This post is also available as a podcast. Many metaphors for translation seem to imagine it as a kind of travel, a movement with baggage across some national, cultural, linguistic, and/or geographic boundaries, usually from an imagined foreign territory to one’s own home turf. In that foreign territory—so these metaphors often go—one discovered something or… Continue reading Translation and Exile
Author: russellv
On Translating Word Play
I’m on my way to the AWP conference later this week and will be speaking on two panels, one on translation and word play, the other on translation and exile. Here are some thoughts about the first. Basically, it’s what I’m going to be saying in the first part of my comments. Then I’ll have… Continue reading On Translating Word Play
Breathing and Stretching
I turned in the manuscript. I TURNED IN THE MANUSCRIPT!!! It clocked in at a bit over 400,000 words. I’m not sure what that will mean in terms of pages. Probably more than a thousand. This will depend on the editing process. But the main part is done. I got a haircut on Saturday, and… Continue reading Breathing and Stretching
A Truth about Dogs
From the last long story in Kin, “Sarajevo Dogs”: The basic sensation of a dog, canine melancholy, the foundation of canine lyricism, is a feeling of extended abandonment. It follows the dog from the moment of birth, is repeated in an array of variations through life, and not once has a single dog ever escaped… Continue reading A Truth about Dogs
Words, Speed, Time, Money
At the October 2017 ALTA conference in Minneapolis, Tim Parks began his keynote address by providing a counterpoint to Lydia Davis’s 19 pleasures of translating theme of the night before by enumerating 19 torments of translating. But when he got to number 19, he was on a roll so he just kept going. It was… Continue reading Words, Speed, Time, Money
Impossible Historical Ideological Neologism Used in Passing
I’m in the revisions stage now, and going back through an earlier section, I found a parenthetical note to myself that says: “no way, samovoz,” and then the page number in the hard copy. The English passage in question is this: No one saw him as he was leaving, and no one knew when did… Continue reading Impossible Historical Ideological Neologism Used in Passing
Translation as Job, Vocation, Calling
I was once accused by a translator colleague of bringing down the going rate for translation by doing it when I had another job. This person had no idea what I charged or did not charge for doing the work, and perhaps she was angry about something else, but I remember distinctly that her comment… Continue reading Translation as Job, Vocation, Calling
Bitch or Female (dog)?
My local vet once referred to her dog, which was about to have a litter, as a bitch, and I thought nothing of it. Or rather, what I thought was that she, the vet, was using the word correctly and also perhaps somewhat provocatively. She, the vet, is also a somewhat unusual person, uses crystals… Continue reading Bitch or Female (dog)?
Visiting the End
I am getting close to the end of this translation and feeling a bit light headed. I don’t think I wrote much about the trip I took in September to Zagreb, to speak with my author, and then to Sarajevo to walk through the areas he writes so much about. It feels like a long… Continue reading Visiting the End
New Terms and Old
Lots of terms for people have regionally specific origins, and many in turn never leave such confines. The term irredentist, for instance, which my computer loves to underline in red to let me know is at least questionable if not an outright mistake, will be clear to anyone who has studied Italian unification or the… Continue reading New Terms and Old
Russell Scott Valentino 