Featured On translation essays
Translating New Worlds with Megan McDowell
There’s this thing people do when they talk about translation that I find very frustrating – they focus on what is lost in the process, and I really think that is putting the emphasis on the wrong thing. Because just look at all that is gained. You get a whole new work. People in a new language are reading it a different way, and they’re not reading it in its original language, which some people believe automatically makes it inferior. But I don’t think that’s true. I think it adds a lot. I think it contributes to the literary culture of the language it’s translated into.
On translation
Translating New Worlds with Megan McDowell
There’s this thing people do when they talk about translation that I find very frustrating – they focus on what is lost in the process, and I really think that is putting the emphasis on the wrong thing. Because just look at all that is gained. You get a whole new work. People in a new language are reading it a different way, and they’re not reading it in its original language, which some people believe automatically makes it inferior. But I don’t think that’s true. I think it adds a lot. I think it contributes to the literary culture of the language it’s translated into.
Anonym
While few literary translators are truly ‘anonymous’ these days, many still move like ghosts through the world of publishing, their names omitted not only from the covers of their books but also the reviews and promotional materials that sprout around them.
Going home singing: The Analects of Simon Leys
Analects are gleanings, crumbs under the table, fragments of old text that, in the case of Confucius, have coalesced into a classic. Simon Leys, his latest translator and annotator, seldom misses an opportunity to remind us just how ragged and loopy this little book is — a mere one hundred pages in this edition (requiring another hundred pages of irresistible notes). The Analects consists of brief passages of partially recorded or remembered conversations between the Master and a set of often unidentified interlocuters.