Tag Archives: Literary translation
A Tale of Two Women: Dorota Maslowska’s “Honey, I Killed the Cats,” Translated from Polish by Benjamin Paloff
By Magdalena Kay Dorota Maslowska’s novel Honey, I Killed the Cats takes us on a fast-paced journey through psychological and physical space. Set in an off-putting contemporary city, we are never sure where we are, again neither physically nor psychologically. Although its neighborhoods and streets have British names, this metropolis is anywhere and nowhere—there is […]
Lightly on this Earth: “Go Tell it to the Emperor” by Pierluigi Cappello, Translated from Italian by Todd Portnowitz
By Frederika Randall The poet Pierluigi Cappello was born in Gemona del Friuli in 1967 and died in 2017 in Cassacco, a town 20 km away. In his fifty years in Italy’s far northeast he never lived beyond a 30 km radius of Gemona, a city whose name still evokes a devastating 1976 earthquake that […]
A Gem of a Translation: “The Jeweller” by Caryl Lewis, Translated from Welsh by Gwen Davies
By Ben Ffrancon Davies Caryl Lewis’s stormy novel, The Jeweller, focuses on the humdrum yet turbulent life of Mari, a market-stall jeweller by day who moonlights in a most peculiar way. She, along with her friend Mo, clears the houses of the recently deceased, sorting through their things to find jewels which she can sell […]
Voices of the Post-Soviet Intellectual: Maxim Osipov’s “Rock, Paper, Scissors,” Translated from Russian by Boris Dralyuk, Alex Fleming, and Anne Marie Jackson
By Jonathan Stone The Grannies took the most practice. There were three of them, and as I prepared to read out loud Alex Fleming’s translation of Osipov’s essay “The Cry of The Domestic Fowl,” I kept vacillating between voices. The one who’s in the worst health hears and sees things: “Yuri, is that you?” she’ll […]
Sentimental Education: Berta García Faet’s “The Eligible Age,” Translated from Spanish by Kelsi Vanada
By Lucina Schell Fidelity is often considered a virtue in translation, especially when the translator is female. So what happens when a young female poet writing in English decides to translate a feminist work of great rhetorical sophistication by a young female poet writing in Spanish that specifically plays with the idea of an aesthetic […]
Shifting Sands: Mercè Rodoreda’s “Garden by the Sea,” Translated from Catalan by Maruxa Relaño and Martha Tennent
By Eva Dunsky In Garden by the Sea, translated by the mother-daughter team Martha Tennant and Maruxa Relaño, Rodoreda writes a slow burn towards catastrophe. Rodoreda, who is considered one of the most important Catalan writers of the 20th century, wrote often about Catalan society in the years before and after the Spanish Civil War, […]
Translators on Books that Should be Translated: Slavenka Drakulić’s “Marble Skin”
By Serena Todesco As a translator, I often find myself trying to find suitable images to describe what translation exactly entails. When it comes to authors from relatively unknown countries, such as Croatia, translation is indeed a form of irregular and unpredictable treasure hunting. Thanks to the strange combination of my academic interest in European […]
The Haunted Modernism of Jindřich Štyrský’s “Dreamverse,” Translated from Czech by Jed Slast
By Sean Lambert Reading Jindřich Štyrský’s dream journal highlights what an understudied genre of literature the dream journal is. Perhaps if there were a larger body of famous examples (Jack Kerouac’s Book of Dreams and William Burroughs’ My Education are desperate for company), it would be clearer how uniquely compelling, evocative and revealing is Štyrský’s […]
“Written in Exile: The Poetry of Liu Tsung-Yuan,” Translated from Chinese by Red Pine
By Heather Lang-Cassera Liu Tsung-Yuan has long been acknowledged as one of the most accomplished prose writers of the T’ang Dynasty. However, his excellent poetry was set aside for a time in China—largely because, relative to his prose, he wrote little of it—and it has been wildly under-translated into English. Fortunately, renowned translator Red Pine, […]
Framing by Fragmentation: Elena Ferrante’s “Incidental Inventions,” Translated from Italian by Ann Goldstein
By Stiliana Milkova The timing of Elena Ferrante’s Incidental Inventions is impeccable – it offers us an aperitivo before we can delve into her new novel scheduled to come out in English translation in June 2020. While we wait, we can flip leisurely through the pages of Incidental Inventions, translated from Italian by Ann Goldstein, and already in bookstores. […]
