Author: russellv

The South, Russia, and Other Places of Occupation

A friend of mine said the other day that he never really felt he understood the deep-seated tensions of the American South until, during a year he spent as a Fulbright Scholar in Belgrade, a local man commented on his attempts to grasp that country’s deep-seated tensions by noting, “It’s hard to understand when your… Continue reading The South, Russia, and Other Places of Occupation

Human Rights, Translation, PEN

Fifteen thousand words into translating Jergović’s monumental Rod (sticking with the title Kin for now), I’m taking a short break to mention the PEN Awards festivities just completed in NYC last week. I was able to attend for the first time, thanks to an invitation from my friend Esther, who knew I was going to… Continue reading Human Rights, Translation, PEN

Big New Book

I’ve just signed a contract to translate a 1000-page novel. It is due to the publisher in May of 2017, so I’ll be working steadily on it for the next couple of years. The publisher (the visionary Archipelago Books) asked for a sample, but I had not read the book, which came out in 2013,… Continue reading Big New Book

Translation and Rhetoric

And with the generous support of the National Endowment for the Humanities and Indiana University: Call for Papers Special Issue of POROI on Rhetoric and Translation Guest Editor: Russell Scott Valentino, Indiana University Rhetorical theorists since Aristotle have known that rhetoric is a temporally and spatially situated form of communication that forges (or fails to… Continue reading Translation and Rhetoric

A Fabulous Translation…

Or I should say a fabulous translation conference, which was this, last weekend. Why it was so good is, I think, a measure of the organization, skills, and experience of the sponsors at the Center for International Education at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. Lydia Liu’s presentation on Thursday night technically preceded the conference proper,… Continue reading A Fabulous Translation…

Recap of NYU Event

A sincere thanks to Eliot Borenstein for the invitation and the introduction two weeks ago for my talk at the Jordan Center at NYU. And to Anastassia Kostrioukova for the recap and summary at the above link, which begins like this: “On April 3, 2015, the NYU Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia… Continue reading Recap of NYU Event

In NY later this week (for a man and a woman)

I’ll be participating in The University of Rochester’s Reading the Word series this Thursday for the launch of The Man Between. Then to NYU’s Jordan Center on Friday afternoon for a presentation drawn from The Woman in the Window. Here are the details: Event No. 1: Michael Henry Heim was one of the greatest literary… Continue reading In NY later this week (for a man and a woman)

Communication, Literature, Translation

A couple of readers of a recent post of mine objected to my claim that literature makes very little use of the common tools of interpersonal communication. I suspect this is a simple case of miscommunication, not a disagreement about principle. Interpersonal communication makes use of a wide and rich spectrum of sensations, an extensive… Continue reading Communication, Literature, Translation

Deep Translation

I’m taking a little break from responding to comments readers have been sending about recent posts in order to think a little more deeply about the activity of translation, beyond, let’s say, the most comment use of the term as a means of finding equivalents across languages and cultures. Now I’m sure someone may find… Continue reading Deep Translation

That Damned Anna Karenina Again

Erik McDonald has expressed some doubts about my take on the quickly aging Gessen review of AK, so here goes–I’m quoting from his blog XIX vek, of which he sent me a snippet. “I personally love trying to figure out what’s causing a whole group of translators to read something differently than I read it… Continue reading That Damned Anna Karenina Again