translation
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“Kholden Kolfeeld’s” Russian Fans
Amid the flood of J. D. Salinger articles related to the upcoming biography and documentary about him, this New Yorker essay by Reed Johnson stands out. It has nothing to do with the biography, actually. It’s about Russian translations of The Catcher in…
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Lexicon Valley Now In Written Form
Slate‘s language podcast, Lexicon Valley, now has a blog component, by popular demand. (Surprise, surprise—word nerds want to read more.) So far, it’s mostly cross-posts from the always-wonderful Language Log on the topics of slang, translation, and the word meh. We look…
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Ox and Pigeon: A Heroic E-Publishing House for Unilingual Americans
The digital literary press Ox and Pigeon was created in 2010 by three friends who, on vacation in Peru, recognized the need for high-quality English translations of all the brilliant yet inaccessible foreign authors we don’t realize we’re missing. Their…
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The Rumpus Interview with Luis Negrón
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.
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Russifying the Rumpus
Aaron 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…
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The Rumpus Interview with Nataly Kelly
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.
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Thriller Education
At 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. Why are English-language…
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Arrr! What do you mean by “cucumber” walls?
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.…
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Selected Translations by W. S. Merwin
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…
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: Marilyn Hacker Is No Hack
Here’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…
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Chris Andrews on Translation
“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,…
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Wind and Rain Make No Difference
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…