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
Category: translation
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
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
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
That familiar ache
Teaching an extra graduate course for a colleague hoping to come up for tenure ate up more of my time in the fall than I thought possible, leaving me far behind my self-imposed December benchmark for translating Kin (not to mention absenting me from this weblog). Then, out of the blue, I got asked to… Continue reading That familiar ache
Russell Scott Valentino 