This is something I’ve been going on about in Our Man in Gdansk for some time now. This time, the book in question, though Polish, is available in an English translation by the highly regarded translator Bill Johnston. I refer to Andrzej Stasiuk’s 9. Look at the mess on page 6: To the right there’d […]
Here’s the RTE (Irish TV and Radio) news website today. It was also on air in more or less the same form: Employers earlier warned that future investment by multinational companies could disappear with many job losses if they were forced to recognise unions. No big deal there, just the usual threats. But here’s where […]
The belief that the translation should be free of the original, which some would have you believe is no more than a necessary evil, is an obsession in some areas of translation studies. Here’s Theo D’haen in his article “Antique Lands, New Worlds? Comparative Literature, Intertextuality, Translation” taken from a special number of the Forum […]
Just for the record, this year’s Man Booker Shortlist has been announced: The White Tiger – Aravind Adiga The Secret Scripture – Sebastian Barry Sea of Poppies – Amitav Ghosh The Clothes on Their Backs – Linda Grant The Northern Clemency – Philip Hensher A Fraction of the Whole – Steve Toltz Perhaps the most […]
I’ve yet to read any novels by George Sanders, but after reading the following passage in an interview between Ben Marcus and Saunders, taken from meaty Believer Book of Writers Talking To Writers, I think it’s about time I did: So, when I’m writing, I am trying to move myself, or impress myself, or prevent […]
“This book makes no secret of the fact that it is aimed at specialists, containing as it does only four pages that are not structured as a list.” This is the encouraging opening of a review of Seamus Heaney: A Bibliography, by Rand Brandes and Michael A. Durkan which appeared in the ever-gripping Irish Times […]
I feel more than a little sullied, having finished George and Martha by Karen Finley, and I’ve a feeling that this is one of the desired effects by the author as she pits George W. Bush and Martha Stewart as fictional acerbic lovers holed up in a motel attempting to pleasure themselves in oedipal hi-jinks. […]
Here’s Peter Bush, in his “The Writer of Translations,” on The Way Things Are for translators: they are dead; their names appear on “…the back flap [of books] as a bleak epitaph to the months of labour that selflessly, neutrally and most economically secreted the new spread of words.” It is simply not true, as […]
Pym, this time, in an article called “On Cooperation,” telling us what translation students should be trained to do. Translate? Well, yes, that too but there are all sorts of other exciting things: “training programmes should progressively be oriented to the production of intercultural mediators.”* This would reflect what is already happening at the “commercialised […]