A Note on the Type
ook designers, like Victorian children, should be seen and not heard. Most readers will only notice a book’s design when something’s gone horribly wrong; if a book’s design needs to be explained, it’s clear that the design isn’t working. So when I was asked if I’d write something about translation and design for this issue of Circumference, I agreed with some trepidation: is there really anything that needs to be said? An answer: it’s more work to keep silent than you might think.
Poets since Mallarmé have recognized that the way that words are laid out on the page can affect meaning. Graphic designers have spent a lot of time thinking about poetry; making a poem look good on a page is a trickier task than laying out prose, which tends to follow fairly consistent rules. Circumference brings interesting constraints to the problem of laying out poetry: in addition to presenting work from poets with often wildly different sensibilities about how their words relate to the page, we present poetry in facing page translation.
Design pulls at translation in various ways. Every language has its own standards for what’s perceived as normal. A common example in English: an American eye looking at a novel printed in Britain will pause, if momentarily, when it sees single quotation marks enclosing dialogue rather than double quotes. A French question mark is usually preceded by a thin space, but were a space to appear before the question mark in a translation, the reader might register it as an affectation. These nuances demand attention.
A second consideration also comes into play: each piece is fit to the Procrustean bed of Circumference style. No piece, no matter how foreign the language, should stick out too jarringly. Technology helps: Adobe Garamond Premier, the typeface that this issue introduces, contains just about every accented Roman, Cyrillic, or Greek character imaginable. It’s not perfect — some Old English macrons proved too much for it — but it makes things easier. Nothing needs to be ugly.
The transit from the manuscript to the printed page is a translation of a sort, and like all translation, perfection is never quite attainable. But the struggle quietly continues.
Daniel Beraca Visel