Category: From the Translator
July, 2012
The Decline and Fall of a Translator’s Brain
Just when you think you’ve figured out what is going on in the Toh Enjoe story “The History of the Decline and Fall of the Galactic Empire,” you trip on another oblique reference to some bit of the outside world. It’s a story that bears up to—and in fact, requires—multiple…...
On “Fish Variations”
Fish Variations has a very particular phonetic structure that throws up special challenges for the translator. Here are a few comments on these challenges and how I addressed them. Both original poem and translation have seven verses. The first four verses and the final verse are linked by vowel patterns,…...
April, 2012
From the Translator: Titling “Tana”
I’m very grateful to the editors of Words Without Borders for letting me discuss my translation of Giulio Mozzi’s “Tana.” This gives me the chance to discuss my failure. Several years back, when I first met with Mozzi in Padua about his collection Questo è il giardino (This…...
March, 2012
From the Translator: Working with the Author
Editor's note: Translator Samantha Schnee worked closely with author Carmen Boullosa throughout the translation of the latter's "Sleepless Homeland." The following exchange, with its multiple rounds of drafts, queries, and responses, provides an instructive glimpse of the process. Did we lose…...
From the Translator: On Translating Fabrizio Mejía Madrid
It’s funny the paths one is led down by what one gets to translate. After having translated Juan Pablo Villalobos’s stunning debut, Down the Rabbit Hole, last year, I now seem, somewhat bewilderingly to me at least, to be considered by some as practically an expert on Mexico and Mexican literature—something…...
January, 2012
From the Translator: The Eternonaut
I discovered El Eternauta while translating a poem. Until recently I considered myself to be primarily a translator of poetry. I’d made a few forays into prose, but poetry is always where I’ve situated myself as a writer, and following the conventional wisdom that one must be a poet in order…...
October, 2011
From the Translator: Yu Jian and the German Enlightenment
Living on “Ilha Formosa” and being one of those translators who likes to get to know his authors before he represents them overseas, I don’t often translate poetry from mainland China, but I couldn’t resist translating Yu Jian's "Beethoven Chronology" and "Immanuel Kant."…...
July, 2011
On William Carlos Williams’s Translation of Ernesto Mejía Sánchez’s “Vigils”
What influence can Spanish have on us who speak a derivative of English in North America? To shake us free for a reconsideration of the poetic line. . . . It looks as though our salvation may come not from within ourselves but from the outside. —William Carlos Williams in his talk on poetic form…...
January, 2011
From the Translator: David Ball and Nicole Ball on Abdourahman A. Waberi’s “Passage of Tears”
The French-Djiboutian writer Abdourahman A. Waberi was one of the writers to whom J.M.G. Le Clézio dedicated his Nobel Prize in his acceptance speech. Waberi has won many literary prizes and honors; his work has been translated into German, Italian, and Portuguese. He has received lavish praise…...
December, 2010
From the Translator: Paul Curtis Daw on Translating Vincent Mondiot
While leisurely making my way through a collection of winning entries from the 2006 French young writer’s competition, I was brought up short by “Ils viennent toujours en l’automne.” Although there were many fine stories in the collection, including works both from France…...
November, 2010
From the Translator: Lydia Beyoud on Fouad Laroui’s “My Father’s Antenna”
Rich with comic and descriptive juxtapositions of traditional Moroccan culture with the exotic and intriguing technology and terminology of the Western world, My Father’s Antenna makes for a comic and bittersweet story of the changes that propel an individual, a family, and a village in Morocco…...
October, 2010
From the Translator: Kim M. Hastings on Translating “Borges’s Secretary”
In this dispatch, Portuguese translator Kim M. Hastings weighs in on her translation of Lúcia Bettencourt's story "Borges's Secretary" from the October 2010 issue of the magazine. You can read the original story here. Not long after I translated “Borges’s Secretary,”…...
- top -
