Dan Golembeski
Photo courtesy of Dan Golembeski
Bio
Dan Golembeski majored in Mechanical Engineering and French (BS/BE—Oakland University, Michigan), then French Linguistics (MA/PhD—Indiana University). In France, he studied language (University of Burgundy and the University of Franche-Comté) and taught high-school English (Lycée Dumont d’Urville, Toulon). His research in sociolinguistics focuses on Northern Ontario, where French is a local majority in many communities. He teaches all levels of college French and has led study abroad trips to France and Canada. Today, he’s addicted to translating, drawn especially to works with an environmental or cultural gist. Every culture, he recognizes, has much to learn from every other. His current projects include a travelogue (Bernard Ollivier, Longue marche, 2001-13) and a sci-fi novel (Pierre Bordage, Dames blanches, 2015). What he really wants to do when he grows up? Hike the Camino de Santiago in Spain, work the grape harvest in France, and visit Poland and India. He resides in Petoskey, Michigan.
Translating books had long been a dream of mine. In the autobiographical tale Wind, Sand and Stars, Antoine de St-Exupéry asserts: “What saves a man is to take a step.” As I pondered the need for a retranslation of the French version, Terre des hommes, I realized that if I wanted to become proficient at translating, I needed to jump right in. So, from St-Exupéry to French pop music and African poetry, I started translating whatever I could. Finally wanting to work on a piece I could publish, I embarked on a quest for French-language titles I thought might interest a North American readership. During a trip to France that year, I spent countless hours in Left Bank bookstores seeking works I couldn’t put down. Poring over a few pages of Longue marche—the 1,000-page tale of a hike along the Silk Road—the three volumes simply jumped out of my hands and into my backpack (after I paid for them, of course).
Be warned, translators, before contacting potential authors! They will encourage you to follow your dreams. I owe a world of debt to author Bernard Ollivier for his insistence and patience as I translated his narrative. For lengthy manuscripts, publishers often require extended samples. That takes time. One memorable evening, determination, I believe it was, pushed me to seek financial support. Against all odds—so I thought—I applied for a National Endowment for the Arts grant. Months later, who’s that calling? “The NRA?” It took the coordinator at least two tries before I picked up . . .
I am extremely grateful for the NEA’s support. Applying for the grant was, in the spirit of St-Exupéry, a crucial step, and it has already opened doors for me as I seek to make literary translation a significant part of my career.
From Out of Istanbul : A Voyage of Discovery Along the Silk Road by Bernard Ollivier
[translated from the French]
I explained and re-explained my reasons to them all a hundred times. I’m sixty-one, an in-between age. My career as a journalist, first covering politics and then economics, ended a year ago. My wife and I had been partners in travel and exploration for twenty-five years; then, ten years ago, my heart was broken when hers stopped beating. [. . .]
A happy childhood and a somewhat difficult adolescence, then a busy adulthood: I’ve lived two productive, full lives. But why must it all end now? What do “those who wish me well” really want? For me to wait around, lifeless and resigned, reading books by the fireside and watching TV from the couch, so that old age can sneak up and grab me by the throat? No, for me, that time has not yet come. I still stubbornly crave fresh encounters, new faces, and new lives. I still dream of the faraway steppe, of wind and rain on my face, of basking in the heat of different suns.
And then, throughout my previous lives, all too often I was on the run. I never found the time, just like the shopkeepers tirelessly chattering the night away in the compartment behind me. I had to secure a position, work, study, and earn my stripes. Constantly driven by farcical needs in the rush of the mob, endlessly running, dashing about, fast and faster still. Throughout all society, this senseless stampede is still gathering speed. In our noisy, urgent foolishness, who among us yet finds the time to step down off the treadmill to greet a stranger? I yearn, in this third life, for slowness and moments of silence. To stop to admire eyes rimmed with kohl, the flash of a woman’s leg, or a misty meadowland immersed in dreams. To eat bread and cheese, sitting in the grass, nose to the wind. And what better way to do this than by going for a walk? The world’s oldest form of transportation is also the one that allows us to connect. The only one, in fact. I’ve had my fill of viewing civilization in boxes and culture grown under glass. My personal museum is to be found in the pathways themselves and in the people traveling them, in village squares, and in a bowl of soup sipped with strangers.
Last year, for my first year in “retirement,” I hiked one of the world’s oldest roads: The Way of St. James of Compostela, from Paris to Galicia. 1,380 miles on foot, pack on my back like a donkey. A marvelous road, full of stories and Histories. I wore out my soles—morning in, morning out—on the selfsame stones of a road that has, for 12 centuries, guided millions of pilgrims, sustained by their faith. For 76 days, I was one with the landscape that had seen them all go by, I sweltered on the same slopes, smelled the same smells, and, in its churches, stepped on same slabs that had been buffed by the boot nails of their shoes. Although I did not find faith on the road to Compostela, I returned home elated, feeling closer than ever to those who, from the earliest of times, had left their mark along the way. As I neared the end of my journey, drunk on the fragrance of Galicia’s eucalyptus forests, I promised myself that, for as long as my strength would allow, I would continue to walk the world’s pathways. And what path could be more inspiring, more impassioned, more infused with history than the Silk Road?
English translation © 2019 by Daniel Golembeski
Copyright Skyhorse Publishing, New York, 2019.
Originally published as Longue marche: A pied de la Méditerranée jusqu’en Chine par la route de la Soie. Vol. 1, Traverser l’Anatolie.
by Bernard Ollivier. Copyright Éditions Phébus, Paris, 2001.
original
About Bernard Ollivier
Retirement: a time to put up one’s feet and watch TV? Not for Bernard Ollivier, who, at the age of 62, donned his hiking boots and set off to walk the Silk Road. A former journalist, Ollivier chronicles world regions unfamiliar to many in the West—Turkey, Iran, Central Asia, China—and does so in such poetic prose that readers may feel they’re traveling right along with him. Walking opens doors to otherwise impossible encounters: he’s invited into homes and offered countless cups of chai. And in discovering the Other, Ollivier, of course, finds himself.