After a test run and some mixing tweaks, Ba.Ren.Chi’s “Oh Say Can You” went live on Spotify, iTunes, Apple Music, Deezer, Tidal, Amazon Music Streaming, and some other platforms I don’t remember about a month ago. Then I started making changes. I don’t think I quite understood the song before. It was angrier than I… Continue reading Oh Say Can You? No, it’s something a little different.
Author: russellv
Polishing the Keys to the Future: The Other Side of Everything
By contrast to the first two films in our Slavic and East European series with the Ryder and REEI, Murina and EO (which I wrote about here and here), there is never any doubt about where we find ourselves in Mila Turajlić’s 2018 documentary The Other Side of Everything. Almost all the action takes place… Continue reading Polishing the Keys to the Future: The Other Side of Everything
Teaching Poetry Translation
Here’s an assignment I’ve adapted over the years. It takes a lot of “scaffolding,” meaning reading and discussion of different approaches, with examples. In the past, I didn’t do enough of that. This time, too, I feel like we could have done more, but the class is not just on poetry translation, it’s on translation… Continue reading Teaching Poetry Translation
EO and The Golden Ass
I initially thought Jerzy Skolimovski’s 2022 feature EO, which IU’s Slavic department and REEI sponsored for a Ryder screening as part of its spring semester film series last Sunday, was very complex in terms of its composition. Probably this is because it uses some rather aggressive editing at the start, especially with the pulsing red… Continue reading EO and The Golden Ass
Murina
The Indiana Slavic department is co-sponsoring a series of films with the Ryder and our colleagues at REEI over the next several weeks. Yesterday was the 2021 film Murina, which we have on our list as a Croatian film though it is really an international co-production (executive produced by Martin Scorsese) with a good deal… Continue reading Murina
A Translator’s List
I remember being impressed by a couple of lists of English words that Joanne Turnbull had compiled while working on her translations of Krzhizhanovsky’s The Letter Killers Club and Autobiography of a Corpse. In going through some of the books left by Michael Henry Heim (see my earlier posts on this here and here), I… Continue reading A Translator’s List
Teaching Undergrad Translation 2.0
Well, actually this is probably more like 5.0, since I taught a number of translation-focused undergrad courses at the University of Iowa between 2007 and 2012 or so, but this will be 2.0 for Indiana, where I taught this course, very humbly titled “How to Translate Anything,” for the first time in Spring 2022. That… Continue reading Teaching Undergrad Translation 2.0
Post-National Book Awards
I recently read for the National Book Awards in the translated literature category. It was a lot of work but also gave me the chance to read many excellent new translations, which is one of the main reasons I agreed to serve on the jury. The committee, which besides me included Nick Buzanski (our spreadsheet… Continue reading Post-National Book Awards
Menard’s Severyanin
Variaciones Borges recently published the latest installment of the Pierre Menard translations that I’ve been slowly working on. (Sincere thanks to Daniel Balderston for asking whether I had any more of those Menard pieces in the works. I did and I do.) This one re-frames a poem by a self-styled genius, ego-futurist Igor Severyanin, whose… Continue reading Menard’s Severyanin
Si Lalo Si
Ba Ren Chi recently topped 10,000 listens on Jamendo, and of the two pieces way out in front, this old tribute to the great Lalo Schifrin, which I gave the title “Lalo Si” when I wrote it around 1997, keeps tempting me to go back and tinker. The piano still sounds good, but there are… Continue reading Si Lalo Si
Russell Scott Valentino 