Message in a Bottle Translators Produce Do-It-Yourself Anthology

by Ingrid Lansford

from the ATA Chronicle,
 September 2003 issue

Most translators are in the business for love and money, but the literary variety mainly work for love and publication. Only the most successful literary translators can subsist on their craft alone. All the same, the Literary Special Interest Group of the Austin Area Translators’ and Interpreters Association (AATIA) has managed to attract as much as 10% of the association’s membership to its bimonthly meetings over the past 10 years. Some technical or business translators, such as our late president Harvie Jordan, have come just to enjoy the conversation.

Sometimes the LitSIG meetings would focus on an outside speaker, sometimes on a common translation assignment, but most often they have served as a forum for discussions of individual members’ translation problems as well as general translation and publishing issues. A collegial atmosphere has prevailed, in which our two or three well-published members shared their experience with the rest of us. Publication is, of course, the shining goal for the latter group, and though the help of our colleagues has been invaluable, the majority has felt stymied by the uncertainties in moving beyond translation to publication.

The Genesis of Our Anthology

During the first half of 2001, attendance fell off so markedly that the group coordinator proposed that we suspend our meetings. At that point we had one of those “you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone” moments. We wanted the group to continue. Group member Traci Andrighetti, who had just won an American Literary Translators (ALTA) fellowship to read an Italian play she had translated, considered ways of recharging our energy. In September she hosted a nine-course Italian meal, which brought all of us back and then some. During the ALTA Conference in November, she and a fellow Austin presenter agreed that a hands-on project would help to give us a new sense of purpose. How about an anthology of our work? The LitSIG would gain practical knowledge by going through the steps of the publishing process from selecting a foreign-language text and obtaining publication rights to seeing its translation in print.

We held a well-attended kick-off meeting in early December 2001. Though I knew that anthologies were often used in writing classes to gather final versions of student work, I had no idea that our group project would focus our efforts to such an extent, or how much could be learned by it. The following is a report on the anthology project as it unfolded.

The Scope of the Project

The first two meetings were spent in defining the content and scope of our anthology. We would accept both poetry and prose translations, including literary non-fiction. We hoped for a wide variety of languages and cultures. In choosing a theme that would yield a title for our book, we tried to keep it broad enough to enable all of us to find relevant source texts. Our working title became Urban Elements. We initially set a 10-page limit for each of the 15 contributors.

We settled on a game plan. Every translator would select no more than three texts and make a pitch for them to the rest of the group. After a text was judged to fall within our criteria, the translator could submit a polished English draft to the group by e-mail attachment before the next meeting for editing and joint discussion. Following a rigorous critique, subsequent revisions, and resolution of the copyrights question, the translation would be ready for the anthology. With an eye to fall marketing opportunities, including the annual meetings of ATA and ALTA, we established August 2003 as the deadline for going to press. To meet it, we switched from bimonthly to monthly sessions. Our agenda for the next four months covered hearing all the pitches while researching various publishing options, funding sources in case we wanted to self-publish, and documenting our progress. At the end of the second meeting, the project sprouted legs as we each committed a $10 toward its realization.

Coming Down to Earth

Our research led to two important decisions. Initially we had hoped to interest a small press and were planning a query letter, but we discarded that strategy as a gamble and opted for self-publication. This meant trading the enticing, but remote, possibility of having our work accepted, along with the valuable experience of working with a publishing company, for the certainty of getting published. But the change would bring us closer to the processes of editing, design, and layout, which would also be beneficial. The certainty of being published would, of course, come at a literal price: We would have to bear the printing costs.

The second decision was not to apply for foundation grants. After very thorough work, our grant-seeking committee had concluded that it would be difficult for us to meet the criteria. In some cases, our parent organization’s 501(c)(6) tax status would disqualify us (most of the grantors we looked at preferred 501(c)(3)s, while for others, we would have to propose elaborate schemes for involving schools and the public. We wanted to focus on writing and publishing, and after we learned that a print run of 200-300 copies would come in below $2,000, grant writing seemed like waste of energy. We opted to solicit seed money or borrow outright in order to cover printing costs, and then sell enough copies to give back the loan.

Queries and Their Limitations

At the March meeting we began to hear the pitches. A pitch was an oral equivalent of the query letter, including the author’s name, the genre, content summary, length, publishing history (if possible), rights situation, connection of the piece with the anthology’s theme, and any other reason it should be published.

Texts were accepted or rejected based on the pitch. Here’s where we learned that a pitch can only give an idea of the content, and that editors must ultimately base their acceptance on the submission itself. When we saw the first complete translations by early summer, two translators were asked to find other texts. In addition, our working title, Urban Elements, no longer seemed to work. As we continued to read, one of us found that the pieces tended to be “poised between two eras, or two phases of life, or two states of being—lots of different kinds of thresholds.” The others agreed that turning points in people’s lives and the marginality of existence were more prominent among the submissions than the urban theme. In August we changed our anthology title to Thresholds.

Contents and Contributors

While our group did not succeed in recruiting translators of African, Middle Eastern and Asian languages, we were able to add Bulgarian, Danish, French, Italian, Russian and Ukrainian to the inevitable Spanish. Half of our offerings are European and half are from the New World, but we hope this accent on one hemisphere is somewhat compensated by diversity in form and content. We picked a chapter from a Ukrainian novel about the change from the gods of Kyivan Rus to Christianity, a story set in Panama just before Noriega’s capture, another about a dysfunctional family in pre-Revolutionary Russia, a third about the day the Graf Zeppelin landed on a Uruguayan beach, and others equally absorbing (a satire of conditions in Bulgaria near the collapse of Communism, a tale about roaming the seas in an apartment building, and a macabre fantasy about an unusual artichoke). The poetic voices of a contemporary Mexican woman, a Nicaraguan man, an anonymous Argentine, and a mid-century North African prostitute can now be heard in English. We present autobiography in the form of a partisan's account of Italian resistance against the German occupation and a chapter of Hans Christian Andersen's life story.

Several interesting source texts came to us through members’ personal acquaintance with their authors. We relaxed the initial 10-page limit for each contributor when our number shrank to the 10 who persevered: Michele Aynesworth, Traci Andrighetti, Tony Beckwith, Jane Chamberlain, Jonathan Cole, Ingrid Lansford, Zoya Marincheva, Marian Schwartz, Jay Tkachuk, and Liliana Valenzuela.

Editing and Critiquing

We had several guidelines for evaluating translations. First we heard Carol Maier of Kent State speak on this topic at our February 2002 meeting. As soon as the pitching stage was over, we received a set of written rules from one of our more experienced translators. These ground rules for the “editorial board”--all 10 of us--included courtesy and helpfulness, a strategy to allow quick comments from all who had checked the piece beforehand, a more thorough critique from the group coordinator, and a short list of specifics pertaining to good English style. While some of us were urged to make more revisions than others, every participant eventually contributed a creditable translation to the anthology. Hearing pitches had taken about three months; the editing and revision phase kept us busy for a year.

If our process had a weakness, it was here, in the critiquing: None of us knew all source languages, and translation errors were hard to catch. In evaluating a translation from Russian or Bulgarian, we had to treat it as an English text about foreign characters and a foreign setting. Still, most questions could be resolved in discussion with the translator, and our ignorance of the source language enabled us to pinpoint for each other where the English reader required help in the form of a modifier or translator’s explanation to bridge the culture gap. Because explanations are best presented in an introduction, we decided all contributions should have one.

Spreading the Word

Throughout the critiquing process, we accomplished other tasks, several being related to publicity. One member introduced the anthology at a regular AATIA meeting last year. An article mentioning the project appeared in the AATIA newsletter and on the website in April of 2003, and another one came out in the July issue. Our coordinator inquired about a program slot for readings at the coming ALTA meeting.

When one of us volunteered to design an advertising flyer for the book, we suddenly found ourselves in need of a better name for the group than “the LitSIG.” After an E-mail brainstorming elicited two dozen good suggestions, Message in the Bottle Translators won out. Mike Conner, AATIA newsletter editor, created an appropriate logo, and the designer of the flyer dreamed up a subtitle everyone liked, World Literature from the Heart of Texas.

The advertising flyer naturally led to a discussion about selling our book at local meetings (including ATA’s Annual Conference), over the AATIA website, and elsewhere. To do this we needed an International Standard Book Number (ISBN). After our initial sticker shock, we applied to R. R. Bowker.

Into the Home Stretch

In May we received two last-minute check sheets for our translations. One was from literary translator Andy Hurley, who had hosted our group while living in Austin (one of our members told him about the anthology in late April at the 2nd annual conference of ATA’s Spanish Language Division in San Antonio, Texas). It was then time for the final polishing, as June 15 was the deadline for turning in all translation manuscripts and possible graphics to the designer. Our designer had circulated a format mockup, which everyone approved. However, the order of our contributions still had to be decided. The group member entrusted with this delicate task suggested dividing the anthology into units thematically linked to the threshold idea.

In early June, we met again with a heavy agenda of last minute business. We considered suggestions for the anthology cover and learned that Andy Hurley had agreed to write our preface. We still needed a brief introduction about the Message in a Bottle Translators, their mission, and the anthology’s title. One “messenger” composed a draft and the others made amendments until everyone was satisfied. The sequence of our translations was settled with a similar round of e-mails. The book’s designer, who is also the composer and layout person, sent out a model for our final submissions. All final submissions came in on schedule. In a subsequent meeting, we decided to issue the anthology under Pangloss Publishing, our book designer’s company name, and had the ISBN transferred to reflect this.

What is left to be done? Thresholds: World Literature from the Heart of Texas is now going through final editing for style consistency throughout the submissions. Then it will be formatted and artwork will be added. In late July, we plan to have everyone proof his or her galleys and perform a general overall proofreading. We will go to press about mid-August.

Now the task of marketing the book begins in earnest. The Message in a Bottle Translators are getting ready for a presentation at the July AATIA meeting. Though the anthology will not be out, we’ll circulate flyers to sell advance copies. After fall publication, we’ll hold readings in Central Texas and market the anthology here and at the ATA and ALTA conferences.

Was our time worth it? Absolutely. The meetings were fun and we learned a lot. We received our first proof of the project’s effectiveness when Zoya Marincheva’s anthologized story “Feta Cheese” was also accepted for the 2003 issue of Two Lines. We hope to see further success of this kind as we help each other with the next step: transforming our short pieces into proposals for book-length manuscripts and submitting them to publishers.