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Toward “Translating the Foods of the World”

2021; University of California Press; Volume: 21; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1525/gfc.2021.21.4.51

1533-8622

Eric C. Rath,

Culinary Culture and Tourism

The Gastronomica Editorial Collective is launching a new section of the journal devoted to translations of culinary writings. In a first for any food studies journal, we hope this will not only provide first-time access to essential food texts originally composed in other languages but also initiate a conversation about the process of translating that sheds light on the strategies needed to convert food writings created in a specific cultural historical setting into accessible English. Another goal is to increase recognition for the labors of the translator to encourage more people to introduce foreign language culinary works to English readers.Translation in general needs to receive a higher profile because it is a task poorly rewarded for most scholars unless they are in a department of foreign languages and literature. With rare exceptions, translating a book will not earn an anthropologist or historian tenure because their departments view translating as necessary but largely mechanical. These departments want their faculty to produce original work, not just to make someone else's ideas available in a new language. So, translating receives less academic recognition, and opportunities to publish in that area are also limited for that reason. Perhaps this helps to explain why past scholars often left the passages they cited in German, French, Latin, or another language in the original, saving them time from unpacking all of the linguistic nuances for their readers (assuming those readers could understand those languages in the first place).Yet scholars who use primary sources in languages other than English know that translation is not a mechanical process. Anyone who has used Google Translate or a similar service quickly discovers that machine learning in that area is a work in progress, with programs often unable to distinguish between badger the animal and the verb meaning to annoy someone. Software simply lacks the thought, knowledge, and craft required to produce a sensible translation. These qualities and more are needed to translate culinary texts, which might in the original provide only a few cryptic directions that if rendered word for word could yield something akin to a bad haiku, such as this example from a seventeenth-century Japanese cookbook. Debone seabream;Cut thinly and press with salt; Grill (Issunsha 1985: 67)While still cryptic, the recipe would be even less sensical without the translator's intervention. "Turned Grilled" is my attempt to explain makuri yaki, a dish that the modern editors of this text claim was quite rare in the early modern period (1600–1868). One way to interpret their comment is that they did not know what the dish really was. Makuri is written phonetically in the original, and there are several possible meanings, though not all of them are appropriate for the period: (1) something turned or rolled; (2) a painting removed from a screen; (3) belongings stolen from a bathhouse, or (4) passing someone in a bicycle race using the sloped outer track (Shogakukan 2021). Of these options, the first has its merits, although the directions do not reveal anything about how the cook should turn or roll the fish, which is instead sliced. "Grill" is the most typical way of translating yaki, but readers are left to devise for themselves how best to accomplish that task, probably resorting to a small portable charcoal grill called a shichirin. This recipe comes from the first published Japanese cookbook, Tales of Cookery (Ryōri monogatari 1643), a work meant for a popular, not professional, audience (Issunsha 1985). Premodern Japanese books written for chefs are even more opaque. To make scholarly use of these texts, learning the arcane vocabulary for cooking, plating, and eating in another language is only the beginning. One must also understand the levels of technology, literacy, and cultural references, and then be able to introduce these to readers in a way that is both sensible and readable. No one likes to read a translation that is more notations than text, especially when the contents are about something as vital to life and as visceral as food. The final product might not resemble a modern recipe with the fixed units of measurement, cooking times, and familiar methods we expect, but readers still should have some idea how the dish was made in the time and place the text was written. To return to the "turned grill" example, many early modern Japanese cookbooks included recipes meant more as amusing literary gestures rather than for actual cooking. So, "turned grill" might be simply a fancy name to enhance a generic recipe, making it tempting to retranslate it as "twisted grill." Or at second glance, the secondary definition of makuri seems more fitting, given that the meat of the fish is pulled from the bone like a painting ripped off its screen. Hence, that inspires the new title "stripped grill," or more specifically, "stripped grilled seabream."Turning away from the nitty-gritty details of one translation and writing as a member of the Gastronomica Editorial Collective, we hope this new section will not only make works available to English readers for the first time but also begin fruitful dialogues about the benefits and challenges of translating. We thus envision translations both of works on diet, cooking, and other food topics, and also articles that peel back the process to reveal why food translators make the choices they do.Ideally, we aim to publish these translations in clusters, with an introduction by a different author who would add their own observations about the texts and the translators' craft. It is also conceivable that some readers might be inspired to try to re-create some of the translated dishes, and we could feature their culinary creations in the style of one of our food phenomena articles in a later issue. When I translated the earliest recipe for tempura in my book Food and Fantasy in Early Modern Japan, I described a dish consisting of fish fried in lard served in a broth, quite different from the crispy version served today of vegetables and shrimp dipped in batter, fried, and accompanied with a dipping sauce or salt (Rath 2010: 104–105). I never imagined anyone trying to recreate the original tempura recipe, but Michelin-starred Chef David Schlosser offered a version at his Los Angeles Japanese restaurant Shibumi in the spring of 2021 (www.shibumidtla.com). Now, if only someone in the United States would try fermenting carp for six months to a year to make the original version of sushi, my translations in Oishii: The History of Sushi (2021) would have new life off the page.What follows is a call for papers for the new section on translations. We hope you will join us.Gastronomica is pleased to introduce a new journal section with an exclusive focus on translations.Even recipes written in English a century ago need contextualization (if not actual translation of now obsolete words or ingredients) for readers today. Such a task is even more complicated when it comes to translating and adapting centuries-old works from other languages into English, be they cookbooks, primers to survive famine or to cook with rationed foods, guides to "healthy" eating, or similar texts. Despite these challenges, making such primary sources more accessible to students and researchers around the world is critical to stimulating and maintaining the growth of diverse voices in global food studies.We therefore invite submission ofWe envision clustering translations and other accepted submissions thematically or geographically, with an introduction by one or more contributors, or other invited subject-matter experts. Please see the Gastronomica website (https://gastronomica.org/submit) for style guidelines and submission procedures. We look forward to reviewing your work.