“Black Box Named Like to Me” challenges the limits of syntax and image to hold the full scope of the imaginary in its grasp, touching on questions of motherhood, the future, memory, and the acquisition of language. The page is a zone for play, here, both in my translation and the original Spanish; words and ideas undergo radical transformation to best serve the purpose of the poems, shapeshifting at will.
How could a Russian speaker who has never been to Azerbaijan, who is not a specialist on the country or even the region, become the English language voice of Azerbaijan’s most important writer? The answer, of course, lies in a single, fraught word: colonialism.
It is Izidora Angel’s translation that brings Leah’s inner world to life. A Bulgarian American food writer, travel journalist, and translator, Angel renders Leah’s fantasies with the sort of precision and richness that only a writer of her caliber could accomplish.
It is the idea of comfort within pain that propels this novel forward. The motherless protagonist, now re-birthed in translation, emerges as an individual specially equipped to help those who need it most, and finds in her abilities a reason to keep going.
An impressive feat of Izidora Angel’s translation from Bulgarian lies in its ability to communicate the sense and culture of a foreign place while still providing a universal, relatable message. The presence of Bulgarian culture is strong—yet it does not prevent access or hang readers up on the foreignizing details.
This post features a cluster of reviews of Nataliya Deleva’s novel “Four Minutes,” translated from Bulgarian by Izidora Angel. This post also reflects on the principles and practices guiding a new college course on the art and craft of the translation review essay.
Banine came into the world in Baku, Azerbaijan, in 1905. She grew up taking lessons in French, German, English, and Russian, participating in feasts marking the end of Ramadan, playing the piano, traveling between the city and the countryside with relatives, talking to poplars, talking to rivers. Daydreaming.
The novel is a vivid recapturing of Italian life in the 1980s, but more than that it engages, and beautifully captures, the universal mystery of each person’s origins – in a specific place and time, in a social caste, and, most of all, from a set of parents – and evokes the loneliness of that insoluble mystery.
It can be useful to think of a work of translation as being a sort of progeny of the original text, its spitting image, yet one that, if successful, must become a creative work in its own right. Kripper has lived and worked in the US as an academic for many years, and translates in both directions between Spanish and English. “Spanish is my mother tongue. English, the language I became a mother in. I speak to my daughter in Spanish. I have an accent when I speak English. I hope readers can hear it in my translation,” Kripper writes in her translator’s note (13).
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.
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.
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.
Makenzy Orcel’s “The Emperor,” translated by Nathan H. Dize, is a novel of contradictions. The narrator, who has been deprived for years of his autonomy living under the control of the Emperor, a corrupt religious leader, must use his voice to fully free himself, even though he lives in a “world that brings death to freedom” (11).
The novel is narrated from the perspective of a fifty-year-old Neapolitan widow, Rosa, whose daughter’s coming independence and plan to move to France lead to Rosa’s decision to start a restaurant in small-town Lombardy. Rosa’s restaurant becomes a source of orgiastic frenzy for the Lombard villagers, who devour her traditional Neapolitan cooking in a kind of carnal ecstasy.
The increased visibility of Natalia Ginzburg’s translated works and renewed engagement with her literary production speak to the traumatic realism of our own historical moment as we look for modes of resistance and survival. Ginzburg’s works, generated in part from the traumatic events that marked her own life, narrate in turn the minor and major hardships of human existence.