End of summer here in upstate New York and the cool weather is already beginning to show its face. That means more reading soon instead of our usual summery frolicking. But until then we leave you with an abbreviated weekend reading suggestion. This week we offer something by one of our absolute favorites, Anne Carson:

Variations on the Right to Remain Silent – Anne Carson Contemplates Translation

Silence is as important as words in the practice and study of translation. This may sound like a cliché. (I think it is a cliché. Perhaps we can come back to cliché.) There are two kinds of silence that trouble a translator: physical silence and metaphysical silence. Physical silence happens when you are looking at, say, a poem of Sappho’s inscribed on a papyrus from two thousand years ago that has been torn in half. Half the poem is empty space. A translator can signify or even rectify this lack of text in various ways—with blankness or brackets or textual conjecture—and she is justified in doing so because Sappho did not intend that part of the poem to fall silent. Metaphysical silence happens inside words themselves. And its intentions are harder to define.

We found this at A Publice Space via Words Without Borders contributor A.M. Correa.