John Fornoff
(1993-1995)

I discovered ALTA and attended my first conference in Boston in 1984. I was so warmly welcomed into the fold (by John Biguenet and Tom Hoeksema) that I stayed. Why did I go to Boston? I had no way of knowing what ALTA would come to mean to me (more of that in a moment). I went because I had published a couple of books of poetry in translation and wanted to seek out kindred spirits and have them tell me what no one else on earth could possibly tell me with any degree of credibility: i.e., how deliriously good my translations were. The kindred spirits I met were too shy to put it in words, but I knew what they meant. I've only missed two conferences since Boston.

In 1991, I almost blew it, foolishly agreeing to host a conference, fully conscious that my primary qualification for such a task was my love and fear of chaos. Visit my life in Johnstown sometime and you'll see what I mean. So I knew what I had to do. I over-compensated and over-organized the Pittsburgh conference. The members came through, though, loosening it nicely. Then something even more dire happened. As an a priori retaliation for my having agreed to host ALTA '92, it occurred to someone to nominate me for high ALTA office. I was elected V.P., by a landslide. Right. Perhaps this is as good a time as any to warn you: if you're elected V.P., later you have to be P. I had to be P. from 1993 to 1995. My amazing accomplishment was to contrive the apparent survival of ALTA and not expire with my term.

I am actually uplifted by ALTA. There's a kind of intense secular magic about gathering together once a year to talk the craft. The collectivity of translators in itself is empowering. Where else do we find humans who know what kind of anxious magic is involved in moving an irony, or a glint of saliva, or an epiphany, from that bounteous language we've hoped would adopt us, into this famished language we were born speaking? It is our ambiguous sense of the surface poverty of our own language (if it were a rich language, why wasn't the Quijote written first in it?) and our blind faith in its hunger to say more, that makes us strain to move mountains, and especially those dazzles and nuggets, from there to here. We mediate the transferral, and in so doing we learn/teach English to say what it hungers to say but forgot how; we unbury the tree of more perfect English and proffer the fruit proudly, as if we'd engendered it. Well, we have.

Fred Fornoff has published several book translations of Laureano Albán's poetry: Autumn's Legacy (1979), The Endless Voyage (1983), All the Stones in the Wall (1988), and Summa of Clarities (1992). He is Professor of Spanish, Comparative Literature, and Creative Writing at The University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown.