I just finished an essay that feels freestanding and that could fit in three places in my Sea of Intimacy. I can’t tell whether its potential multifarious placement is a good thing or not. “Looking for Lucy” begins in Split, Croatia, where a sign that says “Lucy” hangs outside the cathedral (once the mausoleum of… Continue reading Looking for Lucy
Tag: Croatia
Translating Atrocity
When I told my friend Mira Rosenthal that I’d taken on a translation job for a book on Jasenovac, she didn’t miss a beat. “And how are you protecting yourself?” she asked. Naive me hadn’t even considered this, even though I know the words and the scenes always seep inside you when you’re translating them,… Continue reading Translating Atrocity
Baseline of Bones
This post exists only as a podcast at this point. The writing will come, though maybe not for this blog.
World in a Word
My friend Nikola, who hails from Sveti Filip i Jakov, to the south of Zadar, Croatia, tells me that in his local Dalmatian dialect there is a word for “open sea” that only applies to the Adriatic: kùlaf. When I first heard him pronounce it and looked at the spelling he provided, I thought it… Continue reading World in a Word
Ars Prosaica
I’m in the production tunnel now and finding it difficult to comment on my work. This happened to dozens of my students at Iowa when they were in the midst of finishing translation MFA theses and were then expected to write something about them. This required a shift of thinking and approach that they had… Continue reading Ars Prosaica
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
Russell Scott Valentino 