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From Stephen Elliott
Puerto Rican writer, journalist, editor, and queer activist Luis Negrón talks about his first collection to appear in English, working with translator Suzanne Jill Levine, and writing about people who live on the margins of the margins.
...moreAaron Gilbreath’s essay on smoking was recently translated into Russian by InsoSmI.ru, an organization in Russia that translates news, blogs, and essays from English into Russian.
We think it’s pretty awesome that thanks to InsoSml.ru, our friends in Russia can now enjoy a slice of The Rumpus, too.
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Writer, translator, and interpreter Nataly Kelly talks about the difficulties of translating across cultures, the emotional barriers that interpreters face, and what it really means to be fluent.
...moreAt Words Without Borders, B.J. Epstein expounds upon the culture of crime novels, its covert international influence and the diversity of fear.
She also continues the necessary conversation of why Anglophones are relentlessly intimidated by translated literature.
...moreWhy are English-language readers so interested in crime but less likely to want to read other texts?
Peter Mountford writes about lending a hand to the mysterious “AlexanderIII” of Moscow, who is conducting a pirated translation of his novel.
What begins as an author’s dream of “overhearing” a discussion of his phrase-work quickly becomes something else entirely.
“Though I was impressed by AlexanderIII’s dedication, his numerous message-board queries did not inspire much confidence in his translation abilities.
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The translation of poetry requires justification. Not necessarily for conceptual reasons, but because the experience of reading translated poetry however transcendent and beautiful always feels lacking, incomplete, like living in a body missing some essential organ. Of course, this remains true of prose as well, but poetry, which depends more on the idiosyncratic musicality, imagery, and idioms of a specific language and culture, makes it near impossible to create anything even close to a “faithful” translation.
...moreHere’s hoping more people read the concise and precise interview about translation up on Guernica between Erica Wright and Marilyn Hacker.
When we talk about someone being a prolific translator, Marilyn Hacker — who is a fantastic poet, let’s not forget that — is the poster child: “In the past five years alone, she’s brought the work of Hedi Kaddour, Guy Goffette, Vénus Khoury-Ghata, Marie Etienne,” plus (as Hacker notes), Amina Saïd and Habib Tengour.
...more“Sometimes the people who lament that global English has become a ‘grey language’ forget that the greyness predominates in certain social contexts, like business communication, and they forget that while English has been running around the world displacing other languages, it has also been appropriated in all sorts of ways.”
At BOMB Magazine, Will Heyward interviews poet and translator Chris Andrews, touching on the problems of deciphering Roberto Bolaño’s literary influences, controlling the compulsion to re-translate earlier work, and the connection between Oulipo and the Argentinean literary mad scientist César Aira.
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Guide to Capturing a Plum Blossom could fit neatly into any number of contemporary-sounding categories: hybrid text, art book, lyric essay, etc. It is a book that relies on interdependence of image and text, of history and the present, of evocation and concrete image.
A Fire-Proof Box is a porous work, languages overlapped, breathing, an English translation that manages to capture the icy weight of classically “Russian” sensibilities.Rumpus Contributor Mark Folse reports back from the Pirate’s Alley Faulkner Society Words & Music Conference from Odd Words with gems like this:
“Or we can begin with the first question: why American’s don’t read more foreign literature. ‘It’s about what we are prepared for.
...moreDoes the rise of new technology, specifically auto-translate, signal the death of human translation and multilingualism? David Bellos, author of Is That a Fish in Your Ear?: Translation and the Meaning of Everything, thinks not. Check out his reasoning in this interview, which touches on the methodology of Google Translate, vehicular languages, and multilingualism in America.
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Djordjevic’s rhythms provide a strong scaffolding throughout this powerful, necessary volume. In Oranges and Snow we have an outstanding example of the literary enterprise.Tim Parks writes on the tensions between lingua franca and vernacular—readers and writers don’t want to be confined to the limits of their national origin, while wanting to keep the vernacular-specific prose.
There’s always translation, but is there an English language bias changing the structure of foreign languages?
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A concise and erudite presentation of and meditation on the complex and solitary figure of Leopardi, it is also an exploration of the major themes and forms of the poems in Canti—idylls, elegies, dramatic monologues, and history poems, among others—while at the same time it places Leopardi in the wider context of the nineteenth century as a classicist and philosopher and most certainly as a prolific writer.A German court recently ruled that Nazi slogans translated into a language other than German would not necessarily run afoul of that nation’s anti-Nazi laws. According to the article, the court’s argument was that “that translating the words represented a ‘fundamental change’ in the slogan, meaning its use was no longer punishable under German law.” The fact that the words were in German mattered to these judges, and taking them out of that language took them out of the context that violated the law.
...more“The device itself looked for all the world like an Underwood typewriter, at once sleek and erect. In place of the roller carriage, however, rose a stately glass dome, like that on a ticker tape machine (when inverted, the dome stores cunningly in the cavity of the machine).
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