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
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Editing and Self-editing
I think about the importance of editing often as I’m working. Partly this is because I am also editing other people’s writing as I write and translate. It is easier to separate these activities when the writing is of very different kinds, but sometimes they cross paths, and then I have to be careful that… Continue reading Editing and Self-editing
Uncles and Uncles
I am struggling a bit with the challenge of Turkishisms. There are lots of them in Rod, regionally specific words that derive originally from Turkish and retain something of their Ottoman-era stylistic aura. Sometimes they are referenced explicitly, sometimes they pass by without comment, but any reader of the original work will be aware of… Continue reading Uncles and Uncles
On compensation and explicitation
The phenomenon of compensation is well-known to translators. You cannot quite get that metaphor there so you put in one somewhere close by, not the same one using the same figure, but one that might do some of the same work. Or, even more commonly, the rhyme of the source becomes some other form of… Continue reading On compensation and explicitation
Catalogues, lists, parataxis, and pig spleens
One of the things my author does is list. He lists and lists, stringing objects and observations in long catalogues that are sometimes paratactic (without connecting words), and sometimes filled with and’s and but’s and gradations of these (such as the word “a,” which can suggest and, but, though, and a variety of other linking… Continue reading Catalogues, lists, parataxis, and pig spleens
On the loftiness of administration
I have two dogs. When one lies down, the other likes to stand over his head so that when the lying dog looks up he looks right into the standing dog’s penis. I tell the standing dog to knock it off, and he comes over to me all smiling (he does smile) and tries to… Continue reading On the loftiness of administration
The Bizarre Task of the Translator
Janet Malcom’s “Socks” is the latest in the healthy or interminable (depending on your level of interest) debate regarding translations of nineteenth-century Russian fiction into English. The touchstone, yet again, is Anna Karenina, which I wrote about here some time ago on the occasion of a review by Masha Gessen. The primary target of Malcom’s… Continue reading The Bizarre Task of the Translator
Parks on Translators, Royalties, and Glory
Tim Parks’ NYR Daily essay “The Translation Paradox” of March 15, 2016 continues his enlightening series of reviews and commentary on the publication of The Complete Works of Primo Levi. As with his other posts on this topic, Parks demonstrates his thorough familiarity with the works of Levi, the world of contemporary literature, and the… Continue reading Parks on Translators, Royalties, and Glory
Making a Long Book Move
One of the techniques Jergović uses happens at the level of the paragraph and amounts to a kind of clever closure, often of a longish sentence, sometimes more than one, that serves to slow down the pace but also gather up energy as the narrative moves on. It works, I think, a little like a… Continue reading Making a Long Book Move
That Wondrous Paragraph
And, oh my, Miljenko, you have some lovely paragraphs, which I knew already of course, but when I get to write them again in English, I feel them in a way that makes me new: In the winter of 1945, while Vjekoslav Luburić was cooking people alive in the basement of a Skenderija villa, and… Continue reading That Wondrous Paragraph
Russell Scott Valentino 