Tag Archives: Literary translation
A Materialist Approach to Translation
By Sophie Drukman-Feldstein The translator’s sin is that of breaching the mythology which surrounds the individual authorial voice. The literary world erases the translator in order to preserve the liberal ideal of individual genius. And yet this erasure is not a distinctive problem of translation, but rather an expression of the worker’s alienation from the […]
Masculinity’s Menace: Ángelo Néstore’s “Impure Acts,” Translated From Spanish by Lawrence Schimel
By Griffin Nosanchuk Ángelo Néstore has already accrued a vast array of accolades at the age of thirty three. He works as a poet, actor, and professor in the Department of Translation and Interpreting at the University of Málaga in Spain. His collection of poems Actos Impuros won the 32nd Hyperion Poetry Prize. His poems […]
Lines of Flight: Guillermo Cotto-Thorner’s “Manhattan Tropics,” translated from Spanish by J. Bret Maney
By Sergio Gutiérrez Negrón Caribbean literary archives are very much like those metaphoric sea shores where the leftovers of shipwrecks of the past constantly wash up. A few years ago, in an important anthology of Puerto Rican narrative published in Venezuela, novelist Marta Aponte Alsina put it best when she wrote that the literary critic […]
Envoicing the Unheard: “Faces on the Tip of My Tongue” by Emmanuelle Pagano, Translated from French by Sophie Lewis and Jennifer Higgins
By Nataliya Deleva Faces on the Tip of My Tongue is a book difficult to describe in one sentence. It caught my attention at its launch event in London when my thoughts dissolved into a conversation with the co-translators Sophie Lewis and Jennifer Higgins. It was presented as a book about people on the fringe […]
Not Playing Games: Chloé Delaume’s “Not A Clue,” Translated from French by Dawn M. Cornelio
Content Warning: Ableism By Julia Peterson When I decided to read Not A Clue, I was hopeful – perhaps naïvely – that it would offer a new take on a frustrating and overdone premise. The story is set in a psychiatric hospital in Paris, where a doctor has been murdered and six patients are suspected […]
Forced Exile: Shenaz Patel’s “Silence of the Chagos,” translated from French by Jeffrey Zuckerman
By Preea Leelah Every day, Charlesia walks to the ocean and fixedly gazes in the direction of her homeland, the island of Diego Garcia, the place she may never see again. Shenaz Patel’s novel Silence of the Chagos is the haunting, still unfolding story of the people of Diego Garcia, one of the 56 islands that form the Chagos Archipelago, situated in the Indian […]
Slipknots: Jorge Eduardo Eielson’s “Room in Rome,” translated from Spanish by David Shook
By Olivia Lott Room in Rome introduces English-language readers to the work of essential Peruvian poet Jorge Eduardo Eielson (Lima, 1924––Milan, 2006) through David Shook’s translation. A member of Peru’s “Generation of 1950,” Eielson is best known for his borderless aesthetic practice, which includes poetry, narrative, theater, visual arts, performances or “actions,” and syntheses that […]
Translating the Uncanny: The Eerie Landscape of Giovanni Pascoli’s “Last Dream,” Translated from Italian by Geoff Brock
By Elena Borelli Last Dream is a collection of translations from Giovanni Pascoli’s corpus of poetic works. The choice of poems reflects a personal preference on the part of the translator who handpicked a number of works mostly taken from what he interprets as the pastoral, almost Arcadian side of the Italian poet’s production: lyrics […]
A World Classic: Mihail Sebastian’s “The Town with Acacia Trees,” Translated from Romanian by Gabi Reigh
By Alta Ifland The stories we enjoy as children and teenagers mark us in a much stronger way than those we read as adults, maybe because what we read when we are not yet fully formed informs us permanently. These stories are like braids that weave our emotional core, and because they are intertwined with […]
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 […]
