
Even in Spanish the language is “convoluted,” and the author assumes his audience will catch allusions to philosophy, religion, classical literature and political history. This is the work for which Carmell is receiving her NEA grant. She decided to tackle the translation at the urging of her mentor, Margaret “Petch” Peden.
The story revolves around the lives of a privileged Cuban and his circle of friends, as they are guided by the main character—who is dead and whose spirit is channeled by his sister. The themes of the novel, or at least one of them, is sexual identity.
“I just found out that it is based on Ovid,” Carmell says, adding that she is on her fifth or sixth revision and probably has another year of work ahead of her.
Carmell studied Spanish and education at the University of Missouri. There she met Peden, who persuaded her to try literary translation. She subsequently enrolled in the MFA program at the University of Arkansas, where translation is included in the creative writing program.
Her first published translation was the poetry of Belkis Cuza Malé, a Cuban refugee who fled her country during the 1979 Mariel boatlift. Touched by one of Malé’s poems, Carmell tracked her to New Jersey and asked to translate her work. “I think that’s what translators are hooked by—the personal connection,” Carmell says.
Since then, Carmell has veered among Spanish, Cuban and Latin American writers, as well as between novelists and poets, fitting her translating work into weekends (six hours a day) and summers. Her first full-length book, The Last Portrait of the Duchess of Alba, by the Uruguayan author Antonio Larreta, was published in 1988; The Last Cato, a historical mystery by Matilde Asensi, came out in 2005; she recently finished With Eyes and Soul: Images of Cuba, the work of Afro-Cuban poet Nancy Morejón.
“It’s important that you have a writer that fits you,” Carmell says. “I’ve had good fits with all kinds of writers. I’ve tried with others and just can’t find the fit.”
She, too, faces the dilemma of making two languages dance to the same rhythm, especially with Oppiano Licario. “Do I stay true to the style of the original, with its jarring quirks? Or do I smooth it out a little … or even a lot, to make it more commercially viable? What am I going for?”
She says her confidence in making those decisions flows from her years in the translation/creative writing program at the University of Arkansas: “We became writers there,” she says. “We are writers.”
