Aira on Translation
Seems ironically fitting to follow the first Making the Translator Visible post with this bit from Conversational Reading about a recent interview with Cesar Aira (whose Ghosts is—to steal a line from a New York Times article—so good it’s in need of adjectives yet invented that would be written in italics ...
>
Manual Labor
Continuing my series of posts about the Salzburg Global Seminar on Translation (earlier posts available here) I wanted to share the most depressing study about translation I’ve ever heard about—the CEATL Survey of Translator Working Conditions. CEATL—the Conseil Européen des Associations de Traducteurs ...
>
National Book Critics Circle Award Finalists
On Saturday, the NBCC announced the finalists for the series of awards they hand out every year. As always, all of the finalists are pretty strong, and there are two works in translation up for prizes. Bolano’s 2666 is a fiction finalist, and Pierre Martory’s The Landscapist is a poetry finalist. I must say, ...
>
Bernhard on Translators
Also from the Wilkinson article here’s a quote by Thomas Bernhard on translators that’s quite, um, uplifting: Translators are ghastly: poor devils who get nothing for a translation, only the lowliest fee—shamefully low, as they are wont to say—and they accomplish a ghastly job. In other words, the ...
>
Credit for the Translator
I just got a copy of Friedebert Tuglas’s The Poet and the Idiot and Other Stories in the mail from Central European University Press. Which isn’t news, or at all interesting. But what struck me in looking at this book was the fact that the name of the translator—Eric Dickens, who recommended this book to ...
>