Posts Tagged: translation
Talking To Translators
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Translating A Norwegian First Novel: A Q. & A. With Kerri Pierce

| October 17th, 2011

“Awkward” is an overused word that has, over time, come to connote an almost endearing shyness. Its actual meanings, though—difficult, ungainly, abnormal—perfectly describe Mathea Martinsen, the narrator of Norwegian writer Kjersti A. Skomsvold’s debut novel, The Faster I Walk, The Smaller I Am. The book, out next week from Dalkey Archive, takes up Mathea’s life after the death of her husband. With no one to talk to, she wears a watch in the hopes that someone will ask her the time, talks to the news anchors on TV and repeatedly calls the operator asking for her own number. It’s a painfully funny exploration of loneliness, written in a lean [...]

What a World
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Translated: Israelis Confront Attack of Space Plastic!

| April 26th, 2010

The burning object that fell from the sky, through a surf board and onto a Tel Aviv beach Saturday is not a meteorite, as was originally thought. "It is plastic or silicon," said Dr. Diana Laufer, of the Geophysics and Planetary Sciences Department of Tel Aviv University, who examined the object after police brought it to her house. (Which seems kind of odd, but anyway…) "Perhaps it is part of an airplane or a satellite, or it's part of a flare. I do not know. But it certainly is not from space." Whatever it was, it was very, very hot. I asked an Israeli friend to translate [...]

Talking To Translators
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Translating César Aira: A Q. & A. with Rosalie Knecht

| June 28th, 2011

In 2006, Rosalie Knecht graduated from Oberlin and flew to Argentina on a Fulbright scholarship to work on a translation of César Aira’s The Seamstress and the Wind, out this week from New Directions. The novel is Knecht's first as a translator, and working on Aira places her in the company of such respected names as Chris Andrews and Katherine Silver.

This is the fifth Aira novel that New Directions has brought out, and last year Barbara Epler, the publishing house's editor in chief, told GQ that after Roberto Bolaño, Aira would be the next big success-in-translation.

It’s hard to argue with that prediction when you know [...]

Quicklink
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Lydia Davis on Translation

| September 20th, 2010

Local blogger Lydia Davis is blogging about translation, in anticipation of her new translation of Madame Bovary: "We say to ourselves, complacently looking to Darwin, that [translations] will compete with one another and the fittest will survive. But a significant problem is that the fittest will not necessarily be the best, although it, or they, may be. The ones that survive may be the best edited, and/or the best promoted, and/or the cheapest, and/or the ones accompanied by the most useful apparatus…."