If you’re looking for works by Haitian writers translated into English, it’s highly likely you’ll come across texts by American translator Nathan H. Dize, a rising voice in the field. His translation of Les Immortelles (The Immortals) by novelist and poet Makenzy Orcel is being published this month by SUNY Press, and while this is Dize’s first book-length publication, he has translated poetry and fiction by many other Haitian writers, including Kettly Mars, Charles Moravia, James Noël, Néhémy Pierre-Dahomey and Évelyne Trouillot.
A PhD candidate in the Department of French and Italian at Vanderbilt University, Dize is also the content curator, translator, and co-editor of the digital history project A Colony in Crisis: The Saint-Domingue Grain Shortage of 1789. With Siobhan Meï, he coedits the “Haiti in Translation” interview series for H-Haiti. On Nov. 12, he will be in conversation with Jennifer Boum Make of Georgetown University, Washington, DC, for a presentation titled “The Urgent Act of Translation”.
The
following interview with Dize, conducted by email, is part of SWAN’s series
about translators of Caribbean literature, done in collaboration with the
Caribbean Translation Project.
SWAN:
You speak several languages – English, French, Haitian Creole and Spanish.
Where and how did you begin learning languages?
NATHAN
H. DIZE: I started learning French during my second year of high school in
Baltimore at the age of 14. At my school we were required to take Latin in the
first year, and at the beginning of the second we had a choice between French,
German, and Spanish. Many of my friends decided to take Spanish because they
had already started in middle school and others took German because it was not
something they had encountered before. I chose French because I wanted to be a
little different and I liked the way that it sounded.
I
remember that year very well because in October and November we started
studying the unrest in Paris when Zyed Benna and Bouna Traoré were electrocuted
to death while running away from the police. Our teacher was from France via
Guadeloupe and her teenage son was in my class. She was distraught and the
Foreign Language Dept. started teaching about the unrest. From there, we
studied Caribbean writers like Aimé Césaire and Maryse Condé as well as Léopold
Sédar Senghor. Although I couldn't yet read their work in French, I retained
these names until I enrolled at the University of Maryland (UMD) for my
undergraduate studies. In my first term at UMD, I took a class on Francophone
African and Caribbean writers with Dr. Valérie Orlando that I will never
forget. The reading load was intense, and we read work from writers who I still
consider some of my favorites like Myriam Warner-Vieyra, Ferdinand Oyono, and
Frantz Fanon.
Nathan H. Dize
After
taking that class, I immediately started to enrol in every Caribbean and
African diasporic literature class on campus until I decided that I needed to
major in English, French, and Latin American/Caribbean Studies. Most of the
courses I took were taught, at least initially, in English translation, but it
was clear to me that I needed to continue taking French to learn more about the
work that hadn't yet been translated. After a particularly discouraging French
grammar class, I was all but ready to give up until my English professor, who
happened to be Merle Collins, encouraged me to give French one more shot. And,
I haven't looked back since.
In the last five years at Vanderbilt University, I've been learning Haitian Creole and coordinating language clubs and programming with Haitian students there. I suppose I came into the study of language at the right time. It's been the defining characteristic of my life since I was 14.
SWAN:
How did your interest in translation begin?
NHD:
My interest in translation came at the same time as my interest in French,
which is to say in high school and college. In high school, we had the
International Baccalaureate program and our junior year was dedicated to World
Literature. We read works by Haruki Murakami, Bao Nihn, Ariel Dorfman, and
Isabel Allende that year. The next year, we read Wide Sargasso Sea and Jane
Eyre and was transfixed by the way French, Dominican Creole, and English played
out in these novels and I developed a thirst for linguistic confrontation, code
switching, and marronnage via language.
Building on my impressions of Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea from high school, I started reading a lot of Guadeloupean and Martinican women writers at university. I felt that the narrative voices of writers like Maryse Condé, Myriam Warner-Vieyra, and Simone Schwarz-Bart carried the traces of Rhys's writing that I loved the most as she wrote back to Charlotte Brontë. Though I loved Warner-Vieyra and Schwarz-Bart, not all of their writing existed in translation and their contemporaries like Michèle Lacrosil and Jacqueline Manicom were (and still are) only available to read in French.
From there, I went on to do an undergraduate thesis on two novelettes by Myriam Warner-Vieyra, Juletane and Le Quiboiseur l'avait dit..., and translation was something that I was eager to practice as well as critique. Looking back on it, I was far too harsh on the translators. I didn't know how to read translations with the sensibility of a translator, and I insisted that I myself translate the passages I wanted to work from. Professor Collins agreed, knowing that it would be a worthwhile exercise and that it would teach me to be patient with translators. It did that and much more.
SWAN:
You’ve translated poetry and fiction by Haitian writers. Can you tell us more
about this?
NHD:
I've been quite fortunate to translate a number of living Haitian writers -
Kettly Mars, James Noël, Makenzy Orcel, Néhémy Pierre-Dahomey, and Évelyne
Trouillot - these last few years. I'm most motivated to translate a writer
after reading them. Often times, it's that first time reading a book that
sticks with me, and I cannot shake it. It was this way for all of these writers
and the works of theirs that I have translated.
When
I was living in Lyon, France in 2014, I recall reading Makenzy Orcel's The
Immortals on a cold, rainy day. I had just come home from the visa office and
had the day off, so I read the book in one sitting. The novel takes place in
one room in Port-au-Prince after the 2010 earthquake. It's a conversation
between a writer and a Haitian sex worker about her deceased protégé who she
wants to immortalize by having the writer transcribe her story. It's a
transformative thing to be reading alone in your tiny dormitory room about
someone who believes that books have the power to immortalize someone,
especially a beloved friend. I didn't know it at the time, but when I was
struggling to continue my studies four years later, I returned to The Immortals
and started translating it in 100-word portions by night. It became my little
ritual that kept my spirits up. Now, I'm delighted to be able to share this
novel with readers in English and I hope it will impact people in ways that
they do not yet know.
 |
| Makenzy Orcel |
It's not a poem that
many people will remember because it was printed in the Haitian daily Le
Nouvelliste in 1918, but I just thought he was so courageous, especially as
a diplomat in DC, to stand up to the president of the United States while Haiti
was currently under a US occupation. I'm particularly fond of Évelyne
Trouillot's poem "Tremors" because it expresses so much beauty and
pain with so few words. It's another poem that I remember reading in Lyon as I
walked home from the bookstore on the banks of the Rhône. For years, I returned
to the poem on January 12, the anniversary of the 2010 earthquake, as a source
of comfort. One year I translated it and sent it to some friends, thinking it
might help them understand what happened that day on an emotional level and
they encouraged me to try to publish it. With the blessing of Évelyne and her
publisher, Meridians printed it last fall.
SWAN:
How important is translation for today’s world?
NHD:
Translation is critical for our world today and we must make sure that
communities have access to translation and interpretation services, that those
providing those services are compensated for their labor, and that translation
is more than just a service rendered. Translation can be an act of imagination,
an act of empathy, a crossing into someone else's world… translation can be so
many things, if it were only valued the way that it should be.
SWAN:
What can writers and the publishing industry do to support and promote
translation, especially of under-represented literature?
NHD:
There are many things that can be done, small intellectual coups that cost
nothing, but do require a slight shift in perspective. For instance, writers
who are commissioned or who volunteer to write reviews of works in translation
could make the space in their review to acknowledge the influence of the
translator on the translated text. Some reviews of books in translation are
written as though the book magically appeared in another language. I read one
review of the reissued version of Simone Schwarz-Bart's Bridge of Beyond and
the reviewer claimed that the novel was newly translated even though the same
translation was issued in the 1970s and the translator, Barbara Bray, had
passed away three years prior. There are some venues that encourage reviewers
to acknowledge the translator like World Literature Today and
ReadinginTranslation.com, but it is sadly still standard practice by many
reviewers to ignore the translator.
Another
thing that writers can do, especially polyglot writers, is to ask to do reviews
in English of a book (that is written) in another language. I've done this
before with SX Salon for books by Jacques Stephen Alexis and Emmelie Prophète.
Many academic journals already do this, but until you've tried to pitch a translation
to a publisher you don't realize how critical trans-lingual book reviews can
be. They unburden the translator and they help the folks at the press decide
whether the book might be an appropriate fit.
As
for the publishers, the question is more complex. In December, I recall reading
an article in The New York Times called "The Ferrante Effect: In Italy,
Women Writers are ascendant" and I asked myself, what might it mean for
any given island in the Caribbean to have a wave of translations (or publications
for that matter) appear on the US book market due to the momentum of one
writer? I only say the US because that's where I'm based, but the question
would hold for any major book market. Can we speak of an "[Edwidge]
Danticat Effect," a "[Julia] Alvarez Effect," a "[Marlon]
James effect," and so on? I'm being provocative to a degree because of
course writers like Danticat, Alvarez, and James have paved the way for new
voices from the Caribbean to access global literary markets. All you need to do
is look at how many books by Haitian authors Danticat has prefaced or blurbed
to understand her impact. At the same time, the work that she is doing is not
always written about in the same terms as a writer like Elena Ferrante is.
SWAN:
In the Caribbean, as in other regions, it sometimes feels as if we're divided by language. How can people in the literary sphere help to bridge these
linguistic "divides"?
NHD:
This is a pertinent question as well. As a translator, I try to keep audience
in mind as much as possible because it helps me know who I'm translating toward
and who I might be translating away from. For example, when translating a text
from a Haitian author from French into English I often try to engage with a
Haitian diasporic audience by placing Haitian Creole words into the
standardized Haitian Creole orthography rather than leaving them in a
"Frenchified" creole. While this may seem like a minor adjustment,
I've spoken with heritage speakers of Haitian Creole who when they see their home
language in print it fills them with an immense sense of pride. I think we've
learned to think about translation in terms of loss, but there is much to be
gained in carrying out the work of translation in a thoughtful manner.
SWAN:
What are your forthcoming projects?
NHD:
My first book-length translation, The Immortals by Makenzy Orcel just
came out with SUNY Press in the Afro-Latinx Futures series, edited by Vanessa
K. Valdés. Although it was just released, it still feels like it is forthcoming
in a way and I'm eager to hear what readers think about it. Recently, I've been
collaborating with Siobhan Meï, Jonathan Michael Square, and others on an
Instagram-based project called Rendering Revolution: Sartorial Approaches to
Haitian History that visually documents the way that fashion and clothing
constructed notions of freedom during and after the Haitian Revolution. My role
has mostly been as a translator for the project, translating English captions
into Haitian Creole. Siobhan and I have also translated two chapters for a
forthcoming Routledge volume on Anténor Firmin edited by Celucien Joseph and
Paul Mocombe.
In
addition to these projects, I have an advance contract with the University of
Virginia Press and their CARAF series (Caribbean and African Literature translated
from French) for an English translation of Kettly Mars's 2015 novel Je suis
vivant (I Am Alive). It's a translation that I've been working on
ever since the novel came out and I'm excited to see it come into being.
(Editor’s
note: Les Immortelles has previously been translated into English by
Annie Mathews for readership in India, published by Under the Peepal Tree.)
This article is part of SWAN’s translator profiles, in
association with The Caribbean Translation Project (Twitter: @CaribTranslate),
an initiative to promote the translation of literature from and about the
Caribbean.
