Category Essays on Translation
Balkan Women Storytellers: Translating Maria Kassimova-Moisset’s “Balkan Rhapsody”
“Balkan Rhapsody” follows the internal and external exile of the author’s fictionalised grandmother Miriam and her young family during the 1920s and 1930s, a time of turmoil after the Balkan Wars and the First World War—when the Ottoman Empire collapsed, new states emerged, borders were redrawn and hundreds of thousands of refugees were forced to migrate. The novel plays an elegiac rhapsody to these forced displacements across today’s Albania, Greece, Romania, North Macedonia, Bulgaria, and Turkey.
“Paper and ink, nothing more”: Saramago, Pontiero and Dürer’s Crucifixion
José Saramago spent much of his working life as a metalworker, a civil servant, and a jobbing translator before becoming, in his fifties, one of the most distinguished European novelists of the twentieth century. An atheist and a lifelong communist, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1998 for fiction the Swedish Academy characterized as “sustained by imagination, compassion and irony.” It could easily have been described as a long-standing argument with the institutions of church and state, both of which depend on specific forms of assent. Saramago’s increasingly open conflict with these institutions intensified, and eventually cost him dearly, with the controversy surrounding “O Evangelho Segundo Jesus Cristo” (1991), translated into English by Giovanni Pontiero as “The Gospel According to Jesus Christ,” a novel that retells the life of Jesus from conception to crucifixion.
“Qualcosa era successo”: Dino Buzzati and Sandro Veronesi on the Train to Doomsday
In two stories, written approximately three-quarters of a century apart – “Dino Buzzati’s “Qualcosa era successo” (“Something Had Happened,” 1949) and Sandro Veronesi’s “Qualcosa era successo” (2026) – an ordinary train ride becomes an allegory about fear of the unknown and powerlessness in the face of inexplicable events.
“The Craft of Living”: Restoring the Form of Cesare Pavese’s Journals for English-Speaking Readers
Translating “The Craft of Living” into English presents the singular task of transposing Pavese’s eloquent thoughts about life and literature into the language that inspired many of his points of view in the first place. By the time Pavese began publishing works in prose, in the early 1940s, he had already penned the Italian translations of works by Melville, Anderson, Dos Passos, Steinbeck, Joyce, Defoe, Dickens, Lewis, and Stein and was in the process of translating Faulkner.
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.