Tag Archives: Sebastiaan Faber
Translating Joan Sales, or, How to Preserve Impurity: Sebastiaan Faber Interviews Gonzalo Torné and Peter Bush
The fact that “Incerta glòria” (Uncertain Glory) was published in 1956 did not mean that Sales stopped working on it. The French translation by Gallimard in the early 1960s (undertaken at the suggestion of Juan Goytisolo) was already based on a more extensive version. And the first Spanish translation—done by Carlos Pujol, in collaboration with Sales, in 1971—worked from a manuscript that had grown so much that the final section, set in Francoist Spain during the 1960s, would eventually be published separately in Catalan as El vent de la nit (The Wind of the Night). A decade ago, Peter Bush translated both novels into English. Earlier this year, the Catalan novelist Gonzalo Torné published a new Spanish translation of the first volume.
Gerda Taro’s Elusive Afterlives: Helena Janeczek’s “The Girl with the Leica,” Translated from Italian by Ann Goldstein
Pohorylle’s story is the inspiration for Helena Janeczek’s “The Girl with the Leica,” a complex, multivocal historical novel that is less a portrait of Gerda Taro than of her entire milieu: young, antifascist, bohemian, refugee, free-thinking, emancipated, and rife with short-lived romantic entanglements.
Translation as Capitulation: Mario Martín Gijón’s “Sur(rendering),” Translated from Spanish by Terence Dooley
Surrendering, giving in, letting go: if Martín Gijón’s poems stage, at the formal level, the poet’s handing over control to language itself, letting etymology and morphology steer his associations, their thematic content also underscores the role of rendition as an act and attitude of romantic love. Dooley, in turn, manages to strike a fine balance between the translator’s obsessive pursuit of the original’s meaning in the target language, on the one hand and, on the other, the acceptance of the original’s ultimate elusiveness.