Ten questions: Meet professor and literary translator Clyde Moneyhun

Clyde Moneyhun, professor in the Department of Theatre, Film and Creative Writing, holds "Witch in Mourning"
by Maria-Mercè Marçal, one of the four poetry collections he has translated into English

Clyde Moneyhun, a professor in the Department of Theater, Film and Creative Writing, holds four degrees - a BA in comparative literature, an MA in American literature, an MFA in fiction writing, and a Ph.D. in rhetoric, composition and the teaching of English. Moneyhun has traveled all over the world, lived and worked in Japan for two years, and chased a number of passions during what he describes as a career of wandering. But Moneyhun found his deepest passion in literary translation - transitioning a poem from one language to another without losing the original's impact.

It's a task that's more difficult than it sounds. How does one maintain rhyme and meter when the English words sound completely different than, say, Spanish? How to translate something like a pun across vastly different languages, cultures and time periods?

"There are probably a lot of people who would say, 'You translate poetry? That's impossible,'" Moneyhun said. "Which it is. But I think most translators, especially of poetry, would say that what you're doing is recreating a poem. You're doing the best you can. It's impossible to translate a poem, but you can make a new poem that's a kind of performance of the old poem."

Moneyhun translates from Spanish, Italian and French, but primarily from Catalan - the official dialect of three autonomous communities in Eastern Spain. He has translated four books of poetry and one children's book into English.

A professor at Boise State for the last 15 years, Moneyhun is now partially retired. He splits his time between Mahón, Spain - where he owns an apartment - and Boise. Equipped with a warm enthusiasm for literature, and an abundance of techniques he's built over years in academia, Moneyhun continues to teach online nonfiction writing classes.

He took the time to answer our ten questions.

1. What is a question you have spent your life trying to answer?

CM: How to be happy, probably. I've done a lot of things that have made me happy, but the things that have made me happy, I've sort of fallen into. I'm not sure if they were really choices. I didn't move to Boise to be happy, for example. I was working at Stanford, I was burnt out and a job here opened up.

And then it turned out to be fantastic. Little old Boise State turned out to be the key to much happiness, including finding translation - and getting rewarded for translation - on the job.

2. When did you first become fascinated by literary translation?

CM: I've had to answer that question many times. The creation story for me is, my undergrad major was not English. It was comparative literature, which is like world literature. This is at Columbia [University in New York City, in the mid-1970s], and you had to take not one but two foreign languages. So I took a lot of French and a little bit of Italian. It was terribly hard. It did not come naturally. It still does not come naturally, ironically.

Homework didn't help me, but I would translate stuff. If the teacher gave us stuff, I would literally - and I didn't know what I was doing - I would just sit with a dictionary and just translate it word for word, and I would learn that way.

The first translation I ever published was senior year of college. It was a thing I had translated in desperation to try to learn some Italian. And then, I dabbled across the years.

Right before I came here, when I was working at Stanford's writing center, I took a class in Catalan. I knew some Italian, a lot of French and a little Spanish. But Catalan, the language of my ancestors, I did not know, and there was this class, this intensive two-years-in-one-year class. I took it, and again, in desperation, started translating. And when I got to Boise State, I was just on fire. I was ready to go. I was told, "Oh, really? You can do that [publish translations] to get tenure." So that's how it happened.

3. Do you remember the first translation you published?

CM: Oh, I remember it very well. It's by an Italian novelist named Natalia Ginzburg. She's really best known as a novelist, but she wrote some little pieces of memoir, and this one is called "Winter in Abruzzo." Abruzzo is a mountainous area in Italy.

I still look at that little piece. When I was a senior in college and got that thing published, it was the first time it had ever been published in English.

4. What is the most common misconception about literary translation?

CM: That you just look up words and then, you substitute words. This word, that word, another word. Even Google Translate is more sophisticated than that. But most people think that's the idea. Use a dictionary, and just do word substitution.

Languages have not just grammar, but sort of rules of operation, ways of expressing things, reality, that are different from each other. They're just so different. Which makes translation very hard.

For example, Japanese. In Japanese, the verb is always at the end of the sentence, which means that you can watch the person you're talking to, and when you get to the verb, you can do things to it, morphological things. You can make it more polite; you can make it negative. You can add a little word that means, "Don't you agree?" English does not operate that way.

5. What do you do when you're stuck on a problem?

CM: What I've learned with any problem, translation included - writing, personal problems with people - is just leave it for a while. You'll come back. Just leave it. Stop beating your head against the wall. I mean, pop psychologists even recommend this. You're having an argument with somebody, you know, come back later, when you've both thought about it. Teaching problems - they don't solve themselves right away. So, let it go. Go do something else.

Translation is especially great. I dug up a translation the other day that I didn't remember doing. It was the beginning of a poem up to the last couple of lines. And I thought, what the heck? This is really good. I gave up on it, because it got harder. And then I never went back, and now I am.

It will seem easier when you go back. Because you know, you've done it a thousand times. You'll be back. You'll be back later.

Teaching is a great thing. Teaching is like a riddle you're solving all the time. You screw up, you know, you teach a class, something's not going well. And if you can't fix it, then maybe you'll fix it next semester. "Well, we'll never do that assignment again."

6. What has changed the most in terms of your approach to teaching through the years?

CM: Back in the day, there was no such thing as writing drafts and getting comments and then doing revisions. I mean, when I was a kid in college, you just wrote. You didn't even discuss your topic ahead of time with the teacher. It's Thursday, the paper's due. You hand in the paper, you get a few comments and a grade, and you just forge ahead to the next paper.

This isn't how real writers write. They revise, revise and revise some more, and they show it to somebody, and they put it away. So, the insight was building as many revisions as humanly possible into the class. This changes the nature of the comments you can give. If you're only going to see the paper once, you have to comment on everything. But if you're going to allow students a couple of drafts, then you can talk about the huge things first. Towards the end, you're talking about smaller and smaller things, like, you know, the fine points of organizing sentences.

You can only do that if you build in enough drafts.

7. What's a book you've read recently that resonated with you?

CM: There's a book called "Journey Into Cyprus" by Colin Thubron. Oh, man, what a writer. What a dream of a writer. [In 1972,] he decided what he really needed to do was backpack around Cyprus, which turns out to be really dangerous, because half of it's owned by the Greeks, half by Turks. And every time you get to a dividing line, somebody threatens to shoot you.

In the book, you get his narrative, you get everything he sees, everybody he meets, everything he eats and drinks. History, mythology, philosophy - you get everything.

8. What's the most interesting place you've visited in your world travels?

CM: Maybe Kyoto, Japan. The town is just one great Buddhist town. You can get lots of vegetarian food. You see priests walking down the street. It's just beautiful. The outskirts are temples and mountains. I dream about it sometimes.

9. What is one hope you have for the next generation in your field?

CM: That translators get paid better. It's really hard to make a living as a literary translator. There are a few superstars, you know, like Gabrielle García Márquez's translator Gregory Rabassa, who made it big. García Márquez famously said, "When I read his translation of 100 Years of Solitude, I liked it more." There are only a few people who can do that.

In general, everybody's got a day job. Most of us translators are teachers, you know. I don't think I myself would give up teaching, but for some people, it would be great to be able to make a living through translation alone.

10. What's a principle you try to live by?

CM: Well, here's the thing I tell my kids sometimes. Life on Earth is really difficult. You're born, you suffer. You fall in love and they don't love you, you break your arm. And then, somewhere along the way, somebody's going to die. If it isn't you, it's other people. And since that's just a basic truth of life, what we're here for is to help each other through the thing. To be as kind as you can be to each other.

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