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
Category: Latest Post
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
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
Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 7
I’m giving a couple of pre-concert talks for the Indianapolis Symphony, which is performing Shostakovich’s 7th Symphony, “Leningrad” on Friday, February 6 (and then again on the 7th in Carmel), under the direction of Krzysztof Urbański. It is such a perfect case of the changing fortunes of a musical work against the backdrop of world… Continue reading Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 7
The Translator’s Answerability
My previous post on Masha Gessen’s review of the two new Anna Karenina translations, one each by Rosamund Bartlett and Marian Schwartz, attracted some criticisms. I’ll respond in a couple of posts to make each one shorter. John Cowan comments, “You write as if the translator had no responsibility to the author at all, and… Continue reading The Translator’s Answerability
The Translation Police arrest Anna Karenina
Masha Gessen’s review of the latest two Anna Karenina translations in the December 24, 2014 Sunday Book Review of the New York Times is a subtle example of what Eliot Weinberger once called the translation police at work. The translation police are those, according to Weinberger, “who write — to take an actual example —… Continue reading The Translation Police arrest Anna Karenina
Russell Scott Valentino 