E, vidiš te kakva si! This phrase appears in a conversation between a poor couple, one of whom works as a janitor, the other as a washerwoman at a hospital. The man is telling his wife not to look at the bed linen she washes because it makes her sad. She can tell when someone… Continue reading Switching Senses for Sense
Category: Reflections on Kin
Paragraph contours, paragraph tone
There is such a thing as tonal movement in a paragraph, and Jergovic’s are, I believe, distinctive. I cannot take a lot of time out of translating now because my deadline is looming, but here is a paragraph, actually three but the first two are a single sentence each, as an example of what I… Continue reading Paragraph contours, paragraph tone
Description of a Description of a Place
Imagine translating several Balzac novels with all their intricate Parisian detail but never having been to Paris, or a couple of Aleksandr Tišma novels without ever having set foot in Novi Sad. These are of course possible things to accomplish. The words are the words, and today more than ever before we have maps and… Continue reading Description of a Description of a Place
On the Origin of the Expression “Italian Tears”
How to create the appearance of an accent can be to some extent language specific, especially where a word in one language might use different consonants and vowels than an equivalent word in a different language. But as long as the general characteristics of accented speech are recognizable, this should not pose too big a… Continue reading On the Origin of the Expression “Italian Tears”
Another Lost Giant
This is from “The Bee Journal,” which could be its own short book—an internally coherent novella of a little over 170 pages—and is one of the final three parts of Kin I am translating, along with “Parker 51” and “Sarajevo Dogs.” While some appraised Plague and Exodus as an outrageous casserole, “the product of a… Continue reading Another Lost Giant
Internal Rhyme for the Kicker
I’m moving so fast now that it’s likely I’ll forget even more of this process than elsewhere, so I’m creating a quick post as a memory marker. This is towards the end of “The Match Juggler,” an extraordinary story that actually has a slightly longer title: “The Match Juggler—Furtwängler.” The eponymous juggler is introduced early… Continue reading Internal Rhyme for the Kicker
The Cultural Shape of the Sentence
I recall learning in graduate school—I can picture the particular lesson, which was delivered by Irina Paperno, probably in the first-year introductory pro-seminar, in which we were reading The Master and Margarita in Russian, and this topic was sure to come up—about how Russian literary prose typically orders itself differently from English. Irina used the… Continue reading The Cultural Shape of the Sentence
The idea of nebo as sky and as heaven
I remember Fulvio Tomizza making the claim—this was during the only meal we ever shared together, at his home in Trieste—that he aimed for five ideas per page. An idea, I understood, was a turn of some sort, either in reasoning or character depiction or language, some new thought that generated new interest on the… Continue reading The idea of nebo as sky and as heaven
Nego, već, and katekizam
“Nego” and “već” are especially frequent and often do not need to be rendered as “but” or “already.” In fact they often don’t need to be translated at all, or rather their translation is a non-word in English, a sort of translation by omission or translation by silence. An example of the latter: Samo željeznica… Continue reading Nego, već, and katekizam
translating digital versus print
It has happened several times now that I have found a story from my author’s book online, either at the website of a newspaper or journal, or at the author’s own site. It did not occur to me until recently–after having translated two Jergović pieces for the New York Times–that it makes the work go… Continue reading translating digital versus print
Russell Scott Valentino 