Tag Archives: reviews
A Manifesto for Uncertain Times: Noémi Lefebvre’s “Poetics of Work,” Translated by Sophie Lewis
By Andria Spring “Are we at war, Papa?” “What makes you think that?” “I don’t know, all these soldiers outside the shops.” “Then it must be war.” “But people are shopping in the sales.” “So we can’t be at war.” “The police are checking handbags and ID cards.” “That means it’s war.” “But there are […]
In Pursuit of Happiness in Nándor Gion’s “Soldier with Flower,” Translated from Hungarian by Zsuzsa Koltay
by Jozefina Komporaly Translation projects come about for various reasons, and these can include affinities with certain authors, artistic agendas or historical periods to name but a few. Wanting to raise the profile of a particular literary tradition is also a major motivator, and when this is coupled with the translator’s genuine passion for a […]
Live on August 31, 2020: Special Issue on Elena Ferrante’s New Novel “The Lying Life of Adults,” Translated by Ann Goldstein
Elena Ferrante and the Question of Gender, Pseudonyms, and Authorship
Across a Threshold: Olga Livshin’s “A Life Replaced, Poems with Translations from Anna Akhmatova and Vladimir Gandelsman”
By Lev Fridman There is this edge, where some of us recall childhood’s voices. –– There is an edge, Mama i Papa –– where we wake up in the car with a travel mug to recall a Country. ––No, not That Country of the Present slowly invading this one.–– […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Silvina Ocampo’s Queer Eye: “Forgotten Journey,” translated by Suzanne Jill Levine and Katie Lateef-Jan; and “The Promise,” translated by Levine and Jessica Powell
By Dorothy Potter Snyder Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.) —Walt Whitman, Song of Myself Es tan corto el amor y tan largo el olvido. — Chavela Vargas Queerness resists definition and finds expression in the manifold array of ways of being and seeing in […]
Translators on Books that Should be Translated: “Keder” by Yordanka Beleva
By Izidora Angel Keder, like other words in the Bulgarian language, is of Turkish origin. It means sorrow, but also grief and sadness. The story goes that the ancient Turks believed when a person dies, he bestows to his closest forty sorrows, for each of the forty days after death. With each passing day, fewer […]
Gradations of Love: Mihail Sebastian’s “Women,” Translated from Romanian by Philip Ó Ceallaigh
By Mihaela Moscaliuc Née Iosef Hechter, Mihail Sebastian (1907-1945) was a Jewish Romanian prose writer, playwright, journalist, and lawyer who left us chilling testimonies of the milieu leading up to and spanning World War II, which Sebastian survived at great emotional cost, only to be killed by a truck in 1945. Women appeared in […]
Authorial Women: The Gender of Character Construction in Hiromi Kawakami’s “The Ten Loves of Nishino,” Translated from Japanese by Allison Markin Powell
This month, in memory of our contributor Professor Jed Deppman who founded the Oberlin College Translation Symposium, instituted a literary translation minor, and taught courses in literary translation and comparative literature, we are featuring three reviews by Oberlin College Comparative Literature graduates and students, taught and trained by Professor Deppman and other Oberlin College faculty. Professor […]
A Woman Besieged: Clarice Lispector’s “The Besieged City,” translated from Portuguese by Johnny Lorenz
This month, in memory of our contributor Professor Jed Deppman who founded the Oberlin College Translation Symposium, instituted a literary translation minor, and taught courses in literary translation and comparative literature, we are featuring three reviews by Oberlin College Comparative Literature graduates and students, taught and trained by Professor Deppman and other Oberlin College faculty. Professor […]
Clinical Erotics in Luis Panini’s “Destruction of the Lover,” Translated from Spanish by Lawrence Schimel
This month, in memory of our contributor Professor Jed Deppman who founded the Oberlin College Translation Symposium, instituted a literary translation minor, and taught courses in literary translation and comparative literature, we are featuring three reviews by Oberlin College Comparative Literature graduates and students, taught and trained by Professor Deppman and other Oberlin College faculty. Professor […]
Translators on Books that Should be Translated: “Indigo” by Roberto Carretta and Renato Viola
by Stiliana Milkova The reclusive clockmaker Anton Ivanovic has disappeared from his apartment in Turin. His only friend, the erudite professor of mythology Joshua Momigliano, receives a letter which sends him on a quest to find out what happened to Anton. As Joshua asks in the opening pages, “Anton Ivanovic was a reserved, impenetrable man […]
Laughter in the Gulag: “Sacred Darkness,” Translated from Russian by Brian James Baer and Ellen Vayner
By Dimiter Kenarov Looking back at the Soviet Union, nearly three decades after its demise, I can’t shake off the feeling of vertigo. That terrifying whale of an empire, whose blubber once stretched over a sixth of the landmass and most of the twentieth century, seems like a distant memory now, a mythical creature that […]