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
Category: translation
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
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
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
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
Russell Scott Valentino 