Tag Archives: George Henson
What the Translator Puts in Our Mouths: “Eating Ashes” and Performing Hate
Translation is both necessary and dangerous. Necessary because it carries a text—a culture—into another language, another readership, another field of attention. Dangerous because carrying is never neutral. It is handling, and handling leaves fingerprints. Those fingerprints are most legible where the stakes are highest: in a translation’s handling of racial epithets and slurs, where a choice that looks like mere intensity or “grit” can, in fact, dislocate the novel’s geography of contempt.
A Trick of the Tale: Reading and Traveling in Sergio Pitol’s “Taming the Divine Heron,” translated from Spanish by George Henson
“Taming the Devine Heron” is Henson’s sixth translation of books by Pitol. It’s also the second of his trilogy “The Love Parade.” The novel is a major work exhibiting Pitol’s cosmopolitan sensibilities. It’s also a meta-narrative that highlights the self-reflection so evident throughout his oeuvre. Pitol’s literary works are grounded in a type of hybridity that combines fiction, memoir, travel narrative, and biography, to name a few genres. In fact, the entire novel could be read as an exercise in literary imagination, which knows no borders and whose boundary is exclusively contained by the human capacity to wonder.