Books I've actually finished lately: 130

(Audio)Books I've actually finished lately: 128

Weird translation.

Nomenclatterrrr!!!

Yes,



but...

Books I've actually finished lately:118

1) Epic poetry presupposes a professional tradition. 

2) 'They put him on the carved bed, and stood singers beside him,' [the same word is used for professional poets]... 

3) Everyone can wail in every family, but not everyone can make and sing the dirge.

- Peter Levi

The truth about style (and vice versa)

If, being a coward, I take on a heroic tone, I am committing a stylistic mistake.

- Witold Gombrowicz (transl. Lillian Vallee), 'Against Poets'

On translation

Even the Grammarians, tho' their whole bufinefs and ufe be only to render the words of an Author intelligible, are ftrangely touch'd with the pride of doing fomething more than they ought.

- Alexander Pope, in his preface to Homer's Iliad

On the uses and abuses of vernacular

It took Dante, in the late Middle Ages, to take the revolutionary step of writing in his own Tuscan dialect. It would be a mistake, though, to see him with modern eyes as some kind of champion of inclusiveness. He did, after all, use Latin to make his case in On Eloquence in the Vernacular.

- Ana Menéndez, 'Are We Different People in Different Languages?'

South African English

You say that the title pages of French translations of your books read, Traduit de l'americain. Mine say Traduit de l'anglais (Sud-Africaine).

- JM Coetzee, Here and Now: letters 2008-2011

Books I've actually finished lately: 76

from 'Letters to a Translator'

There are many more modes of the past than those allowed by Imperfect, Perfect & Pluperfect!

I racked my brain for a better way of rendering "Wehswirtschaft" (p.14), but not to much avail.

I haven't had proofs from "Sprache im technischen Zeitalter" (what a stupid name for a journal)...

- WG Sebald, 'Letters to a Translator' in Little Star 5 (2014)

I am indebted to Google Translate

for the information - happened upon mid-translation of a 'German' poem - that the adjective 'englisch' means, among other things, 'angelic' (obv.) and 'medium-rare' (less obv.), and the proper noun 'die Engländer' can be 'monkey wrench'.

In translation

A translator, like a novelist, needs to have not just a talent for languages. A translator also needs talent.

- Adam Thirlwell, The Delighted States

'Trepverter'

Because the French have no word for 'l'esprit de l'escalier'.

(With thanks to the Guardian's 'education' pages...)

Books I've actually finished lately: 62

Favourite footnotes: 5

I took some liberties.

- Dave Eggers, on 'The Animal of the Church', his translation of 'Los Murmullos' by Alejandro Zambra, a translation of 'The Creature in Our Shul' by Nathan Englander, a translation of something I can't read in Hebrew by Etgar Keret, a translation of 'In Our Synagogue' by John Wray, a translation of 'Das Tier in der Synagoge' by Franz Kafka, in Multiples (ed. Adam Thirlwell)

Books I've actually finished lately: 60

In those days [Pathak] earned much less from his own work than from the [James Hadley] Chase translations. Translating a Chase book was easier work, too, since he could do it in three or four days while sitting at his day job in the telephone company.

- Sudarshan Purohit, intoduction

'India Sahib'

... surely?

The translator's victory

Once, during work on Calvino's great comic novel If On a Winter's Night a Traveller, a running battle ensued over use of the word 'feedback', which Weaver repeatedly struck out of the typescript, and Calvino repeatedly re-inserted. (In the end, Weaver won: Calvino died before he was able to see the final proofs.)

- Ian Thompson, in his Guardian obit of the legendary William Weaver

Intriguing...

Back in the pre-WWW days you couldn’t just whip open your phone and command it to give you a rare book: You had to brave odd looks in rare bookstore after bookstore by people who had never heard of The Codex Seraphinianus and who highly suspected you had either hallucinated the existence of such a book or had heard of the book from someone else who had hallucinated it.

- Dangerous Minds, on the (now extant) Rizzoli edition of the Codex Seraphinianus

--
Footnotelet: What does it mean to have a 'French' edition of this (ostensibly untranslatable) book?

Ever wondered

what the Welsh national anthem means?

Well, now you know.