Category: translation

How Loving Your Source Can Make Your English Translation Into Doggerel

I think that some translators must have a terribly sad streak inside, but let me start with doggerel since it’s lighter. By doggerel I don’t only mean the unintentionally funny or the inventive and exploratory. To get a sense of these, for the funny end of the spectrum, try William McGonagall’s “The Tay Bridge Disaster”: … Continue reading How Loving Your Source Can Make Your English Translation Into Doggerel

On Imaginary Islands and Real Ones

For many years when they were still trying to map the world, explorers thought there was an island or even something bigger in the northern Pacific between Russia and North America. This was one of the possibilities anyway, between the land being connected (no Bering strait) or there being nothing large out there at all,… Continue reading On Imaginary Islands and Real Ones

Aspersion and Aspersions

While translating Propp’s Historical Roots of the Wondertale, my colleague Miriam Shrager and I wondered a bit over the “sprinkling” (окропление) that comes up occasionally in fairy tales, often in the context of crossing between this world and some other, magical one (“she sprinkled the door with water”). This, so claims Propp, is a remnant… Continue reading Aspersion and Aspersions

From Non-Space to Landscape

I am struck by the notion of the absence of space in Vladimir Propp’s account of the wondertale. This is similar to Mikhail Bakhtin’s observation about the absence of the effects of time on the hero and heroine of romance, where they have adventure after adventure but, in the end, don’t seem to have aged… Continue reading From Non-Space to Landscape

Propp’s Magic

While his prose might not be scintillating (see previous post), Vladimir Propp’s insights and analyses are of the sort that occasionally help just about everything one has ever read in a certain domain fall into place. This happened today when I worked on this passage: Sometimes the hero is tested through a contest before the… Continue reading Propp’s Magic

Propp: Brilliant but Boring

I have been translating, with two colleagues, Vladimir Propp’s Historical Roots of the Wondertale (Исторические корни волшебной сказки), a very important book that has for some reason never made it into English. It is a tour de force in many ways and truly a follow-up to his widely known Morphology of the Folktale (Морфология сказки),… Continue reading Propp: Brilliant but Boring

Bringhurst on Translation

I just read Robert Bringhurst’s “The Polyhistorical Mind” lecture, which is the first chapter in his 2006 book The Tree of Meaning: Language, Mind and Ecology, and was struck by this observation: “Few people earn a degree in European Studies or Asian Studies without acquiring some rudimentary knowledge of a European or Asian language. Students… Continue reading Bringhurst on Translation

Teaching Russian Culture

I’ve taught a version of Introduction to Russian Culture many times over the past several decades. I learned the basic material from Michael Flier at UCLA, then adapted quite a bit over the years, using music, religion, language, literature, geography, architecture, art, and a lot of history. The history has always seemed essential since many… Continue reading Teaching Russian Culture