Translation is that which transforms everything so that nothing changes.
Günter Grass
Category: News
James Wood reviews My Struggle for The New Yorker
…[T]here is…a simplicity, an openness, and an innocence in his relation to life, and thus in his relation to the reader. Where many contemporary writers would reflexively turn to irony, Knausgaard is intense and utterly honest, unafraid to voice universal anxieties, unafraid to appear naïve or awkward. Although his sentences are long and loose, they are not cutely or aimlessly digressive: truth is repeatedly being struck at, not chatted up.
James Wood on Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle, for The New Yorker
Read it HERE!
A translator is…
The translator is not a necessary evil that interposes himself between the text and the reader’s ignorance. He is another voice that says, with whatever freedom the text permits, what the voice of the author has expressed. He installs himself within the word in order to say the word.
Dr. Alicia María Zorrilla
A few wise words from Leonard Cohen
Prayer is translation. A man translates himself into a child asking for all there is in a language he has barely mastered.
Leonard Cohen
Voltaire's dramatic defense of quality translations
Woe to the makers of literal translations, who by rendering every word weaken the meaning! It is indeed by so doing that we can say the letter kills and the spirit gives life.
Voltaire
How one translator proved Virginia Woolf wrong
“Humor is the first gift to perish in a foreign language.” -Virginia Woolf
Anyone who has read David Frick’s translation of Jerzy Pilch’s My First Suicide (Open Letter) knows that with a good translator, translated texts don’t have to lose anything, least of all their ability to make us laugh. This book is straight up hilarious, y’all.
Zoltán Pék's prayer for translation
God grant me
The serenity to accept
The things I cannot translate,
Courage
To translate the things I can,
And wisdom always
To tell the difference.
Zoltán Pék
A few wise words on words
Tell us something we didn’t know
before: how words mean things
we didn’t know we knew.
Wyn Cooper, from “Mars Poetica” (via proustitute)
A sneak peak at Miltos Sachtouris' Poems (1945-1971)
Disappointed dreams
our years pass in agony
the newspapers forget
but in our hearts
a red wound still burns
from the old gold.
Miltos Sachtouris in Poems (1945-1971), translated from the Greek by Karen Emmerich
The saintly fools of translation
To be a successful translator you have to be either a saint or a fool. Ideally…a saintly fool.
Alastair Reid