The Reciprocal Translation Project

[Luxi]

Quote

 

"In The Reciprocal Translation Project, six Chinese and six American poets have translated each other’s works. Since few of these poets speak both languages, bilingual specialists have fashioned literal translations including several options for words that have multiple meanings. These literal translations have been given to three poets in the other language to write poetic translations."

 

How did it go? Here's a review, fresh from LARB's China Channel:

 

Wrestling with the Text - Eleanor Goodman reviews The Reciprocal Translation Project

 

Quote

"One hardly knows where to begin with this tangle..."

Indeed.

https://chinachannel.org/2018/07/30/wrestling-with-the-text/

 

[陳德聰]

Lol sounds very much like a project conceived and curated by people who have no clue how translation works and very likely on some kind of grant funding.

 

Unfortunately that means the translators probably didn’t get paid nearly enough to step in and explain.

[Lu]

That review is awesome. Thanks for posting it.

 

The plan itself is not so bad (as Eleanor Goodman also notes), but then you have to call it something else, not 'translation'. A literary magazine I used to be an editor of had something similar: we'd invite a Dutch poet to 'reply' to the work of a Chinese poet and/or vice versa. The big difference was that those poems were translated by bona fide poetry translators, who were credited and paid reasonably, and that the replies were not presented as translation. In my view this is actually a much more interesting approach.