Gaddis Centenary Roundtable: Translating Gaddis

Marie Fahd: Dear Gaddis translators, dear Ali, welcome to the Gaddis Centenary Roundtable dedicated to Translation. As you all know, I have chosen to divide the Gaddis roundtable into four sections, namely 'The Introductory Roundtable' (I), 'Translating Gaddis, a Journey of its own' (II), 'Discussion about the Role of the Translator' (III) and 'Specific Questions for Each of the Translators' (IV).

I—The Introductory Roundtable

Marie Fahd: Could you please briefly introduce yourself so that we get to know each other. Francine, can I invite you to start?

Francine Fabiana Ozaki: Sure, thank you. I am Francine from Brazil. I have been studying Gaddis since 2017. I came to him through my thesis's advisor who suggested the reading of The Recognitions. Since then, I have been researching The Recognitions at least for my PhD which was done in 2021. I live in Curitiba which is a capital of one of the Southern states in Brazil. I am a professor at the Universidade Federal do Paraná, which has great interest in North American fiction. Many researchers conduct their research there in this area.

Ali Chetwynd: At the Gaddis Centenary Conference, I think you mentioned that you had worked on translating bits of The Recognitions, some sections of it but not all of it. What were some of the sections that you did work on?

Francine Fabiana Ozaki: I have translated the whole first part of The Recognitions. It was a voluntary translation for my PhD research, not commissioned by any publishing house. I focused only on one section of the book. I did so to properly talk about it instead of going through the whole novel and only having small pieces to talk about. I preferred to talk on one section.

Marie Fahd: Thank you very much Francine. What about you, Max?

Max Nestelieiev: Hi, I am Max and I am from Ukraine. I am a journalist and I am an Associated Professor at the University. I am obviously also a translator. I have been studying American Fiction since 2015. I have written two books about American Fiction, one of them named The Labyrinths of American Postmodernism. I have also written some articles and afterwords about William Gaddis. I have translated Agapē Agape and I was an editor for Sergey Karpov's Russian translation of Carpenter's Gothic.

Marie Fahd: Thank you very much Max. What about you, Mariano?

Mariano Peyrou: Hello, I am Mariano and I live in Madrid. I am a poet and novelist myself and I work as a freelance translator. I also work at the University and at a Music Conservatory where I teach the history of jazz and the aesthetics of music. I have translated three books by William Gaddis: J R, Carpenter's Gothic, and The Rush for Second Place. I told Ali the first time we talked that I didn't feel very prepared for this meeting because it was years ago that I did all these translations. I never studied Gaddis properly. Well, to translate one of his books, you have to study a lot about him in a way, yet not in an academic way so to speak. My suggestion was to come here and just listen to the others because I am very interested in this author but, anyways, it is like years ago. I am not sure I will be able to answer some of the questions but here I am.

Marie Fahd: Thank you very much Mariano.

Ali Chetwynd: Between the three of you, you've translated everything apart from the last parts of The Recognitions and A Frolic of His Own. So that's much more than half of Gaddis's oeuvre that you've done, cumulatively. I thought that was worth noting.

Marie Fahd: Yes, indeed! That is pretty impressive! What most attracted all of you to the field of literary translation? I am deeply interested to know more about it.

Mariano Peyrou: I have always been interested in interpretation, let's say it that way. I studied anthropology at university. I am very interested in psychoanalysis. I studied music, I have played music for most of my life. I played saxophone professionally which is, in a way, also interpretation since you have to play music written by others. I think it was kind of natural that, at some point, I started translating. I have to say I didn't do it because it was something I wanted to do but because it was a job that appeared. Then, I thought, alright I will do it. I did one book and another one and then I have been doing it for more than twenty years. It is one of my main sources of income, though it is not as if I had a very clear determination to do this.

Francine Fabiana Ozaki: As a reader myself, I was always interested in this process of translation. When I decided to study languages for my graduation, I chose English for its relevance to the world-wide scenario nowadays. Literary translation was a natural path for me and for my background. Yet, I ended up in this process because of the nature of the course that I took in graduation. I started to feel more compelled to discuss the actual process of literary translation more than studying authors in specific ways. Gaddis was an exception to this whole story but I feel very motivated toward thinking and discussing the role of translators in these scenarios – especially considering the kind of unresolved issue we have in translation theory regarding translators' authorship and copyright. This is something that is really interesting for me and I feel very strongly about.

Max Nestelieiev: For me, translation was a continuation of my literary studies because I have a PhD in Ukrainian Literature and Modernism. For me, the starting of postmodernism was something of a next step to starting modernism. Actually, I found The Labyrinths of American Fiction and I knew that one of the first postmodernist American novels was The Recognitions by William Gaddis. Gaddis was one of the first postmodernists. Perhaps Gaddis was the first postmodernist before postmodernism. It was very interesting for me to study Gaddis. The first element was the studying and then the translation rendering. I was afraid to translate Gaddis's biggest one, such as The Recognitions or the mind-burning J R. I don't know how my colleague Mariano translated J R. For me, it is something incredible. I like to study American fiction and literature. American literature is one of the most interesting literatures in the world. William Gaddis is one of the most interesting American writers of the second part of the 20th century. God bless Steven Moore because without him I wouldn't have known such a great author. Moore's amazing website was very helpful for me when I was translating Agapē Agape.¹Max here refers to williamgaddis.org and its pages of Gaddis Annotations for each novel. While the website contains many of Steven Moore's annotations on all the novels, it was founded by a team of Gaddis enthusiasts, compiles annotations from many sources, and has long been maintained and edited by Victoria Harding, rather than Moore himself.

Marie Fahd: Thank you very much for all of your enlightening answers. It was truly interesting. Gaddis translators, why did you decide to translate Gaddis's work, and why did you choose this particular novel? Max, you have already partly answered the question. For instance, Francine, why did you choose The Recognitions and why specifically the first part of The Recognitions?

Francine Fabiana Ozaki: The idea to translate The Recognitions and to study it came from reading the novel. There are especially two reasons why I chose to work on Gaddis and The Recognitions. The first one was the plot itself. We will find opportunities to discuss this further, but the way the novel is built on the subject of forgery and plagiarism, and all these other translation-related concepts that are destabilised throughout the novel, is something that was felt very strongly.²For more of Francine's perspective on The Recognitions's interest for translators, see her short essay elsewhere in this Gathering: "Originality, Authenticity, Translation, Forgery: Why Translators and Translation Theorists Should Read The Recognitions."

I felt very compelled to delve in when I read the novel. The second one was the fact that there was almost nothing about Gaddis in Brazil. I will rephrase that because I don't want to diminish the work of people who have been discussing it. There is only one other researcher on Gaddis in the academic level in Brazil, that is Valeria Brisolara who also had her PhD focused on Gaddis and The Recognitions. Only one of Gaddis's novels was translated into Brazilian Portuguese, that is, Carpenter's Gothic in 1986. It was a long time ago. Besides that, there was nothing. I felt this was very interesting in a context and in a country which is very interested in studying North American literature. Indeed, why was there nothing about this author who is well established in the canon and also has his importance recognised? This conjunction of these two aspects for me was the main fuel to direct me towards studying him.

Yoshihiko Kihara: Many of the works of great American writers after the World War II had already been translated into Japanese by the end of the 20th century: from William Faulkner, Hemingway, Steinbeck to Norman Mailer, Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, Thomas Pynchon and so on. But William Gaddis's works were virtually unknown to Japanese readers until 2000, when my translation of Carpenter's Gothic was finally published (I also published my translation of J R in 2018). I read Gaddis's works in the '80s and '90s alongside Vonnegut, Heller, and Pynchon, and found Gaddis's irony and humor more to my taste than others. It is very difficult to explain the exact reason for the appeal, but Gaddis's humor and irony seemed more globally relatable than those of other American novelists. So I felt I had to introduce Japanese readers to this very original and important novelist.

Sergey Karpov: I think I should honestly say that first and foremost Gaddis's works are of particular interest to me as a translator; I mean, they are by all rights considered to be among the most difficult in the literature and so it's naturally an appealing challenge by itself, especially given that I've already translated for example some of David Foster Wallace's and DeLillo's works, or Alan Moore's Jerusalem. In some sense it was inevitable that eventually I would try to translate something from him (though a few years ago I definitely wouldn't have expected it to be The Recognitions).

But, of course, his books are of significant interest for Russian culture as well, for several reasons. First of all, as Gaddis scholar Steven Moore more than once said, Gaddis enjoyed Russian classics and more contemporary writers, often drawing or quoting from them. In The Recognitions for instance you may find epigraphs from Dostoevsky (himself a subject of one of Gaddis's essays), as well as more subtle parallels with his novels. So it's interesting to introduce to Russian culture the next step of the evolution of these particular literary traditions and sensibilities, but with the new influences.

Also, speaking of traditions, this kind of novel – I mean maximalist, or systems novels, as they're called by different authorities – was discovered relatively recently by Russian culture, starting with I think publication of the translated Gravity's Rainbow in 2012. So translating and publishing The Recognitions in particular is already quite significant by itself in this context, but also related to this is the fact that Gaddis used in all of his works, not only in the biggest one, a rich and idiosyncratic palette of postmodernist (among others) devices and techniques which to this day seem quite fresh and unique. So I think his style is an interesting discovery for Russian readers, especially since it can uniquely combine avant-garde experiments with modes more approachable for wider public dealing with universal themes.

And so last but not least of course, there's his rich world of ideas, eternal questions rendered with distinctive approach such as art, politics and, in the end, of the human search for self.

Mariano Peyrou: Well, I didn't choose to translate him. The publishing house, for which I have sometimes translated other things, proposed I translate Carpenter's Gothic in the first place. I accepted it like I accepted most of the things they proposed. I didn't know the author actually and it was an incredible surprise. I completely fell in love with Gaddis. I found something that I had in common with him, let's say that way, since ever and I didn't know. You know what I mean? Sometimes you have these meetings with authors or with musicians or whatever where you discover that there is something really deep that unites us to the giants. I had this impression with this first book that I translated. Then, I was lucky because they wanted to publish the five novels and The Rush for Second Place which is an anthology of essays. Three of his books had already been translated, The Recognitions, Agapē Agape and A Frolic of His Own. I did the other ones. Actually, the translator had died, that is the reason why they proposed it to me. That was it, it is not something that I really chose.

Ali Chetwynd: I have a quick question. While working on this special issue, I have been talking to all sorts of Gaddis people and lots of them said: "Oh yes, I feel this great connection to Gaddis – except Carpenter's Gothic which I find too scary or bleak." So, I was very interested that this one novel that other people sort of cut out was the one you had a particular connection with. What was it about Carpenter's Gothic that struck you as being 'simpatico'?

Mariano Peyrou: It was – and I am very certain about that – the way he uses the language, the ways he builds the novel, the structure, the narrative. You know, it is not the story or the characters. Actually, I have the impression – I am not an expert at all and I forgot many things – that the characters are more or less similar in different novels. There are some archetypes in a way and they repeat themselves. The stories are not particularly interesting themselves, but the way Gaddis writes, the way he talks about anything, his intelligence and the way that everything is structured, organised in time and in space are completely wonderful. It has a lot to do with all the things that interest me about modern art, modern poetry, Joyce, Beckett and all this constellation of artists. Gaddis is a big one whom I didn't know. It was absolutely fascinating to meet him.

Marie Fahd: Truly interesting Mariano. What about you, Max?

Max Nestelieiev: I don't know about other translators but I adore Carpenter's Gothic. For me, it is one of his greatest because The Recognitions is too big for me and J R is too complicated. For me, Gaddis was something that I didn't know at all because he was partly a mysterious writer who hadn't had a great success during his life, maybe just during the last decade of his life. I chose Agapē Agape to translate first because, for me, it was somehow a compendium of his previous novels. Perhaps it is the finale of the English-speaking language modernism due to the connection with Joyce's Ulysses which concludes with Molly Bloom's emphatic 'Yes', a connection that reflects Gaddis's familiarity with this tradition. For me, it was very interesting to see this collision of modernism in English-language fiction. Agapē Agape is probably not a good start for a reader who doesn't know Gaddis because it is too complicated, too modernistic in this stream of consciousness things, authors, syntax and so on so forth. For me, it was very interesting to try to render these strange and difficult structures. For me, it was some musical or maybe poetic structure. It was very hard to render it into Ukrainian because English and Ukrainian are different languages. We have a very different syntax; it was the biggest problem. It was also a big challenge. I like challenges so here I am translating William Gaddis. I am also thinking of translating Carpenter's Gothic into Ukrainian. It will probably be my next move into this area. I would be very glad to translate it into Ukrainian.

Marie Fahd: Great! I have a quick question, Max. Prior to translating Agapē Agape, had you heard of Thomas Bernhard? I ask you this because there are direct references to Concrete and to Bernhard's style in Agapē Agape.

Max Nestelieiev: Yes, of course, because I have read a lot of Steven Moore's annotations. So, I did know about Thomas Bernhard and his novels as well as Gaddis's fascination about this writer. I read through all of Gaddis's letters and I know he adored this writer and he used this sentence structure in his Agapē Agape. Yet, it was actually a great path because we don't have Thomas Bernhard in Ukrainian. It is a great problem to render foreign syntax. It was actually the biggest problem because words are not a big problem, we can find equivalence whereas syntax is challenging. I know that in Carpenter's Gothic syntax is also pretty complicated but I like challenges (laughter).

Marie Fahd: Thank you very much Max. I think we all like challenges in this Gaddis Roundtable. That's great. How would all of you define Gaddis's style based on your translation work? Max, you already talked about the particular syntax. Francine, how could you define it in The Recognitions?

Francine Fabiana Ozaki: For me, it was really interesting to work with The Recognitions in the sense that I had only one superficial reading of the other novels and it was a couple of years ago. Focusing especially on The Recognitions, I think this syntax question was something very difficult to work with when translating. In Brazil, we have a different understanding of what is difficult in a novel or in a prose. It is usually related to convoluted language, the use of different words. This is not the case in The Recognitions. The difficulty here, I feel, has a new meaning in our context. I could totally see, when translating, what Marcus Ingendaay mentioned in his essay about Gaddis's prose which is labyrinthic in many ways, the chaining of ideas for instance. That is pretty much what makes it even more difficult to work with. Regarding the syntax, I felt like there were moments in which I had to adjust, especially grammar, because there are no grammar mistakes in The Recognitions that are significant. So, in order to not make grammar mistakes in Portuguese, I had to adjust punctuation many times in order to relate to content and still make it work, make it flow in the Portuguese language. It was one of the most challenging parts of translating The Recognitions, to work with its special syntax that is so characteristic of Gaddis.

Mariano Peyrou: In a way, I have the impression that the way to translate this very difficult author, very difficult to translate and supposedly to read, Gaddis being known as Mr. Difficult, is very ridiculous, in my opinion. I think that the way I translated these books was trying to focus on the way or on the effects of the language on me or on the effects that I could imagine that the language would produce on any reader. Then, I tried to search for that effect in Spanish. So, syntax is a problem, vocabulary is a problem. Yet, none of them are the main problem, in my opinion, or in my experience, because you can't translate Gaddis's syntax, perhaps all the more in Ukrainian which I guess is a very different language – I don't know anything about it. You can't translate it into any language. This is not translatable because Gaddis is twisting it all the time and you can't twist it in the same way in any language, I guess. So, what you have to translate is what is interesting for him, in my opinion, again, which is the effect that this twisting produces. You have to twist your own language in more or less the same degree as Gaddis does, not much more nor much less – which would be like betraying his way of working – and you have to look for the effect. This is very interesting, in my opinion, because Gaddis is very clearly based on these modern and postmodern traditions focused on the materiality of language and of materials, to say it this way, when working with art. Still, when you deal with a translation of his works, you have to forget about the materiality and look for the effect or build another materiality or another material context to produce this kind of effect. Regarding punctuation, Gaddis uses it in a very special way. All these non-semantic elements of writing which are dots, colons or semicolons, dash. The way Gaddis mixes all this and does something personal is very new, very original, very natural in a way. I think that this is also very interesting. I have the impression that his style is at the same time very particular, very peculiar and also deeply rooted in – as I said before – a constellation of authors. So, when you have read or you are more or less acquainted with Joyce, Thomas Bernhard, Kafka, the 20th-century good writers, you get into Gaddis and it sounds familiar. It is like he is playing this game; I know the game. It is a common game. It is a game that some other people played before but Gaddis is playing it with his own rules. He is making something new, like the other great writers or artists did. That is what makes it so peculiar.

Marie Fahd: Thank you for this noteworthy answer. Let's move on to the next question. How is Gaddis perceived in your culture?

Francine Fabiana Ozaki: Throughout my research, it was very lonesome sometimes because, as I said before, there are not many people in Brazil studying Gaddis. I had to rely on international research for my own research. As I was presenting my research in conferences in Brazil throughout my PhD, I managed to find quite an interesting number of people who had read Gaddis and were interested in finding out more about my research. Three years later, since my PhD finished, people still write to me and find me in corridors and ask me about the translation, if it is happening, if it is being published, or if there are more things about it. It was interesting to find out that this group of people, even though they are not researching him, are all interested in Gaddis. They exist, they are here. So, there are readers who are very interested in Gaddis in Brazil. Nevertheless, I feel like one of the reasons why maybe Gaddis's novels weren't translated before or there aren't any more translations is that this group of readers are proficient readers in English. So, they don't necessarily need a translation to get to meet Gaddis or to go further into his writing. On the other hand, there are other groups of scholars which are also interested in discussing translations, in understanding solutions that we find in translation and the criticism we do when we are translating. It is a double bind here. They don't need a translation but they are interested in reading a translation to figuring out what I was doing. I feel like there is an interest in Brazil for Gaddis's novels but not to the point of being published in our native language.

Max Nestelieiev: I would like to add something similar to Francine. One in a while, some Ukrainian readers write to me and ask me: 'Could you please translate The Recognitions and Carpenter's Gothic?' Then, I reply that I am, of course, thinking about it. Ukrainian readers know about the greatness of William Gaddis from my articles, from my lectures, from my videos on YouTube. They know that Gaddis is a very interesting author and that he is also very complicated. So, they are afraid of reading his novels in English because they know that he is very complicated. So, they are waiting for a Ukrainian translation. Agapē Agape is a very important book for Ukrainian writers. I know a lot of Ukrainian writers and they say that Gaddis's experiments are very useful in their writing process because – and I like this formulation – he writes prose that is symphonic. Gaddis's prose is very symphonious and musical. Rhythm is very important to Gaddis. The syntax is another correlation, another symbol of Gaddis's rhythm, musical symphonia. Ukrainian readers and writers adore Gaddis's music, his prose music, and they want more. So, I am thinking of translating more of Gaddis's novels into Ukrainian.

Ali Chetwynd: I think you previously mentioned that you thought that Ukrainian literature didn't have anything quite like Gaddis. What is your sense of what he offers to a Ukrainian readership that they don't get in their own native language?

Max Nestelieiev: Ukrainian society and the Ukrainian nation have a very complicated history. It was a continuous struggle and so on and so forth. So, for us, our literature didn't have a lot of complicated works, probably and unfortunately because they didn't have a lot of intellectuals who could adore this prose since all intellectuals were killed by the Soviet regime and before that by the Russian Empire and so on and so forth. Unfortunately, we don't have a lot of intellectual, complicated, difficult prose in Ukrainian. It is probably a strange situation. Yet, it is a historical-based situation. My fellow translators and my friends who are writers think that we need some examples of complicated, difficult, highly structured prose. William Gaddis is a great example of this kind of prose. I have translated Pynchon into Ukrainian, Don DeLillo, my great friend Joseph McElroy, one of the difficult authors that Jonathan Franzen mentioned in his strange essay. I know that American writers don't like to call their prose difficult because for them it is not difficult, it probably only needs appropriate readers. I think Ukrainian readers need William Gaddis's works and I am working on it.

Mariano Peyrou: Well, I live in Spain so my translations can circulate in all Latin America. I am not very sure how it is working in big places such as Mexico, Argentina or Chile. Yet, I am quite sure it is more or less like here in Spain. When I translated my second Gaddis book, which was J R, I thought it was going to be a huge event. This novel is so good and so incredible. I think it is his masterwork. It is very difficult in a way, or you can see it as a very difficult thing, but it is also very funny. The only problem is that it is a long book. I think that for today's standards, it is a book which, like The Recognitions, looks very threatening. Nobody dares to open or to buy or to get a book of 1200 pages. I think in Spanish it is like 1200 pages. It is a lot. My impression is that you can read it and there is really a lot of humour in it. There is a lot of intelligence. Of course, it is not for people who like Hollywood movies but it is for a more or less big audience. But it didn't get that reception. It didn't work like that and very few people read it. I have the impression that many people respect it because the aura of it is that it is a very good book, but not so many people read it. I was incredibly disappointed about the reception of this author. I never expected it would be a bestseller, of course, I am not stupid, or not so stupid, but I thought that among some parts of the readers it would make a huge impact, and it didn't.

Ali Chetwynd: What about with The Recognitions? Is there any more interest in that because there is so much in there about Spain and South America? Does the Spanishness of The Recognitions give that a bit more connection with the Spanish audience?

Mariano Peyrou: No, I don't think so at all. Anyway, I have the impression that in America, the impact of Gaddis is more or less the same. Many people know him but I don't know if many people read him or have read him in the last decades.

Ali Chetwynd: In the English-speaking world, we've just had a couple of big reissues of his books with very visible publishers. So, I suppose we are at the beginning of finding out whether there is a growable audience.

Marie Fahd: We will now move on to the second section of the Gaddis Roundtable.

II—Translating Gaddis, a Journey of its Own

Marie Fahd: The dialectics of indeterminacy lurk behind the novels of William Gaddis. How far did all of you succeed in conveying such a realm of indeterminacy throughout your translation process?

Max Nestelieiev: It is a very simple and hard question because, for me, translation is the art of indeterminacy, namely this rendering between two different languages, different cultures, different syntax and rhythms, as well as the length of words. In Ukrainian language, all words are a little longer than in English. All Gaddis's novels in Ukrainian will be bigger than in English because of the length of the words. For me, to find the exact equivalent of the word or the exact model of the sentence is something that is as well possible as impossible. Indeed, when I find a good example of sentence, words, rhythms, I have a lot of doubts because I think there is always a better variant. So, for me, all translations and all translation processes play with indeterminacy. William Gaddis is not an exception because he puts a great challenge for any translator. Perhaps in Pynchon's works, there is a lot of indeterminacy too because indeterminacy is one of the aspects of American postmodernism as one of the greatest philosophers, Ihab Hassan, said. Indeterminacy is a part of Gaddis's prose and a part of postmodern American prose. I try to deal with it but I don't think I am always successful in it. It is a translator's faith. What else? I don't know (laughter). It is my faith so I take it as my faith and move on.

Marie Fahd: Thank you, Max. What about you, Francine, regarding the first part of The Recognitions?

Francine Fabiana Ozaki: Considering even my own stance on the translator's role and practice, it is close to what Mariano has said before, trying to attain to the effects that Gaddis intended for his novel, or at least we understand that it was his intention. I feel like this aesthetic effect is closer to language and the way that he organises his language more than of the effects per se. Considering this understanding of what is my response or my duty as a translator, I feel like I tried to, at least, convey the same level of indeterminacy that Gaddis conveys in his novels. It is not an easy task because of course Gaddis is much better at that than we are. It kind of reminds me of one of the letters that Gaddis wrote to a German editor who was foreseeing the translation of A Frolic of His Own. He apologises to the translator for a very dense segment of the text but not to the reader. So, it feels to me like he was expecting reading effort from the reader. This is kind of the same task that I was pursuing as a translator. Gaddis would expect from Brazilian readers the same effort that he would expect from his English-speaking readers. How far have I succeeded? I think that maybe only time will tell since it was not a commissioned translation. My translation is public nowadays to readers online but I still have very little feedback on what I have translated so far besides my advisor and the professors who took part in my evaluation for my PhD. I feel like trying to convey the same level was at least what I was trying to do, or at least what was expected of me as a translator.

Marie Fahd: Thank you very much Francine. I was thinking of The Recognitions because, for instance, the concept of deictics within the sentences can become quite complicated. Take, for example, the moment of Wyatt's epiphany when Wyatt claims that he understands something, but the deictics are, in fact, indeterminate. As a result, the meaning continuously shifts throughout the novel, reflecting a constant state of indeterminacy, which is one of the hallmarks of postmodernism. I think that Gaddis has a very special way of conveying this sense of indeterminacy. What about you, Mariano?

Mariano Peyrou: To be a little more concrete about indeterminacy, I was thinking of a couple of points. I am thinking about J R, which I remember better. I don't know if in all the novels it was like this but I guess so. Sometimes, there are long dialogues and it is not explicitly stated who is talking. This looks like it is indeterminate, who is talking. But when you read it, also as a reader, not as a translator, after a while you realise who is talking because you recognise the voices, the way the different characters are talking, their ideology or their temperament or whatever, the words they use, the voice actually. So, this is what I meant when I didn't consider Gaddis so difficult as is usually said. You get used to it, maybe it is something that you have to get used to. When we get used to it, it is like living in a world that you already know and then it is not strange anymore or its strangeness becomes familiar. In another aspect, it is also very interesting to not know who is talking because sometimes, as I have said before, the dash is not correctly or conventionally used. So, sometimes the narrator starts talking without a clear separation after the characters have talked. So, it is the same. The first time you find this, you think: 'Am I stupid?', 'Am I not paying attention?', 'Is the author wrong?', 'Has something messed with the edition?', 'What's going on here?' After a while, you realise that that is part of the pleasure. This clear point in which in most books the character shuts up and the narrator starts saying something is not clear in Gaddis's novels and sometimes you find it and sometimes you don't. Gaddis manages to build sentences or paragraphs in which you know where to draw the line. This is not difficult. This is fun. This is part of the aesthetic experience of reading and, of course, of translating these things. I have another example which, I think, is very interesting. I think it happens with many or all satirists. The description of the world which he is presenting to us, is it hyperbolic or is it realistic? This is indeterminate as well. In a way; we all would agree that some things of the world that he is portraying are hyperbolic but if you look at the newspapers, at the TV, at the people on the subway around us, that is exactly the world as it is. I mean, it is not the world that we usually represent in our heads but it is closer to the real world than we think, I think. This is part of the gift that Gaddis offers us, a new view of the world truer through these hyperbolic and exaggerated and kind of grotesque characters and relations. That is also indeterminate. You can't say if it is an exaggeration or a true depiction. No idea, of course, of how far I succeeded in translating that. I can't say that.

Marie Fahd: I totally agree with you. Indeterminacy pervades the novel. Let me provide you with some concrete examples. Firstly, indeterminacy in The Recognitions is evident through blurred narratives, equivocal meanings and the differed meanings. The concept of belatedness often arises as well. The novel is replete with instances that underscore the power of indeterminacy, such as anaphora and chronotopic disjunction. The novel's complex style relies on elements like accumulation, fragmentation and syntactic lability, all of which, to name a few, contribute to its dialectical power of indeterminacy. In summary, I would say that the abundance and arrangement of the sentences, unburdened by a predetermined syntactic order, highlight the distinctiveness of this writing. Additionally, the indeterminacy of deictics and the problematic repetition of the neutral pronoun, 'it', as I mentioned earlier, play a significant role in the novel. I don't know if that sounds familiar to you, Francine, but it's a notable theme within The Recognitions.

Francine Fabiana Ozaki: Yes, sure.

Marie Fahd: Ali, do you want to add something?

Ali Chetwynd: I just wanted to pick up on lability, and what Mariano mentioned about the way that Gaddis writes sentences where it seems there is a continuation of dialogue but only later the reader realises, 'Oh, that was the end of the dialogue. This is the narrator again'. I am not a translator so I am the odd one out here. But the thing in Gaddis that I have always thought must be the hardest to translate are these weird sentences where there is a sort of obvious meaning of a word and a secondary less obvious meaning of the word, and the sentence is set up to make you expect the obvious meaning when you first read it, but then as you go on, you realise: 'Oh no, actually what's going on only makes sense with the other meaning of the word and the whole thing hinges on that.' Then, you have to go back and reintegrate. There was a bad review of his recent reissues that was written by this British novelist, Adam Mars-Jones, a couple of years ago and he picks on this technique as an example of Gaddis being an incompetent writer. He says basically 'Why can't Gaddis keep it nice and simple? It always seems like it means one thing but then he uglily makes you redirect it.' Like 'go back and edit, Gaddis!' I was thinking: 'that's the point!' It's meant to make you have a kind of reiterative, reintegrative experience and read slowly and carefully, doing that work of weighing up meanings, which is really directly related to basic obvious themes in the novels. I would be very interested in how you each handle that very specific technical thing, because it seems like certain languages, maybe Ukrainian… I am familiar with Bulgarian where the syntax doesn't let you be quite so indeterminate because the verbs conjugate regardless of where or whether you state a pronoun. So I'm interested in each language's or translator's technical dealing with determinacy and indeterminacy, or sentences that seem to stress different meanings of a word at different points in your progress through the sentence… Gaddis himself, in his English, is very deliberate and effective through that kind of writing. But, for this conversation, it seems to me that that would be almost impossible to translate—to set a sentence up, to hinge on the exact same ambiguity that it hinges on in English—if your language doesn't have the same available puns that English does. I don't know if I'm overestimating the difficulty of it, but it seemed nigh-undoable to me. That struck me, as a non-translator, as what might be the hardest sort of 'central' Gaddis technique to do. I think the word that you used Mariano was a 'twist,' like he has a goal of twisting experience, and then to do that there are these pretty definite syntactical or semantic 'twists' that he works through. I was just intrigued by that because it's a translation-practice issue that comes right out of what Marie is talking about with indeterminacy.

Yoshihiko Kihara: Another example of a Gaddisian complexity that is enjoyable to discover but hard to translate… When translating a literary work, one becomes acutely aware of the smallest details, and so one can sometimes find a painstaking, but very unobtrusive, riddle prepared by the author. Here is an example from Carpenter's Gothic (page references below are to the Penguin paperback edition). On page 62, Liz suddenly remembers the name of a mysterious visitor, Lester. Although the text does not explain what reminded her of the name, she apparently remembers it while looking through a 'bird book.' The bird book first appears on page 36. Liz is looking through the book which lists 'red crossbill, northern shrike, lesser yellowlegs' and so on, when Lester comes to the door. So at first it seems that the bird book just happened to remind her of the man, because it was the book that she was reading when he came to the house. But there is another interesting twist to this sequence. The important point is that Lester is wearing 'ochre trousers' here (p. 36), and his visit was just as Liz was looking at 'lesser yellowlegs' (p. 36). You see? Lesser yellowlegs remind her of yellowish-trousered Lester. The birds Gaddis lists up on page 62 are 'godwits and curlews, sandpipers, snipe' and do not include lesser yellowlegs, but he does not fail to mention 'another turn of the page' before Liz stands up.

I could not find a simple way to mimic the sound similarity between 'Lester' and 'lesser' in Japanese, so in the end I just added the transliteration of the bird's English name in parentheses next to the Japanese name, like 'kokiashishigi (ressaa ierooregguzu),' to imply the sound similarity of the man's name in the Japanese transliteration—'Restaa'—though who knows how many readers will notice the meaning of this seemingly unnecessary addition.

Some people might be inclined to call such a puzzle 'Nabokovian,' but when we think of Beaton's far more complicated murder of Zona by means of Stilton cheese at the end of J R (for its details, see Ch. 4 of Steven Moore's William Gaddis), we can safely call it simply 'Gaddisian.'

Sergey Karpov: I can give an example of wordplay solving, though I would say for the most part it doesn't present a challenge as much as the compelling riddles. Here's one of the first that comes to mind: Agnes Deigh is collecting money for the political party in Part I of The Recognitions.

—I'm collecting members for Art for Labor and Democracy. It's a party.

—A party? someone from another cluster turned to ask.

—A political party, darling […]

Puns on 'party' are quite common and are solved depending on the context. In this case a little bit further Agnes says 'But you don't have to do anything. You just give me two dollars,' and so I've decided to go with the phrase «безобязательств» ('without obligations'), which often associates with sex (such as 'friends with benefits'):

— Я собираю членов для «Искусства за труд и демократию». Это партия, но безобязательств.

— С кем - с кем без обязательств?³Literal translation – «with whom "without obligations"?» обернулся спросить кто-то из соседнего кружка.

— Это политическая партия, дорогуша […]

With Gaddis these riddles are business as usual, but in the same time I tend to solve them quite fast and so don't remember specifically a lot of them nor save them in any form, that's why it's a little bit hard for me to provide more interesting examples; on the other hand, there's no rest with the punctuation questions, it's an everyday unending grind and you rarely have a full satisfaction with them cause of many possible variations, so who knows, maybe amid all interesting turns of phrases and wordplays that would be the main thing which I will remember from Gaddis many years later.

Marie Fahd: That is very interesting. Let's move on to the last question of this section which hinges on intertextuality and allusions of all kinds, be it musical, literary, artistic. These elements pervade in all of Gaddis's novels. How did all of you tackle such a theme in your translation process? I guess it might be, of course, challenging and I am truly interested to get your take on that.

Sergey Karpov: One of the challenges is related to the postmodernist nature of Gaddis's works, namely intertextuality. With this territory naturally comes not only Gaddis himself, but a whole array of authors and texts from ancient philosophers to Victorian classics to writers and poets more contemporary to him. Of course not all of them are known in Russian language, and often I find myself working on pieces such as, for example, a nursery rhyme "There Was a Man of Double Deed." To deal with this variety of quotes you have to constantly switch styles and translating modes (and, it seems, to be a man of double deed yourself).

Also connected to this is the question of annotations. I may be mistaken here, but I think at least in English among other languages there is (or at least was some time ago) a convention to use as few footnotes as possible and to adapt texts overall. By this I mean, if I understand it correctly, that there are a few translated books which generally may be considered written in English. I don't think there's a significant disposition towards one way or another in Russian, but I for myself often try to provide some context for the reader – and I think it's especially important for understanding of such rich with allusions works, when you won't find relevant reader companions as you may find them in English. So even in the case of Carpenter's Gothic or Agapē Agape (this one is translated but wasn't published as yet), definitely not the biggest of Gaddis's works, my translations come with more than a hundred footnotes – as in just one part of The Recognitions. Both annotation in itself and the question of which parts to annotate and in how much detail are a big part of this work and definitely quite unique in its scale among writers whose works I've translated.

Max Nestelieiev: I want to add some fun fact about Mariano's speech because I know William Gaddis adored Stanley Elkin's review on J R. He said about the novel: 'You can hear this novel with your own eyes.' It is exactly what we have in J R. Rhythm, eyes, ears, synaesthesia, something like that. As for intertextuality, once again, God bless Steven Moore and his annotations, his website and his books. Long live the King and so on so forth. The most challenging was the problem that not all the texts that Gaddis mentioned were translated into Ukrainian. I had to translate fragments on my own. I must say I don't like to translate poetry very much because poetry and prose are very different kinds of fictions. I spent a lot of time translating these poetry fragments from Agapē Agape. It was a double complication because you have to render the idea of the poet's verse and the reason of the poet's verse. It was impossible for me but I did my best. Also, the greatest inspiration in my translation was always a quote from a famous American translator, John E. Woods, who did a lot of Arno Schmidt into English. He once said that translation is the impossibility. In Gaddis's case, it is always inspirational to know that. I am not very optimistic. For me, Francine is very optimistic in her attitude to her translation. I am not so very optimistic in my level of translation. I did my best. Intertextuality is the basis of Gaddis's works. Somehow, probably for Gaddis, it's something like on the ground of his own start because, strangely, he was really a European-literature oriented American writer. This European rhythm and intertextuality are very impressive. I tried to render this somehow Slavic rhythm because in Agapē Agape there are a lot of quotes from Tolstoi, Dostoevsky and some of the Russian writers. It is a different rhythm. I can read these Russian authors in their native language as well as Gaddis's English rendering of them in Agapē Agape. I have to choose which rhythm would be better for this part of the text or that part of the text. For me, intertextuality was not a great challenge but it was interesting to try to find the exact quotation, the exact meaning, the exact choice of words because sometimes Gaddis changes their original texts, their original quotes in order to express his own Frolic of his own. Gaddis's intertextuality is a great thing and to me it is something like an addition to his amazing style.

Marie Fahd: Thank you for your noteworthy answer, Max.

Mariano Peyrou: This time, I don't think I agree with Max. At least, my impression was that intertextuality and allusions were so thick and important. It was all over the place. So, it made me have like a constant feeling of paranoia while I was translating like that having the feeling that I was surely missing things. I am sure I have missed some things. It is impossible not to. I would need an annotated version annotated by the author not to miss anything. I am not sure that there is an annotated version or that somebody who wrote notes to these books did not miss anything. It is part of the game as well. So, of course, I didn't let this paranoic feeling take the best part of me. I went on working and doing my best. I think you develop as a translator some kind of sixth sense and sometimes you feel that something is going on here. I don't know what but then, you can investigate. Yet, I am sure it sometimes fails. Intertextuality is a bit part of Gaddis's aesthetics. I have the impression that it is the same, of course, if you translate Joyce, Eliot or Pound. It is full of these things. It is part of the game as I have said before. Also, the game is that no single reader will catch everything. There isn't a reader who can catch everything that Joyce put into his books or in The Waste Land by Eliot. It is impossible that one person gets everything. You don't have to get everything. Everything is there. You catch whatever you can. Of course, as a translator, you should catch as much as possible but I don't feel very guilty about this. I think it is impossible, like translation itself, it is an impossible task and we do it the best we can and that's all.

Marie Fahd: Yes, I agree. What about you, Francine?

Francine Fabiana Ozaki: I agree with Mariano in many senses because in The Recognitions, this intertextuality and allusion is totally part of the game at play. I also echo Max in saying 'Thanks God for the Gaddis Annotations website' because that was so helpful in many ways. It was kind of an important deal working with this and trying to find these allusions. Yet, as Mariano said, it is impossible to identify them all due to the pervasive way they are woven throughout the novel and the way that makes The Recognitions important, even to the extent of being the title. These intertextualities and allusions happen in a process of appropriation. It was something very difficult to work with. I relied on Steven Moore most of the time for that. So, I tried to have a strategy to work with that. For example, the quotations or at least segments or excerpts of texts that Gaddis was using in their entirety. I tried to search for translations, as Max said, in Portuguese. When they were translated texts in Portuguese, I tried to use these translations to rely on them to also provide the reader these recognitions. Maybe if they read it, they will make these connections. I searched for translations which were well established, such as the Eliot. I tried to use these translations so the reader could associate and also, in a sense, recognise the work of these translators who had already worked these texts before. When they were no translations published, I had to translate them myself. This is something that I had to do. I had to rely on the little context I had through The Recognitions sincemaybe I hadn't read the novel or the book he was quoting from. I tried to follow this strategy. I had to consult public libraries, university libraries and went after as many as possible. I had to use what I had at hand. It wasn't always possible to find all these texts available. There were translations available but I couldn't find or get them. I also translated them myself. For book titles for example, it is something that Gaddis also alludes a lot, titles of books and artworks in general. I also tried to follow the same strategy. When there were translations in Portuguese, I tried to use them. When they weren't, I kind of left it in English so the reader will also have this feeling of strangeness to deal with and research on their own discretion. I tried to create a strategy that would help me do that. I felt like if I translated the title that had not been published in Portuguese, that would mislead the reader into thinking that this book is translated into Portuguese, which was not the case. So, I preferred to leave it in English to try not to do that. That's pretty much it.

Ali Chetwynd: I had a quick question on exactly that. How do you each handle the big famous quotations from, let's say Shakespeare or Eliot, like Francine mentioned? Would you translate it again yourself or would you rely on existing translations in your language? There's a kind of fine-grained pedantic issue I guess you have to deal with, which is that there are certain phrases in Gaddis that come up again and again across his novels. So, if you are in a situation like Mariano was, where three of the novels had already been published by a different translator, you have a predecessor to deal with. Like you all probably translated this line on 'the unswerving punctuality of chance' which is a phrase that appears in every Gaddis novel. Which is also a quotation, in English, from the writer Thomas Wolfe. I am just interested in all of your translation philosophies about that. When you come across that phrase, do you say: 'Great, I will translate it myself.' Do you say, 'Well, Gaddis uses it in every book and two of his novels have been translated already by somebody else, so I can use their version.' Do you then go back and use that person's translation of that phrase even if it is not what you yourself would have used, so that somebody who is reading all the books in your language will recognise it from their readings of the other Gaddis novels? Or, what do you do with cases where you might not be translating a citation from something else but you are translating an echo from other Gaddis novels? Like his repeated question of 'What's worth doing?' Even if someone else translated it before, do you think 'Yes, I should echo them so that the reader can spot the echo' or do you think, 'No, I am the best translator. I will translate it my way.' It struck me as a really interesting crux for how you approach things within a wider translation culture.

Francine Fabiana Ozaki: That is something that I wouldn't think because there is no way I am the best translator at all. Well, I have the advantage that Mariano probably doesn't that there aren't other translators. There is only Carpenter's Gothic and this a translation that had only one edition. It wasn't even re-printed at all. If there were others, I would quote from these other translators because I feel like keeping this echo is really important. However, I think that in Brazil, at least, we are facing a different editorial movement in which when a new translation is being published, they tend to revise all the others. There will probably be an opportunity to come back and review all the other translators' work. I would definitely try to echo them and even create this parallel throughout his translations.

Mariano Peyrou: I think what I would do… It depends on the case. I couldn't state a rule for these kinds of situations which happen a lot. It depends on which words the author is quoting. If it is 'To be or not to be […]', you have to use the conventional translation – or the Lord's Prayer or whatever. In other cases, of some more obscure writers or texts, you can do a little more of what you want. What happens if in the two existing translations, the sentence is translated in different ways? This kind of thing happens a lot. What would you do with that? I think this has something to do with the double meanings of some words or some sentences and how you deal with that. I wanted to say something about that. In some cases, you decide that the important thing is the double meaning. It is not so important what those two meanings are. So, you find another, something in your language which has also a double meaning and that is what you put there. That is what you translate. In other cases, one of the meanings is really important. So, you have to stick to that meaning and find another meaning which can play with that one. In other cases, both meanings have to be translated. If you can't make the pun in your language or find something equivalent, bad luck! You can't do anything about it. This is how it goes.

Max Nestelieiev: I agree with Mariano. It depends. Sometimes, I use the translation that we have in Ukrainian. For example, we have over ten translations of Shakespeare's Hamlet. It is very hard to choose among them. Sometimes, for me, it was very necessary to render this quote as the conception by Mikhail Bakhtin of 'foreign word.' You should perceive this quotation in Gaddis's text as foreign words – that you know that they aren't Gaddis's. Sometimes, I had to create something that reminded of the foreign words so the reader could perceive this as a quote. Sometimes, I had to combine two versions. I had a little help because I used a lot of annotations for my translation and also I wrote long afterwords for all of my translations. Usually, I mentioned that it was a translation from that author. Sometimes, I give another translation of this quote in my annotations. There are a lot of ways of rendering quotation and it depends.

Marie Fahd: Thank you very much for your enlightening and detailed answers. Let's move on to the next section and discuss the role of the translator.

III—Discussion about the Role of the Translator

Marie Fahd: How would you define the role of the translator, especially regarding Gaddis's work?

Francine Fabiana Ozaki: Regarding particularly The Recognitions, I feel like this theoretical issue became even more pressing, especially when we considered like 'How can one think of the authorship of a translator?' for example when working with a book that necessarily seeks to destabilise the very notion of authorship. So, this was something, as I mentioned before, that was very interesting to me, especially considering translation theory in the way I have been researching for the last years. During the initial stages of my research, I was very strong on my stance of the understanding of translation as an act of authorship in itself, the translator as an interpretive and as a critic instance, the translator's task as the producer of meanings in itself that is more related to the most current strain of thought in translation theory. When translating the novel, I found myself doing the opposite movement most of the time. The more I engaged with the text, the more this concern for re-creating this dialogue between the novel and other authors became necessary. I was trying to seek these references, make these other voices more transparent in the translated text, making these references and trying to convey this plurality of voices in the text. It's kind of like Gaddis disappeared from the text as an author by giving space to all these voices, so I tried to disappear from the text myself as a translator in order to create the same movement – which is quite like a paradox because this makes Gaddis more of an author than ever, and me less of a translator than ever. So, it was a different mechanism at place over there. So, as I found myself hiding behind these other voices, these other translators that I was trying to bring to the equation here, I was also questioning in what sense it was really necessary to translate this novel in itself. It was an exercise of humility many times.

In practice, what often happened to me was that, although I was not trying to follow Gaddis's own will regarding translations that he mentioned in his letters, namely the word-for-word translation that he advised many of his translators to stick to – even though my own stance on translation didn't follow this line of thought, I found myself doing exactly what Gaddis recommended, trying to go word-for-word in order to convey this double meaning, this indeterminacy we were talking about before. At certain moments, it felt like there is no theory, there is no approach, there is no method that is going to save me from this crossroad that I found myself in. It was very difficult in this sense. Within my own limitations and considering this experience, I would define the role of the translator, especially considering The Recognitions, as a manager of these voices. I would manage these voices alongside with Gaddis, the same way he was managing them in order to produce a text in the target language that is as plural as the original and that sounds like the same thing for the voices that Gaddis created in his text that he masterfully orchestrated, cut, reproduced to speak at the right moment, at the right time on his behalf. I felt like that was the right role of the translator of this novel.

Marie Fahd: Thank you very much Francine for this answer. I really like your definition of the translator as being the manager of all the voices. I think that it is really nicely put.

Mariano Peyrou: I agree mostly with what Francine said. I think that the general role of the translator depends on the text you are dealing with. In the case of Gaddis, I think the text calls for a very subjective and creative translation. I think it is the only way to convey what the author is doing. I remembered a part in J R, I think, where the narrator talks about the 'ptosis' of a car. Ptosis is a disease in which one of your eyelids falls down. Maybe you have met somebody like this. It is a word that, of course, I didn't know before because it is not my field of knowledge and I don't suffer from such things. Anyway, I found it incredibly nice. It is something that I remember after more than ten years. Obviously, one of the car's headlights was broken and Gaddis talked about the ptosis of the car. This is very easy to translate because this word is the same in every language, I would guess even in Ukrainian, but what can you do with a writer of such creativity? When Gaddis builds, invents things which are not so easily translatable, what can you do? You have to be incredibly creative as well. It is difficult to be up to that level but this is what you have to try. So, I think the role of the translator is exactly that. I mean, it is the role of a writer. I agree with Francine and I also agree with the opposite point of view. You have to write the book yourself. Let's say it in another way. Artificial intelligence may translate many texts, most texts actually but it will never be able to translate Gaddis, I guess, never. It is not that I mean that now it is impossible. I think it will never be able to translate this kind of literature in a word. So, it takes a human being with subjectiveness and creativity to do that.

Marie Fahd: Thank you for your answer. I truly agree. What about you, Max?

Max Nestelieiev: I hope that artificial intelligence will never be able to translate Gaddis because then we will lose our jobs (laughter). It's great that AI is not so intelligent as we are. For me, a translator is also a doppelgänger, the voice of the earth in foreign language. For example, I am the Ukrainian voice of Gaddis and I try to find the exact Ukrainian voice for his wording, for his sentence. Of course, it is impossible but I did my best. I always feel something. Perhaps for Gaddis and maybe for Agapē Agape¸ it is a very appropriate thought because I feel very religious in this rendering. It is a part of emulation. You should be less you and more another person. I should lose myself and give the voice for the dead or old American guy. It is something very religious, maybe in a perverse way, but I always feel myself as a humble servant to the author or maybe his submissive shadow. It is something like that because I tried to render his words, his meanings as good as I can. It is pretty difficult but I tried to do so because it is my job, my occupation. I should translate this author because he is great and I want to share his greatness with my compatriots, my Ukrainian readers. That is my job.

Marie Fahd: Thank you very much Max for your thought-provoking answer. Let's move on to my next question. Do you agree with German philosopher Walter Benjamin's statement regarding the task of the translator? I will quote: 'It is the task of the translator to release in his own language that pure language which is under the spell of another, to liberate the language imprisoned in a work in his re-creation of that work' ("The Task of the Translator" [1923], in Illuminations (1968)).

Francine Fabiana Ozaki: I confess that I prepared something for this question. Walter Benjamin definitely was one of the main representatives of this line of thought in translation theory and in translation studies which considered the translated text as a voice of its own. This excerpt is especially representative of this critical stance on language and philosophy of language rejecting rationalist and instrumentalist perspectives of time. When he advocates for language as magical, he means to say that language has the mission of revealing its sort of spiritual content. In this sense, the translation of a text would not exist to provide a reader with the meaning or even the information or content about the original but to exist as a separate text, both separate from but in conjunction with the original. It would emerge as an afterlife of this original to enable its survival in many ways. So, from this perspective, translation would aim, according to Benjamin, to bring the source language and the target language together revealing these inherent aspects of them that would be hidden without translation. So, the translated text would then not seek to be the same as the original but to harmonise with it and bring these two languages together creating its own language that, according to Benjamin, would be pure and even superior. Other translation theorists would label this will of harmony that Benjamin had as utopian in many ways – in the sense that this pure language would arise from the coexistence and complementation between the original and the translation. So, Benjamin, for example, would advocate for the literalness of syntax as a path to set free this pure language where the translators would allow the original language to set in motion into an interlinear translation in many senses. Even though it is interesting, it does not provide a practical solution to translating literary texts, but this essay by Benjamin is definitely one of the most influential in this line of thought, this postmodernist theory, deconstructionist translation theories.

It is important to note that Benjamin's idea would give rise to a new and relevant understanding of the translated text that emphasises its autonomous character. From this point on, in translation theory, translation would start being understood as another task with another status that is derived from the original but independent in many ways. As a consequence of that, discussions would inevitably move away from those notions of translation that usually hinge on gain and losses, and make translation criticism most of the time difficult. With this shift, the need to discuss the translator's authorship also arises when we start to understand the translated text as an autonomous text. This is something that is not, even in this area, something of a consensus among theorists in themselves. In the line of these contemporary discussions, I feel like Benjamin's stance sets a very important discussion in motion regarding the recognition of the translator's role and the legal recognition of the translator's rights world-wide. It is definitely one of the most important theoretical essays that would bring us to this position in which translation studies finds itself nowadays.

Marie Fahd: Thank you very much Francine. Max, what is your take on this?

Max Nestelieiev: To continue the theme of intertextuality, I will quote one of the greatest songs,⁴'Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)' is a song by the British music duo Eurythmics which was released on January 4, 1983. 'Who am I to disagree?' precisely regarding the great German philosopher Walter Benjamin. I like his metaphor. It is true but, for me, it is pretty complicated to think about my translation in these words because I just try to find the exact equivalence and just try to render rhythm, syntax, ideas, thoughts and so on so forth. Revealing pure language and liberate the language is a great metaphor but when I am translating, I don't think in these terms. Walter Benjamin was a great philosopher; I adore him and I agree with him.

Mariano Peyrou: I also like Walter Benjamin a lot and that text concretely but I think, again, that my answer will be 'It depends.' When Benjamin liberates the language imprisoned in a work, I am not sure that the language is always imprisoned in a work. In the case of most authors that I really like, the language is freed. I would say that. The language is already freed, it is not imprisoned. It can do many things. It does what it does but it could do other things. You feel that, you feel that it has some quality of the improvised. Some texts are really composed, like a composition which is written, thought through thoroughly, and it has to be like that, whereas some other texts, especially 20th-century authors, have this improvised feeling to them. I think Gaddis has this in general. I don't feel that the language is imprisoned there.

There is also something that I wanted to say. What you are translating, it is impossible to make a definite ruling, or system or definition of what translation is because it depends on what texts you translate. It is not the same to translate the Bible as to translate something written yesterday. It is very different and it is also not the same translating from Ukrainian into Spanish as from Portuguese into Spanish. It is very different. When you translate from Ukrainian, you have to show clearly in the Spanish version that the original language is very different. It is impossible to show that it is Ukrainian because nobody knows Ukrainian. When you translate from Portuguese, which is, I know, very close to Spanish, this also shows – or it should at least. It is also very different to translate things that are from our time or from another time, or from a big author compared to a small obscure author. I think you have to take into consideration all these things.

I would like to go back to Max's idea, which I agree completely, about the translator being a 'humble servant' to the authors, especially if we admire them so much. Yet, one of the things that I remember from my work translating Gaddis is that in J R the characters at some point start a publishing house. And then, at some point in the book, you have like the catalogue of the publishing house which has five, seven, eight titles. These titles are anagrams, made with the letters of the title The Recognitions.⁵These anagrams can be found on page 515 of the first edition of J R. I had fifteen letters to make, let's say, eight different sentences or possible titles in Spanish which, of course, can't be close to the eight anagrams that Gaddis found in English with the letters of The Recognitions. So, this is not a humble job. It is a very equally creative job. Gaddis invented the game but I had to play it in the same way as he played it. I did not only have to find the eight or whatever titles but there was a sharp description of each "book" in this catalogue of the books in the publishing house. So, I had to find the eight titles alluding still somehow to the eight invented books that he mentioned in the original catalogue. I don't know if it is clear what I am explaining but it is crazy. It was like a week for a page. It is a very creative process. I didn't feel like a servant and I didn't feel humble doing that. I felt like an author. I felt like using all my creative powers to do that. I think that Benjamin's wonderful sentence applies to other translating jobs but not to translating Gaddis.

Marie Fahd: Thank you very much for your interesting and concrete answer, Mariano. Let's move on to the last section which focuses on specific questions for each of the translator.

IV—Specific Questions for Each of the Translators

Marie Fahd: Francine, how far could you highlight the notion of translation which is at play in The Recognitions?

Francine Fabiana Ozaki: As I have said in the beginning, when I was reading The Recognitions, the plot spoke very loud to me in this forgery scheme that was at play because in many ways I could see how Wyatt's act of forgery would share some similarities with the translator's role. Translators also draw elements from the original author in order to create or re-create another artwork in a different language. Also, when Wyatt tried to talk to Valentine and Brown about his participation in this forgery scheme, both of them told him that nobody cared about his authorship of these paintings. It felt very close to home to me because once the authorship of writers is firmly established, there is often little attention given to the authorship of the translator in this sense. It is possible to see how explored these concepts of originality and authorship are in The Recognitions.

Gaddis, in some way, anticipated these important issues that would be addressed by translation theory many years later from Walter Benjamin on included. Despite Gaddis's own will on translation, common sense at the time, the word for word, the equivalence between languages, Gaddis was already foreseeing very important discussions that would come up from the '70s on in translation studies. It is important to say that I don't feel like translators are plagiarists in any way – that is not the point – because when we are working there is no infringing of authorship whatsoever. On the contrary, what we do is to substantially try to interplay our practice with the original. We are bringing the original and the author in but in analytical ways, in critical ways, in creative ways as many as possible. It is part of our creative appropriation.

In the first century before Christ, Cicero was already highlighting how this type of translation that is close to this word-for-word approach, or even this literal approach, does less to promote translation than the active process of manipulating the text, absorbing the text or appropriating these characteristics. Walter Benjamin, in another essay in which he talked about the technical reproduction,⁶Walter Benjamin, 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction' [1935] in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, Trans. Harry Zohn, New York: Schocken, Ed. Hannah Arendt, 1969.
said something similar in the sense that these technical reproductions, forgeries, are more effective ways of disseminating the original than any other. It also echoes translation in many ways because translations allow the original work to endure: these authors and artists that Gaddis references in his novels are brought back to the spotlight because of his novels. When we translate his novels, we do that again. In a way, these new translations or even this revisitation of translations that are already published helped to keep all these authors, works and artworks more alive than ever. I feel like in The Recognitions, Gaddis was able to set the mood of his time, to register the mood of that period regarding these issues and anticipate these discussions to which we still don't have any practical solution as my colleagues were saying before about the artificial intelligence that is now coming, the machine translations that are there. It makes this discussion even more present. So, it comes back again with even different perspectives that arise from this discussion.

Marie Fahd: Thank you very much for your response. In the novel itself, there are numerous instances of mistranslations. For example, one of the fictional paintings in The Recognitions, titled 'L'Ame d'un Chantier,'⁷William Gaddis purposely omits the circumflex accent. The accurate French title would be 'L'Âme d'un Chantier'. is inaccurately translated into English as 'The Worker's Soul.' In French, if I were to translate it, it would be 'The Soul of a Building Site.' Throughout the novel, this ongoing play with mistranslation and the linguistic and misleading game it entails is a recurring theme. Additionally, I was also contemplating another mistranslation in 'The Recognitions,' specifically the misinterpretation of Michelangelo's poem by Otto, if that reference rings a bell for you, Francine.

Francine Fabiana Ozaki: Yes, I think that it many ways, Gaddis has this notion of translation in many instances of the text. Even in the examples that you mentioned, it shows the impossibility of doing something like this, to find the perfect equivalent to having the perfect translation. This mistranslation is one of the mechanisms that he uses to mislead. The topic of forgery is translated in the novel in many different ways. We have mistranslations, we have characters who impersonate others. The mistranslation is definitely one of the techniques he used to disseminate this misleading throughout the text. So, I feel like The Recognitions would also be an example of what all these discussions in translation studies are about. I don't know if I answered your question, sorry.

Marie Fahd: Thank you Francine for your interesting analysis. I also had another example in mind. Esme, a model, painter and poet in The Recognitions finds delight in a seemingly impossible connection with the act of writing. The reader discovers her 'writing' a poem, which happens to be none other than the English translation of Rilke's first Duino Elegy. This is intriguing because Esme's creative act raises questions about intent, which are closely tied to the issue of plagiarism. This idea of translation which is a kind of recreation is also at play in The Recognitions.

Francine Fabiana Ozaki: Thank you.

Marie Fahd: My pleasure. Mariano, as you said, you are a professor, a novelist, a poet and also a musician. It wanted to know if it was possible for you to define the musicality of Gaddis's prose in Carpenter's Gothic.

Mariano Peyrou: I want first to make a comment of what Francine said because I remembered when she was talking about the importance of words being translated internationally. I remember a sentence but I don't know who said it. I know it is a Spanish author but I don't know who he or she is. The author said something like 'Authors write national literature; translators write world literature.'⁸José Saramago, a Portuguese author and the 1998 Nobel Laureate in Literature once noted, 'Writers create national literature with their language, but world literature is written by translators.' I think it is a great idea. It is also a little too much. We should be humbler but there is something in that. You and Francine were talking of The Recognitions, the status of the translator and all that. There is a small fight that is going on in Spain at the moment. Some publishing houses have decided to always print the name of the translators on the cover of the books, for example, which is, let's say, a new tradition, not so well followed or well established. I would rather that they paid us more, because I don't do this for any glory but I think it is a good movement anyway.

Regarding the music of literature or how did some authors use music in their prose… I mean, this is a subject for a PhD, I think, or for many PhDs. It would be interesting to look at all different arts from one point of view, which is like aesthetic, what they have in common. You know what I mean, it is not like when a writer includes, in a dialogue, different voices that come and repeat each other. It is like a fugue of Bach, you know. It is like some classical music or baroque music system or strategies of composition. I think that this is very shallow. I think the interesting way of comparing different arts or disciplines is to look behind that or what makes fugue interesting. Can that be done in novels? How does that in novels? How? And not just the shallow imitation of strategies or ways of working. I know I didn't answer the question.

Marie Fahd: Thank you. Since I have read that you were also a musician and a musicologist, I thought it would be interesting to get your point of view on the musicality of Gaddis's writing. In Agapē Agape, especially, there is this kind of monologue which could be equated with a musical score if you know what I mean.

Mariano Peyrou: For example, if you think of Thomas Bernhard, the analogy of music in Thomas Bernhard's writing is very clear. He is repeating ideas and motifs and going on. It is like a sonata in a way. It has the classical strategies of building speech. In Gaddis, you find that kind of thing too but I think that that doesn't belong uniquely to music. In architecture, that happens as well.

Marie Fahd: Thank you for your answer. Last question for Max. You wrote an essay on postmodern US prose entitled The Labyrinths of American Postmodernism (2019). Would you define Gaddis as a postmodern writer? You already answered in part. If that is so, how would you define Gaddis's postmodernism compared to that of Pynchon?

Max Nestelieiev: I like your question Marie but it is very difficult. I will try. I could read a lecture on this but I prefer not to (laughter). I am not sure that William Gaddis is a pure postmodernist. Probably, he is a late modernist or a high modernist because The Recognitions is a postmodern novel but also is the last modernist novel. A lot of literary critics said that. It is not my idea. They said he was a simple genius. So, we couldn't mark him with one style or another. What's style did Gaddis write? Gaddis's style. For me, it is symphonious prose, in a metaphorical way, the way Benjamin liked to say great and big metaphors and so on so forth. I know that a lot of readers or scholars mixed Pynchon and Gaddis up. Some said that Pynchon could write some of Gaddis's novels and vice versa. For me, they are very different writers. They have some common points, paranoia and anti-American moods, anti-Americanism in a very broad sense. They adored European art. Yet, Pynchon for me is more a meta-historical writer. He writes meta-historical discourse of the American nation from Mason & Dixon to 9/11. For him, history is a very important theme and he rooted his novels in American history. That is his point: paranoia, entropy. Yet, for me, history for Pynchon is the main point. As for Gaddis, he wrote about fake art, corporations, business, jurisdictions. His last novel so-called King Lear's monologue is about inheritance, about what we have to give to the next generation. Of course, they are all products of American culture. Gaddis and Pynchon have a lot of common threads but they are different postmodernists. Perhaps Gaddis is more postmodernist than Pynchon. Yet, it is a very complicated question and that's why I like it.

Marie Fahd: I am glad that you liked it. Thank you for your insightful answer. We are about to wrap up the meeting. Ali, do you perhaps have any question you would like to ask?

Ali Chetwynd: I think I asked my main questions when I was following up earlier. You could probably tell I'm mainly fascinated by all the specific choices and theoretical ideas behind how you translate a specific line. Maybe one very broad question, which a few of you touched on right at the start of the conversation. Two-sentence answers would be great. What is the hardest aspect of Gaddis's language to render into your particular language? Is there something about Portuguese or Ukrainian or Spanish which is distinctively unsuited for the kind of stuff Gaddis does? Is that too broad a kind of claim to be able to back up, or is there something in the way of each of your languages work that makes it especially hard to render Gaddis's particular version of English?

Mariano Peyrou: In Spanish, there is nothing particularly difficult in that very aspect, I would say.

Francine Fabiana Ozaki: I agree. In Portuguese, I wouldn't say that it is in that sense. The hardest part, for me, was the dialogues, conveying this oral language the way Gaddis so masterfully can represent the oral language in his dialogues. It is one of the reasons why I chose The Recognitions and not J R to work with because I felt it would be even more difficult to try to convey that in J R than it is in The Recognitions. Working with the dialogues and working with this oral register in a way that wouldn't sound too informal or even too pedantic, in many ways, was a difficult challenge in Portuguese.

Max Nestelieiev: For me, the hardest part was, as I said, rhythm which depends on the length of the words. The other hard part was punctuation and syntax, which also depend on the length of the words and the differences between syntax and punctuation, English and Ukrainian.

Yoshihiko Kihara: Of course, there is a significant difference between English and Japanese syntax (especially in word order rules), which makes it almost impossible to translate a character's interrupted speeches into Japanese. I had to guess and reconstruct the intended speeches in Japanese in their entirety and then interrupt them at a precise point where the fragmented speeches retained just enough information. A very difficult but rewarding task.

There is also the problem of translating cusswords, as the Japanese language is not rich in them. For example, Billy's favorite 'fucking' and Paul's repeated 'damned' in Carpenter's Gothic could not, to my regret, be translated separately. In J R, JR repeatedly uses 'Holy shit' whose meaning ranges from 'How wonderful!' to 'It sucks!' Such an ambivalent cussword is very hard to find in Japanese, but I was satisfied to come up with 'yabai' which sounds sufficiently vulgar and can refer to both something extremely good and something terrible.

Sergey Karpov: Gaddis has a full house of translation challenges here: puns and word plays, poems, dialects and so on. But the main thing that comes to my mind is syntax (which is unfortunately quite routine and boring in terms of examples). There're a lot of differences between English and Russian languages of course: for example Russian is a fusional language, so in translation you always have to change syntax a lot and in the majority of cases the same text can be quite different in Russian and English. But with Gaddis you have, on the one hand, his long intricate sentence structures and peculiar punctuation, and, on the other, the necessity to somehow preserve these peculiarities. After all Gaddis tweaked syntax a bit for his purposes, so I think in some places it may be an unusual reading for English speakers, and this feeling needs to be conveyed too. (It is impossible not to mention here his rejection of quotation marks, which as I understand makes for something of a cross between American and European punctuation; although mercifully thanks to that comes a solution, cause you can just leave this as it is: it is as unusual in English as in Russian).

Also there are cases where I can convey this idiosyncrasy relatively easy, especially in dialogues, where his style serves to enhance the natural speech: abrupt endings, unconventional use of commas, ellipses, capital and small letters and so on – it may seem like a challenge, but in general I feel myself more at ease with character speech and so, as there, I believe, I can understand author's intention and render it with Gaddis's methods. Though there can be some traps too. Here's a little example with his use of 'well' in the beginning of the sentence. When a character says, for instance, 'Well yes [I was but,]' showing his confusion via the lack of punctuation, one of the most natural decisions for me is to remove the comma from «Ну, да» and get similar «Нуда […]». But in Russian this phrase when unpunctuated may convey much more irritability than confusion, it reads with different inflection, and it's actually a comma which creates a sense of confusion here. So you always need to recheck this moment and either find some other wording, which may not seem as natural, or, as in this case, leave the comma alone and emphasize character's feelings a little bit further down the line. Again, it's not uncommon for the English-Russian translation, but in the case of Gaddis this task is on the different scale.

And it's not so easy in other parts of the texts. In narrative fragments Gaddis has a little bit different style, here you don't have such a clear-cut goal as a character's feelings and moreover his sentences are the things of the beauty themselves which one wants to save as well. One unexpected reason why it may be a bit difficult is that sometimes his unusual punctuation actually matches the normal Russian one: for example, in place of his intonational comma we would put a dash, which we use a lot more than in English, and so we get a sentence with the same structure and sense, but without this peculiar Gaddis punctuation.

Also his syntax has, from my point of view, a flying feeling, when he can construct long cinematic sentences seemingly in one breath. Often you just can't do this in Russian because it relies on punctuation a lot more, and so you always need to balance naturalness and correctness of the speech against the author's punctuation.

Still, it's of course an absolute pleasure and even honor to work with the novels like these, and that wouldn't be so interesting without these and all his other challenges.

Marie Fahd: Thank you very much. I would like to express my gratitude to each of you for your time and cooperation. The discussion was very interesting, enlightening, and thought-provoking. Once again, thank you.

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