translation
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Crouching Tiger, Hidden Hamlet
Shakespeare is invading China. The first complete Chinese translation of the works of Shakespeare wasn’t released until 1967, but Britain’s number one dramatist is now starting to catch the attention of Chinese audiences, reports Melville House’s Moby Lives, saying Shakespeare…
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A Sentimental Translation
Although A Sentimental Novel, the final work from Alain Robbe-Grillet, was published in French in 2008, the English translation didn’t follow for almost another four years. Partially, this was due to the book’s content: a lengthy series of Robbe-Grillet’s sadistic fantasies.…
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Poems from Guantanamo
In 2010, French poet Frank Smith took the transcripts of the initial combatant status review tribunals from Guantanamo and turned them into a book of poetry. The New Inquiry looks at Vanessa Place’s recent English translation of Smith’s Guantanamo.
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Using French to Find English
Sixty years ago, Samuel Beckett published Waiting for Godot, a self-translated English version of his original French play, En Attendant Godot. Elizabeth Winkler writes for The Millions about how Beckett’s bilingual writing practices influenced his work and vexed scholars.
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The Trouble with Translating Proust
For the Boston Review, Leland de la Durantaye assesses the latest edition of Proust’s Swann’s Way. Writing more than just a book review, Durantaye outlines some of Proust’s early struggles, as well as his lasting legacy, and delves into the…
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Resurrecting a Monster
Forty-one years after his death, JRR Tolkien’s translation of Beowulf has been published by his son Christopher. Tolkien translated Beowulf early in his career, yet never published it. In the New Yorker, Joan Acocella speculates on the reason: Another possible…
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Joyce Proves as Difficult to Translate as to Read
The first of three parts of a Chinese translation of Finnegans Wake consumed eight years of translator Dai Congrong’s life. The almost unreadable book proves even more difficult to translate because of the many puns and layered meanings, explains MobyLives: The…
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Is There Too Much Translation?
Writing over at Brooklyn Quarterly, Will Evans discusses why he founded a publishing house dedicated to translation: In addition to being a philosophical problem, literary translation is also a contentious business matter. There are thousands of good to all-time-great books published in…
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Jay Gatsby Invades Poland
Polish language speakers are getting a new translation of The Great Gatsby, but a modern translation raises all sorts of linguistic issues. The primary difference, of course, is that the original translator wrote under the iron curtain and without the aid…
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Translators Lost in Translation
Once upon a time, folktales contained sex and violence. But as the stories were collected by cultural anthropologists, they were gradually stripped of this adult content in order to make them suitable for children. Moreover, these neutered children’s stories often…
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You’re Missing Out, America
In our interview with Molly Antopol, when discussing readership of Israeli literature in the United States, Antopol says, “I have all these smart friends who love books and love international fiction, and whenever we talk about Israeli literature, it’s Etgar…
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The Rumpus Interview with Gregory Rabassa
Responsible for introducing American readers to One Hundred Years of Solitude and a large portion of the Latin American literary canon, award-winning translator Gregory Rabassa discusses the state of translation today and much more.