Category Essays on Translation
The View from Gaza: Some Thoughts on Translating Sami al-Ajrami’s “The Keys to My House”
“Translation is the most intimate act of reading.” The definition comes from Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, in a preface to her translation of eighteenth-century Bengali poetry. I didn’t learn much in grad school, but I do remember at least one thing: it’s a very bad idea to argue with Gayatri Spivak. So I won’t. However, her insight, which has been seconded by scholars of translation everywhere, should really be understood as both a blessing and a curse. If translation is an intimate act, what then happens when a translator translates testimony from a witness to genocide?
Posing and Passing in Translation: from Amara Lakhous to Elena Ferrante and Jhumpa Lahiri
In this essay I consider “posing” and “passing” as narrative, cultural, and linguistic mechanisms that help us understand how exophonic and migrant identities are negotiated in contemporary Italian literature. More specifically, I examine practices of translation in relation to practices of posing and passing as Italian.
LISTENING IN TRANSLATION: THE PODCAST “AN ANCIENT LANGUAGE FOR A MODERN SOUL. POEMI CONVIVIALI BY GIOVANNI PASCOLI”
Throughout “Poemi Conviviali,” music surfaces again and again, sometimes eerie and disquieting, often located in the limbo between life and death, or dream and reality; sometimes as the Dionysian, ecstatic sound of drums and double flutes, but most often as melodies performed on a stringed instrument, the lyre, which is the ancestor of the modern harp.
Skinless Light and Time That Breathes: Oscar Duffield on Translating the Poetry of Gabrielle Althen
The work of French poet Gabrielle Althen (pseudonym of Colette Astier) is a simmering broth of intensity, strangeness and wild overgrowth verging on surrealism. These qualities are paradoxically nurtured rather than inhibited by her preference for miniscule, aphoristic snippets of text ‘sculpted’ (her phrase) out of the blank space that envelops them.
There Can Never Be Too Many Cooks: On Banana Yoshimoto’s “Kitchen” in English and in Italian Translation
For six years, I have had a tradition: right around the beginning of December, when the Florida heat finally cools off, I slip my copy of Banana Yoshimoto’s “Kitchen” off the shelf and allow it to rekindle a warmth within my being. Translated in English by Megan Backus, the light, intricate, and mouth-watering prose of the novella has delighted me endlessly.
TRANSLATOR, READER: “THE PHILOSOPHY OF TRANSLATION” BY DAMION SEARLS
“The philosophical account of translation in this book is of what it means to read like a translator” (5) writes Damion Searls. Some might object that philosophy isn’t particularly good at describing reading (or writing, for that matter) and argue that one should prefer literary theory, but Searls enlists philosophers to describe what translators do (they read). Philosophy, moreover, usefully displaces translation ‘theory’ which too often, in his view, involves telling translators what they should or shouldn’t do.
Mansplaining Mona: Against a Seamless Translation
The satirical character of Oloixarac’s novel morphs into mystery when the forgotten pieces of Mona’s recent past come back to haunt her. Bringing “Mona” into English posed an interesting challenge for the translator. Having never worked with humor, Morris’ task was to find a way to carry over the often-cruel satirical content of the novel.
The Bourgeois Shudder: Fantasy, Politics, Race
New York Review Books has been relaunching Dino Buzzati’s writing in English, bringing out new translations as well as reprints, and I am assembling a retrospective selection of fifty stories. The Italian texts pose unique challenges to a translator, partly because they were written some time ago (1930s-1970s), but also because the fantastic is perhaps the most subversive of narrative discourses, resistant to understanding, or indeed any form of interpretive control. It establishes an unreal world that disrupts dominant notions of what is real, making them seem variously unfamiliar, questionable, irrational – i.e., unreal in turn. Can this unsettling effect, I wonder, be recreated in a translation of Buzzati’s stories today, many decades after they were first published in Italian?
Does my translation have an accent? Exophonic Translation and the Experience of Language
Exophonic translators question not only the equation language and culture, but also the motives driving the translation of a certain work of literature in a certain language. The motives rest in the translator’s “language biography,” a complex and fascinating intersection of personal experiences, bodily encounters and relationships with languages and texts, as well as subjective perception of languages and cultures. In other words, with exophonic translators, the focus is not on the translated text, but on the translators themselves. This shift of focus from text to translator has led to the creation of a new sub field of Translation Studies, called Translator Studies, investigating the lived experiences of individual translators, or their Spracherleben.
Workshop Notes Part 2: Translation and Retranslation
Published in Italy in 1996, “Silk” (Seta) was an immediate bestseller. It was translated in English in 1997 by Guido Waldman – a respected translator and editor whose titles include Ludovico Ariosto’s “Orlando Furioso” and Giovanni Bocaccio’s “The Decameron.” Retranslated by none other than Ann Goldstein in 2006, “Silk” accompanied the film adaptation, an international co-production that didn’t receive much acclaim. Despite the film’s lackluster fate, the retranslation in English of a contemporary literary work by a living author less than 10 years after its first translation, is a notable event.
The Translation Review: Why it Matters and How to Do it Right. Part 2.
A book review can benefit significantly from discussing translation. Reviews that do engage with the translator’s approach provide the reader with a more profound analysis of cultural context and themes while maintaining some of the positive aspects of mainstream reviews, such as prioritizing readability and analyzing how certain audiences will react to certain texts.
The Translation Review: Why it Matters and How to Do it Right. Part 1.
This essay explores the work that reviewers of translations do in the American context, from reviews in mainstream publications to those written for independent specialized outlets. It discusses what the work of reviewing a translation entails; what the purpose of the translation review is and what it can achieve in different contexts; and how the practice of reviewing translations can be improved.
A Pervasive Method: on John Taylor’s Approach in Translating Franca Mancinelli’s “All the Eyes that I Have Opened”
Taylor’s translation appears to be a systematic operation—in other words—oriented by his acknowledgment of a philosophically (as well as poetically) coherent nucleus in “All the Eyes that I Have Opened,” a collection that constitutes one of the most interesting releases of recent contemporary Italian poetry.
Bringing “The Art of Joy” to English Readers
For me, translating this book, in which dialect plays such an integral role, was a continuation of my ongoing nurturing of my Sicilian roots. From the time I first visited Sicily, slept in the room where my maternal nonna Biagina did as a girl, and delighted in the fragrance of jasmine wafting from the terrazza outside her window, Sicily, its scents, flavors, rituals and ways have been formative. So it was not surprising that one of the first choices I made when I began translating the book, was to leave as much of the dialect in there as I could without rendering the text illegible to English readers.
Creating An Alternative Canon in Translation
The one thing all OVOI translated books have in common is their origin from the margins, either because their authors are exophonic and transnational and have been neglected by mainstream Italian criticism, because the texts deal with problematic themes, or because existing translations do them no justice. Several of the authors we publish for the first time in English are displaced people and a lot of them are women. Some of the stories the books narrate are about gender, sexuality, racial and class discrimination, testimonies of marginalization and abuse.