My interest and work in Cambodia has led me to many unimagined places. Most recently, I found myself at the International Translation Day conference which was organised by English PEN and Free Word. This day-long event was full of panel discussions, networking possibilities, question and answer periods, and lots of coffee.  In that way it was like any other conference dedicated to a specific industry or community, and the world of literary translators is a much larger and more cohesive group than I had ever imagined. So, I felt a bit like an outsider standing behind a back door, softly knocking to see if there was any way in. Happily, it is a very welcoming group and I learned quite a bit.

Most writers come to translation because they find a specific author or body of work which they love and want to champion. Interestingly, their fluency in their non-native language is not a given nor is it always necessary (although the fact that I am now actually learning — or trying to — learn Cambodian is extraordinarily helpful, if  not crucial). As I had originally suspected, this is especially true with poetry, which is what brought me to north London at nine o’clock in the morning in the first place. But although I am most interested right now in poetic translation, I don’t have a specific writer I want to champion. I have an entire  country. My hope is to find some poets writing in Cambodian who I can work with to bring their poetry to the English-speaking world. Finding these poets is turning out to be more of a struggle than I had originally believed, but whenever I discuss this project with other writers and now with people in all aspects of the translation world — from writers to reviewers to publishers and editors — I am more convinced than ever that this is a project worth pursuing. At the conference I learned of several organizations which could help me in my search for Cambodia writers. But of more general interest, I think, is what I learned about how to approach the task/art of translating poetry, and this is what I thought I’d outline in today’s post.

I went to a session specifically on Poetry in Translation, which has led by Claire Pollard and Stephen Watts, two poets whose own poetry has led them to an interest in translation. Here is some of what they said:
    * Poetry readers and writers tend to be “word geeks” and therefore tend to mistrust and often dismiss translations as not being “real”. Any poem which is translated must first and foremost work in English. As George Szirtes wrote in the pamphlet we received about the Stephen Spender Prize for Poetry in Translation of which he was one of the judges in 2010:
     Reading translations of poems is not very different from reading poems. If it isn’t a poem we seem to be reading, the chances are the translator has missed something…reading a translation by a poet we don’t know is like reading an entirely new poem, and we are or are not captivated by it.
    * When deciding what to do when a poem has been written in a form which may or may not be found in English, the decision to use a form for the translation must be made on a poem by poem basis. You must ask, what is the most important aspect of this poem? Is it the form or not? What is it that is most interesting about the poem?
    * Poets regularly work with literal translations of the poems, and if possible, directly with the translators/interpreters themselves in order to create their English-language poems. But “translations” are different from “versions.” Translations require a fidelity to the culture, sound and meaning of the original language. Although the translated poem must work as a poem itself, the original language, its nuances and references must take precedence.
    * Poetry magazines are actively looking for translations. They want more than they are offered!
    * Most translations still come from European languages. There is a growing interest and thirst for poetry in Asian and African languages.
    * Don’t forget that many people writing in their native languages actually live in Britain and write for their own communities. Seek them out.

Indeed, all of this has made me even more determined to bring the literature of Cambodia to the English speaking world, but not only to help make us more aware of who the Cambodians are and what their lives are like, but also to encourage them in their own writing, letting them know that there are those outside of their borders who are listening.