I’m in the production tunnel now and finding it difficult to comment on my work. This happened to dozens of my students at Iowa when they were in the midst of finishing translation MFA theses and were then expected to write something about them. This required a shift of thinking and approach that they had… Continue reading Ars Prosaica
Author: russellv
Translating Syntax
I once listened to a student who had listened to another student as he defended his keeping to the syntax of the source language (Chinese, if I remember correctly) as a way of defamiliarizing his English text and interfering in the English-language complacency of his readers. I have no particular problem with this idea in… Continue reading Translating Syntax
Translating Place
My author does a lot with names. Here is an example: Like Mehmed-paše, Nemanjina Street was built in the sixteenth century. It had been a road in the neighborhood of the Hadji Balina Mosque, which the people would remember as Čekaluša. But Čekaluša did not get its name from the word čekanje, or waiting, as… Continue reading Translating Place
Olga and Zehra
Rounding page 340 and making good post-holiday progress, I continue to find little gems of passages, like this one in a chapter from Part Five of Kin, which is called in the source Inventarna knjiga, a play on “invention” and “inventories” that I think I can get at by simply calling it Inventories in the… Continue reading Olga and Zehra
Lydia Davis’s Eleven Pleasures
A very nice piece by Lydia Davis in the Dec. 8 NYRB on “Eleven Pleasures of Translating.” I wish I had the time to write an extended essay on it, because she broaches important topics in a way that invites commentary, if not conversation. Two quick observations (before I return to the pleasures of translating… Continue reading Lydia Davis’s Eleven Pleasures
On demons, devils, Satan, et al.
Problem-based teaching is all the rage, I hear, so maybe translation can serve as a point of departure of sorts. Here is the problem. Od njega, Javorka je prvi put čula riječ đavao. Vrag se u njezinom životu već javljao. Spominjali su ga i Nona i Nono, bio je prisutan u svakoj priči, uglavnom bezazlen,… Continue reading On demons, devils, Satan, et al.
On Translating Miljenko Jergović
PEN gave me 500 words or so to write on this topic, which I have now written many thousands of words on in this blog, so I took a slightly different tack, beginning this way: I have been drawn since first becoming a reader to the sense of adventure that the opening pages of a… Continue reading On Translating Miljenko Jergović
Hacked, rigged, and “interesting”!
In a series of shocking and unprecedented revelations, anonymous sources on Russia have unearthed a complex plot to influence not only the U.S. presidential election but also key senate and house races as well. The alleged plot involved hundreds of proxy voters in neighboring states to those where their illegal votes would have been cast.… Continue reading Hacked, rigged, and “interesting”!
Sieges and The Unwritten
This piece by Miljenko Jergovic in my English translation was in the New York Times this weekend. I was impressed by the quality of the editing by Max Strasser. I’ve done a lot of editing, though not in a journalism vein, so I wasn’t sure what to expect. His light but confident touch was reassuring,… Continue reading Sieges and The Unwritten
The Personal and the Historical
A major feature of the Kin, sometimes rehearsed with surprising results, comes out in the following passage quite vividly. The narrator is describing life with his mother. She didn’t clean the apartment anymore or wipe away the dust. She only worked at her work place. And she was a good, thorough head of the accounting… Continue reading The Personal and the Historical
Russell Scott Valentino 